Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History by Matthew Simonton (review)

Compared to the output of scholarship on Greek democracy, Greek oligarchy has pulled the short straw. But now oligarchy is getting its turn in Simonton’s new book, based on his Stanford dissertation. For Simonton, oligarchy is a “bundle of defensive and reactionary techniques” against democracy (5) more than it is a set of ideologies or beliefs about order, status and hierarchy. A central aim for Simonton is to explain the causes behind oligarchy’s persistence in the face of democracy’s expansion across the Greek world during the classical period. Drawing nimbly on game theory and on the political science literature on authoritarian regimes, he argues that even as majorities of Greek citizens were feeling empowered to take the reins of government, oligarchs held back the democratic tide. They could do this by creating institutions and by fostering practices that discouraged democratic mobilization while encouraging elite solidarity.

A number of background assumptions are necessary to support Simonton’s theoretical model. These assumptions are laid out and defended in chapter 1. Simonton argues that in the archaic period elite-led popular politics were the norm, and that these were different from oligarchy. Oligarchy arose after democracy, and in response to it. Chapter 2 examines how oligarchs maintained their regimes. Their tactics ranged from hosting symposia as venues for deliberation and consensus-building to passing laws penalizing the excessive display of wealth, controlling the behavior of women, and exiling those who would threaten their precarious hold on power.

For all the repression that Simonton attributes to ancient oligarchs, it is surprising that they did not regularly employ the preferred method of modern authoritarian regimes: a dedicated group of enforcers. Instead, they dealt with the threat from their subjects through an array of tactics. These are the focus of chapter 3, including control of the judicial system and co-optation into the regime as assistants or informers. He argues that oligarchs also exploited democratic institutions to divide the potential opposition, most notably by encouraging open voting. Control of space was absolutely essential to the stability of oligarchic rule. Chapter 4 expands on this insight, arguing that oligarchs sought to keep the demos away from the city center. Simonton interprets this desire as an attempt to prevent the demos from radicalizing in public assemblies, making it less likely that they would gang up on the oligarchy and drive them from power.

Chapter 5 keeps the focus on the theme of control, dealing with the topic of information. Of course there were no press or publishers to authorize or control, no media per se. Simonton argues that Greek oligarchs sought instead to limit access to meetings and information or to project images of unity and power by providing feasts, festivals, and choral performances. Yet despite these tactics, oligarchy as a governing form was not very successful. In the end Simonton sees democracy winning out in the early Hellenistic period. So what went wrong with Greek oligarchy? Simonton suggests in chapter 6 that oligarchies lost because they had to rely more on violence than did democracies—even though, as he recognizes, democracies could indeed be quite violent. Simply put, oligarchy’s success planted the seeds of its failure.

Overall, this is an important and pioneering book. Further work might seek to build on the foundation that Simonton has laid down, in at least a couple of directions. First, might the Roman oligarchy be more relevant as a comparandum than the 20^th-century regimes that Simonton uses as touchstones? Second, in Simonton’s model oligarchy and democracy are singular and binary. There is only one kind of democracy and one kind of oligarchy, and they have nothing to do with ideas or ideologies, or with each other. Simonton himself suggests that “we should start with the essential unity of oligarchies before exploring their diversity” (34). In this book he has made a strong case for the first half of that statement. Future work...