Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe

Serena Ferente, Lovro Kunčević, Miles Pattenden, Serena Ferente, Miles Pattenden, Lovro Kunčević

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351255028
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe examines the norms and practices of collective decision-making across pre-modern European history, east and west, and their influence in shaping both intra- and inter-communal relationships.

Bringing together the work of twenty specialist contributors, this volume offers a unique range of case studies from Ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, and explores voting in a range of different contexts with analysis that encompasses constitutional and ecclesiastical history, social and cultural history, the history of material culture and of political thought. Together the case-studies illustrate the influence of ancient models and ideas of voting on medieval and early modern collectivities and document the cultural and conceptual exchange between different spheres in which voting took place. Above all, they foreground voting as a crucial element of Europe's common political heritage and raise questions about the contribution of pre-modern cultures of voting to modern political and institutional developments.

Offering a wide chronological and geographical scope, Cultures of Voting in Pre-modern Europe is aimed at scholars and students of the history of voting and is a fascinating contribution to the key debates that surround voting today.

Part One

Ideas and representations

1
Not just voting, but being counted

The cases of Ancient Greece

Paul Cartledge

There was no such thing as ‘Ancient Greece’: there was no one country or state of that name – for two main reasons. First, instead of one nation-state, such as the state (kratos) of the Hellenic Republic (Elliniki Demokratia) today, the ancient Greek world was made up of a far-flung congeries of about 1,000 political entities, most of them of the state form known as polis (citizen-state) as analyzed most acutely and comprehensively in the Politika (‘Matters Concerning the Polis’) of Aristotle (330s/320s BCE). Second, the ancient Greeks no more called themselves ‘Greeks’ than do their contemporary Greek descendants: they are ‘Hellenes’, who in antiquity collectively both inhabited and comprised ‘Hellas’, the ancient Greek world – a fundamentally cultural rather than political concept on a par with, say, Christendom in the European Middle Ages, or the Arab world today. The keynotes of ancient Hellas, politically speaking, were diversity and disunity. To take the limit case, the way that democratic Athenians did politics was extremely different from, if not actually opposed to, the way that their Spartan coethnics and too often antagonists did.

On one matter, however, they did all agree – on the cardinal significance of what we, following the Romans’ Latin terms civis/civitas, call ‘citizenship’, and what they, taking their cue from their word polis, called politeia.

Citizenship was a key aspect of ancient Hellas, the ancient Greek world, and a key aspect too not only of ancient Greece but also, if very differently focused, of ancient Rome. So culturally important indeed was politeia to the ancient Greeks that, as we shall see, it could be referred to unproblematically, almost casually, as the ‘life’ or ‘soul’ of a Greek polis. Central to the exercise of (the various modes of) citizenship in practical political terms was the casting of decisive votes, whether for legislation and other kinds of policy making or for elections to high office. Central to that practice, in its turn, was the question of eligibility: who shall be entitled to count as a citizen (polites in Greek, a polis-person)? It is no accident that Aristotle in the Politics, after first defining to his satisfaction the notion of polis, turned – after some critical contemplation of a variety of ‘ideal’ states proposed by a variety of thinkers – to the definition of the polites. In the end, he decided that the citizen was best defined as he (only free, legitimate adult males were in question, unsurprisingly, in a gender-skewed and slave-owning world) who has the privilege of exercising krisis (judgment), including legal judgment, and arkhe (rule or office). But he felt constrained to add at once that that definition more closely fitted the various kinds of democracy than of oligarchy, since democracies were more broadly inclusive and genuinely egalitarian.¹

Citizenship matters were managed differently, and I would argue in many ways better, in the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Or rather, since in this case ‘Greece’ and ‘Rome’ are quite different in key respects, in the Greek and Roman worlds. And central to the understanding and practice, the culture, of ancient Greek citizenship was voting, both individually and en masse.

Much or even most of English political descriptive vocabulary (monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, tyranny, etc.) comes ultimately from ancient Greek, not Latin. But ‘citizenship’ and ‘citizen’, as noted, come to us from Latin (civitas, civis), not Greek. The term civitas is cognate with civilitas, civilization – both literally, that is etymologically, and metaphorically, that is symbolically. Thus to be a citizen in ancient Rome or elsewhere in the vast ancient Roman world empire as a whole was to be civilized, and conversely Roman citizenship was one of the hallmarks, the high points, of Roman culture.² So, too, was Greek citizenship, although unlike for the Romans it was for the Greeks politically vital that they did not form a single unified political entity. Politically speaking, the Athenians, for example, were ‘Athenians’ before they were ‘Hellenes’. The culturally specific translation of polis as ‘citizen-state’ therefore captures both the central, defining importance of citizenship in the ancient Greek world and emphasizes the ancient Greeks’ concrete rather than abstract understanding of the strong political community to which they belonged, as a living corporate entity. Greek citizens saw themselves as having and enjoying the privilege of an active share and stake in their political community.³

To show just how close citizenship lay to the very heart of the ancient Greeks’ political praxis, we might first note that they used the same word, politeia, both for ‘citizenship’ and for what we, again borrowing from Latin rather than Greek, call a ‘constitution’.⁴ Moreover, to illustrate how deeply and how intimately citizenship as an institution was connected with citizenship as culture in ancient Greece, one can quote two leading Greek intellectuals and political theorists, who were contemporaries and co-residents in Athens, though one, Isocrates, was an Athenian citizen and notionally a democrat, and the other, Aristotle, was not.⁵ Isocrates of Athens called a polis’s politeia (in the sense of constitution) its ‘soul’, while Aristotle in his foundational text the Politics referred to it as its ‘sort of life’, meaning its way of life. Aristotle was, it is true, philosophically committed to a teleological view of the polis as the final end or full realization of the good life for humankind in society; he might therefore be held to be guilty of intellectual bias. But Isocrates the practical rhetorician and ideologue had no such theoretical axe to grind and was a much more conventional and even humdrum political thinker.

