Ritual, finance, politics: Athenian democratic accounts presented to David Lewis 9780198149927

Citation preview

“$

“Ld 4 Mgr he BaeAN LIS AA pr . wee aao * Ne Cae es oe yet CEES oeweePere diesLe Oi

ro we C ‘ : “y i : eens

Seamed, i . cael x ™~, bY ra

Uf Fae hn Sy wwe “ay sie ne - %

ote wePrete A . toee¥.teeé Ban be ”ah ofah i \ ,

tar PR ce Cons On the other

hand, the formal distinctions which were made between the Generals in terms of their duties seems to bend over still further in the direction of recognizing that in the military field expertise was important, just as the influence of the elected financial officials with long terms of office recognized expertise in the financial sphere.

The removal from the Assembly to the board of Nomothetai of the procedure for making laws not only made it necessary for the Council to sort out proposed Assembly business in order to bring only particular rather than general measures, it also gave a new significance to the selection of the body of 6,000 from which dikasts were drawn and which constituted the Nomothetai. The procedures of the Nomothetai were laid down in great detail and were of considerably greater complexity than any rules pertaining to the Assembly—initially indeed, it seems, of such complexity as hardly ever to be invoked, and the complex process of law creation seems reflected in the complexity of the laws created—as comparison of the law about the testing of silver coinage of 375-4 with the fifth-century regulation about 44 e.g. ‘The Kerameikos Ostraca’, ZPE 14 (1974), 1-4; and note the discussion at ML 21. 45 The date of the change was discussed by D. M. Lewis, ‘Notes on Attic Inscriptions. VI. The Epistates of the Proedroi’, BSA 49 (1959), 31-4.

18 Robin Osborne allied use of Athenian coinage, weights and measures reveals.*® Compare, for instance, the treatment of defaulters. The fifth-century decree provides: If someone other than a magistrate in the cities, either a citizen or a foreigner, fails to act in accordance with the decree, he is to lose his civic rights, his property is to be confiscated, and a tithe of it dedicated to the goddess.

The 375/4 law provides: If anyone does not accept silver coinage that has been tested by the Certifier, he is to be deprived of what he is selling on that day. Denunciations for offences in the grain-market are to be made before the Sitophulakes, for offences in the Agora and the rest of the city before the Syllogeis of the people; for offence in the market and the Peiraieus before the Epimeletai of the market, with the exception of offences in the grain-market; for offences in the grain-market before the Sitophylakes. All denunciations of below 10 drachmas are within the competence of the magistrates to decide, but those above Io drachmas are to be brought before the law-court.

Where the fifth-century decree is concerned with the penalty, the fourthcentury law seems to be almost as intent on establishing the precise ritual moves which are to be made and the proper ritual definition of magisterial competence as it is on punishing offenders. That in the fourth century the very ritualization of lawmaking, and the

very public display of the laws made, led to more, rather than less, manipulation of the law, is argued in different ways by the papers in this volume by Robin Lane Fox and by Rosalind Thomas. Thomas argues that the emphasis on written law in the fourth century, and the outlawing of the appeals to the unwritten laws which in Pericles’ Funeral Speech in Thucydides (2. 37. 3) are seen to be part of the distinctive fabric of Athenian democratic life, actually leads to the development of new arguments, and in

particular arguments based on the intentions of the lawgiver, which are designed to lead to particular, tendentious, interpretations of written law. When Demosthenes attacks Leptines for his new law, the appeal to the authority of the legendary lawgiver and his putative intentions, so far removed from those of Leptines, is coupled with the claim that Leptines has failed to follow the proper procedure for making a law—a procedure which

is also ascribed to Solon. Such manoeuvres are by no means limited to Demosthenes. Lane Fox points to the extreme dubiety of some of Aeschines’ claims about what was legally the case, and to the way in which Aeschines uses his peculiar knowledge of the rituals of the democracy rather to make 4° Testing of silver coinage: R. S. Stroud, Hesperia 43 (1974), 157-61; coinage decree ML 45 (Fornara 97), and on its historical significance D. M. Lewis, ‘The Athenian Coinage Decree’, in I. Carradice (ed.), Coinage and Administration in the Athenian and Persian Empires (Oxford,

1987), 53-63. Similar complexity is in evidence in the grain law to be published by R. S. Stroud, part of which he discussed at the Oxford conference.

Introduction: Ritual, Finance, Politics 19 persuasive claims about past or present ritual practice than to insist on punctilious performance of the actual rules or on democratic proprieties. Rituals lend themselves to the misrecognition of what they are really about,

and in fourth-century Athens the extreme facility in the creation of new rituals of democratic form went side by side with a capacity to overlook, and indeed deliberately to bypass, the democratic ends which the rituals were held to embody. The ready association of freedom with democracy turned all too easily into an assumption that going through the rituals of democracy guaranteed freedom.

The danger that in a highly ritualized democratic society form will be mistaken for content should not be allowed to obscure just how important and effective those rituals were. Lane Fox ends his paper with observing that Aeschines was quite pertinent when he drew attention to the significance of

embassies going to the houses of private individuals rather than to the offices of the democracy—for all that he himself had been open to private contact. For participants, the rituals only made an impact when disrupted or unusually exploited—as in the aftermath of Arginoussai the Apatouria is exploited to whip up public feelings against parties held responsible for not collecting the bodies of the dead. We should not be surprised, therefore, that ancient historians themselves make little of the ritualization of life at Athens and never suggest that it was politically significant. Ritualization was, of its

essence, a regular feature and as such was simply taken for granted. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Thucydides never draws attention to this side of Athenian life, although it comes close to the surface in Pericles’ Funeral Speech and Thucydides’ introduction to it:+” the various categories of ‘instruction’ that Thucydides gives, which are so illuminatingly discussed by Richard Rutherford in his paper, are heavily focused on the explanation of why particular clashes between cities take place at all and why they turn

out the way that they do: even the Thucydidean concern with experience, experiment, training, and practice is directed at preparations directly concerned with contact and conflict between cities. Thucydides is, even in book 8, notoriously lacking in interest in constitutional arrangements, so that even when he analyses stasis on Corcyra he does so in the context of the way in which the conflict between Sparta and Athens had an impact on other’s political stability, rather than taking the opportunity to look in detail at internal factors which render a constitution firm or fragile; indeed the 4? Even here, as Simon Hornblower notes, ‘The public funeral was more of a religious event than would be guessed from Th.’s narrative’, A Commentary on Thucydides, i. Books I-III (Oxford, 1922), 292, on 2. 34. The only occasion where Thucydides seems to go out of his way to provide details of a religious ritual when their relevance to the event in question is not entirely clear is in I. 126 when discussing the Cylonian conspiracy to explain the curse upon the Alkmaionids (cf. Hornblower, ibid. 208, on I. 126. 6: ‘Why Th. introduced this detail about the sacrifices is beyond me.’).

20 Robin Osborne ‘exemplary’ quality of the analysis of stasis on Corcyra rather precludes it from also drawing attention to matters of internal arrangement which might

modify the effect of such universal features as human nature and the influence of war.

Richard Rutherford notes apologetically that his paper has little to do with Athenian democracy, but the fact that Thucydides did not perceive Athens’ democratic constitution and the means by which she preserved it, as opposed to the ‘manners’ of the Athenians, in which he is interested, to be important factors for explaining the part Athens played in Greek history,

has an important political legacy. Both Mogens Herman Hansen and Eberhard Ruschenbusch, in the papers which open and close the ‘Politics’ section of this book, stress the way in which the modern democratic tradition is quite separate from, and owes little to, Athenian democratic practice. Hansen suggests that the eclipse of Cleisthenes in the modern tradition of

Athenian democracy stems from the fact that Plutarch did not include Cleisthenes in his Parallel Lives. But the way in which political writing since

the eighteenth century which has invoked either the Athens of Pericles or the Athens of Demosthenes has relentlessly turned its attention on what went on in the Assembly and on the role of political leaders is surely in large

part a legacy of Thucydides’ historical agenda. The Demosthenic corpus includes much more than the speeches which deal with Athenian relations with Philip and the effect of the threat of Philip on Athenian political life, as Mogens Herman Hansen’s monographs and Rosalind Thomas’ use of Demosthenes XX and XXIV here make clear, but the role Demosthenes has regularly played in modern writings is that of champion of freedom, not of authority on the workings of the democratic system. A proper understanding of Athenian democracy, and of Athens’ ability to survive with so little civil

conflict, demands that we pay the ritual substructure of democracy the attention which Thucydides was unwilling to bestow, and focus not on Demosthenes as witness to the champion of freedom, but as witness to (and indeed largely champion of) ritual constraints.

This collection of papers is not intended to be a systematic account of Athenian democracy—a task variously and fascinatingly fulfilled by the author of the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, by his great modern

commentator, Peter Rhodes, by Mogens Herman Hansen, and by other recent writers. Rather, this collection of papers aims to illuminate the system in action by looking at a whole range of Athenian procedures and practices and asking pertinent questions about their rationale. The way in which the term ‘democracy’ has been hijacked in the modern western world to describe political arrangements essentially very different, in theory and in practice,

from those of classical Athens, makes it difficult to recover the sense of challenge which Athenian constitutional arrangements and their human price should surely stimulate. By juxtaposing religious practices, which we

Introduction: Ritual, Finance, Politics 21 expect to find alien, with financial arrangements, which we expect to find readily comprehensible, by suggesting that both can usefully be viewed as part of an all-encompassing strategy of ritualization, and by putting side by

side scholarly views which are by no means in agreement, we hope to encourage that quizzical regard for Athenian institutions, and for established

views about them, which has been so characteristic of David Lewis’s contribution, both formal and informal, to the study of Greek history.*” 4° T am grateful to Simon Hornblower for his prompt encouragement and acute criticism of an earlier draft.

if

POLITICS

I The 2500th Anniversary of Cleisthenes’ Reforms and the Tradition of Athenian Democracy MOGENS HERMAN HANSEN

We are celebrating David Lewis and Athenian democracy. We all agree that David Lewis deserves to be celebrated, but what about Athenian democracy? Furthermore, David Lewis’s day and year of birth have probably never been disputed. But when was Athenian democracy born? The event we claim to celebrate is the 2500th anniversary of Cleisthenes’ reforms, but during this conference not one single paper has been devoted to Cleisthenes or to the problem of what kind of democracy he introduced. I am not surprised; for the same thing has happened at the other three ‘2500 years of democracy’ conferences I have attended so far. Why is this so?

Both in our sources for Athenian democracy and in the tradition about Athenian democracy Cleisthenes is a subordinate character, and it is only

in this century that he has become the focus of attention in studies of Athenian democracy. As for the sources: Cleisthenes never had a statue in Athens to commemorate his achievements as did Solon and Pericles and Demosthenes.’ In all our symbouleutic and forensic speeches there is no reference to Cleisthenes whatsoever.” Apart from what we read in Herodotus, the only mention of Cleisthenes in classical prose is in Isocrates’ essays and in Aristotle's treatises: the Politics and the Constitution of Athens.’ Also, there is no life of Cleisthenes by Plutarch to match the lives of Solon, of Pericles, and of Demosthenes.

Next the tradition: between antiquity and the Enlightenment Athenian democracy was a Sleeping Beauty, with two major differences. She did not

" Statues of Solon: Dem. XXVI. 23; of Pericles: Paus. 1. 25. 1; of Demosthenes: Ps. Plut. Mor. 847A. Cf. G. M. A. Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks (London, 1965), 83-6 (Solon); 102-4 (Pericles); 215-23 (Demosthenes). > In the speeches, the closest we get to Cleisthenes is a reference, at Dem. XXI. 144, to the Alkmaionidai who expelled the tyrants. > Cleisthenes referred to in Hdt. 5. 66-73; 6. 131. Arist. Pol. 1275°36; 1319°21; Ath. Pol. 20-2, 28-9, 41; fr. 3. Isoc. VII. 16; 15. 232 (306); 16. 26-7.

26 Mogens Herman Hansen sleep for a hundred years only, but for almost two thousand,’ and she did not wake up by being kissed by a loving prince. When she was roused from her sleep, she was feared by princes, detested by philosophers, and found impossible by statesmen. Furthermore, when, in the eighteenth century, Athenian democracy once again began to attract at least some attention, Cleisthenes was still a subordinate character, and if he was mentioned at all, it was certainly not as the founder of Athenian democracy. Hear what John Adams, the second president of the United States, has to say about him: Cleisthenes, son of Megacles, head of the Alcmzeonides, was the first person of the commonwealth. Having no great abilities, a party was formed against him under Isagoras, with whom most of the principal people joined. The party of Cleisthenes was among the lower sort, who being all powerful in the general assembly, he made by their means some alterations in the constitution favoring his own influence. Cleisthenes was now Tyrant of Athens, as much as Pisistratus had been.’

In the eighteen century, Cleisthenes was completely eclipsed by Solon. Thus,

in 1789 when Schiller composed his comparison of Athenian and Spartan political institutions and ideologies, the two figures he chose for his lectures were Lycurgus to represent Spartan law and Solon to represent Athenian liberty.° The historian who ‘rediscovered’ Cleisthenes was George Grote,’ As John Stuart Mill noted in his review of Grote’s work: After Solon ... the first great constitutional change was the reformation of Cleisthenes,

an eminent man, to whose character and historical importance no one before Mr Grote has done justice.®

The next important step forward in the rehabilitation of Cleisthenes was the discovery and publication in 1891 of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens.? Chapters 20-2 offer the longest and most detailed account we have got of

Cleisthenes’ work, and chapter 29 confirms Herodotus’ statement that it was Cleisthenes who gave Athens its democratic constitution. And so at last, in 1925, when Victor Ehrenberg published his Neugrtinder des Staates, Cleisthenes came to replace Solon as the Athenian to match Lycurgus in a 4 M. H. Hansen, ‘The Tradition of the Athenian Democracy A.D. 1750-1990,’ G&R 39 (1992), 16-18. 5 John Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-

8), in Works (Boston, 1851), iv. 486. © Fr. Schiller, Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgs und Solon, lectures delivered in Jena, 1789, printed in Thalia, 11 (Leipzig, 1791).

? G. Grote, A History of Greece, iv. 300-49, in the Everyman's Library edition. ® The Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1853.

9 J. Méléze Modrzejewski, ‘Aristote et les grecs d’Egypte’, in M. Piérart (ed.), Aristote et Athénes (Paris, 1993), 4-5.

The Tradition of Athenian Democracy 27 comparison of the two political systems.*° But it took another generation before, in 1964, Pierre Lévéque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet devoted a monograph to Cleisthenes.'' And five more years passed before Martin Ostwald, in 1969, provided the Anglo-American historians with a book devoted to Cleisthenes.*?

Even today it is disputed whether Cleisthenes deserves to be credited with

the introduction of democracy in Athens. Following the fourth-century tradition some modern historians will have the birth of Athenian democracy pushed back to Solon.’’ Others believe that the essential elements of popular

rule did not emerge until after Ephialtes’ reforms.'* For my own part, however, I recommend that we trust Herodotus when he tells us that it was Cleisthenes who gave power to the people. I am also prepared to follow Herodotus when he uses the term demokratia about Cleisthenes’ reforms." Many modern historians believe that the slogan used in Cleisthenes’ time to describe popular government was isonomia not demokratia.'® But Herodotus never spoke of Athenian isonomia. When he describes Cleisthenes’ constitution he uses the noun demokratia, and when he refers to its principal ideal he speaks not about isonomia, but about isegoria,'’? which in ancient and modern democratic ideology is associated with liberty as much as with equality. In fact, by a closer scrutiny of the sources, much of the talk about equality being prior to liberty in early Athenian political thought vanishes into thin air.'® ‘° V. Ehrenberg, Neugrtinder des Staates (Munich, 1925), 5-54: ‘Der Gesetzgeber von Sparta’; 57-120: Cleisthenes. "' P, Lévéque and P. Vidal-Naquet, Clisthéne l’athénian (Besancon, 1964); English edn. (New York, 1993) trans. D. A. Curtis. '* M. Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1969). '> Q. Murray, Early Greece (2nd edn., London 1993) 184: ‘Solon was the founder of Athenian democracy , repeated 189 and 200, where Murray discusses the ancient tradition about Solon as the founder of democracy. Cf. the review of Murray’s book in CPh 78 (1983), 169, where R. Sealey takes him to task for connecting Solon with the introduction of democracy in Athens. I confess to have more sympathy than the reviewer for Murray’s bold but seminal interpretation of Solon’s reforms. ‘+R. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation (Cambridge, 1988) I, 16. Hdt. 6. 131: KrewoOévns ... 6 tas dudds Kal tiv Sypoxparinv *AOnvaiown Kataornaas. Cf Arist. Ath. Pol. 29. 3: KAecroddv b€ 7a ev dAda Kabarep [1v0d6dwpos etrev, mpocavalynriaat dé tous aipedevras éyparev kal Tovs matpious vouous ots KAevabévns €OnKev 6te kabiarn THV SnpoKpariay.

‘© For the view that isonomia preceded demokratia cf. e.g. G. Vlastos, ‘Isonomia’, AJP 74 (1953), 337-66; M. I. Finley, ‘The Freedom of the Citizen in the Greek World’, Talanta, 7 (1976), 10; Chr. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Cambridge, Mass, 1990), 84, 162, and passim. ” Hdt. 5. 78: "Adnvaion pév vuv nb&nvro. dndoi b€ od Kar’ év pobvov GAAa TmavTayh % conyopin ws eoTl xpyua omovoaiov, ef kal "AOnvaior Tupavveudpevor pev ovdapd@v THv odéas TEptotKEdvTwY noav Ta ToAguta dpeivous, dmaddaxbévres 5€ TUpdvywy waKpw mp@Tor éyévovto.

'§ M. H. Hansen, ‘Was Athens a Democracy?’, Hist. Fil. Medd. Dan. Vid. Selsk. 59 (1989),

23-4.

28 Mogens Herman Hansen The case for isonomia as a Cleisthenic slogan rests on two sources: first Herodotus’ account at 3. 80-3 of the constitutional debate that, allegedly, took place in Persia in 522 before the accession of Darius I. Here Otanes, defending popular government, praises isonomia but has no reference to demokratia. The second source is the famous skolion of which the last line of the last stanza claims that Harmodius and Aristogeiton made the Athenians isonomoi.’?

Let us have a closer look at both sources: most historians agree, in my opinion correctly, that the constitutional debate described by Herodotus can

never have taken place in Persia in 522, but only reflects constitutional ideas in Greece in the age of Herodotus.*° But in that case it must be taken as evidence for political ideology and terminology in the age of Herodotus, and not in the age of Cleisthenes. It is inadmissible to remove the debate in place (i.e. from Susa to Athens) but not in time (i.e. from 522 to about 430 Bc). Thus, even if Herodotus, when he composed the debate, had Athens in mind, which is far from certain, no inference can be made from this source about constitutional concepts in the age of Cleisthenes.*’ Consequently, the only early source we have for isonomia as a political

slogan is the famous skolion which (as most scholars today agree) was probably sung in aristocratic circles and does not necessarily reflect Cleisthenes’ political programme.** We must not forget that one of the earliest attestations of isonomia as a political slogan is in Thucydides, book 3, where the Thebans oppose demokratia to an oligarchia isonomos.** The evidence we

have indicates that demokratia was the slogan used by the Athenians themselves about their own constitution as far back as our sources go, that is to about 470; and before that we have to suspend judgement.**

In short, I think it is essentially correct to have the anniversary of Athenian democracy now, and not in 2039 when our grandchildren may

meet to celebrate Ephialtes, or back in 1907 when, in the light of the recently discovered Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, our great grandfathers might have got together to commemorate Solonian democracy: the popular

courts manned with jurors, the Council of Four Hundred, and the impeachment to the Council of the Areopagos for overthrowing the democracy. '? Quoted at Ath. 695b, cf. D. Page, Poetae Melici Graeci (Oxford, 1962), no. 896. 7° See e.g. H. W. Pleket, ‘Isonomia and Cleisthenes: A Note’, Talanta, 4 (1972), 67, 69-71, and passim.

*" M. H. Hansen, ‘The Origin of the Term Demokratia’, LCM 11 (1986), 35-6. *2 On the date of the skolion cf. K. Raaflaub, Die Entdeckung der Freiheit (Munich, 1985), 116. *3 Thuc. 3. 62. 3: Huiv pev yap } mdAts OTE érUyyavev oUTE KaT bALyapxlav faodvopov TOALTEVoOUGA

otre kata dnpoxpariav. Cf. Hornblower’s note in A Commentary on Thucydides, i, (Oxford, 1991),

455-6. *4 Hansen (n. 21).

The Tradition of Athenian Democracy 29 Why has Cleisthenes had such an insignificant part to play in the modern tradition of Athenian democracy which spans the period from the American

and French revolutions to this century? There is, I think, a very simple answer to that: because Plutarch never wrote a life of Cleisthenes, and because the interest in Athenian democracy is a fairly recent phenomenon. During the Enlightenment the classical tradition was a very strong element

in the creation of public opinion, but Athenian democracy was a very insignificant part of the classical tradition. The history of Rome attracted much more interest than the history of Greece, and even in discussions of

democracy, where we would expect Athens to be cited as the typical example, and Rome to be left out altogether, both cities are often referred to side by side. Listen, for example, to the entry ‘Democracy’ in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1771: Democracy, the same with a popular government, wherein the supreme power is lodged in the hands of the people: such were Rome and Athens; but as to our modern republics, Basil only excepted, their government comes nearer to aristocracy than democracy.”

This short entry strikes a modern reader as strange, but the explanation is, first, that in the eighteenth century there was no clear distinction between the concept of democracy and the concept of republic;?° second, as I said before, that Rome loomed larger than Greece in any historical context; and third, that Polybius, who emphasizes the democratic aspects of the Roman constitution,*’ was extremely popular with political philosophers from Machiavelli in Florence to the founding fathers in Philadelphia.”®

Discussions of Athenian history are few and far between and when, *’ p. 415. Repeated (with the etymology added) in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th edns. (1777, 1778, 1801). In the 7th edn. (1842) Basil disappears and alongside Athens and Rome ‘the most perfect example of democracy is afforded by the United States of North America at the present day’. This entry is repeated in the 8th edn. (1853), and there is no new article until the 11th edn. (1910), where the city-states of Greece are referred to as the most prominent example of democracy, Rome has been confined to a few remarks, and the USA has dropped out again. In Diderot’s Encyclopedie (1754) the historical examples adduced in de Jaucourt’s article about démocratie are, again, Athens and Rome, whereas the contemporary example is San Marino (instead of Basle).

7° R. A. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, Conn, 1989), 360 n. 2. For the distinction between ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ see e.g. Madison in The Federalist, nos. Io and 14. For the subdivision of republics into democracies and aristocracies see e.g. Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, bk. 2, chs. 1-2 (pp. 11-17 in the Garnier edn.). *? F, Millar, ‘The Political Character of the Classical Roman Republic, 200-151 B.C.’, JRS

74 (1984), I-19. 8 G. Sasso, ‘Polibio e Machiavelli: costituzione, potenza, conquista’, in Studi su Machiavelli (Naples, 1967) 223-80; J. H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973) 31-2; G. Chinard, ‘Polybios and the American Constitution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1 (1940), 38-58.

30 Mogens Herman Hansen occasionally, we do hear about the Athenian democracy, we notice, to our

surprise, that the focus of attention is never Pericles but always Solon. Montesquieu in his De l’esprit des lois followed by de Jaucourt in Diderot’s Encyclopedie admired Solon as the father of Athenian democracy, whereas Pericles is not mentioned even once.*? John Adams, the second president of

the United States, published as early as 1787 a long defence of the new constitutions of the liberated colonies and here he devoted some twenty pages to a description of Athenian democracy. It is an uncharacteristically long account, but it is characteristically about Solonian democracy and not,

as a modern reader would expect, about democracy from Cleisthenes to Demosthenes. The passage about Cleisthenes quoted above comes from this

work.*° In 1789 Friedrich Schiller delivered two lectures in which he compared the political systems of Athens and Sparta and opposed the Spartan rule of law to the Athenian rule of freedom. In the lecture about Sparta the principal character is, of course, Lycurgus, but as I said before,

the statesman representing Athenian liberty is Solon.*’ In 1787 in the Crimea, Catherine II, the Tsar of Russia, met Joseph II, the German emperor.

Precisely as one would expect, one of the main issues was troubles in the Balkans, but once when Greece came _ up for discussion, Catherine spoke about reviving Lycurgus and Solon. The French ambassador de Segur, from whose hand we have the account of the conversation, dropped a word about Alcibiades, but Joseph, always level-headed and down to earth said: what in Hell shall we do about Constantinople?** Since she was interrupted, we shall probably never know more about how Catherine thought Greece could be liberated, but it is significant that the first two names to come up in that connection were Lycurgus and Solon. For us today Athenian freedom is associated not with Solon, but with Pericles and his funeral oration as reported by Thucydides. In the eighteenth century, when Pericles was mentioned, he was held up as a bugbear to warn champions of popular rule against the excesses of democracy. Two examples will suffice: according to J. J. Rousseau Periclean Athens was no longer a democracy, but a tyrannic aristocracy governed by ‘savants and orators’,*? and in the Federalist Papers, no. 6, Alexander Hamilton has the following judgement to pass on Pericles: The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentments of a prostitute, at the *2 Montesquieu De l'esprit des lois (edn. Garnier, Paris, 1967) I. 12-5, 25, 48-9, 52, 54, 122; II. 107, 282; de Jaucourt ‘Démocratie’, Encyclopedie IV (1754) 816-8; 3° John Adams (n. 5), iv. 472-92. 3% Schiller (n. 6).

3* K. Mykland, Frihedsrevolutionerne (Copenhagen, 1985), 138; L. Ph. de Ségur, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1823-35), 3. 247. 33 J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'économie politique, 24.6; Sur les sciences et les arts, 68 (in Oeuvres, iii, 1967).

The Tradition of Athenian Democracy 31 expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished and destroyed, the city of the Samians. The same man ... was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war; which, after various vicissitudes, intermissions and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian commonwealth.**

Why has the assessment of Pericles and of the origin of Athenian democracy changed so much between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries? Our understanding of Athenian democracy is based on Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Aeschines, the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens, and a large number of inscriptions. In the eighteenth century August Boeckh had not yet started his study of Greek inscriptions, the Constitution of Athens

was still hidden in the Egyptian desert, and only men of great learning would read Herodotus or Thucydides or Demosthenes or Aeschines. German Quellenkritik had not yet changed the study of history from a semi-philosophical and literary occupation into a scholarly discipline in its own right, and so the authors who really shaped the Enlightenment’s view of classical Greece were Plato, Aristotle, and above all Plutarch.*

In Aristotle’s Politics Solon is singled out as the father of Athenian democracy, whereas Ephialtes and Pericles are held responsible for its decline.2® And in Plutarch’s Life of Solon one can find a description of the institutions that matches Aristotle’s account: the four census classes, the Council of Four Hundred, the popular courts, the Council of the Areopagos,

and so on. Indications of decline appear in some chapters of the life of Pericles, while the very critical view of democracy is apparent in the Life of Demosthenes?’ and dominates the Life of Phocion.*°

We simply have to admit that for the Enlightenment’s understanding of Greek history Plutarch was more important than Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Demosthenes combined. One example will suffice. In 1771, a certain Robert Skipwith asked his friend and neighbour, Thomas Jefferson,

to draw up a list of books that would form a basic library for a cultivated Virginian gentleman. The list is still preserved and under ‘History. Antients’

we find Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, and Caesar representing Roman _historiography, but apart from Josephus only one of the Greek historians is 34 A. Hamilton in The Federalist, no. 6. 35 In H. T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries (Chicago, 1937), 18-

19, there is a table showing how often ancient authors are quoted in speeches made in the French National Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and the National Convention between 1789 and 1795. Cicero scores 83 quotes, Plutarch comes second with 36, and apart from him the only Greek author in the table is Plato with 7 quotes. Authors with 6 or less quotes are not included in the table but listed in a note. 36 Arist. Pol. 1273°35-1274°21. 37 e.g. at Plut. Dem. 7. 1-2. 38 Plut. Phocion 2. 1-9; 8. 4-5; 9. I-10; 16. 4; 21. 2-4; 23. 2-3; 24. 3-5; 34. 3-35. 5; 38. 5. For the importance in the 18th cent. of the life of Phocion, cf. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Entretiens de Phocion (1763).

32 Mogens Herman Hansen listed, viz. Plutarch’s Lives translated by Langhorn.*? So two pages of Aristotle’s Politics combined with Plutarch’s lives of Athenian statesmen are responsible for the eighteenth-century picture of the origin and development of Athenian democracy. Let me sum up by listing the three different views of the origin of Athenian democracy. The view that Athenian democracy was introduced by Solon is

found in almost all our fourth-century sources: orators, philosophers, and historians alike.*° It was also the dominant view during the Enlightenment for a century from about 1750. But the eighteenth-century philosophers took their view from Aristotle’s Politics and Plutarch’s Lives, not from Aeschines or Demosthenes or our other fourth-century sources, and according to this tradition, what Cleisthenes did was essentially, after the expulsion of the tyrants, to revive the Solonion democracy.*' The view that Athenian democracy originated with Cleisthenes was propounded by Herodotus, but was forgotten in the fourth century when, in the light of the propaganda for a return to the ‘ancestral democracy’ (patrios demokratia), Solon or even the mythical Theseus replaced Cleisthenes as the father of democracy, and the rehabilitation of Cleisthenes had to wait till the early nineteenth century when especially the German ancient historians, followed by Grote, turned their attention from Plutarch and Aristotle towards Herodotus and Thucydides as the principal sources. The third view, that the Athenian democracy was introduced by Ephialtes, is a variant of the view that, essentially, Cleisthenes revived the Solonian constitution and did not set up a new constitution of his own. The basic difference is that, in this case, Solon’s constitution is seen not as a democracy but as a form of aristocracy. Consequently, Cleisthenes’ reform is a revival

of aristocracy, not of democracy, and Ephialtes becomes the statesman responsible for the introduction of democracy. The sources for this view are first Aristotle’s comment on Cleitophon’s rider to Pythodorus’ decree of 411. Commenting on the decree, Aristotle refers to the view that Cleisthenes’ 39 Letter to Robert Skipwith, 3. 8. 1771. 4° E. Ruschenbusch, ‘Patrios Politeia: Theseus, Drakon, Solon und Kleisthenes in Publizistik und Geschichtsschreibung des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.’, Historia, 7 (1958), 398-424: M. H. Hansen, ‘Solonian Democracy in Fourth-Century Athens, C1Med 40 (1989), 71-99. repr. in J. Rufus Fears (ed.), Aspects of Athenian Democracy (Copenhagen, 1990). 4" Solonian democracy revived by Cleisthenes: Arist. Ath. Pol. 41. 2: rpirn 8 (peraoraais) 7 pera THY oTdow 7% emi LéAwvos, ad’ Hs apy SnwoKxparias eyévero. reraptn S % émi Ilevovorparov Tupavvis. méuTTy SO Hh eta TaV Tupavvwy KatdAvow 7 KrAecabévous, Synpotikwtépa Tis

SddAwvos. Arist Pol. 1319°19-24: ér 5€ Kal rd rowatra KatacKkevdcpata ypiaya mpos TI dSnpoKxpatiav THY To.avTyv, ols KXecaobévys te “AOnvnow eypjoato BovAduevos av&jaat tv SnwoKxpa-

tlav, kai wept Kupyvyy of tov d4ov xabtotavtes. dvAal re yap €repar Tromtéat rAElovs Kai dparpiar ... Isoc. VII. 16: edpicxkw yap rabryny povyy av yevonévynv ... dmadAdayny, fv €beAjawpev Exeivyv THV dSnpoKxpatiav avadafeiv, Av LérAwv pev 6 Snuotikwraros yevopevos evopobérynoe, KAecabévys 8 6 Tovs Tupavvous ékBadwy Kai Tov Ojpov KaTayaywv m7aXAw €€ apxys KaTéaTHGEV.

The Tradition of Athenian Democracy 33 constitution was not ‘democratic’ (demotikos) but like Solon’s. Echoes of the

same tradition are also found in some passages of Plutarch’s lives of Aristeides, Cimon, and Pericles.**

Following Herodotus and Grote most contemporary ancient historians give Cleisthenes the credit for the introduction of Athenian democracy. But there are still champions of the two heretical views and both deserve a short comment. Historians who credit Ephialtes with the introduction of Athenian democracy never do it because of what they read in Plutarch or in the Constitution

of Athens. Instead they base their belief on the following two arguments. One concerns the term demokratia and the concept of democracy. Many historians still hold that constitutional concepts, such as democracy, first

arose in the years around Ephialtes’ reforms.4? The view rests on an argument from silence: political concepts like e.g. demokratia are not attested

before about 450. But we have no sources before about 450 in which we could expect to find constitutional concepts mentioned and discussed; thus the argument is invalid.44 The other argument concerns the social and constitutional realities behind the concepts: it is a common belief that in the age of Cleisthenes popular rule was a novelty and so undeveloped that it must have taken more than a generation to reach a political system that deserves to be called a democracy in any sense of the word. But historians who want to see Solon as the father of democracy take the opposite stand: the idea of giving power to the people is not an invention of the late sixth century. On the contrary both the term and the reality behind it can be traced back to the Great Rhetra quoted by Plutarch in his Life of Lycurgus. In the last line of the text most scholars are prepared to accept the restoration édauw ... xpatos for yaw ... kparos found in the manuscripts. In any case the gist of the rhetra is that all decisions must be made by the people in assembly. If the Great Rhetra is a genuine document of the seventh

century, we need not have any difficulty in trusting Aristotle and all the other fourth-century sources who hold Solon responsible for the introduction

of democracy in Athens in the beginning of the sixth century. And if that is true, democracy must have originated in Sparta in the seventh century,* ** Arist. Ath. Pol. 29. 3: ws ob Snpotikyny dAAa tapatrAnoiay ovcav tiv KAevabévous troditelav 7H S'dAwvos. Plut. Cim. 15. 3: Kiuwvos ... wetpwuévov 7aAw dvw tas dikas dvaxareiobat Kai THV emi Krevobévous éyeipew dproroxpariav. Plut. Per. 3.2: (KAevo8évns), 6s ééjAace Tlevovorparidas Kai KkatéAvae THY Tupavvida yevvaiws Kal vojous €BeTo Kal ToAtTElav GpioTa KEKpapévyv pos pudvotav

Kal owtnpiav xatéotnoev. Plut. Arist. 2. I: Apraoreidns d€ KAecaBévous pév tot xataoryocapévov THY ToAuTElav jeTa TOUS TUpdvvous ETaipos yevduevos, CyAwWoas dé Kai Bavydcas pddAtora TaV ToAttik@y avdpmv Avxotpyov tov Aakedaimsviov, Hibato pév aprotoKpartiKys moAcreias ...

43 e.g. Chr. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 157 ff.

44 Hansen (n. 21). 45 §. Hornblower in J. Dunn (ed.) Democracy: The Unfinished Journey 508 sc to ap 1993 (Oxford, 1992), I-2.

34 Mogens Herman Hansen not in Athens more than a century later, and the only reason for having this conference would then be to celebrate David Lewis.

So much for the tradition about the Cleisthenic origin of Athenian democracy. But when historians have to describe and discuss the Athenian democratic ideals and institutions, even those who believe that Athenian democracy began with Cleisthenes invariably leap forward a century or two,

some to the age of Pericles, others—including me—to the age of Demosthenes. We never describe Cleisthenic democracy, but either Periclean democracy or the Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes. And when, in contemporary constitutional contexts, Athenian democracy is held up as a model to emulate, or as a bugbear to avoid, there is again a divide between those who prefer Pericles, and those who refer to Demosthenes. Why? In this case we will have to treat scholars and statesmen separately. When historians prefer to focus on the age of Pericles, it is because they see it as the period of the real greatness of Athens in art and literature, especially tragedy, as well as in politics. That philosophy and rhetoric reached their apogee in the fourth century counts for less. For the ideology of Periclean democracy we have a good number of contemporary sources,*°

but for the democratic institutions there is a remarkable lack of evidence which is usually compensated by projecting the rich fourth-century evidence back into the fifth century, as if the democratic institutions underwent only insignificant changes between Ephialtes and Demosthenes.*’

Historians who prefer to describe the Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes do it because it is only for the period 355 to 322 that we have enough sources to reconstruct the Athenian political institutions with any confidence and in sufficient detail.4° For ideology the sources are as plentiful

as for the fifth century, though different in type, and so, in addition to describing the fourth-century ideals, we can also trace the development of democratic ideals from the age of Pericles to the age of Demosthenes. In political and constitutional debates, on the other hand, when a historical example is needed, why have some chosen Pericles and others Demosthenes as their model? In this case the problem of historical accuracy is irrelevant. What matters is the ideological appeal. During World War I, more exactly in the autumn of 1915, all London buses displayed a notice with an English translation of Pericles’ praise of liberty in the Funeral Oration as reported by Thucydides.*? Again, in 1920, when Georges Clemenceau withdrew from 4© K. Raaflaub, ‘Contemporary Perceptions of Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens,’ ClMed 40 (1989), 33-70, repr. in Fears (n. 40). 47 Cf. M. H. Hansen, in CR 39 (1989), 71-4; CPh 84 (1989), 141-4. 48 M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991) pp. x,

20-2. 49 Translation of Thuc. 2. 37 displayed in London buses in 1915: F. M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (London, 1981), 187.

The Tradition of Athenian Democracy 35 politics, he devoted his remaining years to literary work, principally a biography of Demosthenes.°*° Now, Thucydides 2. 37 is such a lucid passage,

and I admit that it would be difficult to find a passage in Demosthenes that would do as nicely in a London bus. But why did Clemenceau write a life of Demosthenes rather than one of Pericles? That is, of course, a complicated question, but part of the answer emerges, I think, if we turn from the two Athenian democratic statesmen to their opponents. The Athenians under Pericles had to face the Spartan oligarchy, whereas Athens under Demos-

thenes was opposed by the Macedonian monarch Philip IJ. Admittedly, Sparta was a monarchy too, but the powers of the Spartan kings were insignificant compared with those of Philip II. So Philip of Macedon was a much better parallel to the German Kaiser Wilhelm than king Archidamus of Sparta would have been, and that may be why Demosthenes appealed to Clemenceau, the leader of republican France. The English, on the other hand, did not oppose the idea of monarchy itself, and preferred

to see the war as a confrontation between a free democracy organized as a naval empire and a continental power whose strength was in the army. So they preferred the opposition Periclean democracy versus Spartan oligarchy. This explanation can find some corroboration if we look at the issue from the German point of view. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was not uncommon to compare Kaiser Wilhelm II to Philip IT of Macedon, and the preface of Engelbert Drerup’s book Aus einer alten Advokatenrepublik (1916) is notorious for matching the Athenian lawyer Demosthenes with the British lawyer Lloyd George.** But after 1918 when the Hohenzollern dynasty had been deposed, the Macedonian parallel was no longer as obvious as it had been, and now, when classical parallels are cited, the praise of Sparta tends more often than before to replace the praise of Macedonian monarchy.°**

Next throughout world history Demosthenes has always been connected with freedom more than with democracy, but Pericles with democracy more than with freedom. In the famous chapter of the funeral oration Pericles praises the democratic freedom in the polis (the city-state) whereas Demosthenes fought for the freedom of the polis, including poleis that were not *° Georges Clemenceau, Démosthéne (Paris, 1924). 51 KE. Drerup, Aus einer alten Advokatenrepublik (Paderborn, 1916), I—4: ‘Advokaten gegen Konige’.

5? ‘German praise of Sparta in this century: E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969), 332-43; J. Wiesehofer, ‘‘‘Denn es sind welthistorische Siege ...”’ Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German Views of the Persian Wars’, Culture and History, II (1992), 61-83, quoting inter alia Goring’s comparison of Thermopylai and Stalingrad and Hitler’s of Thermopylai and the final battle of 1945. (69 nn. 12 and 13) cf. also Heinrich Boll, ‘Wanderer kommst du nach Spa...’ (1950).

36 Mogens Herman Hansen democracies.°? And as a political ideal in early modern Europe, freedom has

had a much longer history than democracy. Whenever a statesman had to defend the freedom of the people against a barbarian or tyrannical monarch,

and wanted to adduce a classical example, the obvious champion was Demosthenes. In 1470 Cardinal Bessarion called for a crusade against the Sultan, and inserted in his pamphlet a translation of Demosthenes’ First Philippic. A century later Elizabeth I of England commissioned a translation of the Olynthiacs, in the preface to which Philip II of Macedon is compared to Philip II of Spain. In 1805 the German historian Niebuhr dedicated his translation of the First Philippic to Tsar Alexander of Russia imploring his help against Napoleon. And, as I said, in World War I a connection was established between Philip II of Macedon and the German emperor Wilhelm IT.>4

The inclination to invoke Pericles has a much shorter history, since the liberty he advocates is specifically connected with democracy. Therefore, Periclean liberty came to be an object of praise only after democracy had become an ideal, that is in Europe after the mid-nineteenth century. There is one modern European tradition of ancient Greek democracy which—deliberately—I have left unmentioned, namely the Marxist tradition.

The reason for that is that it has very little to do with the tradition of Athenian democracy.°> Admittedly, in Engels’ account of the origin of family,

private property, and state we find yet another version of the view that Athenian democracy was introduced by Solon and re-established by Cleisthenes, after a short intermission under Pisistratos.°° As pointed out above, this is the tradition found in Aristotle’s Politics Book 2, in his Constitution of

Athens, and in Isocrates’ essays. But much more important for Marxist thought is Aristotle’s account in Books 3-6 of the Politics, where he defines democracy as the rule of the poor over the rich whom they can outnumber in the Assembly. Demokratia is taken to be class rule rather than popular government, and demos is understood in the sense of the common people, not the whole of the people as Pericles, Demosthenes, and other Athenians preferred to believe. Aristotle’s analysis of democracy in Politics Books 3-6 fits in nicely with Marx’s and Lenin’s thoughts about democracy as the rule

3 For the difference between the democratic concept of freedom and the concept of freedom advocated by Demosthenes cf. M. H. Hansen, The Sovereignty of the People’s Court (Odense, 1974), 57-8. °4 P. Carlier, Démosthéne (Paris, 1990), ch. 10, ‘L’image posthume de Démosthéne’, 286OOo.

, >> For the distinction between the philosophical tradition of Greek democracy and the historical tradition of Athenian democracy see Hansen (n. 4), 16-21. 5© F. Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staates (Berlin, 1987), 128-

40, esp. 140.

The Tradition of Athenian Democracy 37 of the proletariat,’’ but neither in Engels, nor in Marx, nor in Lenin is there any explicit reference to Aristotle as the source for this understanding of democracy. However, the parallel between the Marxist and the Aristotelian definition of democracy is often pointed out in Marxist literature, for example in C. B. Macpherson’s books.*®

In conclusion, we have a socialist tradition based on Aristotle's sixfold typology of constitutions in Politics Book 3, and we have a liberal tradition invoking the Athenian democracy either under Pericles in the fifth century or under Demosthenes in the fourth. In politics and in constitutional debates neither tradition has had much to say about Cleisthenes. Cleisthenes has only found favour with the historians, and only after George Grote in 1847 published the third and fourth volumes of his History of Greece. But we are historians, and so it is appropriate that we take the opportunity and celebrate the 2500th anniversary of Cleisthenes’ reforms. 57 V. I. Lenin, The State and the Revolution (1917), ch. I, sect. 4. 58 C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1977), 9-12.

2 Psephological Heroes NIGEL SPIVEY

The fragments of an early fifth-century Bc Athenian red-figure kylix have lately been laid out for study and reassemblage by staff at the J. Paul Getty

Museum (Figs. 2.1-3).' At first sight, it looks to be a daunting task of reconstruction: one would estimate that what remains of the pot amounts to no more than a third of its original state. As far as the interior goes, this is frustrating. One fragment, showing a terrified-looking figure wearing some sort of feline headgear, has suggested to some scholars that the inside tondo

of the cup depicts the apprehension of Dolon. If this is right, it makes the cup a piecemeal rarity: one of very few ‘illustrations’ to Iliad 10. 314 ff.’ The exterior of the cup, however, presents nothing new or problematical. We have, so to speak, seen it all before (Fig. 2.7). If we look by the handles of the kylix, we find under one, a fine corselet; and under the other, a fine helmet, with further matching armour. Then, on one side of the vase, there are excerpts from a quarrel: armed figures lunging at each other, unarmed figures holding them back. On the other side, there are draped figures, leaning on staffs; and a central block, on to which a hand is placing a bean or pebble. Above the block we see a part of the snake-edged aegis of Athena.

The subject of this cup’s exterior can be easily settled: it is the dispute and vote over who shall have the Arms of Achilles. The decoration accords

with iconographic formulae for this episode which recur on a group of similar kylikes, all fairly close to each other in date. The Getty cup has, for the record, been attributed to the Triptolemos Painter, and may even stand at the head, chronologically, of the group. But its precise collocation within the workshops of Attic red figure will be dealt with by specialists elsewhere. I introduce it here because, despite the foregoing remarks, it seems to me ' My thanks are owed to the editors for much improving this paper, if dissenting from parts or the whole of it, and to F. Buranelli, R. Guy, D. Kurtz, R. Lane Fox, M. Robertson, J. Tanner, and M. True for their help also. Two references are abbreviated in the notes: Robertson: M. Robertson, The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1992). _ Williams: D. Williams, ‘Ajax, Odysseus and the Arms of Achilles’, Antike Kunst, 23 (1980), 137-45. v4 Sec T. H. Carpenter. Art and Myth in Ancient Greece (London 1991), 202.

40 Nigel Spivey | that the iconography of the cup’s exterior is only superficially familiar to us, and wants a good deal of clarification. Why are Homer's heroes involved in all this? Publications of these voting scenes happily refer to ‘the story of the voting as it already occurs in the Odyssey (11. 543-47) (CVA Leiden, iv. 7). But if we go back to that text, we find that Homer says nothing which might directly inspire scenes such as that on the Getty cup. Odysseus, meeting Ajax in the Underworld, alludes only to the Arms of Achilles being ‘put up as a prize’ (€@nxe [Tevyeal) by Thetis, and the award of this prize being adjudicated by Trojan prisoners (raides 6€ Tpwwv dixacav). Commentators from Aristarchos onwards suspect at least part of this as an interpolation: especially line 547, which mentions the Trojan prisoners—presumably testifying as to which of Ajax or Odysseus did more to rescue the body of Achilles, or which of them was reckoned more terrible by the Trojans. How the Trojan prisoners made their opinion known is not specified. No one is sure whether the story of the Arms is preHomeric or sub-Homeric: the Aithiopis probably contained it, but not in terms of a vote amongst the Greek commanders. If we had more of the trilogy which Aeschylus built around the hoplon krisis, we might want to credit the playwright with casting the dispute over the Arms into contemporary, early fifth-century terms. In the Suppliants (607), the Eumenides (735), and the Agamemnon (813 ff.; especially 816, with Fraenkel’s important gloss) he introduces vote scenarios (both the show of hands, yecporovia, and casting of pebbles or such like, %ndodopia). The

voting terminology of the passage of the Agamemnon, in particular, has generated some pedantry about its legalistic nuances. I like the comment which concludes J. T. Allen’s discussion of the passage in CR 18 (1904), 456-8: ‘In the mysterious alembic of the poet’s imagination, even the commonplace act of balloting is transformed into one of marvellous beauty

and significance. But we might want to reverse the emphasis of that judgement. For Aeschylus has invested heroic behaviour with the protocols of Athenian democracy. He has ennobled the officialdom of the fifth-century polis.

What we are looking at on our cup constitutes, like the various Aeschylean passages, a patent anachronism. We see Homeric heroes playing at democratic citizens. Instead of settling things with swords and bloodshed, they

are going to the ballot. Early fifth century Athenian vase painters have enfranchised their heroes with psephoi. The logic of this is perhaps obvious, but it has never been fully explored.’ This paper attempts to do so, beginning with a survey of the visual evidence. 3 The following may be counted as partial explorations: A. Boegehold, ‘Towards a Study of Athenian Voting Procedure’, Hesperia, 32 (1963), 366-74; Williams; and I. Kasper-Butz, Die Gottin Athena im klassischen Athen: Athena als Reprdsentantin der demokratischen Staaten (Frankfurt,

1990), 21-33.

