The Life and Death of Democracy

John Keane

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781416526063
• eBook ISBN: 9781847377609
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

John Keane's The Life and Death of Democracy will inspire and shock its readers. Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, it poses along the way some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? Given all the recent fanfare about democracy promotion, why are many people now gripped by the feeling that a bad moon is rising over all the world's democracies? Do they indeed have a future? Or is perhaps democracy fated to melt away, along with our polar ice caps? The work of one of Britain's leading political writers, this is no mere antiquarian history. Stylishly written, this superb book confronts its readers with an entirely fresh and irreverent look at the past, present and future of democracy. It unearths the beginnings of such precious institutions and ideals as government by public assembly, votes for women, the secret ballot, trial by jury and press freedom. It tracks the changing, hotly disputed meanings of democracy and describes quite a few of the extraordinary characters, many of them long forgotten, who dedicated their lives to building or defending democracy. And it explains why democracy is still potentially the best form of government on earth -- and why democracies everywhere are sleepwalking their way into deep trouble.

PART ONE

ASSEMBLY DEMOCRACY

D

mokratia: a woman, crowning, shielding and sheltering old man D

mos, the people. A detail from an Athenian law sculpted in marble, 336 BCE.

ATHENS

For by nature we all equally, both barbarians and Greeks, have an entirely similar origin: for it is fitting to fulfil the natural satisfactions which are necessary to all men: all have the ability to fulfil these in the same way, and in all this none of us is different either as barbarian or as Greek; for we all breathe into the air with mouth and nostrils . . .

From a fifth-century BCE papyrus fragment, On Truth, attributed to Antiphon, Athenian orator and thinker

Where exactly did it begin?

Most people say: in the city of Athens, a long time ago.

That sounds convincing, as might be expected of a reply nourished by a founding myth with deep roots stretching back into the nineteenth century. Most people are today unaware of the legend, which tells how, once upon a time, in the tiny Mediterranean town of ancient Athens, a brand new way of governing was invented by its people. The glorious invention is said to have sprung from their bravery and genius, their good sense and willingness to fight. Calling it d

mokratia, by which they meant self-government among equals, the citizens of Athens celebrated its triumph in songs and seasonal feasts, in the dramas of stage and battlefield, in monthly assemblies and processions of proud citizens sporting garlands of flowers. So passionate were they about their democracy, the story goes, that the citizens of Athens defended it with all their might, even when knives rimmed their throats. And here the legend ends: it reaffirms how fortitude and genius earned Athens its reputation as the birthplace of democracy, as responsible for giving democracy wings, so setting it free to fly through doldrums and tempests, to deliver its gifts to posterity, to all four corners of the earth.

The founding myth is rarely stated so boldly, and it has a number of variants, certainly. But a striking thing about all of them, references to Athenian bravery and genius aside, is that they never much bother with how and why any of this happened in Athens. This has the effect of making things sound so straightforward, which is a pity, because one trouble with the story of Athens as the glorious home of democracy is that it does not square with the messy realities from which its democracy actually sprang. Democracy was not the child of Athenian genius, military fortitude or simple good fortune. Its beginnings in that city rather illustrate an inconvenient truth: that except for a tiny handful of cases, democracy has never been built democratically. Historical records show that its invention does not happen overnight, and that it has causes and causers. It rarely springs from the clear-headed intentions and clean hands of people using democratic means. Accidents, good luck and unforeseen outcomes always play their part. It is usually bound up as well with farce, and with monkey business and violence. So it was 2600 years ago in the city of Athens, where democracy was born of a string of extraordinary events triggered by a botched murder.

Bloody Beginnings

The details are tricky, but put at their simplest they run something like this. During the middle years of the sixth century BCE, after several bungled attempts, a local Athenian aristocrat named Pisistratus seized power in Athens. Whether his tyranny was unjust remains disputed. There was the usual lavish consumption, cruelty against opponents, dishing-out of sinecures. Yet Pisistratus seems to have won local admiration for his efforts to improve communications by placing milestones between villages, and for his sponsorship of public building projects (including construction of the Acropolis, the Lyceum and temples in honour of Zeus and Apollo). Some people were impressed as well by his legal reforms, which included an instruction from Pisistratus himself that Athenian judges, for the sake of fairness, were to hold court in local settlements. As tyrannies went, the government of Pisistratus and his family was hardly comparable to the far more meddlesome and violent forms of modern dictatorship. So with hindsight the curious thing is that many Athenians found the concentration of government offices in the hands of one family exceptional – and utterly repugnant.

