Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece

6 Democracy, Origins of: Contribution to a Debate

Chapter 6 Democracy, Origins of Contribution to a Debate Paul Cartledge polis andra didaskei Simonides* 155 “The study of the Athenian political order is today one of the most exciting and active areas of ancient Greek history.” So wrote Josh Ober Wfteen years ago, reviewing Raphael Sealey’s typically revisionist and iconoclastic Athenian Republic: Democracy or the Rule of Law?1 In 1994 Lisa Kallet (-Marx), reviewing a number of the many works prompted by the notional 2,500th anniversary of the reforms at Athens credited (or debited) to Cleisthenes, rightly predicted: “The renewed interest in the subject will not wither soon” (1994a: 335). A decade further on, following the flawed U.S. presidential election of 2000 and the no less flawed war against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq in 2003, the same could be repeated with even greater conWdence. A frequent lament these days concerns the democracy we have lost (Barber 2002; Skocpol 2003; Keane 2003). Of the many recent contributions to democracy debates ancient and modern surely one of the most intriguing is Brook Manville and Josh Ober’s A Company of Citizens—subtitled immodestly but not immoderately What the World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders about Creating Great Organizations (Manville and Ober 2003b; see also 2003a). Two other recent and complementary projects catch the attention in this same context: the suitably millennial publication, in 2000, of the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm SchoWeld, which naturally privileged ancient democracy’s ideological and conceptual dimensions ;2 and the Copenhagen Polis Project, issuing from the Copenhagen Polis Centre (CPC), directed inimitably by Mogens Herman Hansen, which * “The community is teacher of the man,” meaning that it teaches a man to be a (full citizen) man: Simonides, quoted in Plut. Mor. 784b = elg. 15, p. 517 in Campbell 1991. 156 Paul Cartledge emphasizes rather the practical and empirical dimensions of Greek polis life, including the workings of ancient democracy.3 It is therefore within a much wider framework than just the political history of Athens that the issue of the origins of democracy in ancient Greece ought now to be contemplated. For a start, Greece should at least mean Hellas, the Greek world as a whole, not just Athens (so O’Neil 1995 and Robinson 1997; cf. Robinson ed. 2004). But obvious though this may be to specialists in ancient Greek history, it is not necessarily so to nonspecialist general readers or even to most historians of modern and contemporary democratic political thought, who begin with a ritual obeisance to the ancient Greece “from where we started” (in the phrase of Crick 2002, though his little book is a shining exception to the Athenocentricity rule). I am not of course wanting to deny that the Western political tradition, in so far as it is democratic, goes back to Athens.4 What I am emphasizing rather is that the story of ancient Greek democracy is much broader than just a story about Athens. As Aristotle (Politics 1296a22–23) was careful to note, in his day most Greek cities enjoyed either a form of oligarchy or a form of democracy; he did not also say that most were a form of the former only, or that democracy was somehow an anomaly.5 That is the Wrst of my three preliminary points. The second is that ancient Greek democracy was a total social phenomenon, a culture and not merely a political system (as we would understand that). Politeia, the word we sometimes translate “constitution,” could also mean, and indeed originally did mean, “citizenship,” a special status of active political belonging; and even when politeia had come to mean also the way a city’s order of selfgovernment was arranged, that arrangement could still be referred to without strain as a bios (life, way of life, livelihood) or psukhe (soul, spirit, mind; see generally Bordes 1982). I am not of course wishing, either, to deny that institutions are important—I agree on this entirely with Mogens Hansen (1989e). Where I differ from him is in not believing that they were allimportant , or all-consumingly important. Theater, the public visual arts, and the battleWeld—these are only the most obvious of the other arenas where Athenian democracy happened, but not in a narrowly governmental way.6 My third preliminary point is that all ancient democracies, including therefore that of Athens, differed radically from all modern ones in the following six, often basic, ways:7 a. Theirs...