Psephological Heroes 41 The following vases all appear to show the vote taken to decide the allocation of the Arms of Achilles:

I. Kylix attributed to the Triptolemos Painter. Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum 90.AE.35. As described above: on the outside, the quarrel between Ajax and Odysseus over the arms, and the vote taken to decide the issue: on the inside, the seizure of Dolon (?) (Figs. 2.1-3).

2. Kylix signed by Douris. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 3695

Fic. 2.1 Fragments of a kylix attributed to the Triptolemos Painter

, 42 Nigel Spivey _ -

re a . ~— Von oe Fic. 2.2

( = Masner 325).ARV 429. CVA i, pls. 11-13. The exterior shows, on one

side, the quarrel over the arms, with the antagonist being restrained; on the other side, the vote. Athena presides, and at least one of the onlookers praises his hands in surprise, or delight (according to Williams, this will be Odysseus: and we perceive, from the psephoi already accumulated on each

7, Pees”? ee, 7% 2s , Pa Sigg egOG nag: ’,gat tyes bo. ‘i- : iie Ggrrne z i, Ping ES Os. Sn Wet, We Soe” b Cet, A 20) a ee, See Re Ce,” 4% ER LE O°. Se mF Be EAE OSS RSS eae, t 12 B55, Sey eat a a 2 age gd %, . Te CCR AEeee 3S BOSS 3Ea Bs He 3BO q&. EES Oe sey IEE OS YOSSI Big Roe 5Be RO REFT aeORG ON i:. ia Cie Ra ae :pea CRE BOE. a‘Se ESA TS % itgf} aSM & KAD» hp er, BP: %. ie tame Coe im peer MB a BS EEG tSSee ehaut ROMER Garg Gsky eS|. EE on GB pgts Mpg bee” A sep | . Pe ” a . eee ees mame * Kay Peg oe 4 i rae “Gi. ah oo . - wl? Ge MA es Maas ie PO ¥? ‘ BB weep GRO . PES Fg 8 ae

\aeee 2 eta * eyOe 7

; Hk ee.PO, nS viet @”+A” BOLT eee «a RE OR Re 2LESS see oie

fog Cee *_..GPa Sry

Bir

: A as 5 ; s a

je i pe, 47 a: :. :eo maety ;. am . .We Ma a

3ay £3 ae iesqan. vt ia #” ve tes, % > # 8 ve Beers, Ye > ¢ ~

aS “og PRET . RS ge &. 3; ‘i no

a BOs rnrc pea Se oe:rpo fs os eo te : ae ~3BE Sey, . a ox ie } Mo et teiy ;3 Be otHe de “RA it a.

aRee 4 8 *ie.. yo oi “oy iG Pa arte 4

44 Nigel Spivey side of the table, that the side blessed by Athena's raised arm is winning). The inside of the cup is ambivalent, but appears to show the final destination of the arms.* 3. Fragments of a kylix attributed to Douris. Paris, Cabinet des Medailles

675 etc. ARV 428. 12. One fragment reproduces the figure of Ajax as in the foregoing cup, wrapped up and desperately clutching his brow. 4. Fragments of a kylix attributed to Douris. Vatican 35091 ( = Astarita Collection 132). ARV 433. 72. A variation. We see the Greek chiefs voting, or about to vote: but this time they are wearing their robes over full armour, and carrying spears instead of staffs (Fig 2.4). 6. Fragments of a kylix attributed to Douris. Vatican 35092 ( = Astarita Collection 133, and including New York Met. Mus. 1974.226). (Figs 2.5— 7). ARV 433.71. Amongst these fragments (it is not clear if we in fact have the remnants of two kylikes here: Beazley’s note on p. 1653 of ARV warns of the ambivalence) there is an intriguing piece (Fig 2.5). It shows the vote,

with Athena presiding: there are two more or less equivalent heaps of psephoi; and it looks very much as if one of the three figures whose hands are hovering over these piles is trying to take some away. Or perhaps this is a counting operation? 7. Fragments of a kylix attributed to Makron. Athens, Acropolis Museum 315. ARV 459. 11. E. Langlotz, Die antiken Vasen von der Akropolis zu Athen,

ii (Berlin, 1925-33), pl. 19. Although fragmentary, this is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the vote as a sub-Homeric episode, for the

voters are named. We are given Agamemnon, Diomedes, Tydeus, Anti-

* The interior contains the signature Douris egrapsen, and an exchange of arms between a beardless youth and an older man. K. Masner, Die Sammlung antiker Vasen und Terracotten im K. K. Osterreich. Museum (Vienna, 1892), 44-5, labelled this as the eventual assignment of the arms by Odysseus to Neoptolemos. Boardman (in the caption to fig. 285.1 of Athenian Red

Figure Vases: The Archaic Period sees Odysseus receiving the arms (presumably from an attendant). The scene is also thought, eccentrically, to show Agamemnon handing over the arms to Odysseus: A.-N. Malagardis,’ “‘Lorsque me furent adjugées ... les armes d’Achille’’’, in J. Christiansen and T. Melander (eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd Symposium on Ancient Greek and Related Pottery (Copenhagen, 1988), 390-406 (a rejuvenation of Odysseus is then implied). The older man involved in the exchange strongly resembles one of the figures involved in the dispute—the figure with sword half-drawn—and must be Odysseus. Is he recipient or donor of the arms? The youth, with his slightly parted lips, evidently views the helmet and corselet with great awe. This could very easily be Achilles’ son. But if Douris intends the decoration of the kylix to make an iconographic triptych, it surely makes sense to view it as (i) quarrel, (ii)

vote, and (iii) result: and the immediate result is that Odysseus gets the arms. So I favour Boardman’s caption for this (contra Williams, 139, and Robertson, 88).

A residual observation to be made about this tondo scene: one aspect of the story which does not seem to have concerned Douris (or any of the other cup-painters here) is the intricate decoration of the Shield of Achilles, as described in Iliad 18. 579-86. I suppose the effort was too much.

Psephological Heroes 45 e

oe 2 eR RHE RS. Ss . Las

Sia) eee Ppp Sy ay Bos

, j oFSeNE noset:aaBe: te a _me- ao - ee Sag ETS {Ee rea FG . “ a: ‘Contemporary Perceptions of Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens’, in J. Rufus Fears (ed.),

Aspects of Athenian Democracy (Copenhagen, 1990), 34. See also C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge, 1988), 5 ff. ‘© J. J. Pollitt, in D. Buitron-Oliver (ed.), The Greek Miracle (New York, 1993), 32-3.

3 Learning from History: Categories and Case-Histories R. B. RUTHERFORD

‘History is philosophy based on examples’ (foropia dirdocodia éotiv éx Tapaderyuatwv) ps-D.H. Ars Rh. 11. 2. ii 376 U.-R.'

Since I arrived as a research lecturer at Christ Church, David Lewis has been a benign presence and a constantly reliable colleague, generous with time, advice, offprints, books, and computing expertise. It is a daunting reflection that he was appointed Tutor in Greek History here the year before I was born, and has been indefatigable in his pursuit of knowledge about

most aspects of the ancient world ever since. I do not expect to tell him anything he does not know; but he will, I am sure, be ready to look again at the greatest historian of democratic Athens, and he will be able to point out at once the passages which may support my argument or which get it into difficulties.

Thucydides claimed his History would be ‘useful’ (1. 22. 4), clearly opposing such utility to the pleasure given by more agreeable but less critical accounts,

whether logographic or rhetorical narratives. The passage has regularly been linked with 2. 48. 3 (plague, and the possibility of recognizing its recurrence),” and with the quasi-medical analysis of recurrent stasis (3. 82. 2). The analogy with medical writing was raised long ago, and Hippocratic texts have been carefully scrutinized, for comparison and for contrast.* More ' Misattributed to Thucydides himself by M. Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford, 1991),

189, apparently the only reference to this author in that work. * See most recently S. Hornblower, Thucydides (London, 1987), 132-4, and the n. on 2. 48. 3 in his commentary, vol. i (Oxford, 1991). He does not, however, develop his points in extenso. See also V. Hunter, Thucydides the Artful Reporter (Toronto, 1973), 58f., 71, 8o0f., 88f., 121,

171-4. Hunter's discussion is probably the closest to my own, but her analyses are often diffuse, and are combined with arguments which I find less persuasive concerning Thucydides’ manipulation of material and pattern-making. > C, Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (Oxford, 1929); D. L. Page, ‘Thucydides’ Description of the Great Plague at Athens’, CQ 3 (1953), 97ff.; K. Weidauer, Thukydides und die hippocratische Schriften (Heidelberg, 1953). It is strange that G. E. R. Lloyd, who is uniquely qualified to take this comparison further, seems not to have paid a great deal of attention to Thucydides in his various books on themes linking medicine and science.

54 R. B. Rutherford recently there has been some tendency to look to other aspects of the fifth-century explosion of intellectual activity: for instance, to sophistic argumentation, reconstruction of the past, conceptual abstractions, arguments from what is probable or natural.* But there remains little agreement about what kind of usefulness Thucydides thought his History would have. In recent discussions two polarized views can be discerned: one taking a positive and optimistic line, that there is much to be learned by politicians and generals concerning the right moves to make, the right things to say, and perhaps especially the mistakes to avoid. This seems to have been one aspect of Polybius’ approach (whether or not he knew Thucydides well; he

mentions him only once), and remained a prominent strand in ancient historiographical thinking.* In modern works it is essentially endorsed by de Ste. Croix, Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972), 28-33. He is opposing the more negative view supported by de Romilly, Stahl, and (rather briefly) Macleod, that the only kind of usefulness which the History

offers is understanding: one sees events in a clearer light (cf. I. 22. 4 76 cadés), but there is no advantage as far as practical improvement on the past, or avoidance of older errors, are concerned.® This comes closer to Polybius’ more general view, that history enables the reader (whether politician or not) to bear the onslaughts of Fortune with more equanimity (e.g. I. 35. 1 and 7; cf. 10. 35. 7)—but Polybius’ formulations regularly involve improvement of moral character (e.g. 2. 35, where the thought of unexpected past successes against the odds is supposed to prevent fear and despondency); by contrast, Thucydides’ concern, on either interpretation, is with intellectual enlightenment. In this paper I attempt to clarify the debate in two ways: first by drawing distinctions between the different kinds of instruction which history, and in 4 e. g. L. Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass., 1975). F. Solmsen, Intellectual Experiments of the Greek Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1975); already J. H. Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), ch. 2. Sophistic thought is brought into relation with 1. 22. 4 by H. R. Immerwanhr, in P. E. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox (eds.), Cambridge History of Classical Literature, i (1985), 454 = paperback edn. iii. 43.

> In Polybius, see e.g. I. 35, 65; 2. 35; 4. 27. 8, 32. 3; 5. 88, 97-8; 8. 21. IO-11; 9. 8-9, 12-20 (the arts of the general); 38. 4 (naturally, Walbank’s commentary should be consulted; he treats the topic as a whole at vol. i, pp. 6-9). See generally P. Scheller, De Hellenistica Historiae Conscribendae Arte (diss. Leipzig, 1911); G. Avenarius, Lukians Schrift zur Geschichtsschreibung

(Meisenheim am Glam, 1956), esp. 22-6. K. S. Sacks, Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton, NJ, 1990), ch. 2, also discusses a number of relevant ideas in later authors, mainly Diodorus himself and Polybius. ° J. de Romilly, ‘L’Utilité de l'histoire selon Thucydide’, in W. den Boer (ed.) Histoire et

historiens dans l'antiquité (Fond. Hardt Entretiens 4, Geneva, 1958), 41-81; H. P. Stahl, Thukydides: Die Stellung des Menschen im geschichtlichen Prozess (Zetemata 40, Munich, 1966); C. Macleod, ‘Thucydides and Tragedy’, Collected Essays (Oxford, 1983), I[01—2, 146-7. On Stahl’s

book see P. A. Brunt, CR 17 (1967), 278-80, repr. in his Studies in Greek History and Thought (Oxford, 1993), 394-8.

Learning from History 55 particular Thucydidean history, may give (I find Polybius a valuable foil here); and second by considering whether and how characters in the History itself cite, exploit, and learn from the past (here contemporary or nearcontemporary rhetoric may be of value for comparison). The picture which emerges is, I think, more complex than either of the polarized views I have outlined would allow.

We may distinguish the following elements which impart learning or instruction of different kinds.’ I should make clear that I am not denying that there are some things which Thucydides simply thought his readers should know because he had taken the trouble to find them out himself; in other words, not all his didacticism has wider significance. Many of the points made in digressions or parenthetically would fall into this category.° My concern here, however, is with instruction of a less self-sufficient kind. (1) One category is geographical, practical, or military description (e.g. 2. 99 ff. on the geography of Macedonia), accounts of specific locales, types

of terrain (e.g. the topography of Syracuse or Pylos), and danger spots. Similar practical aid could be gained from description of tactics (2. 75-7 on Theban siegecraft), ruses, military innovations, etc. The possibility of learning from one’s predecessors in this field was widely acknowledged in antiquity. The reductio ad absurdum of the idea is supplied by an extravagant passage

in Cicero (Acad 2. I) in which he asserts that Lucullus, a man of no military experience, arrived in Asia a fully-formed general, having spent his journeying time reading res gestae (and, admittedly, questioning others more experienced than himself ).? Closer to Thucydides’ own time, we may compare

the Tactica literature being composed from at latest the fourth century, which more obviously serve a practical purpose.*® Passages in Thucydides which fall under this heading include those on the primitive flame-thrower (4. 100), and the Syracusan naval innovations (7. 36).’’ But Thucydides’

concern is not only with the practical details but also with the pressures which bring these changes about. ‘As in a craft, so in politics, it is the rule that improvements always prevail; and although fixed usages may be best for undisturbed communities, constant necessities of action must be

’ Compare and contrast the subdivisions suggested by Scheller (n. 5), 72-8. . * See e.g. I. 6, 3. 104; H. D. Westlake, ‘Irrelevant Notes and Minor Excursuses in Thucydides’, in Essays on the Greek Historians and Greek History (Manchester, 1969), 1-38. ? Cf. E. Rawson, Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic (London, 1985), 215-18. '° Cf. D. Whitehead, Aeneas Tacticus (Oxford, 1990), 34-42. Thucydides 2. 2—6 is a source

for Aeneas 2. 3-6, cf. Whitehead ad loc. Polybius comments on the need for accurate and relevant topographical information (I. 41. 7, etc.; more refs in Brunt, Studies (n. 6), 188 n. I 3).

, Macleod (n. 6), 137 n. 17: add 7. 25. 8. In general on military innovations in the

Peloponnesian War, see S. Hornblower, The Greek World 479-323 B.C. (London and New York,

1983, rev. 1991), 156-66 (note p. 156 on the rise of textbooks: cf. M Fuhrmann, Das Systematische Lehrbuch (Gottingen, 1960), esp. 122-43).

56 R. B. Rutherford accompanied by the constant improvement of methods. Thus it happens that the vast experience of Athens has carried her further than you on the path of innovation’ (1. 71. 3; cf. 6. 18. 6). We may compare and contrast Polybius’ clever wheezes: for instance, 10. 47. 12-13, on his own improvements to the art of fire-signalling.'* Polybius’ interests are more particular; there is not the same easy movement as in Thucydides between the specific incident and the larger awareness of the human condition."

It is also possible, at least on this tactical level, to learn from one’s own experience, sometimes with profit, as Demosthenes benefits from his experiences in Aetolia: ‘as a result of the Aetolian pathous these points came home not least to him’ (4. 30. 1, explicitly looking back to 3. 97-8, esp.

98. 2)."* Here we catch a faint hint of the notion of learning through suffering, familiar from tragedy and Herodotus but not in general a Thucydidean idea.‘> An inverted example, not surprisingly, is Cleon, who according to Thucydides goes into action at Amphipolis with a misguided confidence in his own abilities based on his experience at Pylos. To revert to Demosthenes, he also offers an example of an individual learning from his predecessors’ failures, as is brought out in the chapter in which he assesses the damage done already in Sicily, and diagnoses what needs to be done now (7. 42);'° but of course he is soon caught up himself in the inertia and helpless decline of the Athenian forces. I shall spend less time on this topic than I might, partly because it is here that Virginia Hunter’s book is at its best. (2) My second category of possible ‘instruction’ includes generalizations about human nature and psychology of men, especially men en masse. A simple instance is Archidamus’ assertion that ‘The course of war cannot be foreseen, and its attacks are generally dictated by the impulse of the moment:

and where self-confidence has despised preparation, a wise apprehension has often been able to make headway against superior numbers’ (2. II. 4). Another, in the historian’s own voice, is 3. 82. 7: ‘The majority of men do not mind being called clever rogues as much as they mind being called virtuous fools, being ashamed by the latter description while taking pride in the former.’ "? PF. W. Walbank, Polybius (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), 88-91, lists others. In general

terms, note Polyb. 3. 46, 7. 75. ‘3 Cf. David Lewis’s comment in the preface to CAH v’, p. xiv: ‘it should be added that perhaps his most remarkable achievement was to transmute even military narrative into a commentary on the human condition.’ “* Hunter (n. 2), 71; see further J. Roisman, The General Demosthenes and his Use of Military Surprise (Historia Einzelschr. 78, 1993). "> Cf. R. B. Rutherford, “Tragic Form and Feeling in the Iliad’, JHS 102 (1982), 149 n. 21. © On the interpretation of this passage (Demosthenes or Thucydides? or a case of embedded focalization?) see K. J. Dover, The Greeks and their Legacy (Oxford, 1988), 74-82, and Hornblower in S. Hornblower (ed.), Greek Historiography (Oxford, 1994), 134 f.

Learning from History 57 These generalizing comments are characteristic of Thucydides,*’ and are sometimes dismissed as moralizing, though many of them are concerned with morale rather than morals.'® They mostly fall into a number of broad

categories: statements about the nature of war, about the behaviour of states, about the psychological basis of empire, and more specifically about the political or ideological issues of empire.*? They stand apart from the later

tradition of moralizing in history through their compression and _ their complexity (e.g. the intricate distinctions of 2. 62. 4-5, or the elaborate and more tendentious arguments of 3. 40. 2-3, 6. 92. 4); moreover, it is harder to dissociate them from their context, or from the network of echoes and correspondences which introduce further complications and qualifications.

It would be too simple if we were able to extract a particularly abstract pronouncement by (say) Pericles and take that as the Thucydidean position on the subject; similarly, it is now recognized as misguided to quote choral tags from tragedy and designate this or that line as the ‘moral’ of the play

concerned. |

We should of course note, without surprise, that many of these generalizing statements occur in speeches, and like the speeches in general they frequently

contradict one another. It is hard to know where the author stands. Despite

some scholarly scepticism, it is not hard to see that some Thucydidean speakers are individually characterized (e.g. the pessimistic Nicias), and the particular arguments and generalizations employed by a given speaker play

a part in that characterizing process.*° Thus in 4. 17-18 the strongly traditional emphasis on hybris-style dangers of excess suits the religiousminded Spartans, and cannot be read as Thucydides’ own doctrine; on the other hand, the echoes of 18.4 (the language of ‘grasping for more’) in a number of passages in the narrative do suggest that Thucydides to some extent agreed that the Athenians should have accepted the Spartans’ offer of terms here. But we must beware of making Thucydides too simple. It should not be assumed that any individual speaker in the History speaks for ‘7 Cf. in general terms N. G. L. Hammond, ‘The Particular and the Universal in the Speeches of Thucydides’, in The Speeches of Thucydides, ed. P. Stadter (Chapel Hill, NC, 1973), 49ff.; for more detail, G. P Landmann, Die Friedensmahnung des Hermokrates (diss. Basle, 1932), esp. 27— 31, 58-64; C. Meister, Die Gnomik im Geschichtswerk des Thukydides (diss. Zurich, 1955). See

also W. Schmid and D. Stahlin Geschichte der Griech. Literatur, i. 5. 185, 199-200, with interesting statistics on ‘sentenzen’, which are however too rigidly defined. '8 Cf. Meister, 14-15 (list of gnomai in Thucydides). On mass morale see also the passages collected by E. L. Hussey, ‘Thucydidean History and Democritean Theory’, in P. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (eds.), Crux (Exeter, 1985), 137n. and by D. M. Lewis, CAH v’. 392. "9 Cf. Meister, esp. 78 ff. A selection of particularly interesting examples: 2. 61. I, 87. 3, 3.

10. I, 40. 3, 82. 2 (narrator), 7. 77. 7 (characteristically, a ‘traditional’ concluding truism from Nicias), 8. 89. 3 (narrator). 7° Relevant here is the argument by M. Heath, ‘Justice in Thucydides’ Speeches’, Historia, 39 (1990), 385-400, that certain concepts are peculiar to Athenian speakers.

58 R. B. Rutherford the historian: in the Mytilene debate, for example, the criticisms of the assembly and the workings of the democracy voiced by both Cleon and Diodotus are complementary: both attacks enhance our understanding, neither gives the whole picture. As in drama, it is easier to identify certain dominant preoccupations than

to tie the historian down to firm views on particular moral or political generalities.’ Some clear lines do seem to emerge, however, for example

from the important chapters 2. 40 and 3. 45, the former in particular echoed repeatedly elsewhere in both speeches and narrative.** It seems uncontroversial to maintain that Thucydides endorsed Pericles’ insistence on the need for deliberation before action, and deplored decisions taken in haste or in the heat of emotions such as anger or indignation (as in the first debate on Mytilene). Moreover, generalizations in the narrative do sometimes confirm particular statements in the speeches: thus at 4. 108. 4, the historian

comments ‘it is a habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not fancy’. (For the suspect quality of hope, cf. 3. 45. I and 5, 5. 103, 6. 30. 2, 31. 6, etc.). A fuller discussion of a specific case may help to illustrate the complexity

of the author’s method. In 6. 85. 1 Euphemus voices a typically pregnant generalization: dvdpi dé rupdvyvw 7} méAeu dpynv éxovay ovdev GAoyov Gri Evdépov ov0’ ofkelov OTt “7 TLOTOV'TpOs ExaoTa el 7) ExOpov 7 Pidrov weTa Katpodb yiyvedBar

(‘Besides, for tyrants and imperial cities nothing is unreasonable if expedient,

no one a kinsman unless sure; but friendship or enmity is everywhere an affair of time and circumstance’ [Crawley’s tr.]). In its immediate context, this answers an argument in Hermocrates’ speech, for the latter had appealed

to racial kinship as a factor which should induce the Sicilians to unite against the Ionian enemy (79. 2). In the broader context of the History, the proud but cynical declaration contributes to the picture drawn of Athenian ideology, and like the earlier speech in 1. 73 ff., the characterization is put in their own mouths. The description of Athens as being like a tyrant, while apt in a Sicilian context, takes up a motif which again regularly figures in Athenian speeches, and which must arouse unease or invite criticism.*? Other terms in the generalization, particularly vudépov, also set up resonances which remind the reader of other claims in other circumstances.

The question of the validity of friendship in international affairs and in wartime, unless immediate advantage is present, has also been aired else-

where, notably by the Mytilenians at Olympia (3. 9-11) and by the *! The point is effectively made with reference to Euripides by E. R. Dodds, ‘Euripides the Irrationalist’, in The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays, (Oxford, 1973), 78-91.

*2 Cf. 1. 84. 3, 120. 5, 144. 4, 2. 43. I, 62. 3-5, 87 (esp. §4), 3. 42, 48. 2, 4. 10, 62. 4, 108. 4, 5. 69. 2, 6. 59. I (cf. 57. 2-3), 68. 2 (with 69. I, 72), 7. 21. 3-4. *3 For the theme in general see C. Tuplin, ‘Imperial Tyranny’, in Crux (n. 18), 348-75.

Learning from History 59 hapless Plataeans (3. 54-5): Euphemus’ words have a place in a mosaic of complementary or contradictory ideas and appeals, some of which support his principle, while others may qualify it or support it in pragmatic terms but cast doubt on its amorality. For what is most striking about Euphemus’ pronouncement is its indifference to conventional values or traditional Greek wisdom. What could be more shocking than to claim that friends merit no respect, or that kinship is an irrelevancy?** Or again, the second part of Euphemus’ generalization may remind us of the prudent saying of Bias of

Priene, that we should hate our enemies on the understanding that they may become our friends, and vice versa (ap. Arist. Rh. 2. 13; echoed bitterly by Soph. Ajax 678 ff.); but the even-handedness of Bias’ advice is remote from the cold determination of Euphemus, which envisages no lessening of hostility to enemies in the present kairos, and (like his countrymen at Melos)

pays lip-service only, and little of that, to the possibility of change in the future. We find no explicit judgement on Euphemus’ ethics in Thucydides

(though the outcome of the debate is a success for Athens, so that in pragmatic terms he is the more successful in this antilogy). Some have felt that the ruthlessness of his arguments illustrates the decline of Athenian

morality in politics since the debate of 432/1: others that the common material and themes suggest rather the bleak general outlook of Thucydides concerning inter-state affairs.*> But it seems better to allow that Thucydides

himself meant this debate, like many others, to contribute to a richer and more complicated picture in which moral issues and Realpolitik are intertwined, and from which we can discern (and learn) something of the worrying confusion of human thinking on these large subjects. (3) A further category is more familiar from rhetoric, namely the use of historical paradeigmata to back up one’s argument. The orators, like speakers

in Thucydides, commonly invoke past events to give authority and add perspective to their judgements or recommendations.”° The practice is well*4 L. Pearson, Popular Ethics in Ancient Greece (Stanford, Calif., 1952), 151-60; K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford, 1974), 180ff., 273 ff.; H. Roisman, Loyalty in Early Greek Epic and Tragedy (Konigstein, 1984). It is all the more shocking

when kinship and friendship are in conflict (as at 3. 82. 6). *’ For the former view see e.g. J. de Romilly, Rise and Fall of States according to Greek Authors

(Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977), 56f.; the latter is most influential in de Ste. Croix, Origins, ch. 1; cf. A. G. Woodhead, Thucydides on the Nature of Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).

© For the parallels between Thucydides and 4th-cent. oratory see Macleod (n. 6), 52-158 passim. Hornblower, Thucydides, 47 ff. (and Commentary, i, p. 75-6) argues that they suggest that the orators and the handbook writers learned from Thucydides’ practice (cf. the anecdote about Demosthenes transcribing Thucydides, Lucian, adv. indoctum 4, and more generally D. H. Thuc. 53-4); the corrective is valuable, but he perhaps underestimates the rapidity with which rhetorical techniques advanced in the second half of the 5th cent. See e.g. M. Lloyd, The Agon in Euripides (Oxford, 1992), ch. 2; also A. Burckhardt, Sptiren der athenischen Volksrede in der alten Komodie (diss. Basle, 1924).

60 R. B. Rutherford developed, though not so flagrantly self-indulgent as in Ciceronian Rome.’’ Examples in the orators include Antiphon V. 67-9 (see Edwards-Usher's n.), Andoc. I. 106-9, Dem. XXI. 58-65, 51. 8 f.; instances in Thucydides include I. 40. 5, I. 144. 4 (our fathers defied the Medes with resources inferior to our own); we also meet generalizations from the past unsupported by specific

examples (e.g. I. 76. 7 (where the examples are not hard to find), 5. 105. 4).?°

The process of instruction here might work on a number of levels: most basically, the reader might learn something about the events referred to (but hardly much of substance’*’); secondly, he might learn how to use an example of this kind in a given situation (compare the rhetorical textbooks composed by writers such as Gorgias); and thirdly, he might learn how to see through the examples and find weaknesses in these and other types of argument. One potential weakness is that precedents and examples may be available on both sides of an argument. Thucydides seems to bring this out in an otherwise rather inconspicuous antilogy, 4. 92 and 95. Each speaker refers to a past success won by his people. The Boeotian Pagondas invokes the example of the battle of Coroneia; the matching speech of the Athenian Hippocrates mentions the triumph of Myronides at Oenophyta. An Athenian defeat follows; is it significant that Hippocrates’ speech is cut short (96. 1)? Historical data in oratory are often unreliable, either through deliberate distortion or through woeful ignorance: thus Andocides (III. 8-9, whence

Aeschin. II. 172 ff.) notoriously gives a bizarrely inaccurate summary of fifth-century history as early as the 390s, while Isocrates paints a rosetinted portrait of the idealized Athenian empire (e.g. IV. 100-14).°*° In Thucydides there are other dimensions. (a) The speakers may refer misleadingly to events of which Thucydides

has given a more accurate or more damning account: for example, Alcibiades’ version of his achievements for Athens before 415 (6. 16. 6; contrast 5: 74, 75. 3, 76. 2); or Diodotus’ notorious claim that the Mytilenian demos 77 See esp. S. Perlman, “The Historical Example, its Use and Historical Importance as Political Propaganda in the Attic Orators’, Scripta Hierosolymata 7 (1961), 150-66. Theory is summarized by Arist. Rhet. 2. 20; H. Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich, 1960), §410 ff. For Rome cf. Pease on Cic. ND 2.7, citing further bibliography.

8 Cf. also the negative point made by the Corcyreans at I. 33. 2: few precedents for the Athenians’ opportunity now. *2 The potential value of this ‘instruction’ is further reduced if we accept the view of S. Hornblower, ‘Thucydides’ Use of Herodotus’, in J. M. Sanders (ed.), @IAOAAKQN: Catling

Studies (British School at Athens, 1992), 141-54, that Thucydides took his paradigmatic material for speeches almost entirely from Herodotus. 3° See Dover (n. 24), 10-12; and for more detail L. Pearson, ‘Historical Allusions in the Attic Orators’, CPh 36 (1941), 209 ff. = Selected Papers (Chico, Calif., 1983), 190 ff.; M. Nouhaud, L’Utilisation de l'histoire par les orateurs attiques (Paris, 1982); R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 119 ff., 198 fff.

Learning from History 61 supported the Athenians (3. 47. 3, in conflict with 3. 27). Or again, Euphemus at Camarina (6. 82) bizarrely presents the Athenian empire as having emerged in self-defence, in an effort to escape the domination of the Lacedaemonians (contrast the narrative in Book 1).** (b) The past is often ruled out of discussion, or tellingly ignored where it is clearly relevant. Pre-eminent here is the Plataean debate (3. 68. 5);3* at Melos too the Athenians rule out the past—and indeed the future (5. 89).

Here we already have at least two levels of didaxis: how to argue, and how to see the weaknesses in such arguments; and to see how frequently they fail. But since speakers (quite obviously) do not always fail, and since even in Thucydides it is not always the case, as it is in the Plataean debate, that other criteria and motives outside the speeches decide the issue in advance, the wholly pessimistic reading of Thucydides’ claim for his work seems on this evidence to be overstated. (c) The past events invoked often come from the period of the Persian wars.*? Speakers give their different versions of the Athenian and Spartan achievements or weaknesses in those conflicts, and more particularly refer in different ways to the emergence of the Athenian empire from the antiPersian alliance. Some speakers go further, comparing Athenian domination

with that which the Persians had sought to impose (6. 33, 76. 3f.). On the most obvious level, these references convey criticism of Athens (as Sthenelaidas remarks in 1. 86, if they were virtuous then so much the worse their behaviour now). Secondly, the comparison draws attention to the natural drive towards empire which Thucydides sees as so powerful a force in political activity: states as different as Persia and Athens are subject to this

ambition and are driven by it beyond their own control. Finally, this practice enables Thucydides to keep before his readers the contrast between Peloponnesian War and Persian Wars, between his own historical work and that of Herodotus.*4 Several of these references to ta Medika occur in speeches by Hermocrates,

one of the most consistently effective political leaders in the History (cf. 6.

72. 2 for the historian’s general verdict).*? It would be inappropriate to examine his role in the work at length here, but particularly noteworthy is 3! The rhetorical flourish with which Cleon opens his speech at 3. 37. I (‘I have often observed that a democracy is incapable of ruling over others’)—for the topos cf. Macleod (n. 6), 92 n. 14—is another instance of a bold generalization representing a partial truth drawn from experience; but it is perhaps significant that Cleon cites no other examples to support his judgement. 32 Macleod (n. 6), 103-22, esp. IIIf. 33 See further K. Jost, Das Beispiel und Vorbild der Vorfahren bei den attischen Rednern bis Demosthenes (Paderborn, 1936); W. Kierdorf, Erlebnis und Darstellung der Perserkriege (Gottingen,

1966).

‘ tt Hornblower, Thucydides, 26—33, and his paper cited in n. 29. 35 Cf. H. D. Westlake, ‘Hermocrates the Syracusan’, Essays (n. 8), 174-202.

62 R. B. Rutherford his speech in Book 4, in which Thucydides presents him as warning of a future Athenian invasion, his foresight being combined with a judicious assessment of the Athenian character, a firm grasp of general principles

governing man’s attitude to war, and an ability to see through more superficial ‘racial’ arguments (cf. 7. 57. I-2).3° He shows his ability to learn

from history more clearly in Book 7, where his urgent advice to the Syracusans to improve their performance at sea is based on knowledge of Athenian experience: ‘they had not inherited their naval prowess nor would

they keep it for ever; they had been landsmen to an even greater degree

than the Syracusans, and had only become a maritime power when compelled by the Mede’ (7. 21. 3). It is of course the Syracusans’ willingness

to adapt and resist the Athenian fleet that leads to their eventual triumph. (4) Most important in Thucydides’ eyes, we may assume, would be the prospect of political leaders learning from his work. Pericles himself sets out

the crucial guidelines in 2. 60, and the ways in which his successors fall short of this ideal in different respects are well understood.?’ Thucydides seems to have regarded politics as a kind of expertise, which required of its practitioners intellectual insight and an almost diagnostic power of judgement. The anonymous prytanis in the debate on Sicily (6. 14) is asked by

Nicias to play the part of a doctor in healing the state’s ills, a thoughtprovoking passage which reminds us of the parallel between 1. 22 (general value of history) and 2. 48 (value of the record of the plague).*° Granted that not everybody could be a Pericles or a Hermocrates, it might still be possible for a gifted man to profit not only from his own experience but

from others. Another object lesson for the reader—a negative one—is embodied in Nicias, where the historian seems to emphasize the fatal weaknesses of superstition and fear of the assembly; though outstanding in his conventional arete (7. 86. 5), Nicias is a failure as a general and leader. Experience, experiment, training, and practice are indeed recurring terms in the History,*? and can be recognized as vogue words in the intellectual 3© Though he strangely adopts these more conventional attitudes in his speech at Camarina (6. 76)—for persuasive force? On the racial theme in general cf. J. Alty, ‘Dorians and Ionians’,

JHS 102 (1982), I-14. 37 Still essential is A. W. Gomme, ‘Four Passages in Thucydides’, JHS 71 (1951), 7off. = More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), 92-111, esp. 101 ff.; cf. G. F. Bender,

Der Begriff des Staatsmannes bei Thukydides (Wtirzburg, 1938). More recently see the subtle treatment by C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge, 1988), 158-77. 38 Hornblower in his commentary rightly stresses the importance of 6. 14. For the image of

the statesman as physician to the body politic see further Aesch. Ag. 848-50; Plato, Gorgias 517-19; Weidauer (n. 3), 72 ff. The metria xunkrasis of 8. 97. 2 is also a medical metaphor. Hornblower draws my attention to a self-description by Metternich as ‘a doctor in the world hospital’ (Golo Mann, History of Germany since 1789 (Eng. tr., London, 1968), 53). 39 J. H. Finley, Three Essays on Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 143, etc. See esp. 2. 84-9, with Hunter (n. 2), ch. 3.

Learning from History 63 circles of Athens in Thucydides’ lifetime. The sophists and others asked whether arete (‘excellence’) could be taught (the question is posed at the start of Plato’s Meno), and the same question was clearly being asked concerning political success. The extraordinary thing about Themistocles, in Thucydides’ eyes, was that he managed it on his own, without any such formal training (I. 138. 3), but this passage implies that a man of equal ability might go even further with instruction.

On a more general level, we might consider another recurrent preoccupation in both narrative and speeches, the understanding of a nation’s character. The first book (69-70) sets the Athenian and Spartan character in sharp opposition, and these antitheses are reworked and varied throughout the work.*® Any political leader needs to know the best and the worst side of his subjects or followers, and also the strengths and weaknesses of his opponents (Pericles on Athens in the Funeral speech; Cleon on the weaknesses of the assembly; Nicias on the Athenian character). In contrast, we are shown, and given the evidence to refute, over-confident and optimistic assessments: that of Alcibiades on Sicily (6. 16-18), or the flatly erroneous speech of Athenagoras on the Athenians (6. 36-40). Thucydides himself gives his readers much evidence both to confirm and to qualify the Corinthians’ overdrawn antithesis in Book 1. Thus he shows us, as Edmunds demonstrates in detail, an ‘Athenian’ Spartan in Brasidas and a Spartan Athenian in Nicias!** But besides national character there is human nature, and Thucydides is also concerned to show how little difference there can be between peoples in appropriate circumstances (Archidamus puts this in general terms, I. 84. 4; like all generalizations in Thucydides, it is vulnerable, but within limits has its validity). An obvious gap in Thucydides is the absence of any ‘teaching’ of a more philosophic or religious nature,** of the kind which we might see in (for example) Herodotus’ dialogues between Croesus and Solon, or Xerxes and 4° Cf. esp. 8. 24. 4, 96. 5, and further Finley (n. 39), 154-62; L. Edmunds, Chance and Intelligence in Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass, 1975), 89 ff.; A. Parry, Logos and Ergon in Thucydides (New York, 1981), 131 ff. C. B. R. Pelling, ‘Thucydides’ Archidamus and Herodotus’ Artabanus'’,

in Georgika (BICS Suppl. 58, 1991), 122-30, persuasively suggests that these characterizations are qualified and shown to be unsatisfactory as the History advances (cf. already W. R. Connor, Thucydides (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 36-47. 4" Edmunds (n. 40), 109-42; see, however, the comments by Farrar (n. 37), 173-5. 4? Recent attempts to reinstate religion as a potent force in Thucydides’ thinking do not convince me (esp. S. I. Oost, ‘Thucydides and the Irrational: Sundry Passages’, CPh 70 (1975), 186 ff., N. Marinatos, Thucydides and Religion (Konigsheim, 1981) ), despite the surprising partial support for the arguments by K. J. Dover, ‘Thucydides on Oracles’, The Greeks and their Legacy

(n. 16), 65-73 (effectively criticized by Hornblower on 1. 126. 6; also N. Fisher, Hypbris (Warminster, 1992), 404 ff.). That Thucydides excluded or underestimated significant religious

factors is argued along different lines by S. Hornblower, ‘The Religious Dimension to the Peloponnesian War, or What Thucydides Does Not Tell Us’, HSCP 94 (1992), 169-97.

64 R. B. Rutherford Artabanus, conversations which set human affairs within a larger divine perspective: great men, great empires, have come and gone, but what matters is to recognize one’s own humanity and avoid excess. A verdict such as Herodotus passes on Pheretima (4. 205) is inconceivable in Thucydides. Similarly, talk of Athenian hybris seems to obscure more than it illuminates.*? In Herodotus characters may show wisdom; in Thucydides, what is admirable

is something sharper and more intellectual, perhaps to be summed up as yvwun or good judgement. This seems a narrower and more sombre world.

Yet we should note, if not the wisdom, at any rate the realism of Thucydides’ most admired speakers, Pericles and Hermocrates, who are prepared to look to a future beyond their own ambitions, even beyond the

present condition of their cities. We may recall Pericles in 2. 64. 3, highlighted in a brilliant page by Macleod ((n. 6), 152-3): Remember, too, that if your country has the greatest name in all the world, it is because she never bent before disaster, because she has expended more life and effort

in war than any other city, and has won for herself a power greater than any hitherto known, the memory of which will descend to the latest posterity; even if now, in obedience to the general law of decay, we should ever be forced to yield, still it will be remembered that we held rule over more Hellenes than any other Hellenic state, that we sustained the greatest wars against their united or separate powers, and inhabited a city unrivalled by any other in resources or magnitude.

Or Hermocrates at 6. 78. 2: As for him who envies or even fears us (and envied and feared great powers must always be), and who on this account wishes Syracuse to be humbled to teach us a lesson, but would still have her survive in the interest of his own security, the wish that he indulges is not humanly possible.*4

These speakers at least do not see their cities as enjoying some unique or self-sustaining role; nor do they rule out consideration of past and future, even if they may not allow it to affect their decisions in the present. This kind of human insight, which really goes beyond the practical or even the long-term concerns of a statesman, is hard to separate from the general grasp of the human situation, or, if you like, the temporary quality of political achievement. Here we return to the more negative, even tragic, interpretation of Thucydidean didacticism. According to Macleod, “The tragedy is that to see the truth is sometimes to see that all advice is futile’ (102; and similar comments elsewhere in his work). This is true in some but not all situations where advice is needed. It is an important Thucydidean lesson for ancient and modern readers that even the ablest of leaders may 43 Pace e.g. J. de Romilly, The Rise and Fall of States, ch. 3. See now Fisher (n. 42), ch. 10. 44 Different in tone—and in insight?-—from the more acid response of the Athenians in 5.

gI. I?

Learning from History 65 find that for all his insight and eloquence, he cannot convince or guide his followers along the path he feels convinced is the right one; the forces which oppose rational insight (fear, anger, resentment, the attraction of new ideas or rival voices) are too strong. Even Pericles’ authority is in doubt at his last appearance, and the fact that he is fined despite his cogent statement in self-defence shows that his control of the Athenians is not infallible (2.

65. 1-3). In other words, a statesman may be able to draw the right conclusions for himself, as Nicias and Demosthenes do at various points in

the Sicilian episode, but may be unable to guide a people or an army to decision and action.**> And because conflicting emotions and impulses will

naturally be strongest where the stakes are highest, success will often be hardest for the statesman of insight when success is all-important.

This is not something which only politicians need to learn from Thucydides, though it has special point for them; nor is it something that can only be learned from a historian. Epic and tragedy, to look no further, dwell

constantly on the sufferings of war and the limited gains which emerge after much planning and effort. For the conflicting forces which guide decision in a democracy gone bad we may look to the assembly described in Euripides’ Orestes; for the victor brought low, to the Troades; for the helplessness of leaders, whether their decisions are right or wrong, to the anarchic Iphigenia in Aulis.*° It is indeed important that we should recognize

that Thucydides is interested in human activity and human failures on this very general and highly pessimistic level—and it is important also to see that he takes a far more cautious and limited view of the value of history

than, say, Diodorus in his preface (I. I-5, esp. I. I. 5*’). But as I hope I have made clear, this is not the only level at which we can see Thucydides as composing something ‘useful’ to his readers; and while observing what makes him like tragedy, we need to remain conscious of his other concerns.

It will not have escaped notice that this paper has very little to do with ritual, finance, or even politics in democratic Athens. The editors have assured me that this does not matter, but it seems only fair to introduce some tangential connection, however tenuous. One case of learning from history presented in Thucydides’ own narrative has not been mentioned, and stands perhaps in a category almost of its own. This is a case of erroneous or distorted learning: the Athenian demos, according to the historian, recalling the savagery of the Pisistratid regime after the murder 45 On the difficulties of edBovAca cf. Hdt. 7. 106. 2, 50, 157. 3, 236. 3 (cf. what follows in

237), 8. 60y. 4° Parallels of this kind still seem to me to provide more satisfactory analogies with Thucydides than the comparison of the historian to a journalist working on the Washington Post (E. Badian, From Plataea to Potidaea (Princeton, NJ, 1993) 127f.). 47 Cf. (more moderate claims) ad Herenn. 4. 13 and 24; Cic. de or. 2. 36.

66 R. B. Rutherford of Hipparchus, was overwhelmed by paranoia about the possibility of a return to tyrannical rule, and the witch-hunting in the aftermath of the Hermae affair was all the more indiscriminate because of this. The digression

(6. 53-9) on the real facts behind the assassination of Hipparchus is disproportionate in length and curiously introduced,** but it is clear from the parallel statement in Book 1 (20) that Thucydides considered the general ignorance of these facts deplorable in itself, and it seems that he thought it

had in some way aggravated matters in 415.*? Hardly anyone nowadays wants to turn Thucydides into a committed democrat, and this passage offers little encouragement to suppose that he was one. But it does seem undeniable that he thought it would have been better for Athens at this time if the Athenian people had known more about their own history, and although we can hardly assume a wide readership of his work, the desire to inform those who did read him, and correct their misunderstandings of the past, emerges from every page. Thucydides may never have formulated the notion that the study of history might be good for democracy, but the implication is there. The argument has not lost its force. 48 On the problems see above all Dover, HCT iv. 325-9: compare also D. M. Lewis, CAH iv’. 287-8, 299-300. 49 See further Stahl (n. 6), I-11; Farrar (n. 37), 146-151.

APPENDIX It may be helpful to place some of the points made in this paper in a broader context. The origins of Greek historiography are likely to remain controversial, and one thing

which is certain is that the genre does not derive from a simple unitary source.*° Some place in the complicated stemma might be found for the argument from past experience or from paradigmatic events which belong to ‘history’. The procedure can be traced back to Homer.** In the Iliad, Nestor draws upon precedent to clarify the present and assert his status as an authoritative adviser (1. 254-84), similarly Diomedes and Sthenelus draw differing morals from their fathers’ achievements in the Theban wars. More elaborate are the contrasting narratives about Lycurgus and Bellerophon in Book 6 (129-41, 152-205), the parable of Niobe in Book 24 (60217), and the application to the present is explicitly a warning to Achilles to be more moderate than the fiery Meleager, although ironic resonances are not absent, some of which go beyond the speaker's knowledge. Few of these examples involve the speaker drawing on his own past, however carefully adapted; but the account of Nestor’s youthful cattle-raid in Book 11, however much it may have been reshaped from existing material to form an unusually long speech in the Iliad, does cross that borderline, without its making much difference to the way the passage functions. Not much need be said about the kind of moral generalizations and gnomic wisdom found in Hesiod or in elegy. These may derive from and be prompted by past events, but the events are rarely described in sufficient detail to count as sustained narratives. More substantial is the function of paradigmatic myth in Pindar and in tragedy (especially choral lyric).°* Comparison with ‘historical’ figures in the earlier stages of a family or a city, or with similar cases of great virtue or vice, offers the audience

a chance to reflect on either the continuity of history or the inevitability of moral decline. Change, and the limitations of human fortune, are also common themes: we are not far from the reflections of Herodotus, looking at the vicissitudes of cities in a long perspective (1.5). Consequences can be drawn for the present: the lyric poets affect to advise or exhort kings and tyrants, while tragic choruses warn of the perils of excess, over-confidence, or passion. As has often been observed, the wise adviser is a figure who appears repeatedly in epic, tragedy, and history.°? Some of his advice is illustrated by mythical and historical examples. *° See recently A. Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, Calif., and LA, 1990), ch. 1; K. Meister, Die griechische Geschichtsschreibung (Stuttgart, 1990; rev. Ital. tr., Rome—Bari, 1992), chs. 1-2, which supplies ample bibliography. F. Jacoby, ‘Uber die Entwicklung der griechischen Historiographie’, Klio, 9 (1909), 80 ff. = Abhandlungen z. griechischen Geschichtsschreibung (Leiden, 1956), 10-64, remains fundamental. 5' Cf. R. Oehler. Mythologische Exempla in der dlteren griechischen Dichtung (diss. Basle, 1925),

and other bibl. cited in my comm. on Odyssey 19 and 20 (Cambridge, 1992), 63-5. 52 A. Kohnken, Die Funktion des Mythos bei Pindar (Berlin, 1971); on tragedy see A. F. Garvie’s comm. on Aeschylus, Choephori (Oxford, 1986), pp. 202-3; H. V. Canter, ‘The Mythological Paradigm in Greek and Latin poetry’, AJP 54 (1933) 201-24. 53 R, Lattimore, ‘The Wise Adviser in Herodotus’, CPh 34 (1939), 24-35.