Why was this? Unlike other parts of the Greek-speaking world, Corinth for instance, Athenians had been spared tyranny, thanks in no small measure to their geographic and political isolation. They had kept to themselves. For long periods leading up to the invention of democracy, their city had resembled a frog sitting quietly on a rock overlooking its own pond. It had not needed to defend itself militarily or to submit or adapt to foreign rule. Athens had also refrained from joining the great rush of Greek cities to colonise the shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea from the middle of the eighth century; and in the next century, perhaps because an epidemic decimated its population around 700 BCE, Athens had wisely refused to get involved in the long and vicious war between the nearby cities of Eretria and Chalcis.

An attempt in the late seventh century to impose tyranny by Cylon, a former Olympic foot-race champion, was defeated by opponents who successfully mobilised the city’s farmers against him. The victory was clever – Cylon fled for his life after being lured out of hiding with promises of his own safety – and the stunning success persuaded many local noble families that Athens was a city unusually blessed by its freedom from war and conquest. The nobility (called aristoi) and some of their subjects became convinced that theirs was a city where tyranny – rule by just one family or by one or two of its members – simply did not belong. That impression was bolstered by the vigorous reforms of a local leader named Solon, a noble who was born around 630 BCE. In a well-known poem, he likened human affairs to the sea and spoke of the calming effects of the effort to restore ‘good order’: ‘It smooths what is rough, assuages the urge to overindulge, and cuts down presumption.’¹ He thought conservatively, in terms of returning Athens to an order that had been disturbed, for instance by Cylon’s attempts to impose tyranny. On this basis, Solon freed mortgaged farms by decreeing the cancellation of all debts; declared an amnesty for all those Athenians who had fled to other parts of Greece to avoid those debts, or who had been sold illegally into slavery; established an elite legislative body called the Council of Four Hundred, so called because it comprised four hundred citizens drawn from the wealthier classes; introduced laws covering matters ranging from the placing of limits upon the purchase of land and lavish spending on funerals to widening the right to bring criminal charges before a citizens’ jury in the courts; and required all Athenians to swear obedience to the laws.

The new regulations provoked stiff opposition among parts of the landowning class, but for a time even they could see the folly of attempting to foist a tyranny on to a polity the size of Attica, in which the town of Athens was located. Geographically speaking, Attica was among the largest polities of the Greek world. Protected by virtually impassable mountain ranges in the north and west and measuring some 2500 square kilometres (the size of modern-day Luxembourg), its edges could be reached from Athens only after a long summer day’s journey on foot or by donkey. Such distances were unusual by ancient Greek standards; most other states in the region were traversable within a few hours. Size mattered in the Athenian case, and it did so by restraining the enthusiasm of the local aristocracy for concentrated political power, whose effectiveness they knew minimally demanded careful coordination across both time and space. Pressured by Solon’s reforms, the wealthy families of Athens thus kept to themselves and their banquets, their love affairs, their sporting and hunting events – so bolstering the reputation of Athens as a safe haven for those who disliked the pestilence, war and rotten government caused by tyranny.

These certainties were jolted by the power grab by Pisistratus. His first stab at tyranny happened around 561 BCE (when he cleverly pretended to be under attack and called on his bodyguards to defend him in the city of Athens); he made two subsequent power grabs during the following two decades. The three coups, which had the backing of parts of the poor rural population, did more than wreck the reputation of Athens as a tyrant-free zone. When Pisistratus fell ill, and died of natural causes in 528/527 BCE, the regime controlled by his family faced a succession crisis. Like a delirious wild animal, it scratched and clawed itself to shreds. Ugly rivalries erupted between the sons who had inherited his power. Hipparchus and Hippias were their names, but their younger stepbrother, Thessalus, was equally up to his ears in political mud. Contemporaries disagreed about the respective merits of these three inexperienced young aristocrats, who dressed in fine robes and wore their hair long and fastened with cicada-shaped golden pins; exactly who was causing trouble and who wanted what, when and how, remained unclear. The confusion confirmed the local belief that the foulest thing about tyranny was its vulnerability to murderous infighting. The people of Athens trembled, fearing the worst. But then, in the year 514 BCE, the revenge of the unexpected struck, with stupendous effect. Like an eagle, freedom swooped to earth, to inflict an unpleasant surprise on the courtly nest of feuding tyrants.

