Politics

Antiquity and Its Legacy

Kostas Vlassopoulos

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781845118440
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857736833
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ancient Greece is famous as the civilization which 'gave' the world democracy. Democracy has in modern times become the rallying cry of liberation from supposed totalitarianism and dictatorship. And the desire by the western powers, especially America, to foment (or impose) democracy across the globe is one of the most powerful driving motors in present-day geopolitics: not least in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, a lively and well informed treatment of the nexus between politics in antiquity and political discourse in the modern era is both timely and apposite. As Kostas Vlassopoulos shows, much can be learned about the practice of politics from a comparative discussion of the classical and the contemporary. His starting point is that the value of looking back to a political system with different assumptions and elements can help us think, and even shape, what the future of modern politics might be.
He discusses the contrasting political systems prevalent in the Greek city-states of Athens, Sparta and Corinth; tensions between democrats and oligarchs in Periclean Athens; the bitter rivalries which led to the Peloponnesian Wars in the fifth century BCE; and, the delicate balance of powers between people, senate and emperor in the hierarchical society of republican and latterly imperial Rome. Above all, the book shows how important and surprising the study of antiquity can be in reassessing and revaluating modern political debates.

CHAPTER I

WHO SHOULD RULE?

The question of who should rule and the classification of political systems according to who rules are by no means natural to political thought. Many political systems have existed without ever raising the issue. The ancient Romans practised politics and even wrote about them without ever asking the question, until they came to adopt, very sparingly, some terms and questions of Greek political philosophy.¹ To all means and extents the question and the terminology associated with this question were a Greek invention.

As a matter of fact, it also took a long time before the question arose in Greek political thought. Until the fifth century BCE the important questions for Greek political thought were rather different.² For the archaic Greeks the main question was whether a political community was well-ordered or not; they thus distinguished between two different conditions, eunomia (good order) and dysnomia (bad order). The question of who exercised power within the community was irrelevant and there was no available terminology in order to distinguish between different regimes; what mattered was only whether the citizens thought that their community was governed well.³ The archaic period was also characterised by the emergence of individuals who came to monopolise power in their hands; the Greeks called these individuals tyrannoi, from which the modern word tyrant derives. This monopoly of power and office in the hands of a single individual was strongly resisted by the rest of the traditional ruling classes, who believed that power should be shared between political equals. Their slogan was isonomia, the equal share of power. Isonomia could describe all forms of political regimes in which power was not restricted to the hands of a single individual. These communities could vary widely in their political forms. In some, power was concentrated in the hands of a few elected magistrates or a council; in others, the citizen assembly had wider powers, but only the propertied had the right to participate in the assembly, while the poor citizens were excluded; in others, finally, the poor had the right to participate in the assembly, but not the right to be elected to office. There were no terms available to distinguish between these different regimes; the important thing was that, when contrasted to tyranny, they all appeared to be systems of isonomia.⁴

This way of thinking changed rapidly with the emergence of democracy in Athens during the fifth century BCE.⁵ The exercise of power continued to be seen as a reward for those who most contributed to the community in words and deeds. But in the course of the fifth century a new contender for the reward of power emerged. We have seen how military service in defence of the community was of paramount importance in justification of claims to power. The new Athenian superpower was not, though, dependent so much on its infantry, traditionally consisting of the rich and the middle class, but based its power on the navy, manned by thousands of sailors who belonged to the lower classes. The claim that the lower classes deserved to rule, because they contributed most to the defence and power of the community, is first presented to us by a fifth-century author that scholars traditionally call the Old Oligarch.

First I want to say this: there the poor and the people generally are right to have more than the highborn and wealthy for the reason that it is the people who man the ships and impart strength to the city; the steersmen, the boatswains, the sub-boatswains, the look-out officers, and the shipwrights – these are the ones who impart strength to the city far more than the hoplites, the high-born, and the good men. This being the case, it seems right for everyone to have a share in the magistracies, both allotted and elective, for anyone to be able to speak his mind if he wants to.⁶

