In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 1 Introduction Kurt A. Raaflaub 1 Background Over the past thirty years or so, work on Athenian democracy has intensiWed and yielded most impressive results. The development and functioning of democratic institutions and of the democratic system as a whole, as well as individual aspects, such as the roles of the elite, leaders, and the masses, and democratic terminology, have been analyzed and reconstructed in detail. The sources relevant to the study of democracy have received new editions and valuable commentaries. Democracy’s relation to its opponents, on the individual and collective, political and intellectual levels, its impact on religion , law, warfare, ideology, and culture, and the reactions it provoked from antiquity to our modern age have been reexamined thoroughly and comprehensively .1 As a result, we are now able to understand Athenian democracy much better and to interpret and discuss it with more sophistication than was ever the case. Moreover, this democracy is no longer mainly the property of specialists among classicists: it has become a matter of public interest. The year 1993 marked the 2,500th anniversary of a comprehensive set of reforms enacted in ancient Athens in 508/7 b.c.e.2 The man whose leadership Athenian memory credited with the realization of these reforms was Cleisthenes, a member of the prominent Alcmaeonid family. Some seventy years later, Herodotus stated as a matter of fact that Cleisthenes “had instituted for the Athenians the tribes (phulai) and the democracy” (6.131.1). Unfortunately, the historian did not think it necessary to explain why and how tribal reform and the establishment of democracy were connected. By the late Wfth and fourth centuries the Athenians sought the origins of their democracy even earlier, with Solon (a lawgiver of the early sixth century) or even Theseus (one of their founder heroes: Ruschenbusch 1958; Hansen 1989d). Few scholars today are ready to take the latter seriously. But together with Solon and Ephialtes (an Athenian leader in the 460s), Cleisthenes , who was rediscovered after more than two millennia of obscurity by George Grote and thrust into great prominence by the publication of Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians (Athenaion Politeia or Ath. Pol.) in 1891 (Hansen 1994: 25–27), remains a prime candidate for the title “founder of Athenian democracy”—even if some near contemporaries perceived Ephialtes rather as its corruptor, and if the value of this title itself will be questioned vigorously by some of this volume’s authors. At any rate, the anniversary of Cleisthenes’ reforms prompted a further increase of scholarly and popular activity focused on Athenian democracy, especially since it fell in a period that witnessed a surge of democracy around the world (represented most dramatically by the fall of the Iron Curtain in Germany and the failed push for democracy in Beijing, followed soon afterward by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the demise of Communist rule in Eastern Europe). In 1992 an exhibition on Wfth-century Greek sculpture opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., with the flashy title “The Greek Miracle: Classical Sculpture from the Dawn of Democracy.” The exhibition’s sponsors emphasized the connection between Athenian democracy and the “explosive” development of the arts, and that between ancient and modern democracy. Critics did not wait long to assault both connections, and an intensive debate ensued (BuitronOliver 1992; see Morris and Raaflaub 1998: 1–2). Independently, from 1988, supported by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Josiah Ober and Charles Hedrick spearheaded the development of a series of public programs, known as the “Democracy 2500 Project,” that resulted, among other activities, in the conference “Democracy Ancient and Modern” and the exhibition “The Birth of Democracy,” both of which took place in Washington, D.C., in 1993 (Ober and Hedrick 1993, 1996). Whether inspired by the same event or not, other collected volumes on democracy appeared around the same time (e.g., Eder 1995b; Sakellariou 1996). In particular, a volume Ian Morris and I edited in 1998, based on discussions in 1993 titled “Democracy 2500? Questions and Challenges,” dealt critically with some of the issues brought up by democracy’s anniversary. Another volume (Boedeker and Raaflaub 1998) focused on a different set of questions that had been raised not least by the “Greek Miracle” exhibition : the connection between democracy, imperial power and wealth, and the evolution of the arts in Wfth-century Athens. All these activities brought Athenian democracy and the work of classical scholars studying and interpreting...

Share