The tipping point had more than a touch of the absurd about it; at first, many contemporaries simply could not believe what had happened. During the Panathenaic festival, the spectacular carnival held once every four years in honour of the city’s goddess Athena, one of the tyrants, Hipparchus, fell foul of a murder plot organised by disaffected young aristocrats. Fusing speed and secrecy, his assassins pounced. Wielding daggers concealed beneath their robes, they lunged at his heart, killing him instantly, in broad daylight, right in the main square of Athens. Their daring left bystanders voiceless; so, too, did its fickle effects. For, although the killers had been well acquainted with the tyrannical brothers, they bungled their murderous deed. They had evidently been after Hippias, in revenge (so they had thought) for his spiteful refusal to allow the sister of one of the assassins a place in the procession. But it transpired that the real culprit in the shadows was the young stepbrother, Thessalus. His secret homoerotic crush on one of the assassins had recently met with rejection. That was why he had tried to extract revenge by ordering the girl’s disqualification (and consequent public shaming) from the city’s most important public festival.

Jilted homosexual desire was thus a conspirator in the plot, which backfired in yet another way, this time with historic consequences. While the assassins waited to pounce on the hated Hippias, they panicked after spotting him from a distance, chatting with an accomplice. Fearing that their plot had been exposed, they lunged nervously with their daggers at Hipparchus, who was standing nearby. Better one dead tyrant than none at all, so they thought. Several contemporaries judged the botched assassination to be a personal vendetta for a multiple lovers’ quarrel – the murdered tyrant was himself said to be in love with one of the assassins, who themselves were lovers – but whether or not the killing was part of a homosexual love quadrangle was soon of no consequence. The surviving tyrant Hippias, fearing that he would meet the cruel fate of his brother, dispensed rough justice on the spot. He ordered his guards to draw their swords against the assassins – whose names, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, soon became household names in Athens and beyond. Harmodius was hacked to pieces by the tyrant’s soldiers; Aristogeiton was arrested, tortured and then condemned to a grisly death, along with several supporters.

The tyranny founded by Hippias and Thessalus enjoyed little legitimacy. So foul did it feel that a rival noble family, the Alcmaeonids, successfully plotted their overthrow around 510 BCE, after military intervention by the Spartans under Cleomenes had backfired by inciting yet more political violence, as well as a popular uprising that lasted for three full days and nights. The combination of power-grabbing above and a popular uprising from below proved contagious. For through the cracks within the elite of local wealthy families headed by the Alcmaeonids appeared the figure of Cleisthenes, a man who understood that tyranny founded on fear could never make for durable government. Like a sapling in search of sunlight, he introduced, in the years 508/507 BCE, a new constitution. The previously dispersed population of Athens and its surrounding countryside was integrated into ten ‘tribes’ and three new regional administrative units. A city-based army, rooted in these new structures and comprising non-elite, heavily armed foot soldiers called hoplites, was established for the first time. A governing body, the Council of Five Hundred, was set up, and official encouragement was given to an independent assembly based in Athens; in 506 BCE it passed its first decree. Each of these changes was designed both to cut the city’s old family ties and to put an end to the violence and conspiracy of faction. But these reforms had another, more earth-shaking significance: they acknowledged the power of the powerless. Cleisthenes was the first Athenian ruler of the period to spot that large numbers of people could act in concert, that a d

mos could exercise initiative, take things into its own hands, without guidance or leadership by aristocrats. He drew from this a remarkable conclusion: that if from here on the Athenian polity was to survive it had to be based on the entirely new principle that the d

mos was entitled to govern itself.

That was no mean achievement, and it is why history should remember the aristocrat Cleisthenes as a political leader who was a proto-democrat. It is wrong to see him, as many people today still see him, as the Great Man who was responsible for ‘founding’ democracy in Athens. It is equally wrong to see democracy in Athens as the creation of a brave D

mos that got tough when the going became rough. The blood-and-guts Athenian transition to democracy, like virtually all those that were to follow, was far messier and more protracted than Great Man or D

mos explanations imply. Athenian democracy had many causes. It also had many causers. The assassins Harmodius and Aristogeiton played a vital part in the drama. So too did those unknown commoners who rose up and took things into their own hands against the Spartan invaders in 508/507 BCE and decisively crushed a plot by Isagoras, the arch-enemy of Cleisthenes, to set up an oligarchy backed by the Spartan forces. But Cleisthenes also played a vital role,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Begin reading
• PART TWO: REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY
• PART THREE: MONITORY DEMOCRACY
• Notes
• Index