68 R. B. Rutherford Herodotus is naturally a key figure in this tradition. Artabanus, Nestor-style, points out that he has given good advice in the past (though unlike Nestor’s it was ignored): he warned Darius not to invade Scythia, and now a fortiori warns Xerxes to abandon the invasion of Greece (7. 10. 2, cf. 4. 83). The Corinthian Socles invokes

the horrors of Corinthian tyranny as a dread warning to the Spartans that they should not seek to reinstate the Pisistratids (5. 92. 1 ff.). Different in a number of ways is Croesus’ advice to Cyrus in 1. 207, which is drawn from his own experience, as he himself emphasizes—suffering brings enlightenment. The Persian debate (3. 80 ff.), perhaps drawn from another source fonder of abstract generalization than Herodotus, analyses the ‘typical’ qualities of a monarch, a mob, and an oligarchy:

the implication is that historical research has provided the basis for these generalizations, but the evidence is not brought forward, any more than in Plato’s equally assured expositions in Books 8 and 9 of the Republic. The use by speakers within Herodotus of these arguments and examples to serve a particular purpose, ‘to point a moral for the present age’, has sometimes been seen as a smaller-scale version of the historian’s own project: a lesson for imperial Athens, perhaps?** But however prominent more recent developments may have been in Herodotus’ mind, it is hard to see the supposed ‘lesson’ as the primary object of his history, which is more adequately summed up in his preface. The balance between commemoration of great and memorable events in the past and didactic concern with the actions of potential readers in the present may differ from one historian to another: Xenophon, who probably brings his Hellenica closer to his own time of writing than either of his great predecessors, may perhaps be seen as a writer more intimately concerned with the instruction and correction of his contemporaries.**> The attempt to draw

philosophic lessons from historical material, as in the analysis of Athenian and Persian decline in Book 3 of Plato’s Laws, takes us too far from our subject, and belongs more to the history of political science.*° How should Thucydides be placed in relation to this rapidly developing tradition? Perhaps the most striking point is the emphasis that he lays on the long-term future: his history will remain useful ‘for as long as human nature remains the same’. With that broad claim, which only falls slightly short of the poets’ aspirations for eternal

life, goes a remarkably precise expectation that at least certain events will be predictable and rationally comprehensible, at least by the expert. This goes beyond both the argument from personal experience and the invocation of precedent and example. It is not Thucydides’ only contribution to the theory of history, but it is perhaps his most influential, for good or ill.>’ >4 An influential recent statement of this view is C. W. Fornara, Herodotus: an interpretative essay (Oxford, 1971), 75-91. John Gould’s rejection in his Herodotus (London, 1989), ch. 6, is rather too emphatic. For the same approach applied tentatively to Thucydides see Hornblower, Thucydides 152-3. 55 C.J. Tuplin, The Failings of Empire (Hist. Einzelschr. 76, 1993) assesses and improves upon much earlier work. 5° On this see further R. Weil, L’Archéologie de Platon (Paris, 1959); G. R. Morrow, Plato's Cretan City (Princeton, NJ, 1960), part I. >? T am very grateful to Dr D. C. Innes and Dr C. B. R. Pelling for detailed comments on a draft of this paper, and to the editors of this volume for further suggestions.

4.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy CHRISTOPHER CAREY

The aim of this paper is to examine the range of functions served by the comic ridicule and criticism of political figures, and to relate this strand of Old Comedy to the democratic process in fifth-century Athens. Comedy is not of course a formal part of that process, unlike the lawcourts, with which it is sometimes compared. For Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 9. 1) the jury courts are by definition political from the start, and there is a perceptible trend during the classical period towards enhancing the political dimension of the courts. In contrast, comedy exists alongside but distinct from the formal political processes. There is, however, an essential connection between comedy and democracy, at least in the fifth century. For the density of political allusion,

a politicized mass audience was required; political comedy required the radical democracy. So too did the form taken by political satire; abuse, even

of the powerful was presumably established early in comedy or protocomedy, but for the scale, vigour, and tone of comic attacks on powerful figures a patron more powerful than the individual target was needed, and this patron was the demos. The question of the precise evaluation of comic criticism remains a live one.’ Recent discussion is moving away from neat answers, which is all to the good, since this is an area where neat solutions are blunt instruments. However, the complexity of the relationship between the comic stage and the political process has not been sufficiently emphasized.

Ridicule frequently, and in political satire usually, involves three parties, speaker, audience, and target. Ridicule includes and excludes, by defining a group (speaker and audience) as distinct from the target. Explicitly or by ‘ See in particular S. Halliwell, ‘Aristophanic Satire’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 14 (1984), 6-20; ‘Comedy and Publicity in the Society of the Polis’, in A. H. Sommerstein, S. Halliwell, J. Henderson, B. Zimmermann (eds.), Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis (Bari, 1993), 312-40, esp. 335 ff.; M. Heath, Political Comedy in Aristophanes (Gottingen, 1987); W. Kraus, Aristophanes’ politische Komdédien (Vienna, 1985); S. Goldhill, The Poet’s Voice (Cambridge, 1991),

167-223; J. Henderson, ‘The Demos and Comic Competition’, in J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 271-314; ‘Comic Hero versus Political Elite’, in Sommerstein et al. (above) 307-19; J. Bremmer, ‘Aristophanes on his own Poetry’, in E. Handley et al., (eds.), Aristophanes (Entretiens sur |’antiquité classique, 38, Vandoeuvres, 1993), 125-72, esp. 128 ff.

70 Christopher Carey implication it may express the superiority of group over target; it may comfort, where the target is someone or something inaccessible to any other

mode of treatment; it may seek to persuade; it may merely ingratiate or entertain. Its target may be selected according to the views of the communicator or the views of the audience or both. Accordingly as the speaker sees himself as responding to or acting upon the group, he may be spokesman for the collective or a lone voice seeking by inclusion of the group within

his comic values to carry the group with him. This complex of potential relationships needs to be borne in mind in any attempt to make sense of the political dimension in fifth-century comedy.

The issue is further complicated by the remarkable consensus among the comic poets. They are routinely critical of the contemporary political leadership. Pericles, Cleon, Hyperbolus, Cleophon all take their place both on the bema on the Pnyx and on the comic stage. Evidently to be a prominent politician was in itself sufficient to become a butt for Old Comedy. As one target dies or sinks into obscurity his place is taken by another. The implicit

importance of topicality is reinforced by a closer look at the successive treatment of particular individuals. For the comic playwright eager to mock

Pericles during his period of unpopularity during the second year of the Archidamian War, Cleon offered a useful weapon, and accordingly he is mentioned without any trace of hostility in Hermippus fr. 47. Once Pericles’ death left Cleon as the most influential speaker, the latter became a viable target. This process can be seen in reverse in the case of Pericles, who after

suffering relentless attacks during his period of political prominence was rehabilitated after his death; in Eupolis’ Demes* he figures as a representative

of the good old days, in contrast to contemporary politicians. The comic poets are equally uniform in the features of political leaders selected for criticism. In general the criticism directs itself to the style and character of the political leadership,* including physical and social attributes, rather than towards matters of political policy. The attacks on Pericles concentrate on physical defects (the shape of his head) and details of his private life (his relationship with Aspasia), and on the combination of enormous influence with aloofness (Pericles the ‘Olympian’).* In the case of Pericles’ successors> the attack concentrates above all on low origins (relatively speaking). Also * Eupolis, Demoi test. i K-A. 3 K. J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (London, 1972), 34.

4 Cratinus fr. 73, 118, 258, 259; Callias fr. 21; Telecleides fr. 47, Hermippus fr. 47, Ar. Ach. 26 ff.

> For the treatment of the demagogues in comedy see in general H. Lind, Der Gerber Kleon in den ‘Rittern’ des Aristophanes (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 235-57. For the change in the origins and methods of political leaders after Pericles see in general W. R. Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens (Princeton, NJ, 1971), with the reservations of D. M. Lewis, CR 25 (1975), 87-90, and J. K. Davies, Gnomon, 47 (1975). 374-8.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy 71 generic is the accusation of engaging in ‘trade’. Allied to this is the emphasis on the fact that the political leaders of the late fifth century come from ‘new money’. Individually and collectively the demagogues are viewed as morally

base, unscrupulous in their pursuit of personal profit from politics and litigation. This generic consensus among poets engaged in vigorous and vociferous

competition is surprising enough to require explanation. It also makes it exceedingly difficult to ascertain the views of any individual comic writer. It is, however, important to avoid models which ignore differences between poets and present them as an undifferentiated mass. It is also important to allow for chronological developments with the corpus of the individual poet. To begin at the most basic level, the fact of ridicule itself has a political importance. At a festival sponsored by the state and organized by public officials, men of wealth and power are mocked for the entertainment of the demos. Goldhill has recently stressed the importance of the dramatic festival for civic ideology.° Though this is more obviously the case with the Dionysia, where the presence of foreigners was vigorously exploited for ideological purposes, it is also true of the Lenaia, to the extent that all ritual serves at

one level to define the participants as a group. Comedy functions within this context by levelling down, by emphasizing negatively the equality of all

citizens and by confirming the existence of freedom of speech. Although comedy shows the city a grotesquely distorted reflection of itself,’ the fact of political ridicule shows it beyond this distorting mirror a more favourable image, a city characterized by the principles of isotés and parrhésia. Comedy

thus helps to define the city, not only as a cultural centre but as the democratic polis par excellence. By its very existence comedy acts as a thermometer for the health of the democracy; hence the general unwillingness to curtain comic licence.®

For the general function just described, the target might be said to be chosen at random, in the sense that any one target from the appropriate ° See S. Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, in Winkler and Zeitlin (n. 1), 97129. ” Henderson (n. 1, 1990), 308. * We have evidence for two attempts to restrict the freedom of the comic stage by decree of

the assembly. The decree of 440/39 seems certain, since the source (schol. Ar., Ach. 67) introduces it tangentially; it is therefore not based on conjectural attempts to make sense of the text of Aristophanes (unlike the decree of Antimachus mentioned at schol. Ar. Ach. 1150). This decree is probably to be linked to the crisis caused by the revolt of Samos (so most recently

Henderson (n. I, 1990), 289). This would suggest that the decree of Syrakosios (for whose historicity see A. H. Sommerstein, CQ 36 (1986), Io1ff.) restricting the lampooning of individuals by name is also to be linked to some political crisis; Sommerstein offers a plausible but ultimately unprovable case for a connection (first proposed in the last century) with the mutilation of the herms and profanation of the Mysteries. Whether the law on kakegoria ever applied to the comic stage is uncertain; if it did, it had no discernible effect.

72 Christopher Carey group will suffice. The same is true of some more specific functions served

by comic ridicule. This can be seen at its clearest in the treatment of politicians as a class. The attitude underlying such criticism is that all politicians are at best an irritant and at worst a positive source of harm. This attitude is clearly attested in Plato fr. 202: nv yap amobavnt eis Tis Tovnpds, OV avédvoav prTopes. ovoels yap nudv “IdAews év tht ToAEL, Gots emiKkavae Tas Kehadas TAV pyTOpwy. KkexoAAomevkas’ Toryapoby pyTwp EdEet.

If any one villain dies, two politicians spring up. For none of us in the city is an Iolaos who will cauterize the politicians’ heads. You've been buggered. Well then, you ll be a politician

The accusation of passive homosexuality here can be paralleled in Aristophanes’ Knights,? where the potential for submission to buggery is one of

the qualifications the sausageseller can bring to the job of aspiring demagogue. In so far as this allegation has any basis in fact, it presumably reflects

the importance of patronage in Athenian politics;'° in the comic theatre, political subservience manifests itself as the activity of the catamite. Alter-

natively, it may be that the emphasis on passive homosexuality is an anachronistic survival in the last quarter of the fifth century, reflecting the

traditional dominance of politics by old money and the importance of homosexuality within aristocratic circles. Perhaps however it is unwise to be too specific. The allegation may be no more than a way of saying that politicians are a bad lot. Accusations of corruption may be equally unspecific.

When the successful hero Trygaios hands Theoria over to the Council in Peace (906-8),"* he notes that the Council would have been less eager to accept if this had been an ordinary business matter; a bribe would have been necessary. In such cases, where the attack is a blunderbuss directed at a broad group without any reference to personalities, the carnival model offers the most useful approach.'* This model locates the function of comedy

in the area of reversal of norms. Seen in this light, comedy’s function is 9 Ar. Knights 423 ff.

‘© T am referring here not to large-scale patronage of the sort discussed by P. Millett, ‘Patronage and its Avoidance in Classical Athens’, in A. Wallace-Hadrill (ed.), Patronage in Ancient Society (London and New York, 1989), 15-47, but specifically to the process by which major political figures acquired a coterie of active politicians who would act in a variety of capacities, from membership of a claque through to political prosecutions and the proposal of measures; cf. in particular Ar. Wasps 1033, [Dem.] LIX. 43. ‘" Ar. Peace 906-8: @éac ws mpobipws 6 mpttavis trapedéEato. | GAN ovn dv, et Te mpotka mpocayayeiv @ &det, | AN yupov dv @ bréxovta THY éxexetplay.

'2 See e.g. D. F. Sutton, Self and Society in Aristophanes (Washington, DC, 1980), Halliwell

(n. I, 1984).

Comic Ridicule and Democracy 73 controlled dysfunction, a calculated subversion of the norms of society in a festival context which offers a controlled outlet for disruptive behaviour and vicarious satisfaction of the impulse to disobey. Mockery of public figures thus takes its place alongside sexual licence, breach of the laws, mockery of the gods, and mockery of serious art forms and intellectuals in giving the ordinary citizen an opportunity to score against those who in real life confine

and dominate him in one way or another. This function is presumably present not only in attacks on politicians as a class but also as one strand in the attacks on individual politicians: that is, the individual is attacked in part as a representative of the species. The role of comedy as an outlet for potentially disruptive forces is of course political only in the broadest sense, in that it makes the constraints of living in an ordered society easier to bear.

The lighthearted picture I have presented remains, however, unsatisfactory. The depiction of politicians as a class by the comic poets presents

us with a feeding ground for resentment. They were in a sense (as Plato represents them) a class apart, in that even under the radical democracy political influence was confined to men of substance. Equally real was the trading of favours for rewards. Politicians could make substantial sums of money from grateful beneficiaries of their policies and influence. The ordinary

citizen could only watch. We should not dismiss the jibes at politicians as merely goodnatured festival fun. The divide it presupposes between idiotes and politikos was real, and there is no reason to doubt that there was real resentment among those excluded from the circle of influence. Comedy therefore at one level offers an outlet for phthonos, and in so doing helps make the paradox of democracy, that all citizens have equal rights but not

equal influence or benefit from the system, more bearable. Again, this function is also present as one strand in the attacks on named politicians. The value of comedy as a medium for phthonos probably increased after the

death of Pericles. Both Plato and Aristotle’? note that phthonos is felt especially against an equal. When politicians belonging to a privileged group which had mythologized its claim to authority gave way to politicians who

were socially (though not financially) closer to the demos as a whole, the scope for resentment of those who profited from democracy, in terms of wealth, prestige, and influence, was increased. It may be however that comedy also plays a more specific role with respect to phthonos. Walcot‘ has suggested that at least one function of the ostracism mechanism was the exercise of phthonos against successful politicians. Although the demise of ostracism (little used after the late 440s and a visible anachronism when 3 Arist. Rhet. 1386°: Avan pev yap rapaywdnys Kai 6 POdvos ear! Kai ets edrpaylay, GAN od Tob dvatiov adda rob tcou Kai duotov. Cf. Plat. Lys. 215d: xa? radAAa 87) wavta ottws &by [sc. ‘Haiodos] dvayKaiov éivar Ta Guotdtata GAAnAa POdvov Te Kai dirovixias Kai €yPpas éurimAacba ...

(citing Hes. Op. 25 f.) ‘4 P. Walcot, Envy and the Greeks (Warminster, 1978), 54 ff.

74. Christopher Carey last used, against Hyperbolus)*> is presumably due to a complex of factors, particularly the development of more sophisticated mechanisms of democratic control,’® the comic theatre may have played a minor part by allowing less extreme outlets for phthonos. However, the persistence of large-scale attacks on the prostates tou demou

as a mainstay of comic theatre argues more than envy. These themes were

approved by successive archons, and criteria for approval presumably included predicted appeal for a large citizen audience, whose membership

will coincide to a substantial (if unquantifiable) extent with that of the assembly which provides the power base of the comic victim. There is thus an ambiguity in the attitude of the demos to its leaders. Influence is given, but at the same time the influential figure is pilloried. On the one hand the demos grants enormous influence, prestige, and earning potential; on the

other by laughing at politicians it asserts its collective superiority and authority over them. Comic satire thus functions politically as a means of

control, as part of a range of mechanisms which include at one end withholding of popular support and at the other depositions and trials which may bring fines, exile, or even death.'” Both Pericles and Cleon are reminded that they are no better than anyone else, Pericles with the jokes about his

head that he may be agathos but is decidedly not kalos, Cleon that he is merely a jumped-up artisan. Pericles the Olympian is reminded through public mockery that he is a servant of the common people; Cleon and other ‘new politicians’ are reminded by the insistence on their origins that they are upstarts who owe their prominence entirely to popular support. Both the gentleman and the tradesmen are reminded indirectly by mockery that ‘> For a discussion of the date of the ostracism of Hyperbolus, see P. J. Rhodes, below, Ch. 5. on Hornblower, The Greek World 479-323 B.C.* (London and New York, 1991), 145, sees

financial pressure as the primary reason for the abandonment of ostracism. ‘7 For comic ridicule as political control cf. Henderson (n.1, 1990), 307, and [Xen], Ath. Pol. 2. 18: kwuwideiv 8 at Kal Kaxds Aéyew Tov péev SHpuov ovK eWow, iva pw abTol dxotwot KaKas, idiar d€ KeAevovow, et tis Twa BovAnrat, ed EtddTEs 6Tt OdxL TOK SHOU eat OvdE TOD TrAHMoUS 6 KwWLWLoovLEvOsS Ws emt TO TrOAL, GAN 7H mrAovaLOS 7H yevvatios 7 Suvdpevos. dAlyor b€ TivEs TOV TEVAT WY

Kal TMV ONpLoTLKwY KWEWLOObVTAL, Kal Ovd OPTOL eav uy OLA TOAUTpAaypoa’yyV Kal dia TO CyTeEtv

mAéov te éxewv Tob Ojpov. (‘They do not allow ridicule and abuse of the demos, to avoid being criticised themselves, but in the case of individuals they encourage anyone who wishes, in the firm knowledge that the individual ridiculed is not as a rule one of the demos or the mass but someone with wealth or good birth or power. Very few poor people or members of the demos are ridiculed, and these only if they make a nuisance of themselves or seek to have more than the demos.’)

The claim that comic poets are not allowed to mock the demos is too sweeping, as the treatment of Demos in the Knights shows, though the poet ensures (by an ending in which a rejuvenated Demos announces an intention to mend his ways) that the faults are not seen as irremediable, and even (1111 ff.) allows Demos to claim some wisdom for his seeming dependence on unscrupulous politicians.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy 75 such support is conditional upon their ability to deliver the goods. The most

intriguing example of this ambivalence is the fact, often discussed and variously evaluated, that in 424 a popular audience enjoyed Aristophanes’ blistering attack on Cleon in Knights, an enjoyment which (if we believe Plato on the significance of audience response for the allocation of prizes by the judges)’® will have helped Aristophanes gain first prize; yet the assembly went on shortly afterwards to elect him general for the following year. One

way of evaluating this seeming paradox is to conclude that comedy has no relevance to or impact on contemporary political views.'? Another is to

suppose that the demos changed its mind between the festival and the elections.” An alternative (and preferable) way is to see both the comic attack and the election as two sides of an ambiguous response to the politician on the part of the demos. One reason for favouring this reading is

that it can, in my opinion, be paralleled by the comic treatment of the Peloponnesian War.*' Irrespective of Aristophanes’ attitude to peace, it is self-evident (from the number of plays which he devoted to the theme and from Cratinus’ Dionysalexandros) that there was a perceived public demand for peace plays. Yet the war persisted, presumably because the majority of

those affected by it thought it necessary. But the citizen soldiers who supported the continuation of hostilities knew that they were voting for danger, inconvenience, and (since most citizens owned land at this period) potential financial damage from enemy invasions.** The comic theatre gave voice to one facet of the complex attitude of the ordinary Athenian to the war, the assembly to another, just as each outlet allowed for a polarization of different facets of the complex attitude of the demos to its leaders. On this reading discrepant responses are to be seen not as evidence of compartmentalization of political and artistic processes nor change of heart but of genuine ambivalence. The members of the demos knew that they needed people like Cleon, but they were unhappy about the surrender of so much power to individuals. There is thus a degree of complementarity between the assembly

and the comic stage, the latter allowing for a degree of ambiguity which the former, with its need for clear-cut decisions, did not permit.” '§ Plat. Laws 659a; Aristophanes’ appeals to the audience for support (e.g. Peace 765 ff.) support Plato’s view of the importance of audience reception for the judges’ verdict. ‘9 Halliwell (n. I, 1984), 19. *° P. Cartledge, Aristophanes and his Theatre of the Absurd (Bristol, 1990), 50, Henderson (n.1,

1990) 307. The fundamental compatibility of audience enjoyment of abuse of Cleon and continued political support is rightly asserted by Heath (n. 1), 13. *! Cf. C. Carey, ‘The Purpose of Aristophanes’ Acharnians', Rheinisches Museum 136 (1993)

245-63. ve I do not understand the assertion of Henderson (n. I, 1990), 283, that the masses gained from the war. ?3 During the discussion of this paper Dr. C. Sourvinou-Inwood plausibly suggested the byelection as a parallel in contemporary British politics. The by-election is frequently used by the

76 Christopher Carey For the functions so far discussed, the specific criticisms of politicians are

no more than a means to an end. However, a closer examination of the features selected for criticism suggests that this picture is too simple. One of the recurring gibes against the type of politician which emerged in the latter part of the fifth century relates to their social status; they are nouveaux riches and ill-bred and earn their money by banausic means. There is in fact no reason to doubt that they were in general men of substance. But they did not belong to the class which traditionally provided Athens with her political

leaders, and the comic playwrights never tire of reminding them. The clearest formulation of the comic stance on birth (though expressed with

reference to military rather than political activity) is to be found in a celebrated fragment of Eupolis fr. 384. 3 ff.: nueis yap ovx oUTW Téws WikotmeEV of yépovTes, GAN Hoav Huiv THe 7éAEL TpWTov pev of oTpaTnyol éex TOV peylotwr olki@v, TAOUTWL yévEel TE PATOL,

ois worrepel Beotow nvyduecba: Kai yap Hoav: wot aofadds émpattouev’ vuvi O° Ory THXOWLEV aotpaTevopueo? aipovmevor Kabdppata oTpatnyous.

We old men did not run the city like this in our day. To start with our generals were from the greatest houses, foremost in wealth and birth. To them we prayed like gods—for gods they were! And so we were secure. Now anywhere at all we choose trash as our generals when we go on campaign.

The comic stance is unashamedly conservative. It is very easy to interpret this stance as the attitude of a particular caste.** It is worth remembering, however, that we have no way of knowing Aristophanes’ pedigree, even if

we suppose (as seems reasonable) that his background was financially privileged. It is also difficult to believe that the demos would tolerate for decades class-based preaching from the comic stage; by which I mean that I doubt that such preaching would be popular, and therefore that successive archons would be willing to grant a chorus. More significantly, to take the

comic consensus as representing a minority position is to ignore the circumstances of composition and performance. The comic poets were by the nature of the dramatic festivals competitors for popular favour. If the views expressed in comedy were so divergent from those of the population as a whole, it is very difficult to see why poets vying for favour should collectively present unpopular views. The consensus among the poets makes electorate to register dissatisfaction with the incumbent government in a controlled way not possible within the context of a general election, where a wholesale protest vote might lead to a change of government. *4 So Henderson (n. I, 1990), 284, 291f. His alternative formulation, (n. 1, 1993), 314, of comedy as a champion of minority views from within the demos seems equally implausible in the context of the competition for popularity between poets.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy 77 far more sense as a response to audience expectation than as an attempt to influence audience opinion. It is to be borne in mind that respect for wealth and birth persisted in classical Athens even under the radical democracy. The assumption that old money, land, and a tradition of political prominence are a recipe for intellectual and ethical superiority died hard, and is not to be associated exclusively with any one class. I assume therefore that the audience is expected to share the comic evaluation of birth. It is also to be stressed that birth is a serious issue (by which I mean an issue which is regarded as important) in the world outside the theatre. We must distinguish the recurring criticism of the demagogues’ origins from features such as the shape of Pericles’ head. When therefore the comedians comment on the origins of the demagogues they are voicing a concern which was probably felt by a large number of Athenians. The fifth century was a period of rapid change, which probably disturbed others besides die-hard oligarchs. The comic theatre thus becomes an area for the voicing in humorous form of concerns which affect the population at large. Here the most promising parallel is the treatment of the sophists. The new ideas in circulation during the fifth century were potentially subversive of the ethical order. From the collective reaction embodied in the Diopeithes decree,*> it is clear that many people found this trend disturbing. The rapid change in the political landscape

was probably no less disturbing. The comic theatre in addressing these issues allows anxiety to surface in a humorous context and to be laughed away temporarily.”°

The perceived defects in political leadership highlighted so far could be cured only by a wholesale change of politicians. It may be, however, that

this role for comedy as a conduit for popular anxiety extended to more readily curable aspects of the political process. Knights presents us with a self-seeking politician, Cleon, who is prepared to use any means, fair or foul, to curry favour with the demos; whose manner is noisy, coarse, blustering, violent, and abusive; who seeks to overcome his opponents by intimidation rather than debate; in Knights both Cleon and the other demagogues are seen as men of little education; in Wasps he and his contemporaries are seen as using the lawcourts in a fundamentally unfair way to secure their

own political and personal advantage, to the detriment both of honest politicians and of the demos as a whole. Since we do not have Cleon’s words,

we cannot assess the accuracy of this picture with confidence. We can, however, compare Aristophanes’ portrayal with other sources. The violence *> For Diopeithes and his decree making disbelief in the gods and the teaching of astronomy punishable offences see Plut. Per. 32 with P. Stadter, A Commentary on Plutarch’s Pericles (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), 298 ff.

76 Here I part company with Halliwell (n. 1, 1984), 15, who finds in Aristophanic satire ‘independence of commitment to serious values’, though I accept his rejection of ‘any straightforward version of the moralistic argument’ (ibid. 19).

78 Christopher Carey of manner is attested by Thucydides, who terms Cleon ‘most violent of the citizens’ (3. 36). The coarseness is attested by the Ath. Pol., which asserts that he was the first to indulge in abuse and haul up his himation on the bema.’’ The reliance on intimidation is amply brought out by the Mytilinaean debate, where Cleon uses smear tactics to undermine his opponents. So too is the charge of lack of education; Cleon presents himself with pride as a

simple, blunt man, no better educated than the ordinary citizen and contemptuous of intellectuals. The unscrupulousness is illustrated by Thucydides’ accounts both of Cleon’s conduct during the Pylos affair and his role in the rejection of the Spartan peace proposals. The Pylos affair also illustrates the bluster (which as Thuc. 4. 28. 3 shows was recognized as such by the demos). Cleon and his contemporaries are included by Thucydides among the successors of Pericles who pander to the demos and pursue their own advantage at the expense of the city, and whose effect is divisive (2. 65).

There is much that is unfair in all of this. There is no reason to believe that Cleon was not striving to achieve the city’s good. Thucydides’ account of Cleon’s conduct in the Pylos affair in book 4, like his account of the battle of Amphipolis later, notoriously disguises inference as fact. The picture of

him, in both Aristophanes and Thucydides, as pandering to the demos is also one-sided; Thucydides’ version of Cleon’s Mytilenaean speech shows us a man ready to bully and harangue the demos—he was not afraid to oppose

and criticize the popular assembly. It is also erroneous of Thucydides and Aristophanes to associate divisiveness and competitiveness with the demagogues, in Thucydides explicitly, in Aristophanes by implication, as a

new phenomenon. The system was always thus; Pericles emerged as the dominant figure only as a result of ruthless competition. Fair or not, the point to note, however, is that both sources see Cleon in the same light. And the charges are serious, by which I mean that they appeal to values *7 Ath. Pol. 28. 3 [KAéwv] doxeé pdrcora dtadbeipae tov Sipwov tais 6ppais, Kal mp@tos ent rob Biuaros dvéxpaye kai eAodophaaro Kal Tepilwodpevos ednunydpnoe TaV GAAWwY év Kdgpwe AEyovTwY.

(‘[Cleon] seems especially to have corrupted the demos by his impulsive ways; he was the first to yell and use abuse on the rostrum and speak with his robe hauled up, while others spoke in an orderly manner’). The Ath. Pol. may of course be retailing snippets from comedy. But the persistence of the tradition that Cleon’s public manner was undignified is difficult to account for if it had no distinctive qualities. Probably Cleon’s debating manner did involve a marked departure from that of previous political figures. It is difficult, however, to accept the neat contrast drawn by Aristotle between the decorum of Cleon’s predecessors and his lack of restraint, particularly when we find the same contrast being exploited against Timarchus in the next century (see next note). Presumably the difference between Cleon and his predecessors was one of degree.

But the quantitative difference may have been great enough to amount to a qualitative difference in the eyes of his contemporaries. Quintilian asserts (11. 3. 123) that Cleon was the first orator to slap his thighs, an action found as early as Homer (cf. e.g. Il. 16. 125, and see R. C. M. Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary, iv (Cambridge, 1992), 241) as a gesture of anger or distress. What Quintilian has in mind is the use of the gesture in formal, public contexts.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy 79 which are regarded as important in a society which prizes sophrosyne. The question of style is for most people an issue of considerable importance. The

way in which a politician conducts the business of politics, the public persona projected, is seen as a reflection of the values of the political figure and his or her significance (for good or ill) both for the quality of the political process and more generally for the values of society as a whole. That this

was so for the Athenians is indicated by the amount of space in the Mytilenaean debate in Thucydides devoted to the conduct of debate. It is significant that the Ath. Pol. in its treatment of Cleon singles out his debating manner for comment. Again, debating style was one issue which Aeschines was able to deploy with some effect against Timarchus.”® Before we dismiss this as trifling, or as the product of wealthy snobbery, it is worth bearing in

mind that much of the dissatisfaction with Margaret Thatcher (the most successful populist politician of recent British history), as poll after poll indicated, was concerned with personality and style. We should also note that characters like Nicias whose political methods are successful but uncontroversial do not attract significant criticism from the comic poets. Ridicule of individuals is not distributed indiscriminately.*?

We have then a depiction of the demagogues, especially Cleon, which certainly contains some truth and appeals to important social values. Now, we know that Old Comedy finds amusement at social, legal, and religious derelictions which in life would not amuse. Comedy, however, imposes double standards. It is usually the hero’s breaches which are tolerated. In its treatment of other figures Comedy is more inclined to impose the ethical standards of everyday life. Even in the comic theatre we are not meant to approve of Cleon’s behaviour. It may be significant that Aristophanes’ strongest attacks on the demagogues occur in plays of the 420s, specifically Knights and Wasps. For other observers (Thucydides, Aristotle) Cleon represented a new and disturbing phenomenon, even if (as seems very likely) these observers exaggerate some at least of the differences between Cleon and his predecessors. The moral thrust of the criticism makes it unwise to dismiss it as humour for humour’s sake. The appeal to shared values makes it unlikely that this is a class-based attack from the poets. And the presence of some shared features between Aristophanes and his rivals makes it difficult to regard such criticism as a personal cri de coeur. Here too comedy can be 8 Aeschin. I. 26: oxébacbe 5é, & "AOnvaios, Saov d:adéper 6 LéAwY Tidpyov Kai of dvdpes av dArlyan mpdtepov ev Ta Adyan errepvyHaOnv. exeivor pév ye Hioxdvovto EEw TH xefpa ExovTes A€yery,

Tivapxos dé ottoot ob mdXdat GAAa mpwinv mote pias Botudriov yupvos émayxpariatev év rie éxxAnotat ... (Observe, men of Athens, the extent of the difference between Solon and the men I mentioned a little earlier in my speech and Timarchus. Those men were ashamed to speak with their hands outside their clothing, while Timarchus here recently, not in the distant past, threw off his robe and played the pankratiast in the assembly, stripped bare ...’) 79 Rightly emphasized by Henderson (n. I, 1990), 284; cf. also Lewis (n. 5), 89.

80 Christopher Carey viewed as a conduit for public anxiety. This ethically based criticism may further reflect some disquiet on the part of the demos about its own role. Support for the demagogues may have carried with it some unease about the correctness of acquiescence in such debating methods. And since ‘style’ is something which can be changed, there was at least a possibility in theory

that this public anxiety could be assuaged. Cleon could not be made an agathos. But he could in theory be made to behave better. The comic theatre in cases such as this offers a complement to the normal political process. The adversarial nature of the assembly made it difficult for the populace to

do other than choose between politicians. Individuals compete, and the demos chooses between available competitors. It was difficult to offer support

with reservations. The comic stage allows space for the exploration of reservations and potential for fine tuning, since the demos at least in theory had an opportunity to influence the behaviour of those it favoured.*° This is not a phenomenon which begins with politicians such as Cleon. The same can be said for Pericles’ relations with Aspasia. It is important to bear in mind that for the Greeks sexual desire was a disturbing force, and that one strand of the male view of women was suspicion. Undue influence from a woman could invalidate an adoption or a will under Athenian law.*' The closeness of Pericles’ relationship with Aspasia may have been a source of intermittent worry for the ordinary Athenian.

Thus far I have stressed the generic aspect of Old Comedy and its responsiveness to audience concerns. The poet emerges as a communal voice, whose contribution is not to present the audience with unpalatable truths but to articulate one or more facets of the attitude of the mass of citizens. However, again the picture is too simple. We need to bear in mind that Old Comedy is not a monolith but a catch-all title for a group of writers. It was always possible for a comic poet to utilize the stage as an extension

of the bema on the Pnyx. A possible example of this is the fragment of Hermippus attacking Pericles (fr. 47): Baotdet Latvpwv, ti mor obk €béAeEts ddpu Baordlew, dArAa Adyous pev mept TOU TOAgmou OEwovs TApexyt,

3° With Halliwell (n. 1, 1993), 335ff., I am sceptical that comic ridicule ever had a major impact on events outside the theatre. Since in most cases comedy appears to follow rather than shape public opinion, it is unlikely that it influenced the attitudes of the demos. Likewise, I doubt that it ever influenced the behaviour of successful politicians to any great extent. It may, however, have been influential on occasion with figures whose popularity was on the wane, and it may have induced even successful figures to alter their conduct temporarily. But as long as a politician was able to promote successful policies, the demos was sufficiently pragmatic to maintain its support. However, it may have been felt that comedy was a moderating force; it is necessary to distinguish between the actual and perceived effects of an institution. 31 A. R. W. Harrison The Law of Athens, i (1968), 87, 152.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy SI ux d€ TéAntos breott: Kayyetprotov © axdvnt oxAnpat Trapabyyouevns Bovyets Komidos dnxGets atdwve Kr€wvt;

King of the satyrs, why do you refuse to wield a spear, but you offer fearsome words about the war, while underneath is the mettle of Teles, and as the dagger’s blade is whetted on the hard stone you bellow, struck by burnished Cleon?

These verses voice popular resentment with Pericles’ policy of allowing the

enemy to ravage Attica. However, according to Plutarch (Pericles 32),* Hermippus prosecuted Aspasia for impiety. This may be a garbled recollection of comic mockery. But if there is any truth in the tradition (and some details at least go back to the middle of the fourth century), it seems reasonable to

conclude that Hermippus is not merely registering popular dissatisfaction but seeking to capitalize on that resentment for his own political purposes. There is therefore some evidence that a writer could use the comic stage as part of a strategy intended to achieve specific: political goals, and that the

individual agenda could coexist with the generic stance, though it is interesting to note that even here the poet seeks to harness (rather than to change) existing public opinion. A similar process (though more ethical than partisan) can be seen in the parabasis of Aristophanes’ Frogs. It is no longer fashionable to take Aristophanes’ parabases seriously. But I see no real reason to doubt, for instance, that Aristophanes’ suggestion in the parabasis of Frogs that the Athenians should revert to old-style political leaders is meant seriously, any more than the plea for amnesty is a joke. With reference to the Frogs, it is worth stressing the chronological factor. It is unwise to treat a corpus, produced over decades, as a monolith, even when dealing with a single writer. Stereotyped jokes may take on a new complexion as circumstances change, as Socrates found to his cost. It is reasonable to suppose that by the closing years of the Peloponnesian War the jokes about the quality of the politicians began to take on a new urgency for some observers at least, in view of the city’s plight.*> How frequently the comic stage was used for attempts to influence the conduct of public business it is impossible to say. Nor can we determine with confidence how often, if 3° Plut. Per. 32: epi rodrov tov ypdvov ’Aozacia Sixnv edevyev doeBelas, ‘Epuimmou rot KwywdoTro.od SuwKovtos ... “Aomaciav pev e€niryoato, ToAAG mapa tH Sixny, ws Alcywhs dynow,

adeis Umép adris Sdkpva Kal denbeis trav dixaota@v. (‘Around this time Aspasia was prosecuted

for impiety, the prosecutor being Hermippus the comic poet. [Pericles] secured her acquittal with many tears on her behalf and much entreaty of the jurors.’) See further Stadter (n. 25),

2.

* Lack of space prevents fuller discussion; but a good case can be made for a serious aim to the epirrhematic sections of a number of Aristophanic parabases, including Acharnians, Knights, Wasps, and Thesmophoriazusae. None of these appeals in my view amounts to practical politics, but that tells us nothing about the seriousness of the proposals.

82 Christopher Carey at all, such attempts formed the basis of an entire play. It is enough however

to note that the opportunity existed, and that sometimes at least it was seized.

What I have been arguing for is a multifaceted function for political satire. Most discussions of the function of Old Comedy operate with a narrow range

of alternatives (the satirist as political reformer, the comic playwright as entertainer). But the phenomenon itself is complex. The burden of comic mockery ranges from blunderbuss attacks on politicians as a class to mockery of individuals, from aspects of the system so embedded that change would be difficult, if not impossible, to features which in theory could be changed at a stroke; from throwaway allegations of buggery to depictions of behaviour

which contravenes firmly and widely held ethical principles. Instead of trying to fit this data into a single model, it is better to accept that the political satire may function at more than one level simultaneously. The ridicule of politicians amounts to a programmatic statement on the part of the democracy, an act of self-definition. It also has a social purpose, in offering scope for anti-social impulses. In allowing space for the exercise of phthonos it is again a stabilizing mechanism, offering an outlet for a force which in the assembly might manifest itself in more destructive ways. In

part it supplements the close control over the politicians exercised by assembly and lawcourt, by providing a constant reminder of the superior power of the demos. In part it complements the formal political structures by allowing room for additional dimensions to contemporary debate. And

where appropriate it supplements those structures by offering another platform for a particular position.*+ These functions need to be balanced in

any attempt to make sense of political satire as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. This complex of functions, which in part reflects the complex relationship of the demos to its leaders, arises naturally from the absence of any formal definition of the role of comedy within the democratic

system. The political roles of comedy were negotiated between poet and public, individually and generically.** It is also necessary to note the shifting role of the individual poet. The concept (espoused indirectly by Aristophanes in Frogs) of the poet as teacher is too often glossed as hortatory; the poet as

teacher becomes the poet as preacher. Greek poetry tends to interpret this role more widely. The poet may bring forward new ideas, may challenge

34 T am not of course suggesting that these functions represent the purpose for which ridicule evolved as a part of comedy. The ridicule is part of the ethos which comedy shares with iambos, which in both cases I take to be ritual in origin. These functions are merely ways in which an existing generic feature is harnessed by the democracy through the interaction of competing poets and audience. 35 For comic licence as an issue for negotiation between poets and audience cf. Goldhill (n.

I), 188, 194.

Comic Ridicule and Democracy 83 existing beliefs and values, or express them in a more persuasive or vivid way. The comic poet may be an individual or a generic and collective voice. Again the most promising approach is one which recognizes diversity.

5

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus P. J. RHODES

Ostracism at Athens is one of the many subjects in which David Lewis has

taken an interest, but as far as I know he has not written on Athens’ last ostracism, that of Hyperbolus.* It is a subject which presents a fascinating mixture of problems—in the interpretation of different kinds of text and in the reconstruction of an episode in history. This is the episode in which, according to a story told three times by Plutarch, Hyperbolus proposed an ostracism, hoping to get rid of either Nicias or Alcibiades (or, according to Theophrastus, either Phaeax or Alcibiades), but the two men joined forces

so that the supporters of each voted not against the other but against Hyperbolus, with the result that Hyperbolus himself was ostracized—but afterwards the people were disgusted and abandoned the institution of ostracism.*

First, a word about the ostraca. On the latest count there are perhaps 30 which can be associated with this ostracism:’ 5 against Alcibiades, 5 against Phaeax, 3 against Hyperbolus, and at last (first published in 1990) I against Nicias;* also 8 against Cleophon, I against his brother Philinus (whose existence would not otherwise be known), 3 against Hippocles, who was to serve as general in 413/12, I against a Charias, who may but need not be the archon of 415/14, perhaps I against a Crates for whom three identifications are possible, *° and 1 each against two otherwise unknown men, ' As one of many people who have written a doctoral thesis under David Lewis’s supervision,

I was delighted to be invited to contribute to this celebration. I used preliminary versions of this paper at meetings in Liege, Durham, and Tel Aviv: and I am very grateful to all who have discussed the subject with me. I cite D. Kagan, The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition (Ithaca, NY, 1981), as Kagan. * Plut. Nic. 11. Alc. 13, and cf. more briefly Arist. 7. 3-4. > D. J. Phillips, ZPE 83 (1990), 123-48, at 127-9. Cf. for all except Phileriphus the entries

in Agora, xxv: for Phaeax, Hippocles, and Phileriphus the list of Ceramicus ostraca by F. Willemsen and S. Brenne, AM 106 (1991), 147-56. + Agora, xxv, no. 648 (first published by Phillips, 126~—9, no. 2).

> ‘Phrynondas’ Crates as interpreted by Phillips, 129-33, no. 3; S. Schréder suggests ‘Phrynondas’ son’ Crates (ZPE 86 (1991), 45-6: 96 (1993), 37-45); but M. L. Lang interprets this as a vote against Phrynondas son of Crates[——], in the second quarter of the century (Agora, xxv, no. 660; cf. O. Masson, ZPE 91 (1992), 107-20, at 114-15).

86 P. J. Rhodes Myrrhinicus and Phileriphus. In view of the very small numbers, it was never a serious objection to Plutarch’s story that we had no ostraca against Nicias, but it is reassuring that we now have one; otherwise what is most important here is the confirmation that Phaeax was a potential victim, the confirmation that Hyperbolus’ father was Antiphanes (and not Chremes, as

in a fragment of Theopompus, or any kind of foreigner, as in the texts against which Theopompus was cited°), and, most interestingly, the discovery that Cleophon and his brother were not upstarts but sons of Cleippides (who

was a general in 428’ and himself a candidate for ostracism at some time), and could attract votes as early as this although Cleophon does not appear in our literary sources until 410.

Many of our problems are connected with the dating of the episode. Thucydides mentions Hyperbolus only to tell us that, after being ostracized, he was murdered in Samos in late 412/11.° A fragment from Theopompus seems to state that he was ostracized for six years, went to Samos, and died there,’ and it used to be thought that this meant that his ostracism was six years before his death, that is in 417.°° Reconsideration began in the 1940s. Ostracism took place in the spring;’*

but a fragmentary inscription in which Hyperbolus is the proposer of an amendment was reconstructed by Woodhead with a text implying a date at the very end of 418/17, i.e. too late for the ostracism of that year.'* If Nicias and Alcibiades were among the potential victims, 415 is the latest possible year for the ostracism, so we should have to choose between 416 and 415. The inscription is in fact a very difficult text:

6 HurépBodos eime: 7a ev d[AAa Kabarep ..| [......: rev dJé Alavriéa mputavetav, éme:[dav Tée d€uor d-] ® Cf. schol. Luc. Tim. 30 = Theop. FGrH 115 F 95. ” Thuc. 3. 3. 2. > Thuc. 8. 73. 3. ° Schol. Ar. Wasps 1007 = Theop. FGrH 115 F 96(b).

'© This approach would yield 417 by exclusive counting or 416 by inclusive. 417 was accepted (e.g.) by K. J. Beloch, Die attische Politik seit Perikles (Leipzig, 1884), 339-40, cf. 55;

G. Busolt, Griechische Geschichte, 11. ii (Gotha, 1904), 1257: W. S. Ferguson, CAH, v' (Cambridge, 1927), 276; G. Glotz with R. Cohen, Histoire grecque, ii (Paris, 1931), 673-4. Several 19th-cent. scholars preferred 418, in spite of the Theopompus fragment, and this date was championed again by H. Neumann, Klio 39 (1936), 36-49. '' The assembly’s decision to hold an ostracism in the sixth prytany (Ath. Pol. 43. 5); the actual ostracism in the eighth prytany (Lex. Rhet. Cant. and other lexica on édortpakiopot tpdémos = Phil. FGrH 328 F 30). '2 A. G. Woodhead, Hesperia 18 (1949), 78-83 (text reprinted SEG XII. 32, and, with less

restoration in the original decree and one change of word order in Hyperbolus’ amendment, IG PB 85), subsequently supported by M. F. McGregor, Phoenix, 19 (1965), 27-47 at 31-2, 45-7:

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus 87 oxét, dvaxadlécar déxa Ewepdv homdéev rolis hexadrois h-] le dvaxdAeats dv] éuv rév & éxxAeciav mrorév [rept rés Alavri-|

IO [d0s tos mputaves| Tés Alyeidos mputavletas evs ad’ és a-| [v mpoBodevoe: he BolAé wept rovtov wév[ re Evepov, hézos a-] [v ducalev réc Borée éx]oée [rec eat >Avrid|6vros dpxovtos: | [eéav dé we Stampdyoou Karta Ta elpeulévla, edOdvecbar ...|

14 [.... dpaypyéor héxaorov avrov. I2 rét Bodée €x|gée IG iP: éyoes réc BoAler Hesp. 18 (1949), 78-83.

Hyperbolus proposed: In other respects in accordance with ——; but the prytany of Aiantis, when the people approve it, shall be summoned (to appear) within ten days of the summons to each member. An assembly shall be held concerning the Prytany of Aiantis by the prytaneis of the prytany of Aegeis immediately after the boule has made a probouleuma about these matters, within five days, so that it may be possible for the boule to pass judgement during the archonship of Antiphon [418/17]. If they do not complete the business in accordance with what has been stated, each of them shall be fined —— drachmae.

In line 12 Woodhead restored the name of the archon Antiphon (418/17); I am disturbed by a restoration which identifies the boule by the archon’s year at a time when the boule worked to a separate year of its own, and which makes the boule zpoBovAevew to the assembly yet itself dicaZew,"? but

it may be possible to produce a better reconstruction of this line which still retains the archonship of Antiphon. In lines 7-10 we are asked to believe

that Aegeis, which probably held the last prytany of 418/17,'* is being instructed to proceed urgently with an enquiry into the conduct of an earlier

prytany and complete it by the end of the year. Woodhead is building possibilities on possibilities, not certainties on certainties; but I do accept it as likely rather than unlikely that the year is 418/17, that Aegeis held the last prytany, and that the inscription does show Hyperbolus active in Athens at a point too late for the ostracism of that year. Raubitschek used the speech Against Alcibiades (to which I shall return

below) to argue that the ostracism should be dated to 415;’> and in the 1950s he tried to strengthen his case with a new interpretation of the Theopompus fragment: Ocdroptros b€ dyno Kai Tov vexpov avtot KatatrovTwOfvat, ypadwv éti ““éEworpdKioay tov “YrrépBodov €& Eryn: 6 b€ KatamAevoas eis Xapov Kal THv oiknow avTob TonadpeEvos dméfave, kal ToUTOU TOV vexpov eis GoxKOV ayayovTes eis TO TéAGYOS KAaTETOVTWOAY.

Theopompus says that his corpse was thrown into the sea, writing that ‘they ‘3 Cf. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), 161.

‘4 1G PB 84, I and 19, with B. D. Meritt, AJP 57 (1936), 180-2, CQ 40 (1946), 45-6 (contr. M. Giffler, Hermes 75 (1940), 215-16, at 220-3). 'S A, E. Raubitschek, TAPA 79 (1948), 191-210 = The School of Hellas (New York, 1991), 116-31; date of ostracism, 192-3 = 117-18.