But it was not just the fact that a novel claim to power could be substantiated. It was also the case that the functioning of the political system had changed in a very fundamental manner.⁷ The political and social elite had no power anymore to take decisions on its own. Instead, all important decisions in Athens were taken by the assembly, in which every citizen, no matter how poor, had the right to participate, speak and vote. Furthermore, while rich Athenians had to pay taxes or personally cover the expenses of a number of state functions, poor citizens paid no taxes and received the benefits of these services. To disgruntled members of the old political elite, this looked like a form of government in which power rested in the lower classes and was exercised to promote their class interest. These disgruntled members of the elite soon came with a name for this novel regime: they called it demokratia, which meant that power (kratos) was in the hands of the people (demos). But who exactly were the people? Like in modern languages, the Greek word demos can be understood in two ways, one horizontal, the other vertical. In the horizontal way, the people are seen as encompassing the whole citizen body; in the vertical the people are seen as the lower classes and contrasted with the upper classes, the rich, the aristocracy or the rulers. The difference is clearer in the Latin language, which distinguishes between the populus (horizontal) and the plebs (vertical). Those who initially coined the term demokratia, used the term people in the sense of the lower classes; in their eyes it was nothing more than the rule of the poor over the rich.

Thus, the emergence of democracy led to the discovery that political systems could be classified according to which individual or group was holding power. Furthermore, political systems could be divided between those that aimed at the common good, and those perverted versions which merely aimed at the good of the rulers. A regime was classified as a monarchy, when there was a single ruler who governed according to the common good; but it was classified as a tyranny, when the single ruler governed in his own interest. Equally, a regime was called an aristocracy, when rule was in the hands of the best citizens (aristoi), who governed with the common good in mind; but when the few (oligoi) governed in their own interest, it was called an oligarchy. Interestingly, there was little agreement in terminology when it came to the government of the many. Democracy could be used to describe both the good and the perverted version. The good version could be also called politeia (polity), while the bad version could be called ochlokratia, mob rule. The ambiguity was the result of the fact that democracy could mean either the rule of the people as a whole or of the lower classes only.⁸

Let us concentrate on the concept of democracy for the time being. The view of democracy as the rule of the lower classes became a staple of Greek political thought and found its most emphatic expression in the work of the fourth-century BCE philosopher Aristotle:

The argument therefore seems to make it clear that for few or many to have power is an accidental feature of oligarchies in the one case and democracies in the other, due to the fact that the rich are few and the poor are many everywhere, but that the real thing in which democracy and oligarchy differ from each other is poverty and wealth; and it necessarily follows that wherever the rulers owe their power to wealth, whether they be a minority or a majority, this is an oligarchy, and when the poor rule, it is a democracy.⁹

The spectre of class rule by the lower classes haunted many opponents of democracy and remained influential until well into the twentieth century.

There was also an equally critical view of democracy which, however, put things in a different light. In this conception democracy was not the equivalent of class rule, but was identified with lack of rule, with anarchy. Its most memorable depiction was presented by Plato in his Republic:

‘Is it not the excess and greed of [liberty] and the neglect of all other things that revolutionises [democracy] too and prepares the way for the necessity of a tyranny?’ ‘How?’ he said. ‘Why, when a democratic city athirst for liberty gets bad cupbearers for its leaders and is intoxicated by drinking too deep of that unmixed wine, and then, if its so-called governors are not extremely mild and gentle with it and do not dispense the liberty unstintedly, it chastises them and accuses them of being accursed oligarchs . . . Is it not inevitable that in such a state the spirit of liberty should go to all lengths?’ ‘Of course’. ‘And this anarchical temper’, said I, ‘my friend, must penetrate into private homes and finally enter into the very animals . . . And do you note that the sum total of all these items when footed up is that they render the souls of the citizens so sensitive that they chafe at the slightest suggestion of servitude and will not endure it? For you are aware that they finally pay no heed even to the laws written or unwritten, so that forsooth they may have no master anywhere over them’.¹⁰

This critical image of democracy as equivalent to anarchy remained equally influential in ancient and modern political thought. But even from the beginnings of Athenian democracy in the fifth century BCE, we come across alternative definitions that aim to defend democracy from its opponents. The earliest of them comes from the historian Herodotus, who described a debate among Persian grandees about what form of regime they should adopt after the death of the legitimate monarch. After criticising the excesses of monarchy and the danger of putting all power in the hands of a single person, Otanes, one of the grandees, offered the following account of his preferred regime:

But the rule of the multitude has, in the first place, the loveliest name of all, equality, and does, in the second place, none of the things that a monarch does. It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating publicly. Therefore I give my opinion that we make an end of monarchy and exalt the multitude, for all things are possible for the majority.¹¹