The main focus of this essay will be a detailed comparison and contrast between citizenship and voting as they were practiced and felt and thought in two different, indeed in some ways antithetical, Greek poleis – Sparta and Athens. But first I must essay a general point of comparison – or rather contrast – within the ancient world as a whole, that is between Greece generally and Rome generally. This is a point that has been succinctly made by Philippe Gauthier in his distinction and opposition of ‘avarice grecque’ to ‘générosité romaine’.⁶ Greek avarice, Roman generosity: as an ideal type, or at least as a stereotype, that contrast will work very well. For the Romans did indeed extend versions of their Roman citizenship far more widely – in space, as well as in social milieu – than did the Greeks. Indeed, the emperor Claudius (according to Tacitus’s version of his Senate speech in 48 CE: Annals 11.48) accurately attributed the longevity of the Roman empire, as compared to the relatively transient, fly-by-night Spartan and Athenian empires, to precisely this politico-cultural difference.

But it is not just the fact of the difference but the reasons behind that fact that matter. For such Roman-style ‘generosity’ with their citizenship would have appalled the Athenians, let alone the even more exclusive and inner-focused Spartans (to whom all foreigners, whether Greek or non-Greek, were alike ‘aliens’, xenoi). In the world of the Greek polis it was rare enough for a free Greek person originally born and raised in another city to become a fully political member, a citizen, of a new one. Aristotle, for example, as noted, did not become a citizen of Athens, even though that was where he lived for several decades and where he founded his philosophical school. Throughout his life he remained a citizen of his native Stageiros, and held only second-class, metic (resident alien) status at Athens. The rare exceptions to that rule were all free persons and mainly Greek persons, though Athens did develop the notion of honorary citizenship for foreign and not only Greek potentates who might welcome the honor, but who would not regularly exercise the rights of Athenian citizenship in Athens itself.⁷ In the sharpest possible contrast, at Rome even liberated slaves could automatically become voting citizens, whereas in both Athens and Sparta, and as far as we know everywhere else in the Greek world, too, the highest status that such freedmen could aspire to was that of metic, one who lived with, for example, the citizens of Athens but did not live as an Athenian citizen.⁸ It is a considerable irony that in terms of formal legal status at Athens Aristotle was on a par with a liberated slave. The deepest reason for this rigid exclusivity was that the citizen body of Athens or Sparta or whatever other Greek city was essentially conceived organically: as an enlarged family, or descent-group, in which members had a share, by right primarily of birth.⁹ For Aristotle, therefore, in his Politics the basic building block of a polis or the polis was the oikos, or household, and one became a polites ‘citizen’ and acquired politeia in the first instance because one had been born into a citizen household.

To sum up, ‘Hellas’ was what the Hellenes themselves called their cultural sphere or space, the world within which they defined themselves culturally speaking in terms of shared descent, language and customs, especially religious customs.¹⁰ But politics, including the politics of voting, was something that divided rather than unified them. So, rather than talking of one ancient Greek culture or political culture, one should speak instead of ‘the cultures within ancient Greek culture’, and that, centrally, involved conflict, as well as contact and collaboration.¹¹

Sparta

I shall consider first the political culture of ancient Sparta, because that is the city which – arguably – invented the Greek citizen ideal, or at least gave a first definition of it in practice.¹² But I shall sidestep the vexed question of how the developed Spartan ‘constitution’ should best be classified: was it a funny kind of oligarchy, or a funny kind of democracy, or even a funny kind of kingship, or a mixture of all three types?¹³ That is only partly relevant here, and not to the issue of voting. Instead, I will concentrate on the ‘spirit’ of Spartan citizenship, if I may call it that.¹⁴

The qualifications laid down for gaining and holding Spartan citizenship are as interesting as the ways in which it was exercised politically. The qualifications were uniquely Spartan, but in cultural terms they were also thoroughly Greek. As often, the Spartans were in this respect the same as other Greeks, only more so. Herodotus knew of just two men who had held the Spartan citizenship despite their not having been born Spartans; indeed, so odd was that fact to him that this is the one and only occasion (9.35) on which he used the abstract noun politeia in the meaning of ‘citizenship’. Normally, in other words, Spartan parentage on both sides was a prerequisite. But that was only the first, by no means the last, of a whole series of qualifying conditions – which indeed never ended: for apart from demotion for criminal behavior, as was possible in other cities, it was possible in Sparta to go from being a first-class citizen to being no citizen at all – not just a second-class citizen – purely for economic reasons.

In all Greek cities some semblance of equality was a precondition of the very existence of a citizen body of the Greek type. The Spartans, however, sought to emphasize the – relative – equality and homogeneity of their citizen body by calling themselves Homoioi. This word is regularly mistranslated into English as ‘Equals’. What it actually means is ‘Same-ish’, that is the same in one or some, but not all, respects. And becoming a Spartan citizen meant constantly having to undergo, and pass, publicly imposed tests, in which some inevitably performed better than others.

For a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and table
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part One Ideas and representations
• Part Two Practices, institutions, procedures
• Index