88 P. J. Rhodes ostracized Hyperbolus for six years. After sailing down to Samos and making his home there he died. They put his corpse into a wine bag and sank it in the sea.’’®

There is no good reason to think that the period for which men were ostracized was ever anything but ten years.’’ Raubitschek suggested that

Theopompus is not likely to have written what we actually read in the fragment, that Hyperbolus was ostracized for six years: more probably he gave one of those catalogues of which some Greeks were fond, a catalogue of Athenian demagogues with a period of supremacy for each, in which Hyperbolus had a period of six years from the death of Cleon in autumn 422 to his ostracism.’® That would imply ostracism either in 416 or 415, according to the method of counting used.*? This suggestion rests on an inspiration which is attractive but which cannot be proved. Theopompus could have written that Hyperbolus was ostracized, and was killed six years later; it is not likely that he wrote exactly what we read in the fragment, that Hyperbolus was ostracized ‘for six years’; it is true that the Greeks were

fond of the kind of sequence which Raubitschek postulates, and that what he proposes could have been distorted in transmission to produce what we read in the fragment. I should like to spend a little longer on the speech Against Alcibiades. This is transmitted to us as Andocides IV; it is presumably the speech attributed variously in other texts to Andocides, Phaeax, or Lysias;*° it is ostensibly a speech written in connection with this ostracism by one of the potential victims, very probably Phaeax.”'

§2 of the speech envisages that the decision to hold an ostracism has already been taken, and that the potential victims are Alcibiades, Nicias, and the speaker; §5 perhaps implies that today is the actual day of the ostracism; §7 invites all the audience to act as fair and impartial chairmen of the speeches, like the archons (t@v Adywv taous Kal Kowods Huiv ématatas "© Theop. F. 96(b) (n. 9, above), trans Fornara, no. 145 B. "7 Diod. Sic. 11. 55. 2 makes the period five years, and Phil. F. 30 (n. 11, above) alleges a reduction from ten to five: but the weight of the evidence supports a standard period of ten years, and §2 of the speech Against Alcibiades envisages a period of ten years in this case.

'8 Phoenix, 9 (1955), 122-6 = The School of Hellas, 320-4, at 125-6 = 323-4. This is accepted by W. R. Connor, Theopompus and Fifth-Century Athens (Washington, DC, 1968), 60-2. *? It is five and a half years by direct counting; or, if we reckon by Athenian years, we arrive at 416 by inclusive counting or 415 by exclusive. *° Attributed to Andocides by Harp. E 45 éumodwv, E 152 evavdpia, and (as Andocides’ defence against Phaeax) by [Plut.], X Or. 835a; to Phaeax by Plut. Alc. 13. 3 (emended):; to Lysias by Ath. 9. 408c. 2" Andocides, born in the late 440s (APF 30-1), would be young to have been tried and acquitted four times (§8), and to have served on embassies to many places including Italy and Sicily (§41). Phaeax is known to have served on an embassy to Italy and Sicily (Thuc. 5. 4), and the ostraca confirm that he was one of the potential victims.

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus 89 yevéabar, Kat mavTas dpxovtas tept ToUTwY KaTaoThvat). §3 states that ‘no accusation is made and no defence is given’ (otre xatnyopias yevonévns obre

dmodoyias dmodobetons); in spite of that §25 envisages a debate, in which Alcibiades will not reply to the speaker but will dwell on his achievements,

in which indeed he will ‘offer a defence on anything rather than the accusations (epi mavrwy pdddrdov } tév Katynyopnbévtwv dmoAoyynoecbat).”?

What we know about the procedure suggests that speeches on the actual day are not likely, and there is no evidence to suggest that before the actual day there were meetings of a kind which the Romans would have called contiones, at which speeches could have been made, though Raubitschek wanted to believe that there were.** Since Carcopino wrote it has been ortho-

dox doctrine that there were no speeches in the assembly on the occasion when the decision to hold an ostracism was taken: I am not sure that that is right,*> but this question does not affect the speech Against Alcibiades, since §§2—5 of the speech clearly envisage a later occasion than the taking of that decision. At any rate, it is almost certain that the speech cannot be totally authentic as a speech actually delivered on the occasion it refers to.?° Could it, perhaps, be authentic in the same sense as Isocrates’ speeches,

that is, written for the general context it purports to belong to, but as a pamphlet in the form of a speech? Some people have regarded the speech as a very late composition;*’ but it is widely agreed that as a piece of Greek it could have been written in the classical period, at any rate by a writer ** The nine archons and the boule presided, according to schol. Ar. Knights 855 = Theophr. fr. 18(b) Szegedy-Maszak, Phil. F 30 (n. 11, above), and (mentioning the archons only) Plut. Arist. 7. 6. *3 We can eliminate the apparent contradiction by reading §3 as a vivid way of saying that an ostracism is not like a trial in a dikasterion. *4 In TAPA 79 (1948), 196-7 = The School of Hellas, 120-1, he postulates ‘one of those informal but highly important meetings which are common to all democracies’, and adds that ‘meetings of this type were obviously necessary to concentrate public opinion on those few men who were likely “candidates” for ostracism’. *> J. Carcopino, Histoire de l’ostracisme athénien (U. de Paris: Bibl. Fac. Lett. 25, 1909), 83267, at 127-40. He rightly refused to see in the zpoeyetpordve: of Theophr. fr. 18(b) and Phil. F 30 an allusion to the institution of zpoye:porovia, but then argued that émiye:poroviay in Ath. Pol. 43. 5 was procedurally the same as ras dpyas émyetporoveiy in 43. 4, and that excluded the possibility of speeches. The word which I should actually have expected to find in 43. 5 is diayetporoviay, referring to a choice between alternatives: that does not in itself imply that there could be no speeches, and I think it is possible that speeches were allowed then (cf. G. M. Calhoun, Athenian Clubs in Politics and Litigation (Bull. U. Texas 242, Humanistic Series 14, 1913), 139 with n. 2: this may be correct even if not all that he claims about the activities of hetaireiai is correct). © A. Schroff, Zur Echtheitsfrage der vierten Rede des Andokides (Diss. Erlangen, 1901) argued

for total authenticity: Andocides speaking in his own person on the occasion of the ostracism [non vidi].

*7 e.g. R. C. Jebb, The Attic Orators? (London, 1893), i. 131-6; A. R. Burn, CQ 4 (1954), 138-42.

90 P. J. Rhodes with more sophistic and rhetorical training than Andocides.”® Essentially we have to decide from the content of the speech whether it could or could not have been written at the time of Hyperbolus’ ostracism: Raubitschek thinks it was written in 415 or not long after, and recently Furley has argued that it was written by Andocides, as an oblique way of attacking Alcibiades, in the summer of 415.7”

The speech does not refer to the Sicilian expedition of 415, but it does refer to the Olympic games at which Alcibiades entered seven teams in the chariot race, which are reasonably certainly the games of 416 (§§25-8),°° and to Athens’ treatment of Melos after its capture (§§22—3)—yet Athens started planning the Sicilian expedition ‘in the same winter’ as the capture of Melos.** To make matters worse, the section on Melos states that Alcibiades

bought a woman from among the Melian prisoners and has had a son by her; some people have twisted the story to save the chronology, but if the story is strictly true the son cannot have been born until after the eighth prytany of 416/15, when the ostracism would have been held. Most recently Furley has tried to turn this into an argument in favour of his view of the speech’s near-authenticity: nobody would have bothered to invent such a story after Alcibiades had been recalled from Sicily and had fled to Sparta,

but all that we read in the speech could have been put in a pamphlet written to blacken Alcibiades in the summer of 415, between the departure of the fleet and Alcibiades’ recall.>”

However, I think it would be a very perverse attack on Alcibiades in the

summer of 415 which said nothing about Sicily and nothing about the religious scandals in which he was involved, and which was written ostensibly for an ostracism which by the time of writing had taken place but did not mention among the potential victims the actual victim, Hyperbolus. There are further difficulties too. §12 says that ‘the allies’ hostility will become clear as soon as there is a naval war between Sparta and ourselves’: that would presuppose an exceptionally prescient writer in 415.°> Immediately before this, in §11, we read that it was wicked of ?® It has been regarded as a work of the fourth century by many scholars from F. Blass (Die attische Beredsamkeit, i* (Leipzig, 1887), 332-9) onwards. See especially S. Ferraboli, SIFC 44

(1972), 5-37, Maia 26 (1974), 245-6. *9 W. D. Furley, Hermes, 117 (1989), 138-56, at 149-50: he thinks it could not have been written by the Andocides of speeches I and II but could have been written, in less anxious circumstances, by the Andocides of III. Although he dates the speech to the summer of 415, he dates the actual ostracism to 416. 3° See n. 57 below.

3. Thuc. 6. I. I. 3? (n. 29), esp. 142-3. 33 Stressed by Burn (n. 27), 139. Raubitschek, TAPA 79 (1948), 201 = The School of Hellas, 124, is prepared to allow that the speech was written long enough after 415 for the author to know about the Jonian War. Furley (n. 29), 145, thinks that this passage too could have been written in the summer of 415, but I find that hard to believe.

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus QI Alcibiades (and nine colleagues) to double the tribute of the allies. Discussion

of this has concentrated on the question whether Alcibiades at the age of twenty-six could have been one of the ten taktai who reassessed the tribute in 425,°4 and whether that reassessment could have been described as a doubling of the tribute; what I have not seen discussed in the question whether any Athenian could have stated in 415, before things had started to go wrong for the Athenian empire, that the increase in the tribute in the 420s was wicked.*° Surely, just as the reference to a naval war points to a writer who knows what happened in and after 412, this passage points to one writing after the end of the Peloponnesian War, when it was possible to say in Athens that Athens had abused her position in the Delian League. So I conclude that the speech was written, perhaps as a rhetorical exercise, after the Peloponnesian War, when at best there were no recent memories of what happened at an ostracism. The writer’s assumption, that there was some kind of meeting at which potential victims could make speeches, may

be a mistaken assumption. It does look as if he envisaged an ostracism in the spring of 415, and I should say that omission of a Sicilian expedition which was already being planned, and mention of a baby which could not yet have been born, are signs that he had not worked out quite carefully enough what he should mention in a speech written for that context. Can

we assume that the writer actually knew that 415 was the date of the ostracism? If so, we have to reckon with the silence of Thucydides; if not, we must wonder why a writer who thought it appropriate not to mention the Sicilian expedition in his attack on Alcibiades nevertheless chose to set

the ostracism in that year. I think Thucydides would just be capable of omitting an ostracism in 415 which had failed to remove either Nicias or Alcibiades. The decision is not easy, but if we have to choose between 416 and 415 for this ostracism I think that the balance of probabilities slightly favours 415 and that the author of the speech wrote as he did because he knew that this ostracism took place in 415: in other words, the speech is not authentic but it is evidence for the date of the ostracism.%° 34 IG i 71 = ML 69, (Fornara 136). 35 This is not the same as the point made by Thucydidean speakers, that it was natural for the Athenians to exercise their power over the allies and natural for the allies to hate being subjected to it. And, although Aristophanes and other comedians attacked features of the Athenian empire, I am not convinced that any of them attacked Athens’ treatment of the allies as fundamentally wrong.

3© A new consensus has accepted Woodhead’s argument from the inscription and/or Raubitschek’s argument from the Theopompus fragment, with the implication that we have to choose between 416 and 415. 416 is preferred by C. Fuqua, TAPA 96 (1965), 165-79; Kagan, 145 with n. 28; A. Andrewes, in HCT, v. 258-61, cf. CAH, v* (Cambridge, 1992), 442-4: as evidence of prolonged conflict in Athens after the battle of Mantinea, in 418, Andrewes stresses

that Athens’ alliance with Argos was not renewed until the spring of 416 (n. 53, below). Recently there has been dissent from the new consensus and a return to 417 by S. Bianchetti, SIFC 51 (1979), 221-48, esp. 224-35; G. A. Lehmann, ZPE 69 (1987), 43 with n. 22.

92 P. J. Rhodes I now turn to questions of a different kind: can we believe Plutarch’s story

of an attempt to eliminate one of the other leading politicians which rebounded on Hyperbolus? what were the different men involved trying to achieve?

First, is it plausible that Hyperbolus should have proposed an ostracism in the hope of eliminating either Nicias or Alcibiades, or alternatively either Phaea or Alcibiades, and that the others should have joined forces to ensure that he was eliminated instead? Could Plutarch have had reliable information on the matter? Plutarch names Theophrastus as his source for the alternative version

of the story, in which the Athenians were expected to choose between Phaeax and Alcibiades, so the story was current by the late fourth century. The speech Against Alcibiades, whenever that was written, is evidence for a tradition that Alcibiades, Nicias, and (presumably) Phaeax were all potential victims, but it is written for a situation in which the ostracism has

not yet occurred, and says nothing about collusion. Beyond that we can only make the negative point that, if the story first made its appearance in a comedy, nobody has cited that comedy for the story. I am willing to believe that an authentic tradition survived to be used by fourth-century writers. It has sometimes been suggested that, by the time we are concerned with,

ostracism was ‘a constitutional relic which had not been used for a generation’,*” but an allusion in Aristophanes’ Knights (855) suggests that ostracism was still perceived as a serious option in the 420s, and although it may be true that nobody had actually been ostracized since the 440s it is not certainly true.3®> Whatever the original purpose of ostracism may have

been, it clearly came to be used as a means of choosing between rival political leaders and removing the less popular: Cimon and Themistocles, and so on. Between 420 and 415 Nicias and Alcibiades undoubtedly were

rivals, men from different backgrounds and of different temperaments, standing for different kinds of policy; what we know about Phaeax suggests

that he was less prominent, though if we knew more we might think differently; but we can easily believe that when an ostracism was proposed

37 V. J. Rosivach, Tyche 2 (1987), 161-70, at 163; cf. M. R. Christ, CQ 42 (1992), 336-46, at 338. i ‘In the course of his contest with the Paphlagonian the Sausage-Seller suggests that shields

brought as spoils from Pylos are being kept ready for serious use, and ‘if you were to start fuming and to look to the ostrakon-game’, i.e. if the people were to try to ostracize Cleon, his supporters might use them. We do not know the date of the ostracism of Damon (Ath. Pol. 27. 4, with Rhodes ad loc.), or of Cratinus’ Thracian Women (ostracism is mentioned in fr. 71 Kock/Edmonds = 73 K-—A ap. Plut. Per. 13. I0).

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus 93 in the spring of 415 many men might have seen it as an invitation to choose between Nicias and Alcibiades, and their policies.*?

Until recently it has not been doubted that Nicias and Alcibiades could have joined forces to ensure that supporters of both voted against Hyperbolus.

This has now been questioned by Hansen, who believes that in classical Athens there were sometimes groups of co-operating leaders, but there were

not normally groups of followers whose votes could be controlled by a leader:*° Plutarch was remote from fifth-century Athens, and Hansen claims that his picture of the ostracism of Hyperbolus, and of the earlier mobilization

of supporters by Thucydides the son of Melesias,*’ is not supported by contemporary evidence. But in fact there is some evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries to support the kind of political organization in which Hansen does not believe:*” the law of 410/09 which required members of the boule to sit in the seats assigned to them; the passage in the Ecclesiazusae in which the women plan to sit together in the assembly; the fourth-century arrangements for the allotment of jurors to courts, which inter alia ensured

that men did not sit together on the same panel day after day, and which may again have involved assigning men to particular seats in their courts.*° Despite Hansen’s denial, there are references to packed assemblies,** and to the bribery of a large body of men;** and indeed the speech Against Alcibiades, which (as we have seen) is commonly dated to the fourth century if not to

the fifth, states in §4 that, because ostracism is decided not by jurors appointed by lot but by the whole citizen body, it is an advantage to have a body of supporters (hetairoi and synomotai).

There is also the evidence of prepared ostraca. The hoard of 190 ostraca prepared by fourteen hands for use against Themistocles has been known

39 P. Harding, Androtion and the Atthis (Oxford, 1994), 155-9, prefers to see this ostracism

as a competition for the position of ‘top demagogue’, and rejects Plutarch’s story. I thank Harding for letting me see this part of his book in advance of publication. 4° M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Ecclesia (Opuscula Graecolatina, 26: Copenhagen, 1983), 220-2, cf. The Athenian Assembly (Oxford, 1987), 72-86, The Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1991), 280-7. The only contrary text which he acknowledges is Dem. II. 29. (I should add that he has assured me we are not as far apart on this matter as might appear from some of our published remarks. ) 4" Plut. Per. 11. 1-3. For doubts about that see also Andrewes, JHS 98 (1978), 1-8, at 2. 42 See Rhodes, JHS 106 (1986), 132-44, at 139 with nn. 89-95, from which what follows is repeated. 43 Phil. FGrH 328 F r4o; Ar. Eccl. 296-9; Ath. Pol. 63-5; and on 65. 2 A. L. Boegehold, Hesp. 29 (1960), 400-1.

44 Thuc. 6. 13. I, Xen. Hell. 1. 7. 8 (contra Diod. Sic. 13. 101. 6; but, whether what Xenophon alleges did happen or not, it is something which a contemporary thought could have happened), Dem. XVIII. 143: cf. Thuc. 8. 66. 1, Lys. XII. 44, 75-6, Dem. XXII. 38. 45 Lys. XXIX. 12; cf. the story in Ath. Pol. 27. 5 and later texts that Anytus bribed a jury.

94 P. J. Rhodes for half a century,*® and that is certainly an instance of preparation by a sroup of men who wanted votes to be cast against a particular candidate. More recently Phillips has drawn attention to other ostraca which can be regarded as prepared, on the grounds that the names have been painted on them, or have been incised neatly and on pieces of fine pottery.*’ Not all of the ostraca which by this criterion can be regarded as prepared need be the work of men who wanted to organize votes against a candidate: an individual voter who had the skill, or who had access to someone with the skill, might

on his own account prepare a vote or have a vote prepared with the name of the man against whom he knew he was going to vote. However, Phillips’s preliminary list, based on the Agora ostraca, includes two of the five against Alcibiades, which were incised on joining fragments of the same tile,*° and

that could suggest concerted action against Alcibiades. We have enough evidence to show that organization of votes against a particular candidate could happen, and may have happened in this last ostracism; and more work, on all of the ostraca, may uncover more evidence. I do not believe in speeches on the day of the ostracism, and without evidence I am reluctant to believe in contiones before the day; but there was a period of about two months between the decision to hold an ostracism and the actual day, and I find it hard to believe that the leading figures waited for the spontaneous votes of six thousand or more Athenians and did nothing to try to get the result they wanted. I think we can accept that, when Hyperbolus proposed an ostracism, many of the citizens would see this as an invitation to choose between Nicias and Alcibiades, and that Nicias and Alcibiades collaborated to ensure that a majority of votes was cast against Hyperbolus instead.

What, then, were the objectives of the men involved? Why should Hyperbolus want the Athenians to choose between Nicias and Alcibiades, and which of them would he prefer to see removed? Why should Nicias and Alcibiades each prefer the removal of Hyperbolus to the removal of the other? In 421 Nicias had made peace with Sparta;*? Alcibiades was offended that

Athens had not made use of his connection with Sparta, and in 420 he managed to attach Athens to Argos in an anti-Spartan alliance.°° The allies were defeated by Sparta at Mantinea in 418, and it can be argued that in that year the Athenians were wavering, and did not support the alliance as 4° O. Broneer, Hesp. 7 (1938), 228-43; cf. Agora, xxv, pp. 142-61. 47 Phillips (n. 3), 135-6 with 141-4. 48 Loc. cit. These ostraca are Agora, xxv, nos. 13-14, first published Hesp. 43 (1974), 18990, nos. I—2 (with pl. 28). 49 Thuc. 5. 16. I. °° Thuc. 5. 43-8: on Alcibiades’ taking offence, 43. 2.

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus 95 energetically as they might have done.** After the defeat an attempt to align

Argos with Sparta failed to hold,°* and eventually the alliance between Athens and Argos was renewed—but not until spring 416.°3 There are signs that Nicias was not only opposed to conflict with Sparta in the Peloponnese

but thought Athens’ energies ought to be concentrated on recovering lost territory in the north.°* When Egesta appealed for support against Selinus, in Sicily, Athens decided to respond, but as the preparations went ahead, in spring 415, Nicias argued against the undertaking while Alcibiades enthusiastically championed it: in reporting the debate Thucydides states that they were political opponents.°*? An inscription indicates that at one stage the Athenians considered appointing only one general to command

the expedition:®° we cannot date in relation to one another the debate reported by Thucydides, the decision to appoint three commanders and the appointment of Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus, and the ostracism; but feelings were certainly running high in the spring of 415, and it must have seemed a very suitable time to propose an opportunity for the Athenians to choose between Nicias and Alcibiades, and what they stood for. In 417 Nicias had acted lavishly as leader of Athens’ delegation to the festival of Apollo on Delos; in 416 Alcibiades, in a more self-centred piece of display, had entered seven teams in the chariot race at Olympia.*’ Nicias was rich but from a family new to Athenian politics, and although he did

not belong to the traditional ruling class he tried to behave in ways acceptable to that class. Alcibiades did belong to the class, but was a flamboyant man who tried to beat the new demagogues at their own game. Hyperbolus was one of the new demagogues, who aspired to the foremost position after the death of Cleon, but the comments of the comedians and Thucydides suggest that (for reasons which we cannot now recover) he was contemptible in a way in which Cleon was not.>® The suggestion in the >" Thuc. 5. 59. 3, 61. I-2, 75. 5, with Kagan, 102—4; but Andrewes in HCT, iv. 83, 1289, was sceptical of this interpretation. 52 Thuc. 5. 76-82. >> IG i 86: date established by IG i> 370 = ML 77, 29 (Fornara 144).

4 Thuc. 5. 83. 4, where in 417/16 Athens blockades Macedon after being forced by a change in Perdiccas’ allegiance to abandon a Thraceward campaign which was to have been commanded by Nicias; 6. 10. 5, in Nicias’ first speech against the Sicilian expedition. >> Thuc. 6. 15. 2; cf. Nicias’ appeal in 13. 1 to the older citizens to resist the men summoned to support Alcibiades. 5° IG i} 93 = ML 78, b 2-3 (Fornara 146).

5? Nicias: Plut. Nic. 3. 5-8, dated by F. Courby, BCH 45 (1921), 174-241, at 179-85. Alcibiades: Thuc. 6. 16. 2, etc., dated by K. J. Dover in HCT, iv. 246-7. 58 Ar. Knights 1304 (where he is already given the epithet Thucydides gives him, ,.oy@npés), Clouds 549-62, 1065-6 (zovnpiav), Peace 681; Plat. Com. fr. 187 Kock/Edmonds = K-A, ap. Plut. Nic. 11. 6-7, Alc. 13. 9; Thuc. 8. 73. 3. For other references in comedy to Hyperbolus see Ar. Ach. 846, Knights 1363, Clouds 623. 876, Wasps 1007, Peace 921, 1319, Thesm. 839-

41, Frogs 570-1; Cratinus frs. 196 = 209, 262 = 283; Eupolis frs. 186 = 199, 238 = 252,

96 P. J. Rhodes Knights that Hyperbolus’ ambitions reached to Carthage indicates that, like

Cleon and like Alcibiades, he favoured an ambitious foreign policy for Athens.*? Though closer to Nicias in background, he was closer to Alcibiades

in policy, and in the kind of leadership which he wanted to exercise; and my guess would be that when he proposed this ostracism he was hoping to remove Alcibiades, as a more direct and dangerous rival to himself, and then to replace Alcibiades as a populist leader and champion of an active policy.®° Recently Ellis has suggested that the initiative came not from Hyperbolus but from Alcibiades, who originally wanted to remove Nicias but eventually grew afraid that he might himself become the victim and so enlisted Nicias’ support to remove Hyperbolus;°' but, if we can accept Plutarch’s story at all, I do not see why we should not accept the statement that the ambitious Hyperbolus hoped to advance his own career by taking advantage of the clash between Alcibiades and Nicias. Why should Nicias and Alcibiades combine against him? Alcibiades was selfish, confident, and cunning. I can well imagine that he saw a greater threat to his own position from the populist Hyperbolus than from the cautious Nicias, although (or perhaps partly because) they both wanted the activist policy which Nicias did not want. He could then have suggested to Nicias that Nicias was in danger of becoming the victim of the approaching ostracism, and that the best way to avoid that would be for Nicias to cooperate with Alcibiades in working for the ostracism of Hyperbolus. The result represented a success for Alcibiades against both men: Hyperbolus was ostracized, and Nicias could be led to think that he owed it to Alcibiades that he had been saved from ostracism. Andrewes has argued that ‘the trick now played on Hyperbolos ended any hope that Alcibiades could become

an accepted leader of the whole people in the style of Pericles. ... His collusion with Nicias ... did him permanent harm.’°? I suspect rather that turning the votes against Hyperbolus was the kind of clever trick for which Alcibiades was, however grudgingly, admired, and that the man whose reputation suffered most from this episode was Hyperbolus, whose worth364 = 349; Leucon fr. 1 = 1; Polyzelus fr. 5 = 5; Plat. Com. frs. 166-72 = 182-7 (from a play entitled Hyperbolus); Adesp. fr. 2 Kock/Edmonds.

The references to Hyperbolus in the Clouds include a passage in the parabasis (549-62). That belongs to the revised version of the play (cf. 520-6); it mentions attacks on Hyperbolus in Eupolis’ Maricas of 421 and a play by Hermippus not earlier than 420; and Dover dates the revision of the play between then and Hyperbolus’ ostracism (his 1968 edn., p. Ixxx, repeated in his abridged 1970 edn., pp. xxviii-xxix). That is probably right, but interest in Hyperbolus will not have been immediately extinguished by his ostracism, and a slightly later date for the revision of Clouds ought not to be ruled out.

°9 Ar. Knights 1302-15; cf. (Alcibiades and Carthage) Thuc. 6. 15. 2, 90. 2. °° Cf. Fuqua (n. 36), 169-70. °T W. M. Ellis, Alcibiades (London 1989), 45-9. °? CAH, v’ 443-4; cf. his remarks in HCT v. 263.

The Ostracism of Hyperbolus 97 lessness was confirmed when he became the victim of the ostracism which he himself had proposed. Plutarch claims that the Athenians were first amused but later disgusted

at this use of ostracism to banish Hyperbolus; in both the Nicias and the Alcibiades he quotes a passage from the comedian Plato, to the effect that ostracism was not intended for men like Hyperbolus;” in the Nicias his arrangement of the material implies, and in the Aristeides he directly states, that it is for this reason that ostracism was never used again. A fragment from Theophrastus states that it was because of the subsequent weakness

of Athens that ostracism was never used again, and that may be linked with the statement of Ath. Pol. that ostracism was first used when the people

were confident after Marathon.®* On the other hand, we know from the Ath. Pol. that the institution of ostracism was not actually abolished.” Whatever we make of Hyperbolus, we may reasonably think that many Athenians—no doubt including many who had themselves been induced to vote against Hyperbolus—were shocked when they realized that what had been widely envisaged as an opportunity to choose between Nicias and Alcibiades had resulted in the removal of Hyperbolus while Nicias and Alcibiades both remained in Athens. Ostracism can never have been a reliable weapon for those who wanted to eliminate a particular man, and on this occasion its unreliability was exposed.

Yet there was a need to deal with politicians whose influence was dangerous but who could not be proved guilty of offences against the laws, as narrowly understood; and in the late fifth century the need was increasing with the rise of politicians whose influence was connected more with their ability to make persuasive speeches in the assembly and the lawcourts than with their holding offices through which they could be called to account.

In the late fifth and early fourth centuries there were various attempts to bring such men within the scope of the law. By coincidence, 415 is the year

of our earliest datable instance of the graphe paranomon, under which a charge could be laid against an illegal or otherwise undesirable proposal made in the boule or the assembly, and if the charge was laid within the year the proposer could be held liable and punished.°® We do not know when that was introduced, and I do not want to suggest that anybody viewed it specifically as a replacement for ostracism,®” but I do think that °3 Plat. Com. fr. 187 = 203 (n. 58, above). °¢ Theophr. fr. 18(b) (n. 22, above); Ath. Pol. 22.3. °5 Ath. Pol. 43. 5. °° And. I. 17. Thuc. 3. 43. 5 may indicate that the procedure already existed in 427, or was assumed to have done so when Thucydides wrote that passage; we cannot date Antiphon’s prosecution of Demosthenes ([Plut.], X. Or. 833d, cf. Ant. frs. 8-14, 47 Sauppe). For the proposer’s liability see Dem. XXIII. 104, cf. Dem. XX. 144 with hyp. 2. 3. °? Hansen (n. 40, 1991) 205 cf. 22, thinks it not a coincidence that the last ostracism and the first attested ypady wapavdywv occurred about the same time.

98 P. J. Rhodes what happened after the ostracism of Hyperbolus is that those who wanted to remove a politician used a lawsuit aimed specifically at the man they wanted to remove, rather than risk the unpredictable results of ostracism. There is no shortage of attacks on politicians after 415, and if Hyperbolus was a contemptible man I dare say some of the politicians attacked later were no less contemptible, so we should not look as the ancient texts do to

the weakness of Athens or the worthlessness of Hyperbolus. What was shocking about Athens’ last ostracism, and what I believe made it the last,

was that it failed to work as Athenians of the time thought it ought to work, and it taught the lesson that a weapon with a specific target was a better weapon. There was not the kind of revulsion which might have led to the abolition of the institution of ostracism, but those who wanted to remove a particular politician no longer chose to use ostracism. ®§ A study of ostracism by H. B. Mattingly, Antichthon 25 (1991), 1-26 (dealing with the ostracism of Hyperbolus at pp. 23-5), was not in fact published until 1994, after the completion of this paper. There are points on which we disagree; the identification of Philinus the brother

of Cleophon with Philinus the embezzler of Antiphon VI, to which he refers as if it were certain, was suggested by A. E. Raubitschek, Hesp. 23 (1954), 68-71, and although it is not certain I ought to have mentioned it as possible.

How Violent was Athenian Society? GABRIEL HERMAN

I

At the beginning of book 1, Thucydides looks back into the distant past, contrasting it with his own time. The contrast yields several interesting observations, of which I shall be discussing only one. Like an ancient Norbert

Elias, Thucydides believes to have revealed a ‘civilizing process’, in the course of which lawlessness, indiscriminate violence, and coarseness of manners have gradually given way to settled and peaceful conditions and to more refined manners. As evidence for the soundness of his observation, he adduces the custom of carrying arms (76 ovdnpodopeicbar), at the time still current in some backward regions of Greece: Among these people the custom of carrying arms still survives from the old days of robbery; for at one time, since houses were unprotected and communications unsafe, this was a general custom throughout the whole of Hellas, and it was the normal thing to carry arms on all occasions, as it is now among the barbarians. The fact that the peoples I have mentioned still live in this way, is evidence that once this was the general rule among all the Hellenes. The Athenians were the first to give up the habit of carrying weapons (7év re otSypov xaré$evro) and to adopt a way of living that was more relaxed and more luxurious.’

Thucydides, then, regards the abandonment of weapons as a sign that a society has become more peaceful, and the implication of the opposites he draws (i.e. carrying arms, backward, violent—not carrying arms, advanced,

peaceable) is clearly that he considered contemporary Athenian society relatively safe and peaceful. The question arises of how accurate Thucydides’ view is. Is it possible to

obtain some idea of the level of violence at Athens, not depending on Thucydides, which either corroborates or refutes his appraisal? Can we take

this further, and compare the frequency and seriousness of violence in I am grateful to the Editors and to Peter Garnsey for helpful comment and criticism.

* Thuc. I. 5.3-6.3, adapted from the trans. by Rex Warner. For a similar view taken by Aristotle, see Pol. 126840.

100 Gabriel Herman Athenian society not merely with violence in archaic Greek society, the backward regions of Thucydides’ Greece, or the world of the barbarians, but with violence in comparable Mediterranean societies past and present? The question is complex, and we must be careful. One problem concerns the definition of violence, a term whose boundaries are not always indicated

with sufficient clarity. In common parlance, picking a pocket or hurling abuse will sometimes be classified as an act of violence. However, the critical question in distinguishing between violence and non-violence is whether or

not the act in question results in physical injury. For the purposes of this article, any act causing injury to another person, either by the exercise of physical force or by the administration of some harmful substance, will be considered ‘violent’. Theft and abuse may be important, but it is by no means clear that in any given society their levels are directly related to levels of physical injury. On the contrary, a good cause could be made for considering abuse, at least, a sublimation of physical violence, substituting verbal for physical injury. I intend to exclude from consideration state-inflicted violence such as the

torture and executions carried out by the Eleven in ancient Athens. Stateinflicted violence differs qualitatively from all other forms of violence in centralized, political (as distinct from non-centralized, tribal) societies. First,

it is communally sanctioned and (unlike most other forms of violence) deemed legitimate; secondly, it is a mechanism which is communally designed and systematically applied in order to reduce other forms of violence

and thus ensure stability. State-inflicted violence may more profitably be

regarded as a tool for combating random violence than as one of its manifestations.

Another problem concerns the evidence. Even in societies in which documentation is abundant and accessible, rates of violence are extremely difficult to assess. The reasons for this are complex and manifold, but one,

surely, is that very few of the violent acts perpetrated tend to leave any trace in the records. Criminologists and historians therefore resort for an indicator to those violent acts whose traces are most difficult to conceal and whose documentation is consequently most reliable: acts of homicide. Rates

of homicide are assessed as so many per year per 100,000 population. According to a simplifying assumption, the more often homicide occurs in a certain society, the more violent that society is reckoned to be.’ ? Cf. L. Stone, ‘Homicide and Violence’, in The Past and the Present Revisited (London, 1987), 295-310; T. R. Gurr, ‘Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence’, Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, 3 (1981), 294-343. For second thoughts on the validity of this assumption, see e.g. J. A. Sharpe and L. Stone in P&P 108 (1985), 20624, and J. S. Cockburn, ‘Patterns of Violence in English Society: Homicide in Kent 1560-1985’, P&P 130 (1991), 70-106. Only a fraction of the extensive and constantly growing literature on violence during other periods of European history can be cited here.

How Violent was Athenian Society IOI What sort of evidence do we have concerning homicide in the city of Athens, and in its chora, Attica? Paucity of data is the shortcoming which generally bedevils ancient sources; paucity affects homicide no more and no less than it affects other activities: the evidence, culled from the Attic Orators

and from the works of historians and philosophers, yields for the period TABLE 1. Homicide at Athens, c.507—322 Bc

W = weapons (knives, daggers, poison, etc.); H = hands (fists, stones, clubs, potsherds, etc.);} U = unknown

No. Reference Victim Device Kind Remarks 1. Ant. I Philoneos poison Ww speech academic exercise?

2. Ant. 1 stepmother’s poison WwW speech academic 3. Ant. V. 34, 48 slave unknown U ‘execution’ 4. Ant. V. 26 Herodes stone H as stated by a slave 5. Ant. VI Diodotus poison WwW accidental killing?

husband exercise?

6. Ant. V. 69 master of a slave payapa W attempted murder

7. Dem. XXI. 74 Euaeon fists? H

8. Dem. XXII. 2 Diodorus’ father unknown U insinuation of parricide

9. Dem. LVIII. Theocrines’ Biatw BOavarw U

28-9 brother

10. Dem. LIX. 10 Aphidnaean avtoxerpiaw H woman

59, 67 homicide

II. Dem. XLVII. old nurse hands H unintentional 12. Isocr. XVIII. slave woman fists? H homicide faked 52

13. Isaeus IX Euthycrates fists? H intra-familial killing

14. Lys. I Eratosthenes GLOnpLov W ‘execution’

15. Ath. Pol. 25. 4 Ephialtes unknown U ‘political murder’

507-322Bc fifteen confirmed or possible cases of homicide (Table 1). This figure is so clearly devoid of statistical value that we might seem to have reached a dead end. If we have no idea of the rate of homicide per year per 100,000 population (we are even in the dark about the actual size of Attica’s population!), it might at first seem impossible to form any idea of how much violence there was in Athenian society.

Fortunately, however, this is not impossible. Statistical data are not the only key to societal violence; the issue can be approached in certain oblique ways. Comparative studies have helped to sketch the profiles of excessively violent societies and to delineate the features with which violence is cor-

102 Gabriel Herman related.’ It follows that if we examine Athenian society with an eye to such features, we may be able to form an estimate of the level of violence even in the absence of statistical data. The features which I propose to examine are all interconnected: carrying arms, perceptions of honour and vengeance,

and law enforcement. I should emphasize that I intend to focus attention not only on the violent acts themselves, but also on the presence or absence

of any balancing mechanisms likely to inhibit violence or prevent its escalation, or, conversely, on any social institutions and practices likely to generate violence. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that Athens in the period between the establishment of democracy by Cleisthenes and its abolition by Antipater* was, as judged against comparable European societies

past and present, a remarkably peaceful society, exhibiting probably less violence than is generally assumed by modern scholars.’ This conclusion, as we Shall see, draws its validity both from the fact that all the features enumerated above point in the same direction and from the mutual agreement of all three features. II

Thucydides’ reference to going unarmed is a convenient starting point. Do

our random glimpses of Athenian day-to-day life confirm or refute his observation? 3 The societies with which Classical Athens will be contrasted throughout this article fall roughly into two categories: first, modern and early modern societies which have been formally incorporated into national states but upon which the central government has proved unwilling or unable to impose its authority (e.g. S. Wilson, Feuding, Conflict, and Banditry in NineteenthCentury Corsica (Cambridge, 1988); A. Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village (Oxford, 1974); J. Black-Michaud, Feuding Societies (Oxford, 1975); E. Durham, High Albania (1909); M. Hasluck,

The Unwritten Law of Albania (Cambridge, 1954)); secondly, societies, both modern and

historical, whose central authority has collapsed, or which are in a perpetual state of disequilibrium (e.g. W. M. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune (Berkeley, 1981); M. Gilsenan, ‘Law, Arbitrariness, and the Power of the Lords of North Lebanon’, History and Anthropology, I (1985), 381-400. Each type is notorious for excessive violence.

* Since this article is about how Athenian democracy dealt with the problem of violence, the short intervals of oligarchic rule in 411 and 404 Bc will be disregarded. Elsewhere I argue that Athens was extremely unusual among Greek states in experiencing only two short-lived occurrences of stasis in 200 years (‘Honour, Revenge ...’ (n. 13, below). > See e.g. A. Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City (London, 1982),

175, the most authoritative work on the subject: ‘a certain amount of private violence was endemic in Athenian society’. I agree entirely, however, with a comment Lintott makes elsewhere: ‘This repudiation of violence occurs within the context of the polis’, ‘Cruelty in the Political Life of the Ancient World’, in Toivo Vilhamaa et al. (eds.), Crudelitas: The Politics of Cruelty in the Ancient and Medieval World (Krems, 1992), at 16. Donald C. Richter, ‘The Position of Women in Classical Athens’, CJ 67 (1971), I-8, criticizes a whole series of works which

assume that the Athenian street was infested with violence to such an extent that it was unsafe for women to go out.

How Violent was Athenian Society 103 Let us first turn to the lovely opening scene of Plato’s Republic. ‘I walked

down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaukon, the son of Ariston, to make prayers to the goddess’ (Republic 1. 327a, trans. Cornford). We can see here Socrates and his companion strolling to the Piraeus and then back to Athens

in a way which suggests that they see no reason to fear for their personal safety. Brigands do appear to have given the Athenian legal system some cause for concern,® but Socrates and his companion seem not to have regarded them as any threat. A sense of security is both a state of mind and an objective fact, and the Platonic passage seems to suggest that Socrates and his companion went about unarmed. This suggestion is reinforced by the attitude to arms found in the forensic speeches. The speeches create the overall impression that anyone attempting to win the support of the dikasts felt a certain reluctance to admit that he might have carried or used arms. A telling piece of evidence comes from Lysias I. Euphiletus, the cuckolded

husband, goes into great detail over the preparations which preceded the killing of Eratosthenes—he called upon his friends, got torches from the nearest shop, instructed the slave girl to leave the door open—but makes no mention of the weapon with which he killed him. The information that he did have a weapon is given away almost accidentally when he suggests that Eratosthenes himself could have been carrying one—‘for how could I tell whether he too had some weapon?’ (ei te KdKeivos efye avdyprov; Lys. I.

42). In any society with a scale of values in which aggressive virility ranks high, pride is above all taken in daggers, knives, swords, preferably decorated

and encrusted with gems. Euphiletus, however, takes no great pride in his siderion.

Scores of similar passages show that what we have here is in fact a pattern. An anonymous defendant, charged with wounding with intent to kill, argues that not even his alleged victim accused him of coming with anything like a dagger (éyyevpédcov) in his hands: ‘he only says he was struck by a potsherd’ (d6otpdxw, Lys. IV. 6). The fights described in Lysias’ Against

Simon were fought with fists and stones (Lys. III. 8), and not even when one of them degenerated into a minor battle did anyone resort to arms (Lys. III. 18 ff., III. 28: ‘he states that we went to his house with potsherds in our hands’, Lys. III. 37). Nicostratus in [Dem.] LIII. 17 is said to have attacked the speaker with his fists. The defendant in Demosthenes’ Against Konon was, it is alleged, repeatedly assaulted, but there is no reference to arms, even though some of the violent scenes mentioned took place while the people involved were on garrison duty (Dem. LIV. 5, 8). Moreover, the ° The term in Arist. Ath. Pol. 52. 1 is Awmodvra:. See D. Cohen, Theft in Athenian Law (Munich, 1983), 79-83, for the demonstration that Awzodvo/a signified stripping garments off

a person by the use of force or violence, and was more narrowly defined than modern ‘brigandage’ or ‘highway robbery’.

104 Gabriel Herman law against battery (d/ky alkeéas) cited in this speech envisages self-defence ‘with a stone or anything of that sort’ (Dem. LIV. 18), not with weapons.

The list given in Table I may help to reinforce the conjecture that Athenians tended to go unarmed. As I have already remarked, the list is woefully inadequate, its data so partial as to forbid any conclusion about violence in Athenian society at large. Despite this, it contains a figure which may be of some significance: the proportion of homicide committed without weapons. This proportion is of some relevance to the question at issue: out of fifteen cases of homicide (committed, attempted, or imagined), only five

can be said with any degree of certainty to have involved weapons. Six have definitely been committed barehanded; in four cases it is unknown

whether or not the aggressor used weapons. This is in line with the conclusions drawn from the last set of examples, particularly if we bear in

mind the distinction between premeditated and unpremeditated acts of aggression.

The generalization may therefore be risked that at least in Athens and the Piraeus, if not in the whole of Attica, people were not usually worried about their safety, and went about unarmed just as Thucydides suggests. Of

course, homicides and other violent acts could be and undoubtedly were committed with bare hands, potsherds, stones, sticks, or clubs, but knives

and swords would clearly have increased both the number of physical injuries and their gravity. Comparative studies indicate a close correlation between the availability of weapons and the incidence of violence. There is

a striking contrast between the scarcity of weapons in Athenian hostile encounters and their omnipresence in European encounters from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth century.’ Throughout this period gentlemen

carried swords as a badge of status, resorting to them enthusiastically whenever the situation required: as Lawrence Stone puts it, ‘tempers were short and weapons to hand’. Castiglione’s testimony is here invaluable: there happen oftentimes variances between one gentleman and another, whereupon ensueth a combat. And many times it shall stand him in stead to use the weapon that he hath at that instant by his side, wherefore it is safest to know how to use it. (II libro del Cortegiano, L. xx, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, 1561)

Some impressionistic glimpses of seventeenth-century England may help to complete this picture: John Aubrey, the son of a squire in Wiltshire in the seventeenth century, was nearly killed three times in his life by the thrust of a sword: once in a London street by a

drunk he had never seen before; once during a quarrel among friends in legal ’ Cf. A. V. B. Norman, The Rapier and Small Sword, 1460-1820 (London, 1980), 19-31.

How Violent was Athenian Society IO5 chambers in the Inner Temple; and once by the Earl of Pembroke at a disorderly parliamentary election at Salisbury.®

At Athens, by contrast, weapons were not usually to hand, and so hostile encounters in general, and drunken brawls arising from aristocratic symposia in particular,’ were less likely to result in serious injury or death. This is all the more remarkable because arms were in one sense easily available. Here we must distinguish between the arms appropriate to self-defence (o/énpa) and those designed for war (é7Aa). 67Aa were the arms which every citizen of hoplite status stored in his household,*® and with which he was entitled to parade at processions. These were the weapons which first Peisistratus, and later on the Thirty, took away from the demos (Arist. Ath. Pol. 15. 4 and 37. 2). o{éypa, on the other hand, were arms used for self-defence.” If

my examples are representative, their implication must be that the arms designed for fighting against external enemies were seldom used in hostile encounters inside the city. I can suggest no other explanation for this than self-imposed regulation, or perhaps a law, prompted by a desire to minimize

the risk of upheaval and revolution.'* In Corcyra, it will be remembered, resorting to daggers (a step implicitly condemned by Thucydides) marked the final collapse of the political order, plunging the city into a succession of murders (Thuc. 3. 70. 6). III Let us now turn to some of the psychological roots of violence. An inquiry into the level of violence in any pre-industrial society demands answers to * L. Stone, ‘Interpersonal Violence in English Society, 1300-1980’, P&P 101 (1983), 2233, at 25. ? Cf. O. Murray, ‘The Solonian Law of Hypbris’, in P. Cartledge et al. (eds.), Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990), 139-145. ‘° This clearly emerges from certain literary passages, e.g. Ar. Ach. I11: ‘surely the moths have eaten up my crest’, and from scenes on Athenian vases; see e.g. A. M. Snodgrass, Arms and Armour of the Greeks (London, 1967), 57: ‘Some of the most powerful scenes in Greek vasepainting are those which show a nameless, sometimes doomed, hoplite taking down his shield, or his wife bringing him his helmet.’ See further S.-G. Gréschel, Waffenbesitz und Waffeneinsatz bei den Griechen (Frankfurt am Main, 1989) 82-5. ‘* This meaning emerges clearly from the context of Thuc. 1. 6 and Lys. I. 41, cited earlier, as well as Hdt. 9. 37. 2. LSJ under o:dyprov (‘implement or tool of iron’), and ofSypov (‘anything made of iron, iron tool or implement ... sword or knife) is too vague: the idea of self-defence is implied in the concrete synonyms of o:dyprov or ofdnpov (daggers, knifes, swords), which serve mainly defensive purposes. The distinction is not absolutely clear-cut, but if the Athenians had failed to draw it at all it is hard to see why Thucydides in 1. 6 did not say ra re 6mAa KaréBevro. '* For a probably apocryphal case of legislation against the carrying of arms (é7Aa) in public places, see D.S. 12. 19 (Charondas of Catana) and 13. 33 (Diocles of Syracuse). For an instance of prohibition of iron manufacturing, see MAMA viii. 430: KwAver 6 ré705 106 otdjpov riv déow EITI (vacat) (Aphrodisias, imperial period), with L. Robert in BCH 107 (1983), 509-11, and BCH 108 (1984), 457.

106 Gabriel Herman two questions. First, how, and with what frequency, does peaceful social intercourse between two members of this society degenerate and flare up into a conflict? Secondly, what course does this conflict take, and what consequences, ramifications, and side-effects can it have before its resolution,

if any? The answer to the first question touches on perceptions of honour;

the answer to the second on perceptions of revenge. I have written two articles on related topics;*? here I shall briefly restate my findings, ex-

ploring their implications for the question of violence. First, however, I shall anticipate some natural queries by clarifying an issue relating to method.

In eliciting moral norms from historical documents, it is helpful to distinguish between ideal and ‘real’ norms; that is, between what ‘ought to be’ and what ‘is’. The Athenian forensic speeches, which will be my chief

objects of concern, demonstrably reflect ideal norms. It has often been observed that the speakers in the surviving speeches are distorting, suppressing, and misrepresenting ‘what really happened’ in an effort to promote

their own interests.‘* This would appear to be an understatement. The speakers are not just distorting, suppressing, and misrepresenting what really happened: they are lying through their teeth. The connection between what they are saying and what really happened is at best minimal, at worst

non-existent. However, they are lying in a manner which is extremely valuable for our purposes: rather than revealing what really happened, they are revealing what the dikasts wished to hear. By tailoring their accounts to the dikasts’ expectations, they provide us with the best clue a historian

could possibly dream of to their society's ideal norms. The passages I paraphrase or cite are therefore not just ordinary passages. They are unique and truthful reflections of the Athenian value system—of what the collective Athenian mind perceived as desirable patterns of behaviour. The crucial question, then, is not whether what the speakers report really happened, but rather how the speakers report what happened, or perhaps

didn’t happen. If we narrow down the latter question, asking how the speakers in the forensic speeches report reactions to provocation, we obtain

a remarkably consistent picture. This allows us to make the following generalization: quite unlike the code of honour found in non-westernized modern, or pre-industrial European, societies, which enjoined upon a provoked, offended, or injured man a duty to retaliate by violent means, without "3 G. Herman, ‘Honour, Revenge and the State in Fourth-Century Athens’, in W. Eder (ed.), Democracy in Fourth-Century Athens: Decline or the Zenith of a Constitution (Stuttgart, 1994); ‘Tribal

and Civic Codes of Behaviour in Lysias 1’, CQ 43 (1993) 406-419. 4 See e.g. E. M. Harris, ‘Did the Athenians Regard Seduction as a Worse Crime than Rape?’, CQ 40 (1990), 370-7: S. Todd, ‘The Use and Abuse of the Attic Orators’, G& R 37 (1990), 15978.

How Violent was Athenian Society 107 delay, and at all costs, preferably by inflicting an injury much greater than the provocation or offence which triggered off the conflict, the Athenian code prescribed that upon being provoked, offended, or injured a citizen should not retaliate, but should exercise self-restraint, avoid violence, reconsider, or renegotiate the case; in brief, compromise. Here are some of the more important

examples illustrating this rule.

(1) A certain Ariston, who has been repeatedly abused, beaten, and humiliated, says that he has decided not to bring any action against his attackers. It is his intention, indeed, to forget about what has happened, and ‘in future to be on guard, and to take care to have nothing to do with people of that sort’ (Dem. LIV. 5-6). (2) The speaker in Lysias’ Against Simon has allegedly put up (jvecydunv) with a long series of insults and injuries, preferring ‘to go without satisfaction for those offences rather than be thought lacking in sense (dvoy7os) by the citizens’ (Lys. III. 9). (3) Although Meidias is said to have harassed Demosthenes and inflicted

a long series of insults and humiliations upon him, Demosthenes has allegedly taken no counteraction in reprisal, satisfying himself with keeping a record of Meidias’ acts of aggression. When Meidias punched Demosthenes in the face in public, Demosthenes entered a complaint against him, priding himself on not having retaliated immediately. Demosthenes could easily have won the case in court, but dropped the charge in return for a payment from Meidias of thirty minae (Dem. X XI, Against Meidias). (4) Euthycrates was badly beaten by his brother, Thudippus, in the course of a quarrel over the division of their land. He fell ill, and died not many years later. On his death-bed he charged his relations never to allow any of Thudippus’ family to come near his tomb (Isaeus IX. 19). Euthycrates’ son, Astyphilus, ‘would never speak to Cleon [Thudippus’ son] ... holding the

opinion that it was impious to speak to the son of Thudippus, when the latter was charged with so grave a crime against his father’ (Isaeus IX. 20).

What is striking about this utterance is that the speaker was plainly interested in presenting the relationship between Cleon and Astyphilus in as unfavourable a light as possible, yet thought it unwise to attribute to Astyphilus any reaction harsher than ‘not speaking’ to Cleon. (5) Euphiletus was charged with murdering his wife’s lover, Eratosthenes,

on catching the guilty pair in the act in his own house. Euphiletus did not deny the charge, but produced an ingenious defence speech, the argument of which, in a nutshell, ran as follows: ‘Yes, I killed Eratosthenes, but I did so not by way of revenge, to vindicate my honour, but by way of punishment, in an effort to enforce your laws. I have merely been your instrument, using

violence which was legitimate because sanctioned by you. My act may

therefore more justly be regarded as execution than as murder, as

108 Gabriel Herman punishment than as revenge. I must therefore be acquitted’ (Lys. I, Against Eratosthenes). IV

Needless to say, this interpretation of Athenian popular morality collides head-on with accepted scholarly opinion. I shall cite just two examples. ‘Greek popular thought’, writes Blundell, ‘is pervaded by the assumption that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies ... the anger provoked by injury can, in Achilles’ famous words, be “‘sweeter than dripping

honey” (Il. 18. 109). This in turn stimulates the desire to retaliate, for “revenge is sweet’’ (Arist. Rhet. 1370°30).’'> Dover remarks, in the same

vein: ‘The attempt to retaliate upon an enemy being justified (‘‘unobjectionable’’, Dem. LIX. 15), successful retaliation was a joy, and

failure a horror; a man might be respected for attempting revenge and denigrated for making no attempt.’*®

We must take a hard look at the flaws which beset this analysis. It has been achieved by generalizing indiscriminately from all types of literary evidence, in particular tragedy and poetry, in which the motif of ‘insatiable desire for revenge’ indeed looms large. But how representative of real-life norms or practices are literary pieces designed for popular entertainment?

The Oresteia, for instance, brings on stage an intra-familial blood feud suffused with the uncompromising spirit of vengeance even though, as we shall see, blood feud clearly did not exist in Athens. In present-day Europe scores of written pieces designed for entertainment use as their leitmotif the hero’s insatiable desire for revenge, yet revenge probably has less impact on day-to-day life today than at any previous period of European history. It follows that in attempting to reconstruct Athenian moral norms we should single out the forensic speeches from other forms of evidence, and prefer

their testimony to any other. :

Another shortcoming of the traditional interpretation is indicated by the passage from Blundell cited earlier: it jumbles together the Athenian evidence

with evidence from other poleis. There is no a priori reason to suppose that

the moral norms of ancient Athens—probably the first democracy in history—were shared by other poleis. In fact, some signs suggest that they were not.’? When reconstructing Athenian popular morality, we should confine ourselves to the Athenian evidence. Not even statements such as Aristotle’s—‘revenge is sweet’—should be "5 M. W. Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies (Cambridge, 1989), 26-7. *© K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality (Oxford, 1974), 182. Dem. LIX. 15 cited by Dover is a classic example of taking revenge by appeal to the courts, for which see p. 111 below. ‘7 Dem. XXIV. 141, e.g., implies that in Locris the lex talionis prevailed within both the moral and the legal systems.

How Violent was Athenian Society 109 allowed to diminish our trust in the testimony of the forensic speeches. Aristotle was concerned with universal human nature, not specific societal conventions, and he wrote with an eye to posterity, not to actuality. The speakers in the law courts, by contrast, were concerned with nothing but specific (i.e. Athenian) social conventions, and wrote (or spoke) with an eye to actuality, in a desperate attempt to influence it. It follows that, faced with a choice between Aristotle and the forensic speeches, the historian wishing to reconstruct societal norms should opt for the latter.

All this said, it must be pointed out that the thinking which viewed successful retaliation as a joy, and failure to retaliate as a horror, had not been totally expunged from Athenian life. What we have therefore, is a classic example of double standards—of coexisting codes competing with

each other. But the mere fact that within the Athenian repertoire of normative behaviour a ‘civilized’ code, according to which retaliation was a crime and failure to retaliate a virtue, existed alongside a ‘primitive’ one, is in itself significant, calling for comment. First of all, the ‘civilized’ code did not merely compete with the other; its tenets were enunciated within the framework of the dikasterion, the institution which in Aristotle's estimate overrode all other institutions within the politeia (Ath. Pol. 9. 1), and moreover they were enunciated in order to elicit approval where producing the right argument was often a matter of life and death. In order to win a case in an Athenian court, it was plainly advisable to lay claim to a non-militant attitude. The conclusion is thus unavoidable that it was the ‘civilized’ code which permeated the dikasts’ minds and structured their sense of justice: the ‘primitive’ code had lost its hold over their minds. Secondly, the existence of this code sets apart Athens from those violent societies in which no trace of any ideal of self-restraint can be detected; in which, on the contrary, the uncontested, unabashedly declared ‘public’ ideology is the ‘primitive’ one. In such a society, Euphiletus might have argued, ‘Yes, I murdered my wife’s lover because he had trampled upon my honour’, and scored a victory. This point requires emphasis because of the

tendency in recent research to lump Athens together with those Mediterranean societies which set manly honour above everything else.” Thirdly, and most importantly, the dominance that the ‘civilized’ code achieved in law-court rhetoric implies a deliberate attempt to delegitimate the ‘primitive’ code, in particular where it prescribed quick over-retaliation and ‘mindless’ revenge. These are the ideals at the heart of certain institutions which are largely responsible for rendering society violent: the blood feud, the vendetta, and the duel. The main significance for us of this repudiation '® See e.g. D. Cohen, Law, Sexuality and Society (Cambridge, 1991), with my criticism in ‘Honour,

Revenge... (n. 13, above), n. 36.

I1O Gabriel Herman of the ‘primitive’ code is that it implies a delegitimation of this sort of violence-generating institution.

V

It cannot be assumed a priori that ‘civilized’ ideals actually exercised a restraining influence upon life in Classical Athens: there is often an enormous

disparity between what people say and what they do. Such a restraining influence may, however, be inferred from a series of extraneous signs which betray the spirit of those ideals.

We can never know how, and how often, peaceful social intercourse between people degenerated sufficiently to flare up into a conflict: there are,

as I have remarked, no statistics, and the only descriptions of violent encounters available to us have been refracted through the prism of communally approved norms. It is possible, however, to form a rough idea of the course such encounters may have taken by comparing Athens with societies in which ideals of self-restraint never got the upper hand. Among the main sources of urban violence in Italian cities between 1200 and 1500 AD, according to Herlihy, were trivial incidents which ignited riots and led to protracted factional battles because of what contemporaries called the furori and the rumori—the excessively violent tempers of many of the citizens.*? If the foregoing analysis of Athenian ideals is correct, this sort of violence-generating factor must in democratic Athens have been significantly less intense, if not entirely absent. This conjecture accords with a number of descriptions of crowd behaviour in Thucydides, who, as Hunter observes,”° tends to depict crowds as volatile, emotional, and violent. For all his tendency

to emphasize these unpleasant features of crowd behaviour, Thucydides produces no instances of an Athenian crowd resorting to physical violence,7*

or of a riot or factional battle in Athens sparked off by a trivial incident. Thucydides may, of course, be offering us no more than a partial reflection of Athenian reality. Partial though it may be, none the less, Thucydides’ testimony does seem to license us to consider this much established: that, although the sort of urban violence described by Herlihy formed a common pattern in the Italian cities, in Classical Athens it clearly did not. "2 D. Herlihy, ‘Some psychological and social roots of violence in the Tuscan cities’, in L. Martines (ed.), Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200-1500 (Berkeley, Calif., 1972),

129-54, at 130. 2° V. Hunter, ‘Thucydides and the Sociology of the Crowd’, CJ 84 (1988-9), 17-30. *" Herodotus does produce such an example: the stoning of Lycidas to death by the Athenian councillors during Xerxes’ invasion (9. 5). Foreign invasion, however, almost invariably results in the breakdown of basic rules of conduct. I have no comment to make on the story told by Herodotus, according to which the Athenian wives of the men who fell attacking Aegina stabbed to death the lone survivor with the brooch-pins of their garments (5. 87).

How Violent was Athenian Society III This conclusion may be refined by focusing attention on the second question raised at the beginning of section III: what course does the conflict

take, and what consequences, ramifications, and side-effects can it have before it is resolved, if it is? ‘When a person was killed in Athens’, writes MacDowell at the beginning of Athenian Homicide Law, ‘the attitude of the Athenians to the event was a complex one, containing several distinguishable strands. In the first place, the killed person had suffered a wrong, an injury (dduxia ddikynua), and required vengeance or retribution (tyuwpia); and it was the duty of the family to obtain it for him.’** Closer inspection reveals, however, that z.zwpéa in virtually all of these cases took the form of legal action against the offender. Now, in the eyes of a representative of any one

of a number of notoriously violent societies (for example, an Albanian shepherd, a Sicilian mafioso, or a duelling European gentleman), suing the killer in court in retaliation would have appeared a travesty of vengeance. ‘Primitive’ vengeance is animated by a fatalistic spirit, by the sense of an

obligation which must be carried out at all costs, indiscriminately, and irrespective of the consequences. The sanctions against evasion are formidable. ‘The fame of a gentleman that carrieth weapon’, writes Castiglione, ‘if it once be tarnished with cowardice, or any other reproach, doth evermore continue shameful in the world.’ In Montenegro, a man who neglected the duty of vengeance used to be given women’s clothes to wear. The rewards for fulfilling the obligation are commensurately high. Dante exalts revenge by saying ‘Che bell’onor s’acquista in far vendetta’, and in Bedouin society

prior to Western intervention it was customary to set up, following a successful act of vengeance, a celebration allowing the avenger to bathe in the radiance of public admiration.** The tiuwwpia discussed by MacDowell was in fact an extremely watered-down version of this form of vengeance: ‘primitive’ vengeance and law courts are a contradiction in terms. The question of what course these conflicts took in Classical Athens must therefore be preceded by another: what courses might they have taken?

There can be no doubt that the Athenians knew the answer to both questions all too well; after all, the Oresteia enacts on stage the substitution of legal action in the courts for the taking of full-fledged ‘primitive’ vengeance.

Two patterns of conflict are here implied, each taking a different course. In pattern A, provocation, offence, or injury by X triggers off in his victim, Y, a reaction fuelled by the spirit of ‘primitive’ vengeance, whereupon X (or X’s closest friends or relatives, in the event of his demise) gathers his closest 22 D. M. MacDowell, Athenian Homicide Law in the Age of the Orators (Manchester, 1963), I.

*3 Castiglione: II libro del Cortegiano. L. xvii. Montenegro: G. Glotz, La Solidarité de la famille, (Paris, 1904), 55 n. 7. Dante: Canzone: Senza parlarmi. Bedouin: G. M. Kressel, ‘Sororicide/Filiacide: Homicide for Family Honour’, Current Anthropology, 22 (1981), 141-58, at 143. For further sanctions in tribal societies against evasion of the duty of revenge, see Herman, ‘Honour, Revenge...’ (n. 13, above).

112 Gabriel Herman supporters (kin, friends, clan) and takes revenge on Y. This incites Y to respond in kind, and so on. Every act of violence committed supplies a cause for fresh revenge, no mechanism for concluding the conflict being available, and thus an endless and vicious circle is set in motion. The rudiments of the alternative pattern B are contained in a Demosthenic

passage which provides an explanation for the rationale of the Athenian doctrine of self-restraint: The least of these evils, namely abusive language, has, I think, been provided for to

prevent the last and most grievous, that murder may not ensue, and that men be not led on step by step from vilification to blows, from blows to wounds, and from wounds to murder, but that in the laws its own penalty should be provided for each of these acts, and that the decision should not be left to the passion or the will of the person concerned. (Dem. LIV. 19, LCL trans.)

The alternative pattern envisaged as described both here and in the Oresteia is a simple one: provocation, offence, or injury from X should be met with self-restraint by the victim Y (Demosthenes’ ‘that the decision should not be left to the passion or the will of the person concerned’). Y forbears to exact vengeance and relinquishes the right to punish X to the civic authorities,

the court verdict putting an end, once and for all, to the possibility of a chain reaction. The question that faces us is, to what extent did Pattern B prevail over Pattern A in real-life Athens? There are obvious dangers in drawing inferences from the silence of the

sources, but the starting point of any discussion must be the fact that, whereas pattern B is amply documented, there is no evidence whatsoever for pattern A: there is no trace in our sources of the sort of inter-family vendetta, carried out with the aid of a private army of retainers, which created so much misery in the cities of Renaissance Italy. The city of Siena, for example, recognized the legality of the vendetta as late as the fourteenth century, for the very simple reason that it lacked the strength to eliminate it.°* Nor is there evidence for the sort of vendetta, carried out by relatives, suggested in the last book of the Odyssey. After Odysseus had slaughtered the suitors, it will be remembered, Antinous’ father addressed their fathers and relatives thus: ‘For this is a dishonour forever for those who come after to hear, if we do not avenge the murder of our sons and brothers’ (Od. 24. 433-5). As Finley observes, had the goddess Athena not intervened to stop the vicious circle ‘no human force in Ithaca could have prevented still more bloodshed’.’°

This is not the place to debate whether or not the institution of blood *4 W. M. Bowsky, ‘The Medieval Commune and Internal Violence: Police Power and Public Safety in Siena, 1287-1355’, American Historical Review, 73 (1967), 1-17, at 12, and A Medieval Italian Commune (n. 3, above). *> M.I. Finley, The World of Odysseus* (Harmondsworth, 1979), 77.

How Violent was Athenian Society 113 feud was known in Archaic Greek society.*® For my purposes, it will be sufficient to demonstrate that its failure to figure in the Athenian sources is not merely a matter of documentation: the absence of what I have called pattern A (whether in the form of blood feud, vendetta, or any other form of ‘tribal’ vengeance) from Athenian society makes perfectly good sense if considered in the light of the power structure of Athenian democracy. To make this point clear, it is necessary to digress. The preponderance of pattern A or pattern B in any given society is not merely a matter of convention, culture, or ideology; it is primarily a matter of institutional arrangement. It all boils down to whether, in the event of provocation, injury, or aggression, there is or is not available within that society an agency other than the provoked, injured, or aggressed-against party—cther than his closest circle of friends and relatives—which is willing and able to take steps against the aggressor. The extremes of this spectrum,

between which a whole range of intermediary cases can be located, look

roughly as indicated in Table 2. | TABLE 2

Provocation Reaction Honour Social setting

slight excessive, inflated not centralized violent = REVENGE excessive slight, deflated centralized + PUNISHMENT

For the purposes of our analysis it is important to establish precisely what,

in discussing Classical Athens, we mean by ‘centralized’. It is to the elucidation of this matter that we now turn. VI

‘State power is unique’, writes Finley, ‘overriding all other ‘powers’ within the society by its acknowledged right to exercise force, even to kill, when its representatives deem such action to be necessary.’*’ This generalization aptly describes a characteristic of democratic Athens: the superior power of

the Athenians may have been challenged every now and then, but there can be no doubt that, except during brief interludes (the oligarchic coup of 411 and 4048Bc), it overrode all other powers within the state. How did it © As an alternative to Finley’s assumption, cited earlier (n. 25 above), see R. Parker, Miasma (Oxford, 1983), 125, for the view that ‘there is no real trace in legend of the kind of blood feud familiar from many non-centralized societies’. 27 M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1983), 8.

114 Gabriel Herman do so? Where exactly within the social system was this supreme power located?

The formal agencies that existed in Athens to enforce law and order seem hopelessly inadequate to the task: ten annually elected archons, the ‘Eleven’ (€vdexa) annually elected prison custodians, who also served as executioners, and the three hundred public slaves (the so-called Scythian archers) who acted as attendants (imnpérac) to the archons and the Eleven, equipped with whips, sticks, bows, and possibly daggers;”® these slaves spent far more time keeping order in public places than they did enforcing the law and arresting

malefactors. For the sake of contrast, it may be helpful to mention that Siena in the early fourteenth century had several police forces; made up of hired foreigners, one for every 145 inhabitants, these forces were perpetually engaged in imposing curfews, patrolling the city, and pursuing and seizing miscreants. Yet for all these activities, Siena was a notoriously restless city.*?

Athens was not, mainly because in addition to its formal and in itself inadequate enforcement apparatus it dedicated a whole range of institutions,

forces, measures, and devices to the supreme cause of ensuring political stability. I have chosen to single out for analysis the most important of these: the power élite, self-help, the law courts, and what I shall be calling the internalization of suprapersonal values. Foremost in importance was a power élite consisting of just one section of the citizen body: the armed Athenians of hoplite status. These were the people whose arms Pisistratus is said to have confiscated in 546Bc (Ath.

Pol. 15. 4-5), presumably because he realized that in case of need they could act in concert, forming a force capable of pursuing a wide variety of

agreed goals effectively. Tricking them out of the arms amounted to a bloodless coup d’état, transferring their supreme power to Pisistratus’ own bodyguards and mercenaries. A series of further indications combine to confirm that contemporaries perceived the armed hoplites as the ultimate coercive power within Athenian society.*° We have, to be sure, no concrete examples of their taking collective 28 Cf. O. Jacob, Les esclaves publics a Athénes (Liege and Paris, 1928). Ar. Thesm. 1126ff. is the only evidence that the archers may have carried daggers. 72 Bowsky (n. 24). 3° See Thuc. 8. 66 for the belief of the demos that the revolutionaries instituting the reign of terror were acting under the protective umbrella of the five thousand ‘best able to serve with their persons and their wealth’ (Ath. Pol. 29. 5); the Thirty instituting a reign of terror with the aid of ‘ten archons of the Piraeus, eleven guardians of the prison, and three hundred attendants armed with whips’ and with the tacit backing of the thousand Athenians and the Spartan garrison (Ath. Pol. 35. 1); Theramenes’ proposal to reduce the citizen body so that it correspond to what I have called the power élite—‘to direct the government in company with those who have the means to be of service, whether with horses or with shields’ (Xen. Hell. 2. 3. 48). The fact that these examples come from periods of oligarchic rule do not affect my argument concerning the power élite. Finley (n. 27) tends to underplay the effect of such coercive force, opting for a tacit resignation to authority as the key for political stability.

How Violent was Athenian Society I1I5 action under democracy, but unless we assume that the possibility of their doing so acted as a deterrent it is hard to see how the system functioned at all. The Eleven, acting under the orders of the Assembly and the Law Courts, inflicted severe punishments on many of the city’s inhabitants, and yet as far aS we are aware they never encountered anything like disobedience,

physical resistance, or mutiny. Consider just one, extreme example. In 406 Bc the ten strategoi who had won the battle of Arginoussai were tried, in highly controversial circumstances, and seven of them were actually

condemned to death and executed. This at once raises the question of whether any mechanism existed to prevent the families of the condemned from staging a mutiny in the attempt to stop the executions. Could they not have mobilized a group of relatives and friends, say 50 men per family, and simply overpowered the 321-strong enforcement agency? The answer is an unequivocal no—partly, no doubt, because they were resigned to communal authority, but mainly because they were aware that such a step would be met by appropriate countermeasures by the power élite.

We do have some concrete manifestations of the second link, the supremacy that this élite enjoyed at the level of the individual, the level of

what has come in modern research to be called ‘self-help’.** Far from describing an illicit usurpation of the functions of a properly constituted enforcement authority, Bonfet cavr® meant that in certain situations the individual was authorized and indeed required to take the initiative and carry out a whole series of coercive acts in the name of the community— the sort of acts which are by and large entrusted in modern states to specialized enforcement agencies. (The rhetoric of Euphiletus in Lysias I, cited earlier, attempted to present an act of private vengeance in the guise of self-help.) This sort of enforcement was subject to three restrictions: it must be seen publicly to have been carried out, it could be scrutinized post factum by the court, and it was punishable if the court found that it involved any deviation from the letter of the law. With the tacit backing of the power élite, self-help became an important link in the chain of the enforcement apparatus.

The third link in the chain was the law courts. Seen as a means of minimizing conflict, the courts effected a remarkable transformation in what has been labelled ‘primitive’ conflict. The retribution meted out to an offender

may be interpreted as an act of private vengeance if administered by the victim; if administered by the law court, it is a public punishment. Private vengeance invites violence, which in turn breeds counter-violence in the victim and his family, clan, or tribe; every aggressive act supplies cause for

yet more revenge, giving rise to an incessant war between the groups 3" On the practice of self-help in Athens, see Herman, ‘Tribal and Civic Codes of Behaviour’ (n. 13, above), with literature.

116 Gabriel Herman involved. By contrast, it would seem, punishment administered by the law courts puts an end once and for all to the possibility of this sort of chain reaction.

Does it? This supposition, amounting almost to a cliché, is certainly necessary. It is, however, by no means sufficient. To put it bluntly, court decisions do not stop violence. Feuds, conflicts, and interfamily vendettas

can carry on endlessly in total disregard of court decisions, sometimes because those decisions are not backed by sufficiently effective enforcement

authorities. In Athens, however, court decisions were, as far as we are aware, consistently respected, and were consistently carried into practice. What was the secret of Athens’ success? Answering this question involves invoking the final link in the chain. Just before executing Eratosthenes, Euphiletus said: ‘It is not I who shall be killing you, but the law of the city, which you are flouting’ (Lys. I. 26). Words such as these are normally dismissed in modern research as empty rhetoric. Seen from a different angle, however, they can be shown to embody the essence of the system. What set Athens apart from societies engulfed in

a state of endless feud was the internalization of a set of suprapersonal norms which transcended the realm of private, familial, and tribal interests.

Euphiletus acted, or pretended to act, in the name of these norms, and expected to win approval thereby. The way in which he claimed to have executed the law was the way in which every single Athenian was required to execute it: both actively (as in the well-known cases in which citizens fulfilled the injunctions of the law, arrested delinquents, or enforced court-

decisions) and, even more importantly (though this is less well known), passively, by posing a permanent threat to rise in arms in the name of the

suprapersonal norms against anyone who broke the rules. This tacit, perpetual threat of co-operative action against anyone who might destabilize

the system appears, in conjunction with the factors enumerated above, to give Athenian ‘centralization’ its essential meaning. VII

How violent was Athenian society? The picture we have is without doubt imperfect and sketchy; scores of additional data would have to be integrated into our analysis in order to refine it. Some of the information we lack is recoverable (for example, information about emotional attitudes towards violence, or about practices and rituals which may have helped to sublimate violence, such as sports or hunting),** some of it hopelessly irrecoverable 3? Here I would also include such general statements as Aristotle's remark about the customary gentleness of the Athenian people, or the Old Oligarch’s complaint that one cannot hit a slave at Athens.

How Violent was Athenian Society 117 (rates of homicide, mugging, slave-beating, and rape). As imperfect and as sketchy as the picture may be, however, it seems to point to a trend. The four outstanding features of the Athenian system which we have analysed appear to be interconnected, supplementing each other to form a coherent whole.

The first of these features was, as we have seen, the practice of going unarmed, and the second a non-militant ideology; the third was the absence

of certain social institutions and practices which are the arch-cause of violence in notoriously violent societies (blood-feud, vendetta, duelling), and the fourth an effective political and judicial system, wholeheartedly devoted to preventing escalation of conflicts and promoting stability. Athens was no Utopia, but if these features are carefully weighed, it must be classed among the less violent societies of pre-industrial Europe. Having taken extraordinary steps to minimize what we call political violence, the Athenians proceeded

with remarkable success to reduce what we call criminal violence to a minimum as well.

/ Law and the Lawgiver in the Athenian Democracy ROSALIND THOMAS

INTRODUCTION

In the Thucydidean Funeral Speech, Pericles produces his famous boast about the Athenians’ way of life and their relationship to the laws, and claims as characteristic of the democracy a relative freedom in public and private life (Thuc. 2. 37-9). This lack of supervision contrasts with the rigid discipline of Sparta, and is seen partly in terms of the role of the laws: their public life is conducted freely, as is their everyday life (37. 2); they do not exercise a jealous surveillance over each other... ‘Yet this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless in public matters (03 7apavopodpev), partly through fear, partly because of obedience to the magistrates and the laws, especially those which are established to help the wronged, and all those unwritten laws which bring acknowledged disgrace’ (37. 3). A little later, the intensity of Spartan supervision is contrasted with Athenian freedom in educational terms: ‘we live as we like’ (39. 1), and yet are no less brave. Pericles’ careful insistence that, despite this, the Athenians are not lawless indicates that he is thinking of the role of the laws in Sparta and the kind of surveillance by the laws that may possibly have belonged to the Athenian Areopagus before the 460s,’ but no longer. So here we have an idealized image of late fifth-century ideas about law in the democracy, an image of relative non-interference, in public as well as private life, by either laws or

education.” I begin with this because while it may represent the roughly official democratic idea about the role of law in the late fifth-century democracy,’ it is apparently contradicted over and over again in the fourth' As G. Cawkwell has argued, ‘Nomophylakia and the Areopagus’, JHS 108 (1988), I-12. I am most grateful to the editors for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper, to the participants at the original conference for their suggestions, and in particular to David Lewis, for whom this is a token of appreciation and of thanks for his help over the years. ? Aristotle's remarks on Sparta would support this: he points precisely to the way the Spartan lawgiver makes a study of education and epitedeumata (way of life), whereas in other cities, people all live as they want (Nic. Eth. 1180°24—-8). David Cohen, however, Law, Sexuality and Society (Cambridge, 1991) may go too far. 3 Contrast Arist. Pol. 1300°4-8, 1322°37 ff., on the habits of legal supervision characteristic of oligarchies. The Funeral Speech is, however, curiously muted in its praise of democracy:

120 Rosalind Thomas century democracy in ways which have had little attention. There were, of course, several constitutional changes involving the laws and their status with the return of democracy in 403. The fourth-century democracy based itself explicitly on the rule of law, and in certain respects the laws could be said to have more authority than the demos in assembly. Turning away from the dangerously wide powers of the assembly in the late fifth century, the new democracy removed lawmaking from it, formally distinguished laws from decrees, and declared that decrees could not override

the laws (Andoc. I. 87);4 the democracy is explicitly enjoined to use only written law, not unwritten (cited by Andoc. I. 85, 87, and wilfully misinterpreted by him); the new mechanisms of lawmaking with the panels of nomothetai are set up.° And that is not to mention the still baffling and controversial revision of the law-code in the last decade of the fifth century, irrevocably skewed for us by Lysias’ case Against Nicomachus (XXX), and the remains in the Stoa Basileios, about which recent studies are increasingly

inclined to think that it may not have been completed and did not in any case have a great deal of effect.’ The democracy sees sense, in other words, and grounds its new life on law and proper mechanisms for making law. Andrewes, HCT v. 335; C. Macleod, Collected Essays (Oxford. 1983), 149 ff.; S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, i (Oxford, 1991), on 2. 37. 1. Obviously the speech can be seen against various 5th-cent. discussions of law, which cannot be discussed here. + See M. Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Rule of Law (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles,

1986), 497-524; R. Sealey, The Athenian Republic: Democracy or the Rule of Law? (Univ. Park,

Pa., 1987), Ch. 3, 134-8: id. ‘On the Athenian concept of law’, C] 77 (1982), 289-302: M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991), 170 ff.; id., ‘Nomos

and psephisma in Fourth-Century Athens’, GRBS 19 (1978), 315-30. Contrast J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 299-304. See D. M. Macdowell, ‘The Chronology of Athenian Speeches and Legal Innovations, 401-398 Bc’, Revue internationale de droits de l’antiquité, 18 (1971), 267-74, for chronology of these changes. * Some modern studies follow Andocides’ tendentious interpretation, taking it very narrowly (e.g. J. W. Jones, Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks (Oxford, 1956), 107). Cf. M. Ostwald, ‘Was there a Concept dypados vdéuos in Classical Greece?’, in Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek

Philosophy Presented to G. Vlastos (Phronesis 1973, suppl. vol. 1), 70-104. © On procedures for lawmaking in 4th cent.: M. H. Hansen, ‘Athenian nomothesia in the Fourth Century Bc and Demosthenes’ Speech against Leptines’, ClMed 32 (1980), 87-104; D. M. Macdowell, ‘Law-making at Athens in the Fourth Century B.C.’ JHS 95 (1975), 62-74: Sealey (n. 4, 1987), ch. 3. Law of Diocles at Dem. XXIV 42: review law cited Dem. XXIV 2023. On the validity of laws after the archonship of Eucleides, Andoc. I 87; cf. Dem. XXIV 42. 7 See M. H. Hansen, ‘Diocles’ Law (Dem. 24. 42) and the Revision of the Athenian Corpus of Laws in the Archonship of Eukleides’, C& M 41 (1990), 63-71; Sealey (n. 3, 1987), ch. 3;

P. J. Rhodes, ‘The Athenian Code of Laws, 410-399Bc’, JHS III (1991), 87-100; N. Robertson, ‘The Laws of Athens, 410-399 Bc: The Evidence for Review and Publication’, JHS 110 (1990), 43-75: A. Fingarette, ‘A New Look at the Wall of Nikomachos’, Hesperia, 40 (1971), 330-5; K. Clinton, ‘The Nature of the Late Fifth-Century Revision of the Athenian Law Code’, Hesperia. Suppl. 19 (Studies Vanderpool 1982), 27-37: A. R. W. Harrison, ‘Law-Making at Athens at the End of the Fifth Century Bc’, JHS 75 (1955), 26-35.

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 121 But there is a distinct disparity between theory and practice, between the tenor of these formal legal expressions about the place of the laws, and what is actually being said about law in the speeches delivered before the assembly and law-courts. These speeches are replete with arguments about the role

of the laws and their relation to the democracy, and with rhetorical tricks based on certain attitudes to the laws.® Whatever the difficulties in interpreting this rhetorical evidence (and it has been little discussed), such arguments have serious implications for the role and place of law in the deliberations of the assembly and jury-courts. What is particularly striking is the overwhelming, often heavy-handed reliance in rhetorical terms not only on the authority of the laws as the basis for the democracy, but on the authority of the ancient lawgiver, Solon. Moreover, this authority is

manipulated in a manner which one is left quite unprepared for by the details of the new fourth-century formal changes to the character and place of the laws (or, for that matter, by the details in modern handbooks). It also contradicts the comforting image based on Pericles’ words. This paper, then, is a contribution to the study of the practice of Athenian law, and the place of law in the ideals or ideology of the democracy: that is, the rhetoric, or

the discourse, of law; and by extension, to our picture of the political atmosphere and ideals of the fourth-century democracy.’ It is the image of the lawgiver I wish to concentrate on.

1. THE INTERFERENCE OF THE LAWGIVER

It is, of course, commonplace, that Solon makes an important appearance

in the fourth century. By now widely regarded as the founder of the democracy, he figures frequently in this guise in democratic oratory.*° Fourth-century politicians habitually called Athens’ current laws ‘the laws * [ shall not be concerned with the numerous ancient philosophical discussions of the nature of law (on the difficulties of using these see Nomos (next note, 12-13), but want to concentrate on what is actually said in the practice of law. 9 Cf. S. Todd and P. Millett, ‘Law, Society and Athens’, ch. 1 in P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. Todd (eds.), Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1990); S. Humphreys, ‘The Discourse of Law in Archaic and Classical Greece’, Law and History Review, 6 (1988), 465-93; R. Osborne, ‘Law in Action in Classical Athens’, JHS 105 (1985), 40-58; S. C. Todd, The Shape of Athenian Law (Oxford, 1993). For Athenian ideas of law: Sealey (n. 4, 1982), 289-302; Ostwald (n. 4), s.v. nomos; J. W. Jones, Law and Legal Theory of the Greeks (Oxford, 1956) is disappointing; cf. also J. de Romilly, La loi dans la pensée greque des origines a Aristote (Paris, 1971), mainly on the philosophical side; similarly Vinogradoff, Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence, ii. The Jurisprudence of the Greek City (Oxford, 1922); E. Wolf, Griechisches

Rechtsdenken, (Frankfurt am Main, 1956).

‘© For Solon as founder of democracy: e.g. (most notably), Dem. XVIII. 6; XXII. 30-1; LVII. 31-2; Aesch. III. 38, 257: Arist. Ath. Pol. 9. 1, 28. 1. Some other refs. in Hansen (n. 12 below)—but note that these are not exhaustive.

122 Rosalind Thomas of Solon’, even when the laws in question were manifestly recent (e.g.

Andoc. I. 95; or Dem. XX. 92, on Solon’s establishment of the nomothetai!). But to set aside the question of their historical accuracy,"’

it is important to note, as Hansen shows, that the orators who invoked Solon and his laws were not simply trotting out the clichéed terminology

for ‘current Athenian laws’, but did actually mean to talk about what they thought of as an historical person: that they did largely believe these were properly Solon’s laws (Hansen goes on to argue that the democratic reforms they attribute to Solon amount to a moderate but not radical democracy).** I would like to go further. Solon’s appearances

in democratic rhetoric are by no means confined to precise laws or reforms dignified by his name. A great deal more is attributed to the ancient lawgiver, indeed his intentions in legislating are elaborated at length. On one level this is only yet another expression of the conservative

tendencies of fourth-century Athens. But it seems to be both more complex and more interesting than that. Politicians can attribute legislative, moral, and educative aims to Solon in a manner which cannot but be expressive of attitudes to law and the legal process in the fourth century. Modern discussions of lawmaking in the fourth century devote much attention to the fourth-century nomothetai, but little to the ultimate lawgiver, the ancient lawgiver, who figures much more prominently in contemporary arguments and vision of Athenian laws.*? Some examples will give something of the taste of these allusions. For instance, [Dem.] XLIII. 62 (Macartatus): ‘Solon the lawgiver is very much in earnest about family relations’; his law, which includes the regulation of women at funerals, is cited with approval, followed interestingly, by an oracle (66), which is seen to have the same tenor. Aeschines claims (III. "' For which see E. Ruschenbusch, Solonos Nomoi (Historia Einzelschriften 9, 1966); R. S. Stroud, The Axones and Kyrbeis of Drakon and Solon (Univ. of California publ. in Classical Studies

19, 1978); cf. also E. Ruschenbusch, ‘Patrios Politeia. Theseus, Drakon, Solon und Kleisthenes in Publizistik u. Geschichtsschreibung des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.’, Historia, 7 (1958); A. Fuks, The Ancestral Constitution (London, 1953); M. I. Finley, The Ancestral Constitution (Cambridge, 1971; repr. in The Use and Abuse of History (London, 1975), 35-59); Cl. Mossé ‘Comment s’élabore un mythe politique: Solon, ‘pére fondateur’ de la démocratie athénienne'’, Annales, 34 (1979), 425-37. 2M. H. Hansen, ‘Solonian Democracy in Fourth-Century Athens’, in W. R. Connor et al. (eds.), Aspects of Athenian Democracy (ClMed. diss. XI, 1990), 71-99; and id. (n. 4, 1991), 298—

300. Cf. Jones (n. 5), taking refs. to Solon as merely rhetorical ploy (p. 107), even though he notes attribution of intention (pp. 302-3). ‘3 There is remarkably little on lawgivers in Greece generally let alone in the classical period: works on ideas of law (e.g. E. Wolf, Griechisches Rechtsdenken, iii. 2, Jones (n. 5), de Romilly) have little to say, and Ober’s section on the ideology of law in the democracy ((n. 4), 299 ff.) has a very partial selection on law, and nothing on the image of the lawgiver. Cf. A. SzegedyMaszak, ‘Legends of the Greek Lawgivers’, GRBS 19 (1978), 199-209.

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 123 38) that ‘The lawgiver who established the democracy’, i.e. Solon, avoided

the chaos of conflicting laws and so set up the thesmothetai (so he says anachronistically, dwelling on a fourth-century anxiety) to perform an annual revision of the laws. Or there is the lengthy argument by Demosthenes (XXII. 25 ff., Against Androtion, a graphe paranomon) that Solon, ‘who framed this and most of

our laws, was a very different legislator from the defendant’. And he continues with elaborate speculations on what Solon in his wisdom had realized, in particular, that ‘for men of infamous habits, the most antagonistic state of all is that in which everyone can publish someone’s shame, that is, a democracy’, thinking to prevent men of ill-repute misleading the people

(31). Similarly in the De Corona (XVIII. 6-7), in a general appeal to the laws and role of the jury, Demosthenes launches on a eulogy of the laws which Solon laid down, edvous dv tpuiv cal dnuotikds (‘being well-disposed to

doing.** |

you and democratic’). He does not simply state that the jury oath was instituted by Solon, but elaborates on the lawgiver’s train of thought in so Much of Aeschines I, Against Timarchus, is in effect a blatant eulogy of the laws and the ancient lawgiver in order to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Timarchus is violating the laws, and the intentions of the ancient lawgiver, and therefore destroying the city. From 6 to 32, his audience is treated to a list of Solon’s laws and a commentary on his aims: Consider, Athenians, how much attention that ancient lawgiver Solon, gave to morality, as did Drakon and the other lawgivers of those days NKébacbe yap, w dvdpes >AOyvaio, donv mpdvorav trepi cwhootvvys émomjnoato 6 LédAwv exeivos, 6 TaAdaos vomobérns, Kai 6 Apaxwv Kail of kata Tovs ypovous éxeivous vowobérat (6).

Quite who these ‘other lawgivers’ could possibly be is perhaps tactfully left undisclosed. We then hear about Solon’s laws on the morality of children,

free-born boys, the orderly conduct of children, teachers and children, prostitution of children, procurers, the law of hubris, then (22 ff.) assembly

procedure. Later, he returns to the conduct of women and procurers (182-3). '* XVIII. 7 (loosely paraphrased): he thought that the laws would be authoritative (xupéous) not only through writing but also through the oath of the jury; not distrusting you, the jury,

but because he saw that no defendant can defeat the charges and calumnies which the prosecutor prefers with the advantage of private speech, unless the jury listens with good will to the second speaker.

124 Rosalind Thomas One could go on'*—and we shall encounter other instances below. But even from this tiny selection, Solon clearly has a character, and it is his moral intentions which are brought to the fore, not merely the prim citation of a particular law, or the bare tag of his name. The prestige of the ancient

lawgiver is exploited for all that it is worth and in a way which was presumably thought acceptable, indeed highly appealing, to the jurors. On a simple level, the appeal to Solon is an expression of the common

Greek desire to find a first originator, an inclination reminiscent of the patrios politeia arguments, using the past to authorize the present, to find the origins of the democracy in remote antiquity.'° But I want to tease out more of the implications, especially for the role of law and lawmaking. Given

the quite deliberate changes made after 403 to the status of both, which were responding consciously to earlier problems relating to the laws, one should ask with more insistence why it is that fourth-century orators still

hark back to an image of the lawgiver which is not only archaic but reminiscent of Sparta and her tradition of law. For it surely is reactionary. Appeal to a lawgiver’s intentions is, effectively, or at least potentially, going beyond the law itself, it is an extra-legal argument which seeks to appeal to the source of law rather than to the law. It is true that any law may need interpretation, and that one way of dealing with ambiguity is to go back to the intention of the law.'? But that is only one way: the Thirty sought to remove ambiguity by altering the laws themselves, that is, changing the existing laws (Ath. Pol. 35). A search for the lawgiver’s intentions is another way, but it is not quite the same, and to search for the archaic lawgivers’ intentions rather than start afresh with new laws does not seem straightforwardly and necessarily democratic (we shall return to this: in practice, 'S Other citations of Solon: Dem. XX, esp. 90-1, 92, 93, 102, 104; XXIV, esp. 103, II3, 142, 210-12, 215 (we will return to Dem. XX and XXIV); [Dem.] XLIV. 66-7. Cf. also Aeschin. III. 175 (penalties for deserters and cowards); [Dem.] XXVI. 4 (penalties for private citizens); Dem. LVII. 31-33 (metics in agora and idleness). Also: Dem. XIX. 251-2, XXXVI. 27, [Dem.] XLII. (but cf. 18, which suggest here it was merely a form of words); Aeschin. I. 6-7 (sophrosyne); Aeschin. III. 38, III. 257; [Dem.] XXVI. 23-4 (Solon’s statue, etc.); [Dem.] XLVIII. 56 (law about influence of women); Hyp. Athenag. 21-2. Early citations of Solon are rather muted: Lys. X. 15; XXX. 17-18, 28; Andoc. I. 81-2; 95f.; Lys. fr. 35 S and 194 S are too short to be helpful. Other vaguer references to ‘lawgivers’ or to the drafter of a certain law are less pointed and probably add little, if anything, to the issues raised by what is being said about Solon himself. © See A. Kleingtinter, TPQTOS EYPETH2: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte einer Fragestellung (Philologus. Suppl. 26, 1933); also B. A. Van Groningen, In the Grip of the Past: An Essay on an Aspect of Greek Thought (Leiden, 1953); R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 175 ff. '7 T am most grateful to Stephen Todd for letting me see an unpublished paper of his on the

topos of the lawgiver’s intentions (in which he assumes that it is a democratic mechanism): his statistical analysis confirms that the ‘topos’ becomes more common in the later 4th cent.

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 125 as we Shall see, the topos is manipulated quite cynically). Similarly when

one looks at the scope of his (supposed) actions. We have already seen examples where intense interference into citizens’ lives is implied (women’s behaviour, funeral legislation, education, children, property, prostitution, in Aeschin. I). I particularly like the Solonian law against laziness, mentioned in Dem. LVII 32.'° These appeals simply do not seem to belong to the same political tradition, with its claims of tolerance and non-interference, that is praised by Pericles.

Moreover one can connect this train of thought with certain ideas well outside the field of democratic oratory. If we look at some other contemporary

views, such warm recommendations of the single legislator seem in the fourth century to be distinctly undemocratic (and indeed a peculiarly fourthcentury preoccupation).'? Plato, for instance, in the Politicus would like to substitute for the laws the intelligent will of the legislator: ‘The best thing of all is not that the law should rule, but that a man should rule, supposing him to have royal power accompanied by wisdom’ (Polit. 294a): the legislator

should provide for the general good, giving laws in a general form, some written, some unwritten, that is the ancestral customs, not trying to decide exactly what is suitable for each particular case (295a4—7). In an undisguised criticism of the democratic system of lawmaking he goes on to emphasize that written law would be unnecessarily restricting (esp. 295a9—-c5). Similarly in

the Laws, the legislator is all-powerful.”° He must both lay down written laws and enforce his will by other methods (822d ff.), since it is impossible, indeed inappropriate, to try to enforce everything by written law: ‘The real job of the lawgiver is not only to write his laws, but to blend into them an explanation for what he regards as respectable and what he does not, and the perfect citizen must be bound by these standards no less than by those backed by legal sanctions’ (823a2-—6, trans. Saunders).*'

Another writer of doubtful democratic inclinations, Isocrates, does not exactly espouse a lawgiver like this (so far as I know), but he hankers for fewer laws and more inducements to order and morality through education, '® But attributed elsewhere to Dracon and Solon (see A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens (Oxford, 1968), i. 79). Handbooks treat this with understandable hesitancy. '? The use of the lawgiver’s intentions becomes more frequent in the 4th cent. (see n. 17, above): it does, however, crop up in Aristophanes: in the Birds, ‘an ancient law’, obviously of Solon, is simply cited as requiring obedience (1 35 3-4; also 1660). More interesting, Pheidippides in Clouds 1185 ff. uses an argument from the ‘intentions of Solon’, who was a friend of the people (1187), to get Strepsiades out of his debts: in the context, this mode of argument is obviously regarded as suspect and sophistic. *° Cf. Laws 4, 709c5—710a2.

* Cf. Laws 853b-c, where it is admitted that if people could be perfectly educated in virtue, you would not need laws at all. It is perhaps relevant to mention here Socrates’ admiration for the laws of Sparta (Crito 52e), because their laws provide good moral education (see R. Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton, NJ, 1984), esp. 222 ff.).

126 Rosalind Thomas which is not dissimilar. Thus he idealizes the generation of the Persian Wars as men who ‘understand that for good men (trois cadois cayabois) there was no need of many written laws (zoAA@v ypappdtwr: cf. Areop. 41, below), but

with just a few agreements ovv@nuatwv) they would easily agree about private and public matters’ (Paneg. 78).** Even more revealing, in his fantasies about the old Areopagus (Areop. 39-41), he insists it was not taken

in by the idea that laws should be prescribed with the greatest exactitude: in fact (40) they thought that virtue was not advanced by written codes (é« toutwy, i.e. Ta ypdupata), but by upbringing. He objects ‘to the filling up of stoas with writing’ (41), and to the multiplication of laws to prevent crime (40-1). Those properly brought up will respect even a simple code (41).*? I perhaps cannot press this latter example, but Isocrates is worrying about controlling citizens either by means of written laws or by Areopagus-type guardianship, and his doubts about ‘excessive’ amounts of laws, his preference for education rather than laws, is tellingly reminiscent of Plato's strictures which are linked to the ideal of the lawgiver. (It is interesting, incidentally, that Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Social Contract, also shared this admiration both for Spartan society and for

the enlightened lawgiver.) We seem, then, to be seeing hints here of a background debate about the exactness of law, and the need for written law

at all, which in this context is clearly anti-democratic and reminiscent of the oligarchic liking for the unwritten law which surfaced at the end of the fifth century. The fourth-century democracy had after all accepted a law against unwritten laws (Andoc. I. 85, 87); indeed it was probably sophistic and oligarchic manipulation and stretching of the unwritten laws which largely contributed to the firm association of the democracy from then on with the rule of written law.** Appeal to a single legislator, which goes along with disdain for written laws, would seen to have clear anti-democratic overtones. It is thus hard to see the presence of the ancient lawgiver in the democratic

arena as quite consistent with the sense that the various legal reforms after the oligarchy were being made responsibly in order to secure the authority and respectability of the laws and legal processes; or with the increased 22 Cf. Panath. 144: of some misty idealized period, in which their laws were written up in a few days, not full of confusion, as today, but intelligible and consistent (and more to do with their common ways of life than with private contracts). 73 Our only post-399 reference to the laws inscribed in the Stoa Basileios, Cawkwell (n. 1), esp. 9-11, has an interesting discussion, drawing on Isocrates, of aristocratic-style ‘guardianship of the laws’, where nomoi would have the wider Spartan sense (of morality). Cf. Tac. Ann. 3. 27 ‘corruptissima re publica plurimae leges’ (and 3. 26), of evident Greek derivation (I am grateful to Simon Hornblower for pointing this parallel out). 74 See R. Thomas (forthcoming BICS; cf. de Romily (n. 9), 46 ff., on non-written law, etc.; Ostwald (n. 5).

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 127 association of democracy with written law. It is true that appeals to the laws and the importance of upholding them are ubiquitous in the speeches (and law-courts are hardly the place to air anarchic views). It is also very likely, after all, that these sentiments were often thought to reinforce the rule of the demos, not undermine it;*> and one’s opponent is invariably trying to destroy the laws (e.g. Dem. Against Timocrates). One must also

acknowledge that appeal to an ancient lawgiver in a system with a democratic jury is rather different from appeal to a lawgiver in one without: at least the jury have the final power of decision. There is an issue of jury

power involved here, which impinges on the nature of the laws and complicates the picture: as mentioned before, the Thirty attempted to tighten

up the laws to avoid contention and therefore discretion for the jury (Ath. Pol. 35), and it could be thought in the fourth century, as Ath. Pol. 9 shows,

that Solon deliberately left his laws ambiguous in order to allow more leeway to the jury.”° But as the differing responses of Plato and the Thirty show, there are several methods of approaching this problem (if it be so regarded), and invoking the authority of the ancient legislator was one of them, indeed a central one (so Plato wants a legislator with very clear laws and intentions clearly laid out, in case of ambiguity).*” The triumphalist note sounded by some modern scholars, applauding the Athenian attempts to create the rule of law unswayed by day to day surges of opinion,”® surely underestimates both the reactionary and non-democratic tendencies here, and the extent to which the new principles about law are undermined. The presence of the democratic jury does not fundamentally affect the fact that certain sentiments are being presented to them which may be reactionary in tendency. Similarly, you cannot consistently believe that the laws are

made and upheld by the demos, and that they are passed down from an ancient lawgiver (we return to this below). Let us look more closely at certain elements in the image of law painted by the orators which also portray less of a success story.

*> As Ober argues ((n. 4), 299 ff.) but with very brief coverage. See e.g. Dem. XXIV. 152—

4 on the danger of invalidating jury and courts; XXIV. 155-6; LVII. 56; XXI. 223-4, the laws are only writing, they are really upheld by the demos. © Cf. Arist. Rhet. 1354°31-61: laws should be defined very carefully, because a few wise lawgivers are easier to find than many wise jurors. The importance of conflict in the democracy is discussed by R. Osborne, Nomos (n. 9 above), ch. 5a, esp. 99-102. *7 There are further ramifications here which deserve fuller examination than there is time for in this paper. The question of exact or interpretable laws seems to have generated much theoretical discussion, to judge from Aristotle’s Politics, and seems to be very closely linked with an image of a single lawgiver. ® Ostwald (n. 4), ch. 10, and Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1969), esp. 55-6, 158-60; Sealey (n. 4, 1987), esp. 41-—S.

128 Rosalind Thomas 2. DIFFIDENCE AND NOSTALGIA

The need to gain affirmation from Solon seems to be linked not merely to general fourth-century conservatism, but to many wider statements made by orators about the laws which present a markedly diffident and downbeat image. They enable us to trace a more nuanced picture of Athenian ideas about the role of law. Even if some of these remarks are tailored for the rhetorical occasion, I find it interesting that they can be given to a democratic audience at all—indeed, it is precisely because of the occasion that they are so striking.

For instance, there are really too many laws. This view which we have heard from Plato and Isocrates is also integrated into democratic oratory. Demosthenes declares in Against Leptines (XX. 91) that ‘there are so many contradictory laws that you have had to appoint a commission to sort out the contradictory ones and the business never seems to come to an end’. Or in Against Timocrates (XXIV. 142): the rhetores legislate every month and for private ends; and Demosthenes then produces a cautionary tale about the Locrians (below) to underline the virtue of having few new laws.’? These views may not be strictly correct,*° and they have a rhetorical point.*' But

their disillusioned air must have been calculated to appeal (and it is no wonder, then, that the straightforward claim to Solonian laws was also a powerful rhetorical weapon). One can detect an undercurrent, beneath protestations about upholding the laws, of an idea that the laws really should not be changed at all. The controversies surrounding laws and those who used them in the late fifth century provoked criticisms of those ‘who think they are cleverer than the laws’ (an accusation made by Cleon, Thuc. 3. 37). Conversely, Archidamus (Thuc. I. 84. 3) boasts that the Spartans are not too learned to despise the laws.*” Cleon drives the conservative and anti-sophistic interpretation home by adding crudely that it is better to have laws which are unmoving though not good than excellent laws which lack authority (3. 37). (Aristotle, Pol. 1269°15-18, on the danger of unstable laws, is more philosophical on this.) Far better, then, to lay claim to the authority of Solon than have to rely

on a more recent, possibly tainted, authority. It deserves emphasis quite how far respect for the ancient lawgiver may involve a correspondingly muted appreciation of more recent laws. So Demosthenes in XXII. 25 seeks 79 Cf. Aeschin. III, esp. 191 ff. on the jurors’ laxity concerning legality. 3° As Hansen shows, (n. 4, 1991), 176. 31 Cf. Hansen’s and Macdowell’s articles (n. 6, above) on nomothesia, illustrating the danger of using clever rhetorical arguments. 3? Also Clouds 1399-1400: Pheidippides praises the new teaching and new-found ability ‘to be able to look down on the established laws’; cf. Humphreys (n. 9), 474-5: Ostwald (n. 4) 254-6 (though I do not understand why he sees Cleon’s speech as indicating the development of ‘an establishment mentality’, p. 254).

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 129 support from Solon, ‘who framed this and most of our laws’, and who was a very different kind of legislator from the defendant. Or in Against Timocrates

(XXIV. 142), the present day rhetores repeal the laws of Solon which were

enacted long ago, and expect you to obey laws of their own which they establish és’ dducia tis 7éXews (‘to the detriment of the polis’). (Indeed in the traditions about the archaic lawgivers, Solon included, there is a constant

tendency to see the lawgiver’s laws as unchanging and unchangeable.*) Demosthenes can even resort in the same speech (XXIV. 139ff.) to the cautionary tale about the Locrians, who insist that someone wanting to propose a new law has to do so with a halter round his neck. Result: only one new Locrian law in 200 years. The tale is often blandly cited as an example of legal conservatism, but we may well also ponder the spectacle of an Athenian audience being offered the Locrians, of all people, as a suitable paradigm for their own democracy.**

This leads to a related point. Other foreign (or un-Athenian) laws were evidently cited elsewhere on other occasions.** This kind of citation of other

cities’ laws to prevent new Athenian laws (as is the case in Dem. XX and XXIV) is astonishing,?° and seems to reflect the same failure of nerve that lies behind the need for Solonian authority.*’ It seems, then, that the fourth-century appeal to the authority of the laws is not quite so straightforward and obviously sensible as it looks at first. It is shot through with hints of deep unease and nostalgia for a simple legal past and the single authority of Solon. Seen in the living context of legal rhetoric, which in this type of non-professional legal system must be quite as important as what the laws themselves say, these statements reflect a diffidence about new and recent law that implicitly undermines the value of the new fourth-century arrangements, and confidence in them.

This was, after all, a system in which there was apparently a law prescribing the death penalty for anyone who cited in court a law which did not exist ([Dem.] Against Aristogeiton II, XXVI. 24). One might also consider that even Aristotle thinks of law, in rhetorical terms, as only one 33 Cf. Plut. Lyc. 29. 1-3; Hdt. 1. 29. 2; further discussion of the various legends in SzegedyMaszak (n. 13). 34 The law could be attributed to Zaleucus (Polyb. 12. 16), who had a reputation for extreme

severity. Though Demosthenes does not mention him, his description of Locri as a aéiXts edvoxoupevy Shows that he is quite aware of the aristocratic implications of the law. 55 e.g. Dem. XX. 106-7, where the speaker objects to the citation of laws of other cities, presumably what his opponent was doing, and declares that ‘Our laws’ have made us great;

cf. perhaps Aeschin. I. 180: an approving ref. to a Spartan action, though not a law; and of course Dem. XXIV. 139 ff. © Contrast Pericles at Thuc. 2. 37-9: other cities copy Athenian laws (37.1); so too, Aeschin. I. 117, other Greeks coming to Athens; Dem. XXIV. 210.

37 Cf., however, Humphreys (n. 9), suggesting a greater readiness in the 4th cent. to look positively at other societies’ laws.

130 Rosalind Thomas among five types of proof (pistis) (Rhet. I. 15, 1375°22 ff.: dréyvwv Kadoupévwr mlOTEwV).

Let us turn finally to some more pragmatic elements in the use of the lawgiver. 3. PRAGMATICS AND THE RHETORIC OF LAW: THE EXTRA-LEGAL USE OF ‘THE LAWS’

It is obvious, but has mostly been left implicit so far, that these appeals to Solon may have had a very precise function, cynically exploited, for the needs of that particular case: there is indeed the possibility of immediate rhetorical manipulation. But that is the other side of the coin: the arguments used concerning Solon and the laws may bank on nostalgia and disillusion, and they use that for political and rhetorical purposes. This is a huge topic, and I confine myself to a few observations here, mainly drawn from Dem. XX and XXIV and Aesch. I, which illustrate particularly well the extra-

legal, or non-legal use of the laws and the way the apparently innocent appeal to the lawgiver can in fact be a means of evading the laws altogether. (i) Exploiting the demos’ distrust of politicians and experts. Appeal to Solon

can obviously be a powerful way of appealing over the heads of your opponents, exploiting latent distrust of present-day politicians.

Thus Demosthenes declared, in a passage already mentioned (XXIV. 142), that our rhetores legislate every month for their own benefit, leading private citizens to prison; they repeal those ancient laws of Solon and expect you to obey laws of their own which they establish to the detriment of the city.3°

Or XX. 90ff.: his opponent, Leptines, is neglecting the law establishing the nomothetai and the system for passing new laws, which Demosthenes attributes quite anachronistically to Solon; yet Solon’s aim was ‘so that the private citizen should not be confused and put at a disadvantage against those who knew all the laws, but that it should be possible for everyone to read 7a déxara, and know them simply and clearly.’ Kal pn Tovs lowwTas atTo TobTo TapatTn Kal ToLh TMV ArravtTas ElddTWY TOUS VvOpoUS

éXatrov éyew, GAAA maow 7 Ta’T dvayvavat Kal pabeiv dmAd Kai cap Ta dixara. (93)

This is a nice manipulation of the fear that ordinary men will be excluded , from the laws for experts (it is not entirely clear which experts he means). This neat twist is entirely a suggestion made by Demosthenes about Solon’s underlying aims: the clever orator can merely attribute aims to the lawgiver 38 Cf. XXIV. 133 ff. also; he goes on to play on the jurors’ sense of their own importance and fear of oligarchy.

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 131 which will serve by a rhetorical sleight of hand to contrast with and therefore heighten the nefarious intentions of the opponent. (ii) How to defeat ‘new laws’. The authority of the lawgiver and suspicion

that there are ‘too many laws being passed nowadays’, are never more useful than when one orator is trying to prosecute another for trying to pass a law of his own. Demosthenes XX and XXIV almost form a compendium of reactionary statements about the laws, several of which we have encountered

already, and the cynical motives of the opponent's attempts to introduce new laws. Thus, for example, Dem. XX. 102, ‘Leptines either has not read

the laws of Solon, or he has not understood them’; XX. 104, another excellent law of Solon is cited: ‘Leptines is far from the intentions of Solon’;

Timocrates is accused in XXIV of subverting the laws of Solon. It is no coincidence that Against Timocrates (XXIV) is a graphe for proposing an unsuitable law, and Against Leptines (XX) is another graphe against a law which Leptines has passed through the nomothetai, but allegedly without the proper procedure, a graphe nomon me epitedeion theinai. In other words, the lawgiver is a particularly powerful tool in cases which

involve any opponent unfortunate enough to have proposed a new law, or even to have already passed one (the Athenian equivalent of the Locrian halter).*?

(iii) Finally, how to get round the laws altogether. This is where it becomes most obvious that the idea of the lawgiver circumvents the neat legal rules

of the fourth century. Such is the force of authority that Solon’s laws possess, that his intentions seem to be just (or almost) as forceful. We have

just seen an example (Dem. XX) where Solon’s intentions behind a law which was quite anachronistically attributed to him in the first place were thought to be a powerful argument against a new law. Similarly with the many other cases where the lawgiver’s thoughts are apparently divulged: an orator may seem to be bringing in proper legal evidence, citing the laws, but he is actually inserting non-legal considerations. It is worth underlining

that in this (as in so many areas) the laws about the use of the laws are being circumvented. To return again to the unwritten laws, it was, after all, now prohibited to cite unwritten laws, an attempt to ground legal processes firmly on written law rather than the slippery unwritten laws. Yet when Aeschines, in Against Timarchus I, expatiates on the wise intentions of the ancient lawgiver, he is effectively claiming the authority and proper legality of the written laws, but actually inserting the completely extra-legal authority of Solon’s personality in his speculation about Solon’s intentions—and it is 39 T wonder, in fact, if the new arrangements for safeguarding the laws and the making of new laws do not encourage this kind of rhetorical opposition.

132 Rosalind Thomas these intentions that bear much of the burden of Aeschines’ argument.*° One may compare the confidence of Sealey (for instance),*’ that the sup-

plementary measure about using written law ‘put an end’ to the use of unwritten law in court cases. But what we are seeing here is the use of Solon’s authority as an appeal at a level which goes beyond any particular laws, to some more general idea of ancient morality.

CONCLUSIONS

If we take the arguments of the orators, then, as indicating at some level contemporary views about the laws, the phrase ‘Solon’s laws’ is not an empty catchphrase denoting merely the laws in the revised law-code. The lawgiver is appealed to, discussed, interpreted, to such an extent that he has a character and authority in his own right. But this, then, would imply that the towering figure of the archaic lawgiver should be recognized as an equally important part of the legal processes alongside the various new rules and formal mechanisms so carefully initiated by the new democracy—and that the former seems seriously to undermine or even contradict the latter.

Certainly, this is how his name is used in the speeches before jury-courts and assembly, and in this comparatively open system what the jury hears and is persuaded by, about law, is presumably just as important as what the laws say about law.*’ The status of the lawgiver is accompanied, indeed backed up by, a series of rhetorical statements about law, which again, taken at face value, capitalize on nostalgia and disillusionment about current laws and current politicians. The arguments would not be there if they had no force of persuasion. But this cluster of views seems to be turning in the

direction of a markedly non-democratic view of the character of the law (and lawgiver), perhaps even a somewhat Spartan concept of law of the kind that Pericles, back in Thucydides II, was made to reject outright. Certainly there is a democratic level, in the presence of the jury, which was absent in Sparta. Yet on the literal level of remarks relating to the laws, one may glimpse a different picture. Indeed we even find remarks in Demosthenes

XXIV about the educational and moral value of the laws of the ancient *° e.g. I. 27, ‘it was with this in mind that the lawgiver ...’; I. 30, unlikely (according to Solon) that someone could be bad in private but good in public; I. 183-4, Solon’s laws on the good conduct of women and also procurers. *" Sealey (n. 4, 1987), 39 (though he accepts a non-positivist element, 159 n. 12). Note the sinister attempt to use ‘unwritten laws’ against Andocides in [Lys.] VI. 10, by means of a reported statement by Pericles. The point is not whether or not Pericles ever said it, but that Pericles is being used here much as Solon sometimes is, to insert an unimpeachable authority where strict legality is doubtful. 4* See Humphreys (n. 9) on effects of open, non-professional system; cf. Todd and Millett (n. 9), 14-15, on Athenian law as ‘dispute settlement’, with refs. there, and Todd (n. 9).

Law and the Lawgiver in Athenian Democracy 133 lawgiver which are not so far from Plato’s view of the lawgiver’s moral and educative role.4*> Compare especially the view expressed at 211, that the demos should punish those whose nomoi are contrary to the spirit of Solon and Dracon’: Kal unv ef LoAwva kal Apakovta dixatws éaveite, ... 6tt cupdépovtras €Onkav Kal Kadwds Exovras vouous, Oikatov On7ou Kal Tots UmevavTiws TWEiow exeivois 6pytAws ExovTas Kal KoAdlovras daivecbar.

If you are justified in praising Solon and Dracon ... because they established beneficial and good laws, it is surely right that you should ... punish men whose laws are contrary to their spirit.

This seems to be very slippery ground indeed. Compare Aristotle’s discussion

of the way the Spartan lawgiver made a study of education (trophe) and way of life (epitedeumata), unlike most cities where people all live as they want (Nic. Eth. 1180°24-8). We are seeing a quite literal reversion to the image (and spirit) of the archaic lawgiver and a model which is perilously

near to the Spartan respect for theirs.

It remains to suggest, if this picture is plausible, that it was precisely encouraged by the revision of the law-code and, paradoxically, the various measures to safeguard the laws. It is not really enough to point to the Greek penchant for the ‘first discoverer’, the protos heuretes, since the question still remains, why the tradition about Solon developed as it did, when it did.*4 It is perhaps part of a more general emphasis in fourth-century Athens on the value of tradition. Perhaps the creation of the new nomothetai brought Athenians face to face with what seemed to be a sad decline from previous bearers of that name. More important, once you have an authoritative code, it is tempting and indeed often necessary, to interpret it. It is frequently the case that as soon as a body of laws or code is established as completely authoritative, more energy is then devoted to interpreting it, or deducing

the intentions behind the code or lawgiver when these are not entirely explicit (cf. the American Bill of Rights). It is partly this which seems to be

happening in Athens. It would seem to be the very creation of a revised law-code and safeguards for the laws, which paradoxically allows and actually encourages the shift to the ancient lawgiver, and thus a far greater attention to his moral and educational views. And that is more reminiscent of archaic Greece than the legal processes we would usually take to be characteristic of the fourth-century Athenian democracy. 8 e.g. Dem. XXIV. 210-11, and esp. 215. There may be some links with 4th cent. concerns over education, especially ephebic (I owe this suggestion to Robin Lane Fox). *4 T am assuming for the time being that this is essentially a 4th-cent. development, though law-court evidence for the 5th-cent. is thin. Andocides and Antiphon use other tricks but not this. See above, n. 19, for two earlier cases.

8 Aeschines and Athenian Democracy ROBIN LANE FOX

I

Aeschines’ surviving speeches contain some of our most explicit statements about the ideals of democracy and its procedures among the Athenians." Athenian ideology, the issues of sovereignty, the role of oratory, and the

rule of law have been at the centre of the recent spate of writings on the subject. The importance of Aeschines’ evidence has been noted and the temptation is simply to list each passage in his speeches and take it at face

value. One aim of this paper is to draw attention to the range of his references but to warn against generalizing out of context. Much less has been published recently on Aeschines himself, but here,

too, his surviving speeches take us into distinctive territory, the public utterances of a ‘self-made man’, in A. H. M. Jones’s apt description.* His

origins also make his literary style particularly interesting, although its nature has not been studied on a broad front since Blass’s pioneering work in 1893. Blass admired Aeschines’ narrative art, the easiest, perhaps, of an orator’s weapons, but elsewhere he was inclined to note the flaws and the excessive straining.’ Apart from a study of Aeschines’ fondness for listing

points in advance, modern critics have tended in the same direction: Aeschines’ contorted use of history and the scope and crafting of his I am particularly grateful to P. J. Rhodes, S. C. Todd, and M. H. Hansen for helpful comment:

I trust it is obvious how much I owe to Hansen's published works, although this paper comments on points where I find less in the evidence and prefer views on democracy in the fourth century whose emphasis differs from his and cannot be fully argued here. " T am less concerned with Aeschines’ role in foreign affairs, on which see J. Sadourney, REA 81 (1979), 19-36 with bibliography. The fullest recent study (not used in this paper) is E. M. Harris, The Political Career of Aeschines (Harvard, diss. 1983), to judge from the summary

in HSCP 88 (1984), 262-4; I also pass over much of literary interest, well covered by E. M. Burke, Character Denigration in the Attic Orators, with Particular Reference to Demosthenes and Aeschines (Madford, Mass.; diss. 1972) and by H. Wankel, Demosthenes: Rede ftir Ktesiphon tiber

den Kranz, I and II (Heidelberg, 1976). * A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1957), 55. 3 F. Blass, Die Attische Beredsamkeit iii. 2 (Leipzig, 1898), 221-66.

136 Robin Lane Fox quotations have been compared unfavourably with Demosthenes’.* The ancients were uncertain about Aeschines’ rhetorical teachers; this uncer-

tainty, together with his weaknesses, have led to the suggestion that in fact | he had none.° I doubt if this suggestion is correct, but I do not intend to pursue these open questions here: my concerns are political, not literary. First, I wish to

dwell on known aspects of Aeschines’ career which belong with an Athenian | of the fourth, not the fifth, century. Differences between democracy in the fifth and fourth century have tended to be discussed in general terms of a

rise or fall, a modification or extension. We can also see them through individuals, by asking what makes an Aeschines so unlikely a figure in the age of Thucydides and his contemporaries. Next, I shall turn to democratic statements in the speeches and the question of their sensitivity to changing details of democratic practice. In Roman history, we are familiar with the ‘new man’, unusually keen to uphold the exact proprieties of the Senate

into which he has risen.® In Athens, is our best-known ‘self-made man’ a | constitutionalist, unusually keen to uphold the exact rules of the democracy in which he is active? Finally, by comparing Demosthenes, I shall dwell on a point at which Aeschines looks forward, however unwittingly, to democracy in a new age. A sense of Aeschines’ context requires a judgement about his age: here,

his career connects with the second theme of this conference. In 1958 D. M. Lewis argued in a note that Aeschines was born in 399, not 390:’ his case involved reference to the Byzantine life of the orator and the observation that at I. 49, Aeschines claims to be older than Timarchus, yet Timarchus, we know, served on the Council in 361/o0 and must, therefore, have been born in or before 391/0. Traditionally, Aeschines’ own birth has been put in 391/o: the case rests firmly on his own statement at I. 49 (‘this is our forty-fifth year’, spoken in 345) and in my view, it is correct. The credit of the Byzantine life as an independent source is very low indeed and the comparison with Timarchus’ age stands in a context where deceit was

greatly to Aeschines’ advantage. He was aiming to counter the natural

view, that Timarchus was more or less of the same age as his lover, Misgolas. To this end, Aeschines upheld Misgolas as an older man, his own

contemporary, while implying that Timarchus was younger than both of them. The truth was probably simpler: Timarchus, Misgolas, and Aeschines

were all of closely similar years. Nobody in Aeschines’ audience would 4 C. W. Wooten, ‘Clarity and Obscurity in Aeschines’ Speeches’, AJP 109 (1988), 40-3. > J. F. Kindstrand, The Stylistic Evaluation of Aeschines in Antiquity (Uppsala, 1982). ° O. Murray, JRS 59 (1969), 262: ‘The novi homines were more open to an awareness of the dignity of their new ordo and to ideas philosophical or political,’ 7 D. M. Lewis, ‘When was Aeschines Born?’, CR n.8 (1958), 108.

|

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 137 connect up the hints on which we rely nowadays to refute him. The arguments for disbelieving him have been well put recently by Harris, and I have always preferred them.® He reminds us that in 345 Aeschines was already grey-haired and so his emphasis on Misgolas’ seniority would be even more plausible if he associated Misgolas with himself. The case for 391/o is strongly supported by the reference in II. 168 which fixes Aeschines’

first military service against Phleius in 366/5. I would add the implications of II. 25 and 108 where Aeschines presents himself and Demosthenes as the youngest members of the Embassy to Philip in 346 Bc. The claim would have been harder to sustain if 399 was Aeschines’ own birthday and up to sixteen years separated him from Demosthenes. Symptomatically, as we shall see, Aeschines could conceal his birthday

when it suited him. Otherwise, 390 rather than 399: does it matter? On Lewis’s view, Aeschines would already have celebrated his sixty-fifth birthday

before composing his last great attack on Ctesiphon and Demosthenes. In fact, Aeschines’ last known flourish occurred at the age of sixty. Nothing follows from this conclusion about the general productivity of the oversixties, either then or now: David Lewis himself is a corrective. The more important points concern Aeschines’ beginnings. Born in 391/90, Aeschines would have attained citizenship and become politically aware in the years after the foundation of the second Athenian confederacy, not in the immediate aftermath of the King’s Peace. At either moment, financial weakness was the fundamental limit on Athenian policy,’ but in the years after 373/2 the choice between an expanding Thebes and a curbed Sparta was an even clearer issue. Empire had been rethought and so far from being a possible blueprint, the resulting Confederacy was a proven success, ready to be combined with renewed Athenian opportunism. *°

In 330 Aeschines could attack Demosthenes both for the Theban alliance

(he had ‘transplanted the council-chamber and the democracy to the Cadmeia’) and for receiving allies like Kallias the Euboean without obliging them to pay the syntaxis like good Confederacy members."' Of course these

arguments were meant to appeal to their audience, but they are also heirs to past obsessions, strong in the later 370s when Aeschines matured. It was Demosthenes, not Aeschines, who broke with their old framework in the interests of a wider freedom.

As for Aeschines’ political debut, the argument is essentially one from * E. M. Harris, ‘When was Aeschines Born?’, CPh 83 (1988), 211-14. 9 G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1981), 607

nN. .

3 ‘G. L. Cawkwell, ‘Notes on the Failure of the Second Athenian Confederacy’, JHS 101 (1981), 40-55, is one of the many who stress the opportunism more than the success. "" Aeschin. HI. 145; HI. 162.

138 Robin Lane Fox silence, but something in the 350s presumably preceded the prominence in ;

347/6. Demosthenes implies that friendship with Aristophon played a part:"* | perhaps it brought the newcomer into helpful circles, from where he inclined | to Eubulus and his group, his position by 347/6.** If so, his political career : would have begun in his late thirties, not so conspicuously late as on Lewis’s

dating of his birth, but still late enough to belong with those other men from less favoured backgrounds, observed by P. J. Rhodes in 1986.'* They | were later climbers of the political ladder than those Athenians who were !

born with a political silver spoon. : According to Demosthenes, Aeschines’ father was a foreign slave and his ! mother a prostitute and a vampire: as such, she was named by him openly | in court.’> The slander differs in degree (not kind) from its fifth-century | forerunners, but even when we discount it we must still place Aeschines |

socially very far below a Cleon, Hyperbolus, or Cleophon.’® The problem is | his father, not his mother. His mother’s brother had served as a general and

is now known from his tombstone to have been a noted soothsayer:’’ his : father, however, remains much more obscure. Aeschines describes him in | terms of athletic prowess, military and democratic heroism, and association with the phratry and fair name of those Eteoboutadai whose social self- | awareness was beautifully explained by Lewis in 1963.'° In the democracy

of the 340s, before a jury ‘guided’ by Demosthenes, this ennoblement by | allusion was still a trick worth trying.’? Josiah Ober has gone further and 7 proposed that ‘Aeschines reinforces his pretensions to aristocratic culture by :

frequently employing athletic metaphors in his speeches. Apparently he : hoped to be perceived as the sort of man who spent a good deal of time in | gymnasia and so naturally used gymnastic turns of phrase.’*® Aeschines certainly states that he has been, and is, a lover of boys, that he has written

some of the love poems which his opponents will quote, and that they will | claim he has pestered boys in the gymnasiums,”* but on closer inspection

2 Dem. XIX. 291; XVIII. 162. |

"3 Dem. XIX. 303-4; Aeschin. II. 79, with S. Perlman, ‘The Politicians in the Athenian

Democracy of the Fourth Century B.c.’, Athenaeum, Ns. 41 (1963), 352. '4 P. J. Rhodes, ‘Political Activity in Classical Athens’, JHS 106 (1986), 132-44, at 144 nn. 165-8, J. K. Davies, Wealth and the Power of Wealth in Classical Athens (New York, 1980), 117, on the poor men ‘from the sycophantic fringe’. ‘S Dem. XVIII. 129-30. A. R. Dyck, ‘Demosthenes’ Portrait of Aeschines’, Greece and Rome, 32 (1985), 42-8: D. Schaps, ‘The Women Least Mentioned’, CQ 27 (1977), 323-30, esp. 328 n. 5 on Aeschines’ greater reticence about naming Demosthenes’ female relations. ‘© The basic discussion, with all the evidence, is by J. K. Davies, APF 543-7.

7 SEG XVI. 193. 18 Aeschin. II. 147; D. M. Lewis, ‘Cleisthenes and Attica’, Historia 12 (1963), 22-40, at 26. ™9 A, Andrewes, ‘Philochorus on Phratries’, JHS 81 (1961), I-15, at 9. 2° J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 283. *t Aeschin. I. 135-7.

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 139 athletic metaphors are not unduly prominent or distinctive or applied to Aeschines himself. The most elaborate are directed to the jurors, as fellowcompetitors against Demosthenes, the political wrestler. They do not reinforce ‘aristocratic pretensions’ of Aeschines himself: the language is not so pervasive or revealing.*” We do know that Aeschines married rather well. Since 1947, the evidence

of his father-in-law’s tombstone has connected his wife with a family of known liturgical status.?? Demosthenes alleges that one of her brothers left Aeschines ‘five talents’, and it is tempting to see the marriage as Aeschines’ route to success:”* J. K. Davies’s basic discussion suggests a possible date for

it in the 350s,?> whereupon we find Aeschines serving in the cavalry in spring 3487° and leaving a major political mark soon afterwards. The truly remarkable fact is that not only Aeschines but his two brothers, one older, one younger, reached political prominence too. The eldest became a general:

the youngest had an important role in public finance and served as an ambassador to Persia.”” Did they all marry well, or did one of them pull the

other two into important public circles? The family refutes many of our average assumptions about ancient family life: three surviving sons, all of them successfully on the make; a mother who lived on into her seventies, and a father, Atrometus, who survived to be 94 in 343 Bc.”° He must have been extremely pleased with his sons’ prowess: his own family property was

due to be split between all three, and with a father still living, it cannot have been much help to them on the way up. In speech I, Aeschines makes references to other Athenians’ circumstances

which reveal their varied and scattered types of property.*? Davies has suggested that these mixed holdings can ‘fairly be called the norm for the fourth-century propertied class’ and that this ‘background of growing homogeneity’ eased the acceptance of nouveaux riches.*° If so, Aeschines’

own oratory is witness to a changed structure which eased his own emergence. Of his own properties we know nothing, except for plausible allegations of a fortune made from his political career.** In the Periclean age, he would never have made it against a solid wall of xadoi cdyafoi. I ?2 The key passage is Aeschin. III. 206, applied to the jury, not A. himself. Other passages are random and incidental: IT. 183, III. 179-80, III. 246. ?3 SEG XVII. 104, with D. M. Robinson, AJA 51 (1947), 366. *4 Dem. XVIII. 312. *> APF 545. © Aeschin. III. 86. *7 APF 545. 28 Aeschin. III. 191 (father’s age); II. 148 (mother’s age). 79 Aeschin. I. 97-105. 3° Davies (n. 14), 72.

3! APF 547: Dem. XIX. 145, 167, 314; XVIII. 41, 131, 311-12.

140 Robin Lane Fox |

suspect that it was important that like his father, he married into a family of greater wealth than his own. Marriage apart, Aeschines’ pre-political career is known for two dimen-

sions, neither of which features among politicians of the fifth century: acting | and the archives. In the early fourth century, unlike the fifth, actors emerge

as public envoys,** linking the theatre, embassies, and politics in a way

which was to be out of the question for top people in the staid moral | atmosphere of Rome.?? Since the Periclean era, formal rhetoric had developed, :

and good delivery helped the power of speech, the perpetual key to public | influence in democratic Athens. Outside the city, dynasts had emerged, first

in Sicily, then in Macedon, who themselves relished Attic drama and the 7 theatrical scene.** Aeschines matured in a climate of foreign diplomacy | which needed his skills more than ever: he had a fine voice (like a mythical ,

Siren’s, he admits), one attribute about which neither he nor Demosthenes | lie.»

Acting, then, helped his public prowess: from Demosthenes, we also learn |

that he had served the city as a secretary, first as a paid underling, then as | an appointed official: significantly, Demosthenes scorns the tenure of a ! salaried public job, whereas the later appointment with public dining-rights

is not presented as quite so contemptible.*° Both jobs concerned the ‘public | writings’, stored in the Metroon which we tend to describe rather loosely as | the City Archive.*” By the 360s, the Metroon was a long established fact,

although it had never existed in the political life of a Cimon or the young : Pericles. Rosalind Thomas has suggested that its impact is visible and that 3

the years in the Metroon influenced Aeschines’ tactics as a speaker: he is | ‘the first to exploit the public records as part of his rhetoric ... surely : encouraged by his secretarial activities: these alerted him to the extraordinary | potential of the documents stored in the archive’,?® though not, I think, to : a filing and retrieval system as proposed for Athens by William West in |

1989.*” The notion is attractive, the former secretary who knew where to | |

3* DFA 168 and 279; P. Ghiron-Bistagne, Recherches sur les acteurs dans la Gréce antique |

(Paris, 1976), 154-61, on Aeschines. | 33 There is nobody comparable in C. Garton, Personal Aspects of the Roman Theatre (Toronto, |

1972) Appendix I, or in E. D. Rawson, Roman Culture and Society (Oxford, 1991), 485-7. 34M. N. Tod, Greek Historical Inscriptions, (Oxford, 1946), 108 (Harding 20), with com- | mentary: Dem. V. 6; XIX. 12, 18, 94, 192-3; 315: Aeschin. II. 15, 16, 52; Plut. Alex. 10. 2. | >> Aeschin. IIT. 228; Dem. XVIII. 308. DFA 167-70; Plut. Mor. 838c, on the large Siren

537-8. |

on Isocrates’ tomb.

3© Dem. XIX. 249, with D. M. Lewis, JHS 102 (1982), 269.

37 R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 38- }

O.

" 38 R, Thomas (n. 37), 69, 71.

39 W. C. West, ‘Public Archives in Fourth Century Athens’, GRBS 30 (1989), 529-43, esp. |

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy I4I look to dredge up just the right document to undermine an opponent. However, I think it is misleading. In our tiny surviving fraction of Attic oratory, the appeal to past decrees is indeed more prominent from the 350s

onwards, but that prominence may owe something to the nature of the surviving trials. Both in 343 and 330 Aeschines does applaud the preservation of ‘public writings’, but only at a particular point, where they support his case.*° Above all he was not the first to cite chapter and verse

from a public text and dwell on it: in speech XXIV, we can already see Demosthenes making great play with exact details and quotations from both a decree and a law as a source.*’ Yet Demosthenes had never been a salaried clerk in the Archives. Aeschines’ ‘documentary habits’ do not differ in kind from his great rival’s.4* The Metroon may have helped both, but Aeschines was not uniquely helped because of his secretarial experience. Lastly, the demands of military service. Neither the stage nor the secretariat

excluded it in his career, neither in 366/5 nor again in 348/7 when he served in Euboea on horseback, although already in his early forties.** The

military career continued to carry weight. In 330, Aeschines chides the Athenians for allowing the intercession of important generals to sway cases against politicians: they should wait until the sentence is being discussed, he argues, when generals can more fairly ‘intervene’.** It is from Demosthenes, however, that we hear of a more telling complaint: the conduct of political

rhetors who head political ‘syndicates’ with a general under them.* The increasingly clear separation of oratorical careers and generalships has been

admirably presented for the fourth century by J. K. Davies.*° We do not hear about this split from Aeschines, perhaps because of the nature of his speeches (none survives to the Assembly), perhaps too because he benefited from it. His link with the general Nausicles conformed to the pattern, as 4° Aeschin. IT. 89 and III. 75; cf. II. 135 (II. 58 and II. 92 are more general). 41 Dem. XXIV. 26-8 (a decree): XXIV. 63-87 (proposed law), esp. 71 (verbatim quotation of the ‘very graphé’).

42 R. Thomas (n. 37), 88, states that ‘he was also notorious for his citations of historical documents, as Demosthenes’ criticisms imply’, citing Dem. XIX. 303 on A.’s reading of the ‘decrees’ of Miltiades and Themistocles, in 3478c. D.’s comment is, however, specific to that occasion: for his own citations of ‘historical’ documents cf. XIX. 271 and IX. 41, reciting the ‘Arthmius Decree’ or the decrees cited by Deinarchus, Against Demosthenes 17. 27 (‘often recited’, 23), 79, 83. A.’s ‘historical’ citations were not peculiar to him: he could also be evasive in what he quotes. At III. 102, he has a long decree by Dem. read out, but this time, makes no play with its ‘fine’ preservation in the public records, a significant silence if (as I prefer) we accept the argument of G. L. Cawkwell, ‘Euboea in the Late 340’s’, Phoenix 32 (1978), 42-67, at 58-67, that A. was fudging the year-date of what he cited. 43 Aeschin. II. 168 with Xen. Hell. 7. 2. 17-23: 2. 169 (on 348 Bc) and 3. 86 (significantly, a ‘we’ passage). 44 Aeschin. IIT. 198. 45 Dem. II. 29 and XIII. 30 on which I agree with M. J. Hansen, CPh 84 (1989), 148. 4° (n. 14), 124-30.

142 Robin Lane Fox perhaps did his link with Phocion:*’ the pattern emerges in his own family

where Philochares, his older brother, is elected general from 345/4 to 343/2.*° In those years, Aeschines stood for the view that Philip would yet prove as good as his word and live up to promises given vaguely to Athens in 346. To his eternal discredit, this misguided judgement was included in his speech I and was not even erased after delivery in 345.49 The prominence of Aeschines’ brothers in this period, when the clash with Demosthenes was already open and policies divided, is an argument for not seeing Aeschines

as a marginal figure, used merely for his fine voice and acting talent in the | embassies to Arcadia in 347 and to Philip in 346. Manifestly, he was part | of a central political group with its own view of Philip: a politician, not an entertainer in politics. In modern terms, he stands to Demosthenes’ Thatcher more as a Hattersley than a Clement Freud. Unlike his friendly general, Nausicles, Aeschines did not shift totally toward Demosthenes when the latter’s policy against Philip became the accepted option after 342.°° Personal animosity endured: how could it not, after Demosthenes’ speech XIX? In 330 the rivalry erupted again in the wake of Agis’ failed revolt. On his own admission, Aeschines, by now aged

60, was an infrequent speaker in the assembly:°' if we could support Bauman’s recent suggestion, he might, however, have been spurred on in 330 by a successful defence of Leocrates, defeating Lycurgus’ prosecution in a speech now lost to us. It is a pleasant thought, the self-made orator pitted against the Eteoboutad with whose phratry he had once tried to link himself, but Bauman’s evidence is not cogent.°’ After the failure against Demosthenes,

we are reduced to anecdotes: the alleged withdrawal to Rhodes, the years of his sixties spent in retirement, and in later doxography, a second career as Founding Father of those sophists who blossom in the second century ap.*? Of the three brothers, all of whom attended public prominence, Aeschines remained the orator, valued as a speaker. He was not wholly unmilitary, but the generalship was not his horizon. He came to matter politically, but

his origins and his earlier life on the stage and in the archives are not comparable with the background of any known figure of importance a century earlier. By the 350s the political class was more open, as broader 47 Aeschin. II. 184, although L. A. Tritle, Phocion the Good (London, 1988), 101-3, questions the Phocion connection. 48 Dem. XIX. 237, Aeschin. II. 149. 49 Aeschin.. I. 169. 5° APF 396-7. >" Aeschin. III. 217-18. >* R. A. Bauman, Political Trials in Ancient Greece (London, 1990), 102—3, whose inference from Lycurg. In Leocr. 139-40 is unconvincing. > Philostratus, Vita Sophist. (ed. W. Wright), 509 p. 60, with Kindstrand (n. 5), 75-82; on the pseudonymous ‘letters’, Blass (n. 3), 185-6, and S. Salamone, ‘Sull’ Epistolario del PsAeschine’, Maia, 37 (1985), 231-6; they are probably works of the 2nd cent. ap.

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 143 studies have long taught us: Aeschines is our most articulate surviving example of the change.** IT

If Aeschines had been born some forty years earlier, he would have matured in an Athens where oligarchy was still a living option for many people with

political ambitions. In the fourth century it was dead. The democracy in which he was active is not, in my view, best described as a ‘modified’ democracy: it was an entrenched democracy, no longer under serious questioning internally.°°> Its stability in the fourth century has recently concerned Josiah Ober,°° but the basic reasons seem clear enough: there was a general sense that the established constitution worked and was not

too heavily in one class’s interest; demands were made on the richer Athenians’ property, but they were not penal and nobody threatened to squeeze them until the pips squeaked;?’ an increased range of state pay supported public involvement, and was the symbolic ‘glue’ of the system, although its scale may seem rather modest to a modern eye.*® Politicians openly admitted that expansion overseas was necessary ‘because of the poverty of the demos’, thereby keeping the issue in sight and blunting class tension;>? custom and a sense of justice supported democracy, while oligarchy

was discredited by continuing awareness that it might involve Spartan intervention, and that coups elsewhere in Greece led to fearful bloodshed.°° Above all, Athenians had twice known oligarchy and hated it: Ober underestimates these memories as a force for stability, not just in orators’ speeches

but in families whose members had known 411 and 404/3. From old Atrometus, Aeschines would have heard quite enough to put oligarchy beyond the pale as a political option.®’

Praises of democracy are explicit in all orators whose speeches survive from the 350s onwards. No doubt they always had been, but Aeschines’ are particularly explicit. In 345, against Timarchus and in 330, against 54 Perlman (n. 13), 327-55, esp. 334-40, although his reference to politicians of the ‘middle classes’ is misleading.

55 M. H. Hansen, Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1991), 300-4, helpfully summarizes the evidence, but emphasizes a slightly different judgement. © (n. 20), 95-103 and passim. 57 R,. Thomsen, Eisphora (Copenhagen, 1964), 226-42, for the attested eisphorai, but not their procedure. 58 Hansen (n. 55), 315-16, for an important reckoning: Demades, ap. Plut. Mor. 101 1b (the ‘glue’).

59 Xen. Poroi I. I. 6° A. W. Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City (London, 1981), 2228.

, ®t Aeschin. II. 147.

144 Robin Lane Fox : Ctesiphon, he begins a speech with the same gambit, proof that like Demosthenes, he must have worked with a stock of shorter, fragmentary |

‘prefaces’, although none of his happens to survive.° | ‘There are agreed to be three constitutions in all the world: tyranny, |

oligarchy and democracy ...’°? Later sources credited Aeschines with Plato | as his teacher, but here the scholiast remarks that Aeschines cannot have drawn the idea from Plato, as Plato would never have limited the world’s constitutions to three.®* ‘Tyrannies and oligarchies are administered by the whim of their leaders, democratic cities by established laws. ... Laws preserve

the persons and the constitution of democratic subjects: suspicion, apistia, and armed guards preserve oligarchies ...'

In 345 Aeschines presents his remarks on the ‘three constitutions’ as well known, ‘heard previously from others’ and familiar. Perhaps he exaggerates |

to lull the audience, because both parts of this stock passage are highly | tendentious. Try telling the point about lawless oligarchies to Cicero, one | feels,°> or to Timoleon’s restored contemporaries in Corinth, to the Arcadian :

League, or to Hermias and his enlightened companions in Atarneus. The : democratic praise concerns us more and, as Aeschines states, its substance | was hardly new. Among his contemporaries, it survives for us first in Demosthenes 24:°° ‘let each consider to himself what, then, is it which distinguishes law from oligarchy ... he would find this, in truth, is the difference which lies most to hand’, that in an oligarchy past enactments can be undone and anyone can prescribe ‘whatever he pleases’ for the future, whereas ‘the laws’ (in democracies only) tell us ‘what must happen’,

having been passed with the conviction that they will benefit their users. ‘Laws’, here, mean democracy, and the passage anticipates what Aeschines, nearly ten years later, presents as a platitude. Perhaps Aeschines picked up : this rhetoric in the 350s when the two orators may both have stood close :

to Eubulus’ group: perhaps it has an even wider currency, now lost to us. | Its implications have attracted recent scholarship, but we must be careful | not to over-interpret. If the laws preserve the persons of democrats, from :

whom do they preserve them? Recently M. H. Hansen has rightly emphasized the muted presence of a strand of ‘negative freedom’ in occasional statements from Athenian democrats: ‘freedom from’, not freedom to’, in Isaiah Berlin's classic formulation.®” In his view, these passages of Aeschines can be cited

in support. However, Aeschines’ point is not that the laws ‘save’ citizens’

°2 Démosthene, Prologues, ed. R. Clavaud (Paris, 1974). | ®3 Aeschin. I. 4: on apistia preserving the plethos against tyranny, contrast Dem. VI. 24-5. |

4 Scholia in Aeschinem, ed. M. R. Dilts (Teubner, 1992), pp. I 3-14, para. 16A. | ®5 P, A. Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic (Oxford, 1988), 317-20, on the similarity, not contrast, between Cicero and Attic orators on this point. °° Dem. XXIV. 75-6: cf., later, Dem. XXV 20-1. °7 Hansen (n. 55), 74-8, esp. 78 n. 235. |

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 145 rights or freedom from their own magistrates. In context, he is aiming at Timarchus: the laws ‘save you from those who speak or live contrary to the law’, from immoral, loose-living rhetors, therefore, like the one whom my speech will attack. We are far from a liberal ‘theory of law’. Are we, however, being told what democracy is ‘really’ about? To Sealey, Aeschines’ words are evidence for the very priorities which he has attempted to rescue from historians of political conflict and systematic change. In his clear, but usefully misguided, study, he has fastened on Aeschines’ statement as a proof-text for the thesis brought home to him (he tells us) by a summer spent in the historic setting of a German township, a Rechtstadt through the

ages.°° In 1982 he had already proposed that ‘the Athenians achieved something more valuable and fundamental than democracy: they achieved the rule of Law’.°? More recently he concluded, ‘if a slogan is needed, Athens was a republic, not a democracy’.”° The ‘rule of Law’, we must remember,

had not been an Athenian monopoly or innovation: to find it, we can look back to the seventh century Bc and then observe it in poleis from Massilia to Miletus. In 345 and 330 Aeschines was not providing the proof-text for Sealey’s argument. When he confined his rule by law to democracies he was not being honest nor was he reducing democracy to ‘something more fundamental’. Who makes the law, who applies it and to whom are questions

which Aeschines does not even address. They are questions for which the nature of the constitution, democracy or not, is ‘more fundamental’ for political justice than the mere acceptance that law should rule the state. In his opening gambit, Aeschines certainly does not reduce Attic democracy to an Attic ‘republic’; does he, however, reveal a widely-held view about ‘sovereignty’? This issue has been put at the centre of our democratic studies, first by the important studies by M. H. Hansen and then by the recent tussles round the Maastricht treaty throughout Europe. Aeschines’ words, Hansen believes, are relevant to the question of who is sovereign in

Athens: people, laws, or courts? ‘If we could travel back to the age of Demosthenes and ask the ordinary Athenian the question, ‘“Who is kyrios in Athens?’’, all the sources indicate that the immediate reply would be “‘the laws’’.’”* ‘All the sources’, as cited, are passages in the speeches of orators to a jury in court. There are two questions here: do Aeschines’ words concern ‘sovereignty’ and can we generalize from them? His language is not very strong: democ8 R. Sealey, The Athenian Republic (Univ. Park, Pa., 1987): helpfully reviewed by M. H. Hansen, Gnomon, 61 (1989), 744-6. °9 Td., ‘On the Athenian Concept of Law’, CJ] 77 (1981-2), 289-302, at 302. 7° Sealey (n. 68), 146. 7’ Hansen (n. 55), 303 with n. 89; M. H. Hansen, ‘Political Powers of the People’s Court’, in O. Murray and S. R. F. Price (eds.), The Greek City (Oxford, 1990), 240 n. 117, cites more oratorical texts for the same answer.

146 Robin Lane Fox racies ‘are managed’ (dioikountai) ‘by laws’, not by the whims of individuals.

The theoretical issue of sovereignty (kyros, kyrios, and so forth) is not evident. How many people in Athens shared Aeschines’ view (let alone Hansen’s)?

So much has recently been written on Attic democracy, trying to recover

the general views of Athenians themselves, yet a constant caution is in place: are we producing handbooks by being too literal, by isolating what one source alleges in a particular context and treating it, not as theory, but as ideology? Definition is important here,’” and I would define ideology as :

the beliefs which a group holds, the ideals, aims, and values which it ! professes with a wider scope than selfish desires. Two aspects are central to

this definition: ideology must be consciously held and expressed (in the French tradition, I reserve the word mentalité for inarticulate attitudes and outlooks, evinced in a custom or a way of behaving as much as in words). Ideology must also be shared by a group, not projected by one speaker or author on to an audience who do not profess it too. One-sided statements shade into propaganda, aiming to exclude alternatives and (however briefly)

to pass muster with others whose ideology they are not. | By repetition and success, propaganda can of course become or create ideology: none the less, the terms have different fields. Our new chapters on ‘democratic ideology’ risk mistaking propaganda in a lawcourt for ideology:

the most explicit statements about the saving role of the laws survive in

speeches in the lawcourts where their orators thought them to be relevant , and effective gambits.’* Most of them occur in difficult cases where the

illegality of a proposal by an orator is the point at issue: they serve to ‘remind’ the jury why the case before them is not trivial. In Aeschines I, praises of democracy and law preface a preposterous case based on a law which, at best, was usually left dormant. Aeschines claims that they had been ‘heard before from others’, but such claims are suspect: were they heard in the Assembly? We have only some fifteen speeches to the Assembly in our evidence, all in the Demosthenic corpus, all speeches as written, not

necessarily as delivered: we have Thucydides’ version of a few more and

Aristophanes’ invention of others in comedy. In none of them is the ‘sovereignty of the laws’ emphasized, although Thucydides’ Cleon is given

space for a tendentious statement about the value of unchanging laws.” 72 M. Voville, Idéologies et mentalités (Paris, 198 3) for the definitions and ways of imposing them: useful survey by Patrice Higonnet, Times Literary Supplement (1983), 1141.

73 Of Hansen’s texts, (n. 71), 240 n. 117, many are irrelevant, given the restricted meaning of kyrios (his n. 116): Dem XXII. 46 (the laws must prevail over wrongdoers): X XIII. 73 (laws are just); XXIII. 118 (‘laws are still in force’, for juries): XX V. 20 (laws ‘maintain’ the constitution). Life must be ‘governed’ by laws (Hyp. III. 5), but this platitude is not referring to issues of their ‘sovereignty’ over assemblies and decrees.

“4 Thuc. 3. 37. 3, with S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, i (Oxford, 1991), 423-4.

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 147 Despite this silence should we deduce an abiding concern for ‘sovereignty’

from Athenian practice? After the Peloponnesian War, Athenians were particularly careful about the procedures for introducing new laws and for not conflicting with existing laws, but there is no need to see these concerns as propelled by burning questions of ‘sovereignty’.”> The two recent oligarchic

revolutions had simply shown the dangers in allowing laws to be changed

or suspended too simply. From this experience, not from a concern for sovereignty, the new ideas on nomothesia emerged. Neither the ‘Attic republic’ nor the ‘sovereignty of law’ is deducible from Aeschines’ opening gambit. Outside a lawcourt, indeed, would such a gambit occur to ordinary Athenians, let alone be their shared ideology? There are

views which an orator can put to his jury, believing that they would like to hold them, even though they had never thought of them before: we need only consider Cicero’s ‘accepted wisdom’ about poetry in the Pro Archia.”° There are generalizations which are worth trying on in context, although they bear no relation to reality: we need only consider Cicero on ‘optimates’ as opposed to ‘populares’.’” Generalizations which ‘you all know’ or ‘are often repeated’ are no more reliable than any other. Orators guide and pick their ground: in my view Aeschines’ gambit tells us neither what was true nor what Athenians held as an ideology, let alone anything about sovereignty. Oligarchies, too, were ‘managed’ by laws: Athenians’ answer to Hansen’s questions, ‘who is kyrios?’, would be ‘the demos of the Athenians’. A look at Aeschines’ own citations of laws may put the democracy’s ‘rule

of law’ in context. I pass over his use and citation of laws concerning homosexual practice because his distortions here have been amply discussed by others: I concentrate on two laws which concern democratic procedure and have found their way into current handbooks: a law on age and another

on ‘positive vetting’. In speech I, he quotes what ‘the lawgiver’ specifies about the conduct of public business.”* First, he quotes the laws about eukosmia: public assemblies are to begin with religious rituals and a particular sequence of business. Then, the herald asks: ‘Who wishes to speak of those

over 50?’ Only then are the others invited. The implication is that this rule is old and venerable and it is not explicitly said to have lapsed.

At one point we can check Aeschines’ words here: the sequence of business (sacred matters, heralds, ambassadors, profane matters) is described 7> P.J. Rhodes, ‘Nomothesia in Fourth Century Athens’, CQ 35 (1985), 55-60: I disagree with the emphasis on ‘sovereignty’ in Hansen (n. 71), 215-44, at 239-44. 7© Cicero, Pro Archia 17-22. 77 Cicero, Pro Sestio 96.

78 Aeschin. I. 22-3: this privilege is not discussed by M. I Finley, ‘The Elderly in Classical Antiquity’, Greece & Rome, 28 (1981), 156-71, a general overview of the subject. G. T. Griffith, ‘Isegoria in the Assembly at Athens’, in E. Badian (ed.), Ancient Society And Institutions (Oxford, 1966), 115, discusses possible historicity, esp. pp. 119-20.

148 Robin Lane Fox in the same words in the Aristotelian Ath. Pol.’? Evidently, both authors , draw on the same source. What, then, about the law on age? Ath. Pol. does not mention it, but fifteen years later, in speech III, Aeschines returns to laws of Solon about the eukosmia of rhetors. In the past, the oldest would speak first, with dignity, but nowadays ‘the finest and steadiest proclamation :

of those in the city has fallen silent; who wishes to speak of those over | 50?’°° The context, here, is explicitly that these laws have lapsed and that their lapse is regrettable. We hear nowhere else of any such law and, as Aeschines says, it is not |

to be found in recent democratic practice. Twice, we meet the over-fifties in | Athenian evidence as specified envoys: once for Pericles’ Congress Decree and once for the embassy to Perdiccas in 430.°* Those who believe (as I do

not) that the Congress Decree is a fiction of the years between 360 and 330 | might point to its ‘over-fifties’ clause as evidence that somebody else, in | Aeschines’ active lifetime, shared his claim that ‘senior citizens’ had been | privileged in the past.*? However, in practice no such general rule applied ,

to all ambassadors: Demosthenes’ presence in 346 refutes the notion, and : hence over-fifties had to be specified for an embassy when wanted. Possibly | the same age limit applied to the ephetae and certainly it applied to trierarchs : in our text of the Themistocles Decree,*? another text with a disputed fourth- | century history involving Aeschines’ own citation. For Assembly speakers,

however, there is no sign of it.** Nicias spoke first, not Alcibiades, in , Thucydides’ account of the Sicilian debate, but not necessarily for this procedural reason. In a year which I would date as 349, Demosthenes states ,

that he is speaking first in the Assembly, although he cannot have been over 35.°> When news arrived that Philip had reached Elateia in 339/8, Demosthenes does not so much as hint that one of the over-fifties might , have been asked to speak first, in his memorable account of the Assembly.*° | The law, then, did not apply: Aeschines was correct thus far but had it ever existed? The correspondence between words in the preceding passage 79 Aristot. Ath. Pol. 43. 6.

8° Aeschin. III. 2-4. 5st Plut. Per. 17. 2; 1G i} 67, lines 17 ff.

52 A.B. Bosworth, ‘The Congress Decree: Another Hypothesis’, Historia, 20 (1971), 600-16. ®3 Suda s.v. Ephetai; ML 23. 22 (Fornara 55); P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. (Oxford, 1981), 498 and 647. On Plut. Nicias 15. 2 and Sophocles’ invitation to speak first as the senior strategos, H. D. Westlake, Essays on the Greek Historians and Greek History (Manchester, 1969), 145-56, and M. H. Jameson, ‘Seniority in the Strategia’, TAPA 86 (1955),

63-87, at 70. 4 In Homeric Ithaca (Homer, Od. 2. 15—16) and Phaeacia (Od. 7. 199) the oldest (and wisest) does speak first; on the ideal of gerontocracy (a different notion, despite A. Dalby, JHS 112 (1992), 20) cf. Plato, Republic 412 and Laws 634 d-e, 660 d, 680 d-e, 690 a. 85 Dem. IV. I. © Dem. XVIII. 170-3.

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 149 and the Ath. Pol. suggests that both sources were quoting ultimately from the text of a law. Was it really Solon’s? In 594, Solon is unlikely to have bothered about rules of precedence for addressing the Assembly: nothing else suggests he did, and the very role of Assembly debate from 594 to 508 is uncertain, and probably minimal. Was Aeschines’ reference to it a venial error, based on some later ‘Solonian’ text, or analogies in the Themistocles or Congress Decrees? Or was it, perhaps, his own wishful thinking? In 345, he tells us, he was already grey-haired and he implies his own seniority during the speech; did it suit his pose, both then and in 330, to emphasize how the old (like himself) should have precedence? Either way, the law’s suspension, or non-application, conflicts with the implication of his praises of democracy.” In the one constitution which ‘obeys established law’, some of the ‘established’ laws lapsed, and no democrat, not even an elderly one, is known to have objected before 345. As for ‘positive vetting’ it confronts us in Speech I. Aeschines purports to quote again from the lawgiver: ‘Scrutiny of public speakers’. Those who abuse a parent, prostitute themselves, or dodge military service or throw always their shield in battle are liable to penalties if they ‘speak among the demos’ .*® They are subjected to dokimasia if any Athenian wishes to challenge

them: the case is heard in a lawcourt and ‘it is in accordance with this law that I come before you now’, against Timarchus, an acknowledged homosexual.*?

Like modern Britons or Americans, Athenians did not separate the private lives of politically active citizens from their public role. However, once again,

this law is most obscure to us, apart from Aeschines’ quotations: can we

trust him? The nub of it is clearly marked in his speech, avoiding the uncertainties of other ancient laws which are cited in texts without quotation-marks.?° There may even be traces of it in other sources, although we need to be careful. Under rhetorike graphe Harpocration refers this phrase

to Isaeus’ speech against Eucleides: the speech is lost to us, but even Harpocration is uncertain what it meant, remarking that suits against rhetors were brought under various laws.?’ We must not mistake one of these graphai for Aeschines’ ‘vetting’. The evidence for specific dokimasia is as follows: Lycurgus is known to have referred to a dokimasia rhetoron and

although his speech was later than Aeschines’, his references to other dokimasiai seem to be accurate.?* In the same speech he mentioned a °7 Cf. Thuc.’s Cleon at Thuc. 3. 37, contrasting ‘immovable’ laws (akinetoi) with ‘akuroi’.

88 Aeschin. I. 28-32. °9 Aeschin. I. 32. »° gyoi marks the quotation in I. 28-30; I. 32. For the problem of ‘separating quotation from comment’, K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (London, 1978), 25. 9" Harpocration, s.v. rhetorike graphe. »* Lycurgus, ap. Harpocration s.v. dokimastheis.

|

150 Robin Lane Fox : dokimasia of horses, which seemed highly suspicious to some of his editors : until the finds of Attic cavalry-documents proved him right.?? In speech X !

in the 390s, Lysias tells us that Lysitheus had prosecuted the defendant

Theomnestus on a previous occasion for ‘speaking before the public when , he had thrown his weapons away, and it was illegal for him to speak.?* The :

manuscripts all read e’onyyeAXe here for Lysitheus’ prosecution, suggesting | a full eisangelia before the demos, but Gernet proposed emendation to étyyyeAXe, conforming to Aeschines’ quotation of the law at I. 32.” If Gernet |

is right, Lysitheus had brought a suit in a lawcourt against a defendant | who had illegally spoken in the Assembly because he had previously | abandoned his armour in battle. The case then conforms to Aeschines’ |

notions of a dokimasia rhetoron.% The strongest argument for a law’s existence is that the jury disenfranchized Aeschines’ opponent, and two years later not even Demosthenes | accused him of inventing a law. Indeed, according to the author of Demos- | thenes XXVI, the penalty for alleging a non-existent law was death.?’ The

simplest course is to support Aeschines by the Lycurgus fragment (and : possibly by emending Lysias) and accept that such a process existed, but : was very rarely used. However, the likelihood that Aeschines is quoting the |

exact words of an original law from Solon the lawgiver is infinitesimal, even | for those who accept that Solon’s original axones survived, at least in part, | into the 340s.°° Would Solon himself have legislated about rhetors in 594, ! a period when speeches to an Assembly were not politically central? It seems :

most unlikely: the law, on a generous view, is ‘Solonian’, not Solon’s, and : appears to have been seldom applied. Timarchus, after all, had been a public

figure for years without trouble until Aeschines raised the old issue of

‘vetting’: like the law for the over-fifties, it was a law which was dormant, almost defunct. Once again, it raises questions about the ‘rule of established

law’ and the supposed ‘immobility of law’ which Aeschines’ praise of democracy had skirted round. What about laws which seemed obsolete or

laws ascribed to lawgivers who never actually gave them? ! Aeschines’ speech against Timarchus is notoriously misleading on the |

93 J. H. Kroll, ‘An Archive of the Athenian Cavalry’, Hesperia, 46 (1977), 83-146. 4 Lysias, X. I. 95 Lysias: Discours, i, ed. L. Gernet and M. Bizos (Paris, Budé, 1955), 144 n. 1. Contrast Greek Orators, i, ed. M. Edwards and S. Usher (Warminster, 1985), 230-31. 9° Carl Newell-Jackson, ‘The Decree-Seller in the Birds and the Professional Politicians at Athens’, HSCP 30 (1919), 89-102, esp. 100-2: the accusations against rhetors in Comedy often coincide with those in Aeschines’ ‘dokimasia’.

97 [Dem.] 26. 24. :

98 A. Andrewes, in D. W. Bradeen and M. F. MacGregor (eds.), Phoros: Tribute to Benjamin Dean : Meritt (New York, 1974). 1974), 21-8; for the problem of revision, N. Robertson, ‘The Laws of : Athens, 410-399 Bc’, JHS 110 (1990), 43-75, although his own theory is debatable; for orators’ allusions, Hansen (n. 45), 60.

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy I51 implications of the sexual law which he quotes:%? I retain the suspicion that he is misleading, too, on the ‘scrutiny of rhetors’. Dokimasia is best known to us as a process undergone before entering office or public responsibility:*°° in this sense, speakers could not be ‘vetted’ in advance. In theory, anyone

might suddenly speak at any time. At the very least, ‘dokimasia’ is being

used here in an extended sense, as later by Lycurgus. What about the explicit restriction to rhetors? Orators were well able to imply that a particular process did not apply to ‘ordinary’ Athenians, but only to rhetors:

we find Hypereides applying this argument to aspects of the law of eisangelia.*°’ We can also dispute the range of the word ‘rhetor’, or wonder, indeed, if a law really did refer to ‘rhetors’ at all. Aeschines also quotes a ‘graphe hetaireseos’ against any Athenian who prostitutes himself and speaks publicly or holds public office.*°? Procedures could overlap, but was a specific ‘dokimasia rhetoron’ really needed too to ‘vet’ speakers’ sexual conduct? Or

did the presumption spread that some ‘Solonian’ law prescribed such a dokimasia because orators tried to invoke it before juries? Is Aeschines dressing up a specific ‘graphe hetaireseos’ (on which Timarchus was convicted) as a ‘dokimasia rhetoron’ which sounded more in the public interest? However far we take these doubts, we can see flaws in unqualified praises

of democracy as rule by ‘established’ laws: why, then, had a law on the over-fifties lapsed in the democracy and how did a law on ‘scrutiny of rhetors’ become all but obsolete until Aeschines revived it? On a generous view, he did have a ‘Solonian’ text of both, but he would not need to have dredged up the evidence from his years of service in the archives. Other orators were just as versed in ‘Solonian’ anachronisms, without archival training.*°?

If Aeschines’ use of law is questionable, is he none the less vigilant about

the health of the democratic constitution? In the published speeches, he does indeed attack Demosthenes for being oligarchic, whereas Demosthenes

claims that Aeschines is unpatriotic, like the traitors whom he lists and denounces in other Greek cities. Both speakers are democrats, by action and profession, but this difference of attack has suggested a difference of priorities.

In 1974 Hansen inferred that Demosthenes was far more interested in foreign policy than in constitutional questions, while Aeschines was more 9 (n. 90), 20-39: D. J. Cohen, ‘Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 5-6; C. Hindley, ‘Law, Society and Homosexuality in Classical Athens’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 167, 175-7.

°° Hansen (n. 55), 218-20. '°! Hypereid. III. 4, 8-9, 27-30; M. H. Hansen, Eisangelia: The Sovereignty of the People’s Court in Athens (Odense, 1975), 12-13; P. J. Rhodes, JHS 99 (1979), 107-8. '°2' Aeschin. I. 20-1. Known dokimasiai did not end in penalties, merely in rejection of the candidate: in Speech I, A. does not dwell on this fact. '°3 Rosalind Thomas, above pp. 119-33, for ‘Solonian’ citation.

152 Robin Lane Fox concerned with democratic proprieties.*°* This contrast, I believe, is helpfully

misplaced. It is not just that Demosthenes is intricately aware of constitutional detail and concerned to mobilize it, both in speeches and in action, from the proposals for new symmories to the use of the Areopagus, from speeches XIII and XIV to the Fourth Philippic.‘'® It is that Aeschines

too, though a self-made man, does not exploit the issue of democratic propriety in any particular depth.

At the start of Against Ctesiphon, he begins with one of those reproachful , laments about public procedure of which Demosthenes, too, is well capable.’ Old Solonian laws (he tells us) about orderly assemblies are being ignored; . the over-fifties do not speak first; ‘proedroi’ arise by prearranged trickery, not

by the lot; those who do hold the job by lot are impeached whenever they

announce the results of a show of hands correctly; the legality of trials is | being destroyed; decrees are being decided by passion. How seriously should : we take this lament? Recently, Hansen has invited us to catch positive ! implications behind its rhetoric: Aeschines, he suggests, is contrasting the

way ..°” | Assembly unfavourably with the courts. ‘E contrario’, Aeschines is implying |

preference for the lawcourts’ procedure, for decisions by ballot, not by a | show of hands; he is urging orderliness and ‘we must infer e contrario that | debates in the dikasteria were believed to be conducted in a more orderly :

If Hansen is right, Aeschines would be expressing here a real constitutional |

preference with implications for democratic stability. However, I cannot find | such a contrast between the courts and assembly in his remarks. Athenians, |

especially Athenian jurors, know their ‘dikastic thorubos’’®® even better than we do and would hardly infer that thorubos in the courts was preferable 3

to thorubos in assemblies. Aeschines’ contrast is not, I think, Hansen’s. He | is explicitly opposing the present in the Assembly to the past in the Assembly. | He is not opposing the present in the Assembly by implication to the present | in the courts. |

At whatever rhetorical level, there is no realistic programme for ‘new ! democracy’ here. As for vigilance over democracy’s health, in 330Bc, he | does contrast the demotikos and the oligarchikos in Against Ctesiphon, but the |

contrast is tendentious and posed in very general terms.’°? It has none of | |

74 Hansen (n. 101), 57-8.

°5 Dem. II. 29-30; III. 10-11; IV. 35-6; X. 36-45; XIII. 1-3 and pass. XIV. 14-28; R.

full constitutional 106ofAeschin. III.detail. 2-4. |, Sealey, Essays in Greek Politics (New York, 1967), 43-6. Dem.’s forensic speeches are, of course,

107 Hansen (n. 71), 215-44, at 225.

'08 V. A. Bers, ‘Dikastic Thorubos’, in P. A. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (eds.), Crux: Studies in | Greek History (London and Exeter, 1985), I~16. | *°9 Aeschin. III. 169-70. I

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 153 the detail or wit of Theophrastus’ Character of an oligarchikos, a sketch best

- dated, I would argue, to this same period, in the Athens of Alexander's lifetime. **°

As for democratic proprieties, we know that in the later 340s Demosthenes

contrived a trial of Antiphon before the Assembly on a flimsy charge of attempting to burn down the dockyards in Philip’s interest.*** Two hearings were necessary and the second was achieved only by resort to the Areopagus, who duly returned the case for public trial. In this same period, we find the Areopagus intervening to quash Aeschines’ appointment as Athenian envoy

to Delos, and again Demosthenes’ hand should be seen in the matter.*** This deliberate involvement of the Areopagus in political detail is a point where modern constitutionalists do indeed wonder if Demosthenes was treading on shaky ground. In recent studies, it has been suggested that a law of the early 340s had opened up the role of the Areopagus and that the return of Antiphon’s case to the assembly for trial rested on the procedure of apophasis.‘'? Even so, we are told that Aeschines opposed the referral to the Areopagus as an ‘abuse’ in a speech before the Assembly. Like Aeschines’

other assembly-speeches, it has not survived, but it is significant that we know about it only from Demosthenes.*’* Despite moderns’ concern for the proprieties, the use of the Areopagus and the Antiphon affair are not issues which Aeschines bothers to revive in his denunciation of Demosthenes in

330 as the oligarchikos who is ‘shredding’ the constitution.**? In 330 Aeschines says nothing on this promising topic. Instead, we have to turn to Deinarchus’ Against Demosthenes in 324 when the use of the Areopagus was once more an issue.**®

In what we can now read of Aeschines, the emphasis is elsewhere, on the (supposed) disorderliness of assemblies (but the Solonian ideal was an invention); the citing of generals to win acquittals in court (but he himself cited Phocion and Nausicles in his own cause in 343); the centralizing of powers in Demosthenes’ hands in the 3 30s (yet Aeschines’ political associates had pioneered the Theoric Commissioners, from whom developed the single Commissioners, the first Bursars of the Attic democracy).**” The proposals

in the 330s to limit the Bursar’s term to not more than five years and ™'° Theophrast. Char. 26: I shall discuss the dating elsewhere. "™* Dem. XVIII. 132.

2 Dem. XVIII. 134. E. M. Carawan, ‘Apophasis and Eisangelia: The Role of the Areopagus .. .’ GBRS 26 (1985), 115-40, at 124 ff.; Hansen (n. 55), 291-5. 't3 R. Sealey, Demosthenes and his Time (Oxford, 1993) 185-7.

"4 Dem. XVIII. 134. "5 Aeschin. III. 207. © Dein. I. 62-3. "7 Aeschin. III. 4: III. 7 with II. 184; III. 26, which exaggerates Dem.'s concentration of ‘offices’ in his own hand.

154 Robin Lane Fox (possibly) to share it with a board was Hegemon’s not (so far as we hear) : Aeschines’, neither directly nor indirectly.**®

These issues concern our modern studies of Attic democracy, but they are not at the centre of this democratic watchdog’s barking; on most of them, he himself is inconsistent. We would mistake him, then, if we were to see him as the vigilant constitutionalist. Our evidence is the evidence of a rhetor through and through, flexible whenever it suits and aiming to persuade, not to safeguard. In Athens, unlike Rome, the ‘self-made man’ who succeeded in politics succeeded above all as a speaker to the Assembly. , He did not enter a Senate or ‘House of Parliament’ whose traditions moulded | him and were important to his self-image and sense of success. Both Aeschines and Demosthenes lived through a turning point in their

city’s history which would lead, in 322, to the abolition of democracy: if we read them with hindsight, do their speeches seem aware of the course which |

events might take? We often write as if democracy ended in Athens in 322: a long and distinctive chapter did end then, but to borrow a metaphor from | D. M. Lewis in another context, what followed was more an ‘interruption |

to a complex television play’ than a final conclusion.**? By 307, the :

democratic show was back on the air, with a different cast and slightly : different rules, though not, I would argue, such modified rules as Ferguson’s influential study first suggested.**°

The setting, however, was different. In the age of Hellenistic kings, as

much as in our own, the most widely approved constitution was democracy. , As A. H. M. Jones observed in The Greek City, civic inscriptions equate freedom | with democracy, as Alexander’s liberation of Ionia had exemplified.‘*’ It

is, therefore, particularly interesting that the equation is already visible in Demosthenes’ speeches. Hansen has suggested that the freedom which | concerns Demosthenes against Philip is freedom in the limited sense of autonomy. But explicitly in On the Chersonese (early in 3428c) and in the Fourth Philippic (whose authenticity I accept), Demosthenes openly characterizes Philip as the danger to democracy, and Athenian democracy | as his acknowledged enemy.*** Already, for Demosthenes, the two terms, , ‘freedom’ (eleutheria) and ‘democracy’, are converging. On the broader |

|

8 Plut. Mor. 841c, on a suggestion by D. M. Lewis, discussed and developed by G, L. Cawkwell, | ‘Eubulus’, JHS 83 (1963), 54—-5, to which add R. Develin, ‘From Panathenaia to Panathenaia’,

ZPE 57 (1984), 133-8; Rhodes (n. 83) 235. | ™*9 Sparta and Persia (Leiden, 1977), 111, on the ending of Thucydides 8. |

needs detailed revision. | *2° W. S. Ferguson, Hellenistic Athens (London, 1911), 95-165, and Appendix II, all of which |

‘21 A.H.M. Jones, The Greek City (Oxford, 1940), 157-8 with 1o1—2; Arrian, Anab. I. 18. 1-2. :

2 Dem. VIII. 41-2 and X. 11, against (n. 101), 58 with n. 32.

Aeschines and Athenian Democracy 155 Hellenic canvas of Philippic III, the ideal of freedom implies the democracy which Philippic IV spells out.**?

In the near future, the convergence became an equation, but only under the control of Demosthenes’ enemy: the rule of kings. Philip and Alexander did not, in fact, put down Athens’ democracy, as Demosthenes might seem

to predict. Yet their power did change its context and here, famously, Aeschines does strike the first, vigilant note which survives for us.**4 ‘Does

it not seem awful to you if the Council chamber and the Demos are being overlooked and letters and embassies come to private houses, not from any ordinary men, but from the foremost in Asia and Europe?’ The recipients

‘read and compare their letters between one another ... some of them encourage you to look into their faces as ‘guardians of democracy’ ... others demand rewards as saviours of the state’. Under the democracy, embassies had always availed themselves of private contacts: foreign ambassadors had generally lodged in an Athenian’s private house, often that of their proxenos.*”? Aeschines’ point is that missions and letters are now exclusively private, though paraded by individuals, and the comment is significant. In the 330s and 320s, we already have evidence of royal letters to individuals at Athens; significantly, letters from Antipater are made the hallmark of a Boastful Man in Theophrastus’ contemporary character-sketch.’?® ‘Free democracy’ in the age of kings required ‘friends’ of an outside power in the cities, members of a private epistolary network which we miss if we write histories of ‘city and sovereign’ only from the letters which cities received and inscribed publicly. In 345 Aeschines both delivered and published comments about Philip and his good intentions which damn his political judgement.'?” Through and through a rhetor, he has left us three court speeches which are neither simple sources of a general ideology nor especially vigilant of democratic

detail. Yet, in this passing comment, made in 330, he does touch on something new and important which the aftermath of Philip brought to democratic history. Demosthenes, of course, would insist that here, too, Aeschines is inconsistent: was not Aeschines himself bribed by private contact, the first beneficiary of the change he deplores?*”®

"*3 W. Jaeger, Demosthenes (Cambridge, 1938), 172-3 with notes 43-4. ‘*4 Aeschin. III. 250. **5 Xen. Hell. 5. 4. 22 with F. Adcock and D. J. Mosley, Diplomacy in Ancient Greece (London, 1975), 161. '2© Chares, ap. Plut., Phocion 17; Aeschin. III. 164; Plut. Alex. 39. 3, Demosth. 31. 3; Phocion 18; Hypereid. Pro Eux. 3. 23; Theophrast. Char. 27. 3. Letters also from individual Athenians to kings: Aeschin. III. 162; Plut. Phocion 30. 6, Dem. 20. 5, 23. I. 27 Aeschin. I. 169. 128 Dem. XIX. 175-6.

9 Writing, Reading, and Democracy CHARLES W. HEDRICK, JR.”

There is no practice so characteristic of the ancient Athenian democracy as

writing. The Athenians of the fifth and fourth centuries nc documented their political habits, activities, and accomplishments almost obsessively. Lists of magistrates, accounts of expenses, resumés of decisions, and many other kinds of political texts were recorded. These texts were written in a variety of media, including perishable materials such as wood and papyrus, as well as on more enduring fabrics, such as ceramic, stone, or metal. Most notably, certain texts were erected in the public space of the city, where all could see them. The number of fifth- and fourth-century Athenian inscriptions which have been preserved to modern times is unparalleled by any other classical Greek state: the Athenian production of public writing differs from others’ by orders of magnitude.’ ' I feel rather honoured myself to contribute a paper in honour of David Lewis. In the language of Athenian inscriptions, his work has been an éddptAdov, a standard of excellence, and an incentive for myself and for others who work in Attic epigraphy. I hope that he will receive this paper as a token of esteem and admiration. A short outline of some of this paper’s arguments has been published as ‘Writing and the Athenian Democracy’, in J. Ober and C. Hedrick (eds.), The Birth of Democracy: An Exhibition Celebrating the 2500th Anniversary of Democracy at the National Archives, Washington D.C. (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 7-II, repr. as ‘Literacy and Democracy’, in Classical Outlook, 70 (1993), 131-3, and (with some unintended alterations) in Humanities, 14. 2 (1993), 24-7. I would like to take this opportunity to thank some of my friends for discussing this paper with me, though they may prefer to be influential rather than cited: Adrienne Mayor, Josh Ober; at the Cornell epigraphy project, K. Clinton and J. Mansfield; and the two editors of this volume. I hope that all of these can see their comments reflected somewhere in this paper. * There are many introductions to Greek epigraphy: the best, I think, is by M. Guarducci Epigrafia greca i-iv (Rome, 1967-78). In English see A. G. Woodhead, The Study of Greek Inscriptions’ (Cambridge, 1981). In this article I restrict myself to those texts which were most accessible to the public, that is, to inscriptions. These inscriptions were obviously subvented by less durable, though doubtless extensive documents in a variety of media. Generally on record keeping in Greek antiquity see the complementary studies by A. Wilhelm, ‘Uber die 6offentliche Aufzeichung von Urkunden’, in Beitrdge zur griechischen Inschriftenkunde (Vienna, 1909), and G. Klaffenbach, Bemerkungen zum griechischen Urkundenwesen (Berlin, 1960). For more recent bibliography and accessible summary, R. Thomas, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1992), 132-44. Such ‘archival’ materials, however, were not made publicly

available in any systematic way until the end of the 5th cent.: see A. Boegehold, ‘The

158 Charles Hedrick The temptation to relate this practice of public writing to a political system, the Athenian democracy, has been irresistible. In most modern democratic states we understand public access to official information as an essential precondition of democracy. If decisions are ultimately to be made by the people, then the people must be informed in order to choose wisely, or at all. If the state monopolizes information, keeps it from its citizenry, the people will be effectively removed from taking any meaningful

part in the decision-making process. Without some source of news and information the people can only be the wards of the state, unenlightened and so unable to govern themselves, and the name democracy will be little more than an empty slogan.’ Since the eighteenth century, it has been commonplace to suppose that there should be some independent medium of information within the state, which (at least nominally) acts outside the limits of state control, and so is able to verify and guard the

public access to the activities of its government. This guardian is commonly called the ‘free press’, which, as its name implies, has traditionally been conceived as an agency of printed information. More recently, the rubric of the ‘free press’ has been extended to include a variety of electronic media which do not rely so much on writing, most obviously radio and television.* If a political order such as democracy is based to some extent on the ideal of an informed citizenry, and if writing is the vehicle used to inform that citizenry, then it seems obvious that the citizenry must be able to read. For

a government to furnish written texts to an illiterate populace might be construed as, at best, ineffectual; at worst, it might be seen as a cynical exploitation of a democratic ideal for less than democratic purposes. Conse-

quently it is to be demanded that any political order which claims the name ‘democracy’ will promote education, or at least minimally, literacy. Traditionally, in modern states such as America, the ideal of ‘the informed citizen’ has been a chief justification for the public subsidy of education. It

Establishment of the Central Archive at Athens’, AJA 76 (1972), 23-30. For unofficial forms of writing on a variety of materials, see E. Turner, Athenian Books in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries? (London, 1979); H. Immerwahr, Attic Script: A Survey (Oxford, 1990). 3 See e.g. R. Dahl, Democracy and its Critics (New Haven, Conn., 1989), 233, 338-40. J. Elspeth Stuckey, The Violence of Literacy (Portsmouth, NH, 1991), provides a rather different perspective. 4 For the idea of ‘the freedom of the press’, see e.g. A. Meiklejohn, Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (New York, 1948); for the early history of this idea in England and the USA and its relation to printing, see J. A. Smith, Printers and Press Freedom: The Ideology of Early American Journalism (Oxford, 1988), 17-56. For freedom of speech and the new electronic media, see J. Abramson, F. C. Arterton, and G. Orren. The Electronic Commonwealth: The Impact of New Media Technologies on Democratic Politics (New York, 1988).

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 159 is thought that by educating the populace, modern democracies produce citizens and so perpetuate themselves.° These ideals, so important in the formation of the ideology of the modern

democratic nation state, have had no obvious influence on the scholarly assessment of the political functions of writing in the ancient Athenian democracy. Much has been written in recent years about the place of writing in ancient Athens. There have been few explicit attempts, however, to relate the Athenian ideology of reading and writing to that of the political system,

the democracy. Doubtless the most famous and influential essay on the subject was written by Benjamin Meritt.° Some fifty years ago, in his Martin lectures on Attic epigraphy, he commented (rather casually and parenthetically) on the proliferation of public inscriptions in Attica from the

mid-fifth century sc. This development, he suggested, was to be linked specifically with the origins and elaboration of democratic practices in the Athenian state at this time: The principal reason for the abundance of such documents [that is, inscriptions] was the democratic form of government of the Athenian people. The business of govern-

ment was everyone’s business, and the publication of many details of all sorts of transactions shows a general desire to let everybody know the acts of government.

Although Meritt’s interpretation and arguments have served as the foundation for contemporary assessments of the political significance of public

inscriptions in the ancient Athenian democracy, they have never been critiqued in any detail. I do not have the space to make good this omission

here; I shall return to the subject elsewhere. Briefly, Meritt presumes a political function for inscriptions which is analogous to that of the ‘free press’ in the modern world. He supports his contention with three observations (all 5 In America at least, it would be impossible to overestimate the influence of the classic essay by John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, 1916). Dewey was most notoriously concerned to argue that educational institutions

could serve as a kind of laboratory, through which a democratic society could be promoted. For a summary of democratic thought on education, see Amy Gutman, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ, 1987). More recent arguments in America for government sponsorship of education have tended to focus more on the production of a capable work force than on the production of citizens—so, as Josh Ober points out to me, the official motto of Montana State University is ‘Education for Efficiency’.

© B. D. Meritt, Epigraphica Attica (Martin Classical Lectures 9, Cambridge, Mass., 1940). Meritt gives some four pages to the topic (89-93), in the context of his general discussion of ‘Lettering’ (88-106). Certainly his basic position—that the democratic function of inscriptions is to inform the populace—has been virtually universally accepted: see e.g. M. I. Finley, ‘Censura nell’ antichita’, Belfagor, 32 (1977), 605-22; D. Musti, ‘Democrazia e scrittura’, Scrittura e Civilta, 10 (1986), 21-48; M. Détienne, ‘L’espace de la publicité: ses opératures intellectuels dans la cité’, in Les savoirs de l’écriture en Gréce ancienne (Lille, 1988), 29-81; M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structures, Principles, Ideology

(Oxford, 1991), 311-12: Thomas (n. 2), 132, 144-50.

160 Charles Hedrick of which are more or less debatable): first, he claims that ‘the habit of writing’ in ancient Greece is characteristic of the democratic political order; second, that in Athens there is a correlation between the vicissitudes of the democracy and variations in the numbers of preserved inscriptions; third,

that Athenian inscriptions often include an unambiguous explanation of their democratic function—that is, a formula is appended to the text which states that it is erected ‘so that all (who desire) may know; (iva zavres [of BovAdpevor] efSHow) or, Much more rarely, ‘so that anyone who desires may see’ (oxomeiv T@ BovAopévw).

Meritt’s appeal to the ‘habit of writing’ as an index of democratic sentiment

is problematic. Many, perhaps most, of the Greek city states have left to posterity some public inscriptions, specifically, documents inscribed on stone and erected publicly. What sets Athens apart from other ancient Greek city states is not the simple, all too common fact of its erection of inscriptions, but the quantity of inscriptions it erected. Unparalleled numbers of inscriptions have been found in Athens. The meaning of the great size of this corpus of texts is not so simple as Meritt argues. A brutal enumeration of the number

of inscriptions which an ancient state has produced is a clumsy and inadequate gauge of the extent of popular government within that state. After all, many states have erected inscriptions in great quantities without being accused of cultivating democracy: witness the civilizations of the Near East and Egypt, Rome or, in the New World, the Maya.

Even so, there is something insistent and remarkable in the sheer proliferation of inscriptions in ancient Athens. The current version of Packard Humanities Institute disk 6 contains 22,803 Attic inscriptions.’ No other Greek city state even approaches this total.® The distinctiveness of Athens is even more apparent when we turn to the surviving inscriptions which date before the end of the fifth century Bc, now collected by David Lewis in the third edition of IG i. This corpus, when completed, will include approximately 1,500 inscriptions, most of these dating between the middle and end of the

fifth century. Again, no other ancient Greek state of the period produced

anything close to this number of inscriptions. It would be difficult to ” John Mansfield provided this count for me. He and Kevin Clinton caution, however, that this figure includes some duplications: IG texts that are re-edited in SEG and elsewhere. The

PHI 6 repertoire is also incomplete. Perhaps the single most useful ‘hard’ (i.e. printed) supplement to the inscriptions collected in the second edition of IG is SEG XXI (1965), which is devoted entirely to Attic inscriptions. ®> To my knowledge, no one has bothered, since the days of Boeckh, to make a count, city

by city, of known Greek inscriptions. My assertion here is based on nothing more than a casual, unsystematic perusal of the volumes of JG and the various larger local corpora (e.g. of Delos, Delphi, Ephesus, and Lindos). Compare further S. Stoddart and J. Whitley, ‘The Social Context of Literacy in Archaic Greece and Etruria’, Antiquity, 62 (1988), 761-72, for a welldocumented, quantitively based attempt to generalize about regional variations in the ability to use the alphabet during the archaic period.

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 161 exaggerate the distinctiveness of this bulk. In total, the corpus of inscriptions

of the Athenian city-state alone takes up more space in IG than entire regions of ancient Greece. Whether or not this production should be ascribed

to something like a ‘democratic ethic’, it would be difficult to deny that there appears to be some peculiar connection between the practice of erecting inscriptions and the city of Athens.

The most important and persuasive point of Meritt’s argument is the reference to the ‘formula of democratic disclosure’, that is, to the claim that

an inscription is erected ‘so that all who desire may know’. This phrase appears to be a precise and unambiguous illustration of this contention that democratic inscriptions were meant to inform the citizen body.’ In addition,

the phrase used to describe ‘the one who desires’, 6 BovAdpevos, is an unambiguous allusion to the attested ideals of the democracy. The conception of the citizen as a voluntary participant in the political activities of the state, as ‘the one who desires’, is one of the elementary underpinnings of democratic government in Classical Athens.*°

No one, I think, will deny the importance of reading and writing in the ideologies of modern democracies. For many modern scholars, the explicit

Athenian claim that certain public inscriptions were erected so that the inquiring citizen might ‘see’ or ‘know’ will seem familiar, its significance obvious. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude too quickly that ancient Athenian attitudes toward inscriptions and their political functions are fundamentally and generally the same as modern conceptions of the text. There are obvious formal differences between a text on stone and a

text on paper; the social conventions which govern the production and consumption of texts in the ancient world also differ from the practices which modern scholars often presume.” The publication of state documents provides only one half of the democratic

‘access to information’. If citizens are truly to be informed, then it is not sufficient for the state merely to make written texts available; the citizens must also be able to read these texts. In his discussion of public writing and the Athenian democracy, Meritt presumes the literacy of the Athenian public. Perhaps he believes that the mere existence of public texts implies a 9 Generally on the formulae and the sentiment they express, see W. Larfeld, Griechische Epigrafik (Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 1. 53, ii. 720; Meritt (n. 6), 90 and n. 6; Hansen (n. 6), 311-12. R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Ancient Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 51 and 61 (cf. however the dissent of Immerwahr in his review of Thomas

in AJP 113 (1992), 96-9). *° See e.g. Hansen (n. 6), chs. 11, ‘The Political Leaders’, and 13, ‘The Character of Athenian Democracy’.

‘* Again, I will return to this subject in another article. For the connotations of the inscription, see particularly the first chapter of Thomas (n. 9); for practices of reading in ancient Greece, J. Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece (Cornell, 1993).

162 Charles Hedrick reading public; perhaps he is simply unable to imagine that the Athenian democracy could have functioned without widespread literacy. In either

event, for him it goes without saying that each Athenian citizen could read , the texts which the state provided. If citizens could not read, then what kind of ‘public access to information’ did inscriptions provide? In the context of the argument about the relation of literacy to democracy,

it is important to define clearly what we mean by ‘literacy’. Elementary skills of reading and writing may be sufficient to allow an individual to function as an economic creature in modern society, but they do not provide the capacity to participate effectively or intelligently in politics. To inform oneself sufficiently to make intelligent political decisions, one must also be

able to take advantage of more complex written texts: say, the National Enquirer or the Daily Mirror.*?

Much has been written in recent years about the extent of literacy in ancient Athens, and in ancient Greece generally. Nevertheless, the subject has remained wildly controversial. I can do no more than sketch out my own position in the broadest and most general terms.** Specific evidence about reading in the Greek world is almost entirely anecdotal (as is, for that

matter, the literary evidence in general for social trends in the ancient world). Even so, attempts have been made to generalize about the levels of literacy of ancient society on the basis of these texts. Predictably, such efforts yield idiosyncratic and various results. So it is possible for some to conclude that literacy was ‘widespread’ in the ancient world,‘ while others (and they "* This point has been made by many in recent years. For a recent convenient survey see e.g. Thomas (n. 2), I-28. H. C. Youtie notably has examined the evidence for varying degrees of literacy in Greco-Roman Egypt in a series of articles: see particularly “Bpadéws ypadwv: Between Literacy and Illiteracy’, GRBS 12 (1971), 239-61. Again, it is useful to consider some of the recent work done on Mayan literacy: see S. Houston and D. Stuart, ‘On Mayan

Hieroglyphic Literacy’, Current Anthropology, 33 (1992), 588-92; note particularly their discussion of ‘recitation literacy’ (591). For consideration of various types of literacy in ancient Greece, S. Stoddart and J. Whitley, ‘The Social Context of Literacy in Archaic Greece’, Antiquity,

62 (1988), 761-72. On the relationship of various types of literacy to democracy, Amy Gutmann, Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ, 1987), 146-8, 273-5. 3 For discussion and a review of bibliography, I recommend especially W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Compare the comments of Thomas (n. 2). Of the older bibliography, I have found the following particularly useful and relevant: F. D. Harvey, ‘Literacy in the Athenian Democracy’, REG 79 (1966), 585-635; M. I. Finley (n. 6), 605-22 (an Italian translation, with expanded notes, of ‘Censorship of Antiquity’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 July 1977); P. Cartledge, ‘Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy’, JHS 98 (1978), 25-37; S. Cole ‘Could Greek Women Read and Write?’, in H. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (New York, 1981), 219-45. ** Notably B. M. W. Knox, ‘Silent Reading in Antiquity’, GRBS 9 (1968), 421-35; id., ‘Books and Readers in the Greek World’, in P. Easterling and B. M. W. Knox (eds.), Cambridge History of Classical Literature, v. 1 (Cambridge, 1985), 5—7. See further Turner (n. 2); Immerwahr (n. 2), 171-7.

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 163 are the majority, now, I think) maintain that there is no such thing as a general ‘reading public’ in the ancient world.*°? As M. I. Finley pointed out

repeatedly for many years, the evidence of the ancient literary texts is virtually worthless for considering the extent of phenomena at a broad social level.’° Nevertheless, in order to discuss the connection between democracy and writing, it is necessary to make some estimate, to come to some consensus about literacy in society. Democracy is a mass phenomenon: in so far as moderns speak of democratic uses of writing, they are presuming mass literacy. If literacy is not widespread in society, or at least widespread among that fraction of society which is composed of Athenian citizens, the assessment of the political force of democratic texts will have to be modified accordingly. This estimate of literacy will have to be based more on general considerations than on a tabulation of citations. Evaluated on more general grounds (and for me, these are decisive) it appears unlikely that more than a small minority of Athenian citizens would have been able to read in better than a hesitant and rudimentary manner.’’ Purely on the basis of what we know of other, better documented societies, it seems inconceivable that anything like a majority of Athenian citizens could have read. By modern standards, Athens had a traditional, agrarian

economy. Such economies are not known for the large reading publics which they produce.'® Obviously the context in which literacy flourished will have been different in ancient Athens than in early modern Europe or in contemporary primitive societies, and due caution should be exercised in making comparisons.’? Even so, it is impossible to ignore the cumulative weight of the available comparative evidence. Certainly it would be a mistake ‘5 Most recently, Harris (n. 13). This book should have disposed of the controversy once and for all—it has not. Among the reviews of Harris I recommend particularly that of H. Pleket, who combines expertise in early modern Europe with ancient Greek epigraphy: Mnemosyne, 45 (1992), 416-23; see further J. Humphrey (ed.), Literacy in the Roman World (JRA sup. 3) (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991). © See e.g. ‘Documents’, in Ancient History: Evidence and Models (New York, 1985), 27-46. The point has been made often by many scholars; see recently Harris (n. 13), 3-24. "7 Finley said this many years ago, (n. 6). For an example of the kind and quality of literacy which might have existed, see the examples of spelling which occur in plays, cited and discussed by Svenbro (n. I1), 160-86, ‘The Inner Voice’. '® Historically, it is easiest to look at early modern Europe: see e.g. E. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1983), 30—4, and the bibliography cited at 27981. For literacy in contemporary primitive societies see the UNESCO Statistics of Educational Attainment and Illiteracy (UNESCO Statistical Reports and Studies 22, Paris, 1977). For an intelligent (but oddly polemical) look at ancient levels of literacy in light of comparative documentation see Harris (n. I3), esp. 3-24. Harris puts the rate of literacy for Attica as a whole (including women and slaves) in the ranges of 5--Io per cent (p. I14). "9 See the salutary remarks of M. Detienne, The Creation of Mythology (Chicago, 1986), ch. 2, ‘By Mouth and by Ear’, who contrasts the beginnings of literacy in Tahiti with that in ancient Greece.

|

164 Charles Hedrick to estimate a degree of literacy among Athenian citizens which is even remotely comparable to that of a contemporary industrial society, such as

America. Current estimates of illiteracy in the USA, which are based on the | ability ‘to read and understand a newspaper,’ range between 15 and 50 per cent of the adult population.*° Those who believe that most or even many Athenian citizens could read must argue that this literacy is not an effect of economy, but of democratic culture. Athens may have been an agrarian society, but it was a democratic

agrarian society—and this qualification arguably makes a great deal of difference.** Unfortunately, there is no indication that the Athenian democ-

racy valued or promoted mass literacy: above all, there was no state subsidized education. Schools, in so far as they existed, were privately operated, outside the sphere of the state.”* The absence of publicly subsidized

education in classical Athens is a paramount fact, not only for considering

the extent and quality of practical literacy in Athenian society, but for evaluating the political ideology of public writing in the democracy. Anyone , who wished to learn to read and write had to pay for private instruction, or learn in their homes from their families. So, effectively, literacy would have been monopolized by those with the resources or leisure to learn.”? Where it is possible to examine the connection in detail, mass education seems to be a prerequisite for mass literacy. In the absence of any statesponsored schools, widespread literacy would be virtually unparalleled.” Furthermore, regardless of the actual extent of literacy, there is an important

omission here: if the Athenian state was committed to promoting the dissemination of information among the public, it is remarkable that it did nothing to assure the general public accessibility of writing. A conservative, traditional economy, little exposure to written texts, no publicly subsidized education—in such circumstances, it is impossible to *° See Carmen St John Hunter with David Harman, Adult Illiteracy in the United States: A Report to the Ford Foundation (New York, 1979), 23-56, and the discussion in Gutmann (n. 12), 273-5. See further J. Kozol, Illiterate America (New York, 1985). The most thorough and nuanced survey done to date, ordered by the US Congress and conducted by the Educational

Testing Service in Princeton, concludes that almost 50 per cent of the American adult population is illiterate: Adult Literacy in America (US Department of Education, 1993). *" So E. M. Wood has argued how unusual Athenian ‘peasant’ society was: Peasant-Citizen and Slave: the Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London, 1988). 72 On education, F. A. G. Beck, Greek Education: 450-350 B.c. (London, 1964), and the rare volume published by the same author, Bibliography of Greek Education and Related Topics (Sydney, 1986). For the situation of education outside the public realm, D. Lanza, Lingua e discorso nell’ Atene delle professioni (Naples, 1979), 65. 73 For the connection between education and political élites, see J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 156-91. 74 Harris (n. 13), 15-17. An exception would be societies which have a ‘religion of the book’ and promote literacy through repeated readings of, say, the Bible. There is nothing comparable in Greece.

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 165 imagine how any significant number of Athenian citizens could have learned

to read with any facility, if at all. Without question some literacy existed among citizens in ancient Athens, a function of social or economical class; ‘name signing’ literacy may even have been fairly common. It would be foolish to maintain, however, that significant numbers of the Athenian citizen body could read well enough to inform themselves—and the ability to inform oneself is the crucial quality in the modern conception of democratic literacy. Granted the lack of mass literacy in Athenian society, difficult questions

arise. If only a few could read, why did the state erect inscriptions? Were Athenian assertions of the general accessibility of information then nothing

more than a cynical lie, designed to conceal the domination of the few behind a myth of ‘the power of the people’? What is the political force of a generally illegible public document? Traditionally scholars have tended to

take the connection between writing and democracy for granted, understanding writing as a specifically democratic instrument in ancient Athens. As we have seen, Meritt notably argued that the Athenian habit of erecting inscriptions should be understood in terms of the democratic need to keep the citizenry informed.*°*As it became increasingly apparent that literacy was rather more restricted in ancient Greece (or, for that matter, in modern

America) than Meritt may have imagined, his interpretation had to be modified. The connection with democracy, however, was maintained. So M. I. Finley argued that the documents were not displayed simply to be read, or even to be read at all, but to be accessible. As Finley put it, in the absence of a modern ‘reading public’, the inscrutible letters carved in marble

stood as unequivocal reminders of public action, as silent assertions that democratic power is not founded on secrets or deceit, but is available to all. For the many citizens who were illiterate, it was not necessary to read the inscriptions; their presence was enough.”°

Finley's article indicates a tendency to accept Meritt’s link between democracy and writing in ancient Athens. It is, however, possible to take the opposite tack, and argue for an oppressive, anti-democratic function of writing in the Athenian democracy. This argument presupposes a more pessimistic view of the character of the democracy as a whole. So, recently, W. V. Harris has suggested that among citizens literacy was restricted to ‘members of the hoplite class and above’; only such élites, he maintains, participated regularly in public life.*” Consequently the Athenian democracy

was a democracy in name only, and the use of writing served to shore up *> Meritt (n. 6). © Finley (n. 6). *7 Harris (n. 13), 62-3, 79-80, 102, 104. Compare the interesting (and parallel) interpretation of Mayan inscriptions by C. H. Brown, ‘Hieroglyphic Literacy in Ancient Mayaland: Inferences from Linguistic Data’, Current Anthropology, 32 (1991), 489-96.

166 Charles Hedrick

|

the status quo. The connection between writing and democracy for Harris

is entirely illusory; claims to the contrary by the democracy should be

regarded as an alibi, an ideological smokescreen, behind which lurks, as | always, a sinister and dominating élite. This dismissal of democracy is typical of a particular perspective on the world, especially common among ancient

historians over the past fifty years or so—which is not to say that there is

no merit to the argument.”® As Harris argues the case, however, it is scandalously facile, presuming as he does without argument the existence of a ruling élite in the face of the notorious difficulties of locating such a group within the government of the Athenian democracy.*? Certainly there is nothing inherently ‘democratic’ or ‘tyrannical’ about

writing. It can be imagined as an oppressor or as a liberator—indeed, it has , been imagined as both in the modern world. The political significance of writing, in other words, is a problem of its particular applications, of a specific social context, certain ideological associations.*° It is notoriously

difficult to isolate a democratic ideology: the Athenians did not speak | systematically about the ideals of their form of government.’' It is easier to find abstract discussions of political ideology in the anti-democratic philosophers, notably Plato. Still, there are some indications that suggest something like a consistent image of the political significance of writing. 8 For a review of the critics see Ober (n. 23). It is also possible, of course, to reject the political associations of writing altogether. So recently Rosalind Thomas has concluded that ‘there is no straightforward relationship between political system and the written word’ in

ancient Greece: (n. 2), (Cambridge, 1992), 144-50. |

79 J. Ober has made the case for popular rule best in recent years: (n. 23). Several of the authors in this volume are concerned to isolate the ways in which specialist knowledge (such as literacy) may have produced an élite: cf. E. Badian, From Plataea to Potidaea (Baltimore, 1993), 242 n. 18. *° The argument that literacy produces certain and consistent effects on human behaviour has been made by many, most notoriously Eric Havelock. The most recent formulations come from Jack Goody. This position has been increasingly criticized: see e.g. J. Halvorson, ‘Goody and the Implosion of the Literacy Thesis;, Man, 27 (1992), 301-17. For me, the problem with the argument is not so much one of ‘technological determinacy’, to use Cartledge’s felicitious phrase, as its presumption of a universal human mind, a ‘black box’, which always reacts the same way to the same stimulus. 3" This is a problem generally in democratic theory. Virtually all theory until modern times was written against democracy: see R. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, Conn., 1989), 1-9: P. Euben has suggested that in Athens drama played the role of democratic theory: The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken, (Princeton, NJ, 1990). For the argument that theory is in itself an anti-democratic form, see Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (The Johns Hopkins Series in Constitutional Thought) (Baltimore, 1989), particularly the essay entitled ‘Tending and Intending a Constitution: Bicentennial Misgivings’. For further (and more detailed) discussion of systematic ‘political thinking’ in ancient Greece, see C. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (Cambridge, Mass.,

1990); C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1988).

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 167 Because it is fixed, writing comes to have egalitarian connotations in ancient Greece. When words are set down in letters, they seem to become inalterable, ‘carved in stone’, so to speak. Divorced from the dynamic, mercurial interplay of oral exchange, the written word is static, and cannot be changed to suit the interests of the influential, powerful, or wealthy. So an inscription from the Athenian Acropolis claims to ‘answer the same (or even ‘equally’) to all men who ask’ (dow io’ dvOpwouls| troxpivopat otis é[pw]ra).*°

This fixity (and perceived egalitarian character) of writing is at the heart of its well known association with law. Solon claims to have ‘written laws for good and bad alike’ (fr. 36, lines 18—20). Euripides provides perhaps the most famous formulation of this connection. In the Suppliants he has Theseus,

a reputed founder of Athenian democracy, say (Il. 433-7): when laws have been written, both the strong man and the weak have an equal legal case, and the weaker if he is slandered may sue the more fortunate, and the weaker man, should he be in the right, defeats the stronger man.

There are many citations which demonstrate the connection between writing

and law.*? Not the least important are the allusions to ‘unwritten laws’, dypadot voor, Which become particularly prominent in Athens in the sophistic discussions of the latter half of the fifth century. As many have noted, the negative qualification, ‘unwritten’, implies a written standard. ** The mere fact that writing is associated with law and equality, however,

does not prove that it has peculiarly democratic overtones in Athens. The ideology of equality was not confined to democracies in ancient Greece, nor

is the connection between laws and writing exclusively a democratic phenomenon. The ideals of equality and law may arguably be regarded as part of a more general political heritage which the Athenian democracy shared with all Greek states, be they democracies, oligarchies, or tyrannies.*»

The equation of writing and law with equality, however, is too simple. Writing is not intrinsically ‘equal for all’ any more than law is intrinsically ‘equal for all’. The fixity of the written word, its independence from give and take of oral society, is certainly one of the most salient qualities which separates writing from speech. This fixity, however, is not an unequivocal 3* Quoted with discussion in Svenbro (n. 11), 28-30, 172-4. >} For discussion and citations, see e.g. Harris (n. 13), 47, 49-51. 75-7: Thomas (n. 2), 65— 73, 144-7. 3+ The most famous allusions to these are of course in Sophocles’ Antigone. Generally on this subject see M. Ostwald, ‘Was There a Concept dypados véyos in Classical Greece?’, in E. N. Lee, A. P. D. Mourelatos, and R. M. Rorty (eds.), Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy

Presented to Gregory Vlastos, Phronesis suppl. 1, (Assen, 1973), 70-104. See further id., From Popular Sovereignty to Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society and Politics in Fifth Century Athens (Berkeley, Calif., 1986), 252-3 and pass. 35 Cf. Thomas (n. 2), 144-7.

|

168 Charles Hedrick : political blessing. Protectors can easily become tyrants. Writing and the | laws can serve to equalize the political status of weak and strong, mass and ) élite; at the same time, their static character can be (and has been often) | used to formalize and authorize abusive and oppressive social relationships. It is precisely the fixity and disengagement of the written word and the law

from the living mind of the people which make them at the same time |

potentially an egalitarian standard and an unresponsive instrument of |

sovereignty. | authority. The specifically democratic significance of writing, I would suggest, |

is tied to the resolution of the conflict between written and spoken word or , (in more explicitly political terms) between the rule of law and popular

Perhaps the most obviously tyrannical characteristic of writing is its |

exclusionary force: in no society, past or present, has writing been equally comprehensible to all members of the community. In contrast, the spoken

word might be imagined as ideally democratic, immediately accessible | and transparent to everyone. Indeed, one of the defining qualities of the community, perhaps the defining characteristic, is possession of a common linguistic ground.?® So, ideally, in so far as all are members of the same community, none are excluded from oral communication. |

When once words are fixed on stone or papyrus, they cannot modify : themselves according to the situation. They become dull, stupid—unable to respond. Removed from their author, they can give only one answer to any situation: always the same. So the written word (like the law) is unamenable

and insensitive to shifting circumstances. In the absence of their author,

words are no longer attached to an intent or, if you like, a ‘spirit’, but are evacuated of an animating intelligence. Without life, they are susceptible to

abuse by the cunning, unscrupulous, or ignorant. In contrast, speech apparently emanates immediately from conscious will, and so is an infinitely

adaptable tool of representation. If confusion arises in conversation or debate, , positions can be altered, attitudes adjusted, to suit the circumstances and the audience. If opponents misconstrue a statement, whether wilfully or by error, their interpretation can be immediately corrected and controlled by the author. This flexibility too makes speech seem more democratic than

writing. As an Athenian democrat might have said, confronted with a ! conflict between speech and writing, or (put another way), between the general constraint of the rule of law and the circumstantial desires of popular |

3 The classic statement of the importance of oral communication is provided by Moses Finley, in his description of Athenian democracy as ‘face to face’ society: Democracy Ancient , and Modern (New Brunswick, NJ, 1973). With the rise of the nation state, the importance of the spoken word has obviously declined in favour of more impersonal kinds of communication: see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

(rev. edn., New York, 1990).

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 169 sovereignty: ‘would it not be a terrible thing if the people cannot do [and say] what they want?’ (cf. Xenophon, Hellenica 1. 7. 12). The ambiguous political virtues and vices of writing and speech, as I am outlining them here, were articulated in ancient Greece, most notably by the philosopher Plato. In his discussion of writing in the Phaedrus he criticizes writing for precisely these reasons, concluding (275d-e): It is the same with [written] words; you might imagine that they spoke as if they had some intelligence themselves, but if you question them, wishing to learn, about what they say, they indicate always only one and the same thing. When once it is written, every word is rolled about everywhere, both among those who understand and likewise among those who have no interest in it; it has no comprehension to speak to whom it should and to whom it should not. When mistreated or unjustly abused it always needs the help of its father, for it has no power to defend or help itself.

The written word, Plato argues, is an alien thing, external to human consciousness and will. Paradoxically, though, it can speak. For this reason there is a danger that any sentiment or statement, once set in letters, may become dislodged from the oral processes and circumstances which generated it. No longer attached to consciousness, it floats free, an authority without an author, and can be appropriated by anyone who desires. Because writing can be distinguished from ephemeral thought and evanescent spoken word, because it endures, it can be used to preserve memory. This autonomy poses a threat as well: there is a danger that writing can be used in place of memory. Plato acknowledges certain benefits, but insists on the importance of mind. True knowledge can only be kept in consciousness, and cannot be preserved in external form (Phaedrus 277a-278a): in the written word there is necessarily much that is playful, and that no argument has ever been written, whether in metre or in prose, which deserves to be treated

very seriously ... but truly the best of them are a reminder of what is already known.

Plato’s conclusion, that writing should be used as a reminder, is repeated several times in the Phaedrus (cf. 275a; 275c—d; 276d). In sum, he maintains that the only good writing is an unread writing; it is dangerous when it is granted the authority of intelligibility. Instead, writing should be used as a mnemonic device, a prompt which summons up innate knowledge which everyone always has already in mind. By regarding the meaning of writing as dependent on mind, its potential for tyrannical power is eliminated. The importance of this notion in Plato’s philosophy of politics and knowledge would be difficult to overestimate. Education, for example, can be regarded as good or bad; at what point does it cease to be education and become propaganda or indoctrination? Plato’s

teacher and creature, Socrates, insisted on the oral dialectic; he wrote

170 Charles Hedrick nothing. Plato himself might have answered (were he able to speak) that in so far as there is no exchange, in so far as what is taught is written, in the sense of being dead and unresponsive, it should be regarded as prop-

aganda. So, for example, if you are reading this essay uncritically, without maintaining a critical dialogue with it, you are creating what I have written as authoritarian propaganda and indoctrination, rather than as education. Because it is written, this essay can never be better than a prompt. To create something more, say a mutually educational exchange, I would have to be present—that is, the essay would have to be given orally.

So Plato suggests that writing can be imagined as a master or a servant, depending on whether it is used as a source of information or as a mnemonic device. The only safeguard against its abuse lies in bridging the gap between oral and written expression, between word and thing, by imagining writing as a reminder or prompt. This notion of writing as a reminder certainly provides an appropriate and workable paradigm for reading in a society which is largely unlettered: texts would not be ‘read’ so much as ‘recognized’,

that is, remembered in view of a prompt.*”’ Many, however, will find the manner in which Plato’s philosophy reflected popular trends in ancient Athens debatable—Plato is nothing if not a sophisticated reader.** It would certainly be a mistake, however, to imagine that there is no relationship between even the most sophisticated philosophical thought and society. Plato could no more have kept his thought on writing ‘clean’ of the influence of contemporary practices of reading than contemporary philosophers can remain unaffected by the electronic technologies of information.*? Certainly

his discussion of writing is explicitly written in response to the perils of common, ‘naive’ reading. His solution, furthermore, is arguably less ‘sophisticated’ than conservative. The suggestion that writing be used as a ‘reminder’ rather than as a content might be understood as an appeal to

a traditional practice of unlettered society against the nascent practices prompted by the increasing use of writing. Writing, in other words, should

37 Cf. J. Svenbro’s description of reading as ‘recognition’ and the Greek verb dvayvyvwoKw: (n. 11), 160-86, ‘The Inner Voice’. 38 Eric Havelock most notoriously has attempted to locate Plato’s thought within the context of a Greek ‘literate revolution’: see e.g. Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). The idea that orality is superior to literacy is obviously not restricted to Plato. See further the reviews in T. Lentz, Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece (Carbondale, Ill., 1989), and Thomas (n. 9), 158.

, 39 Cf. M. Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Chicago, 1990).

The most famous (and, in many ways, successful) attempt to link Greek philosophy and politics has been provided by J.-P. Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY, 1982).

Writing, Reading, and Democracy I71I be understood more in the fashion of a traditional monument than as a modern text.*°

In fact, the ambiguous nature of writing, as Plato outlines it, is a recognizable issue in other Classical Greek authors—and particularly in the source criticism of the two major historians of the fifth century Bc, Herodotus and Thucydides.** Thucydides in particular is well aware of the ways in which monuments can be used to cultivate oral memory, and the tension

between these practices and the habits and prejudices associated with writing. In a famous passage from the funeral oration (2. 43), he even has Pericles make an eloquent case for memory: For those who have sacrificed their bodies in common receive individually unaging praise and a distinguished tomb (rddov ém:onudtarov)—not so much the thing in

which they lie, but that in which is preserved their renown, to be eternally remembered on every occasion in word and deed. For the entire earth is the tomb of renowned men, and not only the inscription on the stones in their homeland commemorates them (ornA@y onpaiver émrypady), but also abroad an unwritten memorial resides (dypados pvnun édcatrdtat) in everyone, a memorial more of the meaning (yvwu%) than of the monument (or deed, épyov).

This passage has ironic overtones, given that writing has important powers of preservation elsewhere in Thucydides. Here, however, we see the same contrast between writing and memory, between the reference and residence, which is so important in Plato. At the same time, Thucydides glorifies native memory against all forms of representation, including oral speech, material monument, and that compromise of the two, writing. Memory resides in mind and is independent of things outside. This memory may need to be prompted, however, and an occasional interaction of word and deed with the monumental inscribed tomb will suffice to call it forth. Through Pericles, Thucydides is providing a recipe for reading an inscription. A crucial citation from Demosthenes (X XI. 224) suggests the democratic significance of this ideal of reading. The passage is all the more important because it occurs in the context of a speech. And what is the strength of the laws? If one of you is wronged and cries out, will

they run up and be at his side to help him? No. Letters are only written things, and | they would not be able to do this. So what is their power? You are, if you support 4° For this notion of the monument and its relation to Plato’s thinking about writing, see my essay “Thucydides and the Beginnings of Greek Archaeology’, in D. Small (ed.), History and Archaeology (Brill, forthcoming). Inscriptions obviously combine some elements of the written

text and the monument in themselves. I shall explore the tension between these elements at more length elsewhere. 4? That is, in Herodotus’ treatment of the éus/d«o7 dichotomy, and in Thucydides’ treatment of Adyos and épyov. See my essay ‘The Meaning of Material Culture: Herodotus, Thucydides and their Sources’, in R. Rosen and J. Farrell (eds.), Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honour of Martin Ostwald (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993), 17-37.

172 Charles Hedrick them and make them ever powerful to help one who needs them. So the laws are strong through you, and you through the laws.

Demosthenes here is explicitly concerned with the political force of laws and

writing. He does not emphasize the potential tyranny of laws versus their democratic application, so much as their impotence when not subsidized by living, consensual support. There is nothing unusual about the link between writing and the laws in

this passage.** Demosthenes’ instructions for the use of laws and letters here, however, is suggestive. The ambiguous character of writing is paralleled

by a contradiction in the status of the law: the laws should be understood in the same way that a text is read.4? The laws of the Athenian democracy were regarded as authoritative; at the same time, they were regarded as products of ‘the will of the people’. Laws do not change. The will of the people, however, fluctuates. Consequently there was (particularly in the fifth

century) a tension between ‘popular sovereignty’ and ‘the sovereignty of law’ .*4 The implications of this tension are evident in practice: in Athenian

law courts, the jury had tremendous discretion in deciding precisely what the law was. In a democracy, the laws, when written down, are fixed and so can serve equally as a protection for all. Such written laws, however, must not be imagined as an autonomous, external standard of conduct, which dictates to people independent of their will—such control would be the destruction of democratic laws. Letters are merely ‘written things’ which take their power from the actions of the people. Written laws must be kept at the same time consensually, unwritten, by members of the community in heart and mind. As Thucydides might have had Pericles say, not only is the law indicated by inscription on stone, but also in an unwritten memorial, which resides in everyone. It is precisely this knowledge which defines individuals as members of the community, and which creates the laws themselves. Only once such rules of conduct have been internalized in society at large, when everyone already knows them, can law be said to exist.*° Simultaneously, 4? T have already cited several examples of this equation. Plato assimilates his discussion of writing to the law in the Phaedrus at 278. 43 J. Svenbro makes a comparable suggestion, arguing that the understanding of the law is

preconditioned by the cognitive effects of oral reading: (n. 11), 109-22, ch. 6, ‘Nomos, ““Exegesis’’, Reading: The Reading Voice and the Law’.

44 The balance swings after 403 in favour of the law. So, e.g., it becomes illegal to contradict a vouos, that is, a general ‘law’, with a %yjdiopa, an ad hoc decree of the people. Even so, as

the passage from Demosthenes shows, the tension between law and popular sovereignty remains. So the theme of Martin Ostwald’s definitive book, From Popular Sovereignty (n. 34, above). For further discussion of the contradictions between law and popular will, see Ober (n.

23), 299-304. 45 See further the famous discussion of laws in Plato’s Crito, and Robin Osborne’s discussion of the practice of law: ‘Law in Action in Classical Athens’, JHS 105 (1985), 40-58.

Writing, Reading, and Democracy 173 written laws strengthen the people. Demosthenes does not specify precisely how. Plato would have said that written codifications should only be used to provide a check on pre-existing knowledge: the virtue of the laws is that they remind and verify the practices which all always already know. In this essay I have been chiefly concerned to discuss the role of public texts, that is, inscriptions, in the classical Athenian democracy. Documents

were at all times circulating in a variety of other less durable media, for example on papyrus. For the first one hundred years of the democracy, however, texts were systematically made public only in monumental form, that is, by setting them up in the public space of the city. In this environment

writing is as much monument as text, and as such is accessible to all, whether literate or illiterate, so long as they already know what the text means. Then, at the end of the fifth century Bc, an archive was established

in the Agora, in the Metroon, where records were kept on papyrus and other perishable materials, such as wooden planks.*® At about the same time, the Athenians developed a code of laws. There probably was more or less complete public access to these archives; nevertheless, their establishment marks a vaguely sinister watershed in the history of political reading and writing in Athens. No longer are all public texts kept in monumental format, preserved as a matter of course as a part of the urban environment, where any casual passer-by can see them, walk around them, or lean on them. The consolidation of texts in the Metroon may usefully serve to mark the beginnings of a new and particular way of using texts. Obviously enough the state does not abandon the monumental

inscription in the fourth century or later. The creation of an archive, however, implies a shift in the monumental attitude toward public texts, and an increased emphasis on the text as a content, as a thing to be read in the modern sense. The archive itself doubtless had a kind of symbolic meaning as the repository of state documents. The texts within it, in so far as they were regarded as something like ‘autographs’, would have retained something of the prestige and authority which are the properties of original texts: vandalism, whether erasure or some other alteration, might have been construed as a crime (Lycurgus I. 66). Even so, by the standard of public inscriptions, these texts were fragile, portable, sequestered. At the

same time, they would have become less accessible to the unlettered populace, if not to the few who could read fluently. The creation of archives might be regarded as a threat to the Athenian democratic ethic. Writing, in a democratic context, is dangerous when it must be read. So long as people do not need to read them, texts cannot be 4° For archives at Athens: A. Boegehold, ‘The Establishment of the Central Archive at Athens’, AJA 76 (1972), 23-30. There may have been some system for finding information before the establishment of an archive: see Ostwald (n. 23), 410.

174 Charles Hedrick used as a hegemonic repository of knowledge; instead, they will remain vacuous mnemonic devices, confirmations of popular knowledge, and so will be no danger to democracy, but a supplement to popular will: as Demosthenes says, a source of strength. The democratic power of writing lies not in its distant, authoritarian intelligibility, but in the active, social interaction of citizens, literate and illiterate, with the vague, inscrutable hieroglyphs which remind them and assure them of what everyone already knows.

LO

Two New Attic Inscriptions ANGELOS P. MATTHAIOU David Lewis oTnAoKkoT@y TaV viv

OvtTwy ta. Arrikwratrwrt

In this paper, I present two new inscriptions’ which, I believe, touch upon

old scholarly problems. The architect Dr Manolis Korres produced the drawings (Figs. 10.I—4) of the two inscribed monuments. His contribution to the understanding of the form of the monuments was decisive. Credit for the reconstruction of Kimon’s monument must go to his long experience and unique knowledge of ancient Greek architecture. I

Rectangular base of Pentelic marble. Until 1984 it lay in a stone-heap at the north wing of the Propylaea on the Acropolis. Today, it stands in front of the SE corner of the E Porch of the Propylaea by the statue-base of Athena Hygieia. The stone was used at least three times. First, as a base for the dedication of Philoumene (Fig. 10.1). Second, as a base for the bronze statue of Diphilos

(Fig. 10.2). In its second use the stone was turned upside down and the name of the honorand was inscribed on the reverse side. From this use also

derive the two cuttings that can be seen on the original lower surface of the stone. These cuttings received the feet of the bronze statue. At some point, I express my warm thanks to the ephor of Antiquities, Dr Th. Karagiorga, for granting me permission to study and publish the monument of Kimon, and the curators of Antiquities, Mrs

M. Theochare, D. Kyriakou, and P. Papangele, for facilitating my work in the area of the apotheke in Areos Street and the Museum of Eleusis respectively; also to the Director of the Acropolis Museum and Ephor of Antiquities Dr P. Kalligas and to the ephor Dr I. Triante for facilitating my work there; and to the former director of the Epigraphical Museum, Dr D. Peppa-

Delmouzou, not only because she made it possible for me to see the inscription IG ii? 4390 (EM 2710) and to acquire a squeeze, but also for useful discussions about the two Kephisodotoi that I had with her. I would like also to thank Dr A. Corso for his contribution to those discussions and Professor Chr. Habicht for reading my manuscript. I am grateful to my friend Nike Makres for her useful suggestions and the translation of my paper from Greek. ' At the suggestion of the editors of the volume, I do not include the third part of my paper presented at the symposium, concerning the new block of the epigrams of the Persian Wars.

176 Angelos P. Matthaiou

: tn boo, i :/% > BO woo : (\ ',ne;%OU f re . ‘ “At : a-; eters ‘ AV 1A ae a Va ae 5‘.i

oY ate na ON — ” " SSS " = i aa — \N

icPeg ‘$ BSS Sg gee Yee not te tt rename mer rn ee ern ten mer sane

I&‘,Ayo a 3 ‘i ¥x “ vr 3 ht 5 ~a 9a .7-xj i.yaf-iz

4 . ee Jane : ‘ad J . et ** 3 334 : :=,"y hn * | tie :’_comH a .‘Rew a % The dating and the identification of the kosmetes Philokles with the general Philokles are interrelated questions and are much discussed. J. K. Davies (APF 9142, 14541, where the bibliography and previous discussions of the issue are cited) accepts Leonardos’ identification, but following Mathieu (see n. 4, below), he places the inscription at the end of the ephebes’ two-year service; similarly, J. A. Goldstein, The Letters of Demosthenes (New York, 1968), 276—

81. Of more recent scholars, Reinmuth and Worthington accepted Mathieu's dating but rejected the identification; Pélékidis and Gehrke rejected both. See Chr. Pélékidis, Histoire de l’éphébie attique des origines ad 31 avant J.-C. (Paris, 1962), 127-47; O. W. Reinmuth, The Ephebic Inscriptions of the Fourth Century Bc, (Mnemosyne Suppl. 14, Leiden, 1971), no. 15, 58-82;

H.-J. Gehrke, Phokion (Zetemata 64, Munich, 1976), 78/79, n. 12; I. Worthington. ‘The Chronology of the Harpalus Affair’, SO 61 (1986), 63—76, esp. 71-2, and ‘Thoughts on the Identity of Deinarchus’ Philocles (III Against Philocles)’, ZPE 79 (1989), 80-2. S. Jaschinski, Alexander und Griechenland unter dem Eindruck der Flucht des Harpalos (Bonn, 1981), 39-42 and

51-4, and A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire (Cambridge, 1988), 293-4, rejected, among other things, the identification of Leosthenes, son of Leosthenes, with the general of the Lamian Wer. 4 Notes sur Athénes a la veille de la Guerre Lamiaque’, RPh 55 (1929), 159-83, esp. 162 (and n. 6)—164. > Professor Chr. Habicht kindly brought to my attention the reference to the inscription of Oropos in Gomme’s and Bosworth’s books. See A. W. Gomme, The Population of Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.c. (Oxford, 1933), 67-9. The dedication of the ephebes was not

made at Rhamnous as he notes on 68, but at the Amphiareion, and Pherekleides is not a general with responsibility for Mounichia (epi toi Peiraiei), 68-9, but with responsibility for Akte (epi tei Aktei).

® Gomme thought that Leonardos and Mathieu agreed on the date of the crowning and as to who the ephebes were. However, it appears from Leonardos’ text (p. 100) that he had in mind the newcomers of 324/3, though Mathieu explicitly recognizes ephebes from both years (see 162, n. 6). The confusion made its way into the recent bibliography.

180 Angelos P. Matthaiou of the kosmetes with the Philokles involved in the Harpalos Affair and suggested the date 326/5 or 327/6. Since Gomme’s contribution, both scholars who agreed and disagreed with Mathieu's version have focused their attention on the identification of Philokles and thus on the issue of his deposition, condemnation, and possible restoration. However, the reason for setting the inscription at the Amphiareion, which would have been an important clue for dating, is unknown. D. M. Lewis

has already noted (CR 23 (1973), 255) that ‘the inscription is certainly incomplete as it stands, with no dedicatory formula’. The monument must have had a crowning moulding, probably inscribed. Another important piece of information that is also unknown is the exact time of Harpalos’ second arrival and entry into Athens.’ Thus, the dating of the inscription® at the beginning of 324 sc—I follow Leonardos here—is not safe. But this does not prevent the dating of the birth of Leosthenes, son of Leosthenes, with some certainty. His generalship with responsibility for the countryside (epi tei chorai) and the recording of his heirs at the end of 323/2 as responsible for their father’s debt on the trireme Hebe Philocleous, IG ii? 1631. 601/2 and 681/2, indicate that he was born at least in the mid 360s. Philoumene, daughter of Leosthenes, should, according to the dating of the inscription from the Acropolis, be the sister of the honoured general and not his daughter. It follows that the father of Philoumene, Leosthenes from

Kephale, and Leosthenes, the father of the general Leosthenes, son of Leosthenes from Kephale, are the same person. Leonardos and Davies thought it? very likely that the general Leosthenes (PA 9141), whom the Athenian demos sentenced to death under the charge of treason, confiscating his property, because of his defeat at Peparethos by ? The issue is also discussed by R. Sealey, Demosthenes and his Time (Oxford, 1993), 265-7. He states (266) that the speaker of Deinarchos III does not state clearly that the general who allowed Harpalos to enter Athens was Philokles. Thus, Sealey places the entry early in 324/3 and attributes responsibility to Dikaiogenes. But what does the clause, III.1 ‘(Philokles) said that he would prevent Harpalos from putting into the Peiraieus, when he had been elected by us as general with responsibility for Mounychia and the dockyards’ (ddcxwy i.e. (P®AoKAjs) kwArvoew “Apradov eis tov Tletpacé KatamdAeboat orpatrnyds vd? judy emi tHV Movvixiav Kai ta vewpia KEexe_poTtovnevos) mean? Cf. also §§ 12-13. Finally, if Philokles did not admit Harpalos

at the time, then why does he portray him in § 7 as ‘the man who played the leading role in getting the gold distributed and so exposing the city to all the blame’ (tov dpynyov yevdopevov rob dtadedopeévou ypvaiov Kai els altiav KafiadvTa Tdcav THY TéAW)?

® As D. M. Lewis has noted (CR 23 (1973), 255), the inscription is important because it is

related to the chronology of the Harpalos Affair and touches upon serious questions of demography. I hope to discuss the evidence of its dating and the problems of methodology that arise from the bibliography in another paper.

9 See Leonardos, p. 94, and APF, p. 342. APF, p. 343, tends also to identify Malthake Moschos’ daughter and wife of Leosthenes who is dedicator in Artemis Brauronia (IG ii? 1523. 27-29; 1524. 202-4; 1529. 11-2) with the wife of Leosthenes the father.

Two New Attic Inscriptions I8I Alexander of Pherae in 362/1,'° was the same person as Leosthenes from Kephale, the father of Leosthenes, son of Leosthenes from Kephale. I find it difficult to accept the identification, since we do not know the patronymic and demotic of the former. However, I must say that the lowest chronological limit for the birth of Leosthenes, son of Leosthenes, corroborates the identi-

fication, since it falls before 361, the year of conviction and flight (Schol. Aeschin. II 21) of general Leosthenes. Kndicddoros éxénoe. There are two Athenian fourth-century sculptors by the name Kephisodotos. Pliny places the floruit of Kephisodotos the elder,

father, or, according to others, older brother of Praxiteles, in the 1o2nd Olympiad (372-369 Bc), and that of Kephisodotos the younger, son of Praxiteles and brother of Timarchos, in the 121st Olympiad (296-293 Bc)."' There is no firm evidence of works by Kephisodotos the elder later than

the decade 370-360 Bc.'* Thus I think that it is more likely that the signature of the artist on Philoumene’s base belongs to Kephisodotos the younger (PA 8334). The identification suggested is supported by two more pieces of evidence. First, his signature on a base from the Asklepieion in Athens, IG ii* 4390, which is securely dated in 34.4/3 from its reference to the priest of Asklepios, Lysitheus of Trikorynthos. Second, his public appearance between the years 334/3 and 325/4, which is sufficiently documented. *’ There are other extant bases bearing his signature.** Their dating is based

mainly on the letter-forms. Apart from the one from the Asclepieion, according to Marcadé, the older ones are two from Eleusis, IG ii* 4552 and

4608; he dates the first one to the second half of the fourth century and the second one to the last quarter of the fourth century." I compared the squeezes of the inscriptions IG ii? 4390, 4552, 4608, and '© Diod. Sic. 15. 95, Polyain. 6. 2.1-2; cf. Hyper. III. 1-2. Until 346 Bc he was still alive in Macedonia (Aeschin. II. 21). ‘' Pliny, NH 34. 50 and 51. For the two sculptors see G. Lippold, Die griechische Plastik (Munich, 1950), 223-5 and 299-302: also A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.,

1990), 173/4 and 275/6; 198 and 295-7. '? The only work of his known from copies and representations on coins and vases is Peace who holds Ploutos in her arms. It stood in the Agora of Athens (Paus. 1. 8. 2 and 9. 16. I2). It is dated with some certainty soon after 374 Bc: see Stewart (n. 11), 173. The later dating. just before 360/59, is discussed by P. D. Valavanis, [Tava@nvaixot dudopeis amo tiv >Epérpia, (Athens, 1991) 110-12, where the recent bibliography is cited. '3 See APF 8334, esp. p. 288. ‘4 J. Marcadé, Recueil des signatures de sculpteurs grecs i (Paris, 1953), 53-6. I do not take into account the one from Chersonnesos, IosPE* I, 423, because it is uncertain whether the signature predates the inscription (2nd cent. ap). The one from Troezen, IG iv 766, and IG ii? 4304 and 4915 (its attribution to Kephisodotos is unsafe) are dated to the end of the 4th or the beginning of the 3rd cent. Bc. 'S Marcadé, i. 54 (b). Kirchner dates the first to the beginning of the 4th cent. attributing it _ to Kephisodotos I, and the second to the end of the 4th cent.

182 Angelos P. Matthaiou that of Philoumene.'® 4552 seems to me the earliest, 4390 and that of Philoumene constitute one unit; IG 4608 is more recent.'’ The inscriptions IG ii? 4390, 4552, and that of Philoumene establish the appearance of Kephisodotos the younger very soon after the middle of the fourth century,’® approximately forty years before his floruit and that of his brother Timarchos.’? This is also indicated by the extant bases that bear the signature of both brothers; they are all dated to the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third century.”° B. Alje]écAov; originally the stone-cutter inscribed 4eédiAov and then erased

the E. For this spelling instead of Aididos, cf. L. Threatte, The Grammar of Attic Inscriptions (Berlin, 1980), 196—8. Diphilos, son of Diocles from Alopeke,

is unknown. However, others by the name Diphilos from Alopeke are attested, see PA 4475 (6236) and IG ii* 5557, Agora xv. 423. 47 and 49. There is also a Diocles from Alopeke who was general and trierarch between

the years 360 and 340 Bc (PA 4015, APF 3990 = 4015). Finally a Diphilos, son of Diocles of unknown deme is recorded on a list of thiasotai dated before the middle of the fourth century, IG ii* 2345. 67 (PA 4470). The chronological distance between Diphilos, son of Diokles from Alopeke, and the thiasotes makes the prosopographical association difficult. C. Dirocgpamis. The name is attested in Attica from the middle of the second century aD, cf. IG ii* 3968. 7 (148-50 AD), 2100. 23 (after 169/70),

2130. 148 (192/3).

‘© T had a second opportunity to compare the squeezes of these inscriptions with each other, this time from the collection of squeezes of the Institute for Advanced Study. I thank Prof. S. V. Tracy, who kindly shared with me his long experience. '? Marcadé, i. 54, dates IG ii? 4025 to the last years of the 4th cent. J think that it is earlier than that and Kirchner rightly notes ‘post med. s. IV a.’ The letters resemble those of the base of Kleiokrateia of Praxiteles (Marcadeé, ii (Paris, 1957), 115), I place it between IG ii* 4390 and 4608. Prof. K. Clinton kindly informs me that in his new edition of 4552 he assigns the signature to Kephisotos I on prosopographical grounds. '8 This activity coincides with the later artistic production of Kephisodotos’ father, Praxiteles. The comparison of the letters of Philoumene’s base with those of two signed bases of works of his from the Athenian Agora, the base of Kleiokrateia and that of Archippe (Marcadé, ii. 115

and 115 (b)) indicates that the letters of Praxiteles’ works are certainly not older than the base of Kephisodotos. Kleiokrateia’s base is dated by Marcadé on prosopographic grounds ‘avant

361 av. J.-C.?’, though by B. D. Meritt (Hesperia, 26 (1957), 200-3 n. 50), I think more correctly, around the middle of the 4th cent. The base of Archippe is dated by Marcadé in the third quarter of the 4th cent. and by Meritt after the middle of the 4th cent. (Hesperia, 29 (1960), 37/8 n. 46). ‘2 The discrepancy is already noted by Davies, APF, p. 288. 2° Marcadé, i. 57-8. The signed base of the statue of Menander, i. 58b/59 (IG ii* 3777), is dated after the death of the poet (293/2 Bc). K. Fittschen, AM 106 (1991) [1992], 274, dates the work around 290 Bc.

Two New Attic Inscriptions 183 IT

In June of 1991, I noticed a rectangular inscribed base of Pentelic marble (Fig. 10. 4) in the courtyard of the Apotheke of the 3rd Ephoria of Antiquities,

at the corner of Dexippou and Areos Streets. The anathyrosis along its two long sides and the two lion-foot shaped sockets that are extant on its upper surface indicate that it was connected with at least another stone on each of its sides. One of the sockets survives fully, and the other partly, and both originally received legs of tripods. The location and disposition of those traces indicate that the two legs did not belong to the same tripod but to two different ones. The provenance of the base is unknown. Height, 0.245 m.; width 0.802 m.; thickness 2.042 m. Height of letters: 0.022 (O)-0.03 (I). Kipwv Srovdin|rov ——— éyopnye:|. |Kimon son of Spoudip[pos -—-— was choregos|.

Aewvtis avdpalv évika. -—— édf5acxe]. | Leontis won the men’s [ ——— was

' didaskalos|. ’Eniyovos Aiyw|[nrns nidAe. --— 4- Epigonos of Aigina [was auletes -——

12 ——— 7Hpxe]. was archon].

The base belongs to a choregic monument which supported at least two tripods that were won in dithyrambic contests of the City Dionysia by a chorus of the tribe Leontis. Line I: Xzovdin| ov]: one could also restore X7ovéir|ridys|, cf. Biduridns, Eibpinmiéys, etc. The name Spoudippos is not attested.*’ Kimon, son of Spoudippos, is not known in Attic prosopography. The Aeginetan fluteplayer Epigonos is also unknown. Kimon’'s demotic and the names of the poet and the archon are missing. The left end of the inscription is aligned with the edge of the lion-foot trace and thus its right end must have been approximately in line with the right lion-foot of the tripod. The shorter as well as the longest possible restoration is determined by the name of the archon in the third line. I think that, on the basis of the letter-forms, Fig. 10.5, the inscription should be dated in the period between 365 and 345 sBc.** The archon of that period with the shortst name is Xiwv (365/4), and the one with the longest, KaAXiorparos (355/4). The study of the technical details of the stone by M. Korres has led to the following conclusions: (1) The location, the disposition, and the size of the *" There are some other Attic names with the stem 27oud- : Saotéis (DAA 87), Xovdias, S'rovdidns, LTovdoxpatns. Chr. Habicht kindly pointed out to me two more: S'zoudaios (IG ii’ 5256), LAwovdwvidns (Agora, xv. 61, 119).

*2 Cf. P. Amandry, ‘Trépieds d’Athénes, II. Thargélies’, BCH tor (1977), 196-8, figs. 1820.

7a

184 Angelos P. Matthaiou , ~ _ ™ - fs ~ “, F _ , >

Poe : oaee welOAL y a Ltfeet “se -awe ~ . - ;” giana ue a wie“

Se= tf We ~= “ = oe “% #4 . \ \ *$.¥c+ (=: aor Nee VN rf "“2¥48drae y ol \Borsa Wy 2S: NM oy 3° | ss ‘MRSS , Para IR: RIEL my ~ Ve: tet 8j‘; ro ie us

90° | 0.802

erase SSK IMAN EP OTAIP YL. B2-.SseeL AEQNTITANAPS sf

SALT UK TEP IP ON Oz AIFIN]O

Fic. 10.4 Kimon’s base

Two New Attic Inscriptions 185

: hy re’ ©, 7 a a rn 4% - As “4 SEA ( 3 ies 2 re ape, ‘J a re ie By: f

Bg:. ST > (ee re ,woe Sat of re ern Tt we . .7a ae ole xae4EY we, oa

Fic. 10.5 Kimon’s inscription (squeeze)

two lion-foot traces suggest that the base of the monument consisted of eight blocks in total which were identical to the extant one. On that base three tripods were set (Fig. 10.6). The length of the base was 6.40m., and the height of each tripod exceeded 4 m. including the height of the handles. (2) The form of the anathyrosis on the left side of the extant stone indicates

that this and the one that was adjacent to its left side were constructed simultaneously. As regards the size of the monument two hypotheses are plausible: (a) It

was originally composed of three blocks, the first three to the left upon which the first tripod was set. Kimon, son of Spoudippos, or another member

of his family dedicated the tripod in order to commemorate his choregic victory with a chorus of the tribe Leontis at a dithyrambic contest at the City Dionysia. Later, on the occasion of another victory of Kimon and a member of his family they added the other blocks which bore the other two tripods. The second part of this hypothesis requires two victories, one won by Kimon and one by a relative of his in different dithyrambic contests in City Dionysia of the same year. Alternatively, the case may be that Kimon was victorious twice in the same year for his tribe, with a boys’ and a men’s

chorus respectively. A double victory for Kimon would suggest that an Athenian had the right, not the obligation, to become choregos twice in the same year and at the same festival, i.e. at the Dionysia. There is literary evidence that in the fifth century it was possible for the same man to be in

charge of two choregiai in the same year but in contests of different festivals. The unknown speaker of Lysias X XI was choregos for tragedy and subsequently choregos for a men’s chorus at the Thargelia in the archonship

of Theopompos (411/10). In the next year he became choregos for pyrrhichistai at the Panathenaia and then choregos for a men’s chorus at the

186 Angelos P. Matthaiou

VO VO VO

”

Co eee Cee eee Gt Sie] ee ee ieee Cee ie pin Z ES GRIF O NOR Arm t_...-~----- --—- = -

beer bf a0 10 20M Fic. 10.6 Kimon’s choregic monument (restoration)

Aeschines reflects this concept by coining the term

Ta Onudcia ypaupata (‘the public documents of the people’), to which Demosthenes refers with his phrase év tows kowots tots tuetépots ypdupacw (‘in your public documents’).° Appropriately, these public documents were kept év +t@ dnuootiw, which Boegehold argues should be translated, ‘in the state archive’ .’ > Cf. E. Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 102-14; A. Boegehold,

‘The Establishment of a Central Archive at Athens’, AJA 76 (1972), 23-30; R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 68-83. For the collected testimonia on the Metroon, see R. E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora, iii. Literary and Epigraphical

Testimonia (Princeton, NJ, 1957), 150-60. For an excavated bronze stele, see R. S. Stroud, ‘A Fragment of an Inscribed Bronze Stele from Athens’, Hesperia, 32 (1963), 138-43. + Pollux, Lex. 8. 128: cf. B. Jordan, The Servants of the Gods: A Study in the Religion, History and Literature of Fifth-century Athens. (Hypomnemata Untersuchungen zur Antike und zu ihrem Nachleben. 55, Gottingen, 1979), 39-40. > M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991), 11. ® Aeschin. Against Ktesiphon III. 24; Dem. XIX. 129. Cf. Thomas (n. 3), 70. 7 (n. 3), 24, 28.

Freedom of Information and Accountability 215 The authority which supervised the transfer of powers from Panathenaia

to Panathenaia was the Athenian Council of 500. After the Treasurers passed their annual examination, they sent one set of inventories to the Metroon, and then marble stelai were inscribed and set up on the Acropolis to provide accountability.® Whitened boards were used to document the charges for the completion of the examination (ed@dva:).? The Athenian

inventories span from 434 to the tyrannies of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Lachares and the wars at the end of the fourth century and early third.’° The very fact that the inscriptions were no longer published under the tyranny supports my point: only in a democracy that places value on the sharing of public information is there publication of temple inventory lists. Why did the Athenians carve their inventories on stone, when they had already written them on papyrus and stored them in the Metroon archives? As stated in Amos vs. Gunn (Florida, 1922), ‘A public record is a written

memorial, made by a public officer authorized by law to make it. It is required by law to be kept, or necessary to be kept, in the discharge of a duty imposed by law, to serve as a written memorial and evidence of something written, said, or done.''' A papyrus document, however, would have sufficed. Mogens Hansen has suggested that the publication on stone was a reflection of the Athenian lifestyle: they lived out of doors, and it

would seem only natural to inscribe on marble a durable material for enduring the weather.'* Yet the stelai were expensive to carve. The cost of inscribing on marble can be estimated from the temple administrators at Delos, where they spent 165 drachmas per stele.*? These annual inventories were also redundant to read: year after year,

the inventories of the Parthenon were set up on the Acropolis, saying virtually the same things. One new item, two old items removed: who could really notice such patterns? So just who were reading these lists, and why were they inscribed on marble? In part, it was what the stelai represented: that the public had access to them, and could study them if they wanted to,

just as government records in the United States are available for study although few citizens would ordinarily take advantage of the opportunity. * The preserved fragments of these inscriptions have been published as IG i? 292-362 and IG ii? 1370-1492, plus fragments published in Hesperia, AJA, and elsewhere. See D. Harris, The Inventory Lists of the Parthenon Treasures, diss. Princeton (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1991). ” A. Boegehold, ‘Andokides and the Decree of Patrokleides’, Historia, 39 (1990), 149-62, esp. 155. Cf. Ath. Pol. 48. 4. '° Cf. D. M. Lewis, ‘The Last Inventories of the Treasurers of Athena’, in Comptes et inventaires dans la cité Grecque, (Netichatal and Geneva, 1988), 297-308. ‘' Amos vs. Gunn, 84 Fla. 285, 94 So. 615 (1922): cf. H. L. Cross, The People’s Right to Know (Morningside Heights, NY, 1953), 21. '* (n. 5), p. 11. ‘> Th. Homolle, Les archives de l'intendance sacrée a Délos (Paris, 1887), 13-14; cf. Posner (n. 3), 99.

216 Diane Harris In addition, the act of setting up a costly marble stele on the Acropolis can

be interpreted as a sacred act: it was within the temenos, and was an expensive offering to Athena and a testimony to their goddess that the treasurers had been faithful stewards of her treasures, and that the Athenian citizens had performed their audit satisfactorily. Only the sacred accounts and inventories were inscribed. Of the Delian League tribute, only the 1/60th part, the aparche to Athena, was published on the marble stelai known as the tribute lists, but the remainder, arguably

the most important information, which needed the most accountability, were not put on marble. Likewise, the annual accounts of the money kept on the Acropolis were not inventoried, but only the sacred treasures. The Athenians built many expensive structures during the fifth century, including marble administrative buildings in the Agora, but only the building accounts of the temples on the Acropolis, the Propylaea, and some cult statues were

inscribed on stone tablets. The treaties and accounts published on stone often have the heading OEOJ, Gods. This may indicate that they wanted the Gods as witnesses, or that by inscribing the information on stone