Democracy was a polity in which all citizens were free and equal. Therefore, nobody had a better claim to rule than anybody else. Yet, decisions needed to be taken and these decisions needed to be put into practice. Democracy answered these needs by creating a political system in which all citizens had an equal chance to participate in deliberation and to rule. All important decisions were taken by the popular assembly, in which all adult male citizens had the right to participate and speak. The magistrates were merely executive officials, who had no power to initiate policies or to take important decisions on their own. They were selected by lot annually, among those citizens who wished to hold public office. No citizen could be selected twice for the same office; thus, rotation ensured that no citizen could become excessively powerful by continuous holding of office. The only exceptions were those functions that required special talents, like the military and financial offices. In these cases, the Athenians employed the system of election instead of the lot and permitted re-election to the same position without limit. But even these magistrates had no power to initiate policy and were strictly within the power of the assembly.¹²

It is often said that the difference between ancient and modern democracies lies in the fact that the former were direct, while the latter are based on representation. While there is an important element of truth in this, it is also highly misleading.¹³ Many important political decisions and functions were undertaken by representative bodies in Athenian democracy. Let us briefly look at two of them: the Council of the 500 and the popular courts. The Council of the 500 was a representative body: each of the 139 districts of Attica was represented in the council in proportion to its number of citizens. The Council prepared the agenda of the assembly: no issue could be discussed in the assembly if it had not already been discussed and put into the agenda by the Council. But councillors were selected by lot, like the other magistrates, and no citizen could serve as councillor more than twice in his life and even that non-consecutively.

The popular courts had important political functions, as we shall explain in the next chapter. Every year 6,000 jurors were selected by lot from among all citizens who wished to serve as jurors in that particular year. Cases were heard by panels selected daily by lot from this pool of 6,000 jurors. Any decision of the assembly could be challenged in court, and the jury had the power to overturn it if found unconstitutional or inexpedient. The courts were an important means of revisiting the decisions of the assembly, and their decisions were final, making some modern historians believe that they were the true sovereign body of Athenian democracy.¹⁴ Thus, important political functions were undertaken not by the assembly in which every citizen could participate, but by special bodies which represented the Athenian citizens. But, in contrast to modern democracies, all these representative bodies were selected by lot and not by election. Thus, the difference between ancient and modern democracies cannot be sought in representation; it rather lies in the specific role that representation and election play in modern democracies, a point to which we shall return later.

Classical Greece was characterised by an intense struggle between partisans of oligarchy and democracy. To avoid these constant fights, Greek thinkers from the late fifth century onwards came up with a new idea: the mixed constitution. The idea was that one could avoid the excesses of every single form and satisfy both democrats and oligarchs by combining elements from the different constitutions into a single, mixed form. This was a very potent idea in ancient, and later in modern political thought.¹⁵ Plato and Aristotle, the earliest Greek thinkers to deal with the concept, tended to see the mixed constitution as a mixture of monarchical, aristocratic and democratic principles. Thus, the mixed constitution should combine the democratic principle of the lot with the aristocratic principle of election; or it should combine the democratic principle of universal right to vote for all citizens with the aristocratic principle that only certain citizens should have the right to be elected into office.¹⁶

But a new departure in political thought took place when Greek thinkers tried to accommodate within this scheme some polities that were considered highly successful and could be seen as ideal examples of the mixed constitution: initially Sparta, and later also Rome.¹⁷ Sparta and Rome could not fit easily into the usual classification of Greek political thought.¹⁸ In Sparta power was divided between the two kings, the senate (Gerousia), the popular assembly and the ephors. The two kings were mainly in charge of the army; the senate, made up of the two kings plus 28 Spartan citizens over sixty elected for life, discussed all political affairs and brought proposals for decision to the popular assembly. The assembly, in which all citizens with full rights had the right to participate, could not discuss the proposals put in front of it, but only accept them or turn them down. Finally, an important role was played by the five ephors elected annually from all the Spartan citizens, but without the right of re-election. The ephors were seen as a bridle on the power of the kings, and each month they swore an oath of allegiance to the kings, valid for as long as the kings kept their own oath of upholding the law.¹⁹

Rome had a similarly complex political structure.²⁰ Power was divided between the two consuls, the senate, the assemblies and the tribunes. The two consuls were the annually-elected heads of the executive: chief among their duties was military leadership. Once the consuls and other high magistrates, like the quaestors, the praetors and the aediles, had finishe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION:
• CHAPTER I: WHO SHOULD RULE?
• CHAPTER II: THE EXERCISE OF POWER: LIBERTY
• CHAPTER III: POLITICS AS ACTIVITY: PARTICIPATION, DELIBERATION, CONFLICT
• CHAPTER IV: THE ENDS OF POLITICS: THE GOOD LIFE, A BETTER WORLD
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES