Political "Parties" in Athenian Democracy: A Modernising Topos

To the memory of Leonidas Manolopoulos

Le développement de la science des partis politiques (ne pourrait-on l'appeler stasiologie?) . . .

Duverger 1976.551

Party-spirit still was the great mover of their politics." This remark of William Mitford's, in the lengthy historical work he started publishing in 1784, typifies the way he introduced the notion of the "party" in fifth-century political life, chiefly in the Athenian democracy, but also in the other Greek city-states (1822.vol. 2.102–03).² The birth of the concept of the "party" in relation to the political affairs of the ancient world coincided with the consolidation of the study of ancient history in Britain, and the notion of "party" rivalry, as encountered in Mitford and, around the middle of the next century, George Grote,³ became a commonplace with a strong and lasting influence. In recent decades, of course, it has been widely regarded as a misleading anachronism,⁴ and the term has almost, though not entirely,⁵ fallen out of use. This is certainly connected with the general deprecation of any attempt to "modernise" the past.⁶ The aspiration to make the study of the "parties" of the ancient period a subject in its own right (as announced, at least, by such historians as Julius Beloch and Leonard Whibley),⁷ independent of any description of specific facts of political history, is considered inappropriate nowadays.

The topos in question is a good starting point from which to trace, on the one hand, how and in what historical context a typical instance of modernisation of the past developed and, on the other, the stages of the development of its rebuttal. It is also a good basis from which to examine a specific instance of how the ancient Greek precedent operated in the formation of modern perceptions of democracy: the "transfer" of the "party" phenomenon to antiquity not only presupposed that it was in some way appropriate to the direct democracy of the city-state—revealing its "distinctive" form—but this transfer also concealed a more general evaluation of the political environment of our own contemporary representative democracy. In some cases, indeed, as we shall see farther on, this latter aspect has eclipsed, or even supplanted, the former.

Two points need to be made here. The use of the term "party" in the study of the ancient world, and also its ideological content, in fact went hand in hand with the gradual establishment of the party system in the modern world, both in the United States after the Constitution of 1787 and in Europe after the French Revolution. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the historians studying the ancient world always used the topos in question in a way that was entirely clear. On the one hand, the very concept of the "party" was anyway a fluid one in Europe, at least until the beginning of the twentieth century when universal suffrage finally prevailed. On the other, since the need for clarity in historical narrative frequently necessitated the conventional use of familiar terms,⁸ it is not always obvious in the political history of the ancient world whether "party" was being used as a terminus technicus or whether it conveyed the looser notion of a political "bloc," "group," or simply "force."⁹

The latter point does not apply to Britain, of course, where a powerful influence was exerted by the advanced party—or rather two-party—system of the Whigs and the Tories. This is tellingly reflected, around the mid-nineteenth century, in Grote's account of the confrontation between the Athenian "democratical" and the "conservative [or "oligarchical"] party," told from the standpoint of his own political career,¹⁰ and also in Whibley's pioneering monograph on the "parties" of Athens. In this early use of the term "parties," one recognises the inevitable influence of the long-standing presence of the party phenomenon in Britain: in 1770, in the context of a theoretical discussion that had already been on-going for a century or so, it was Edmund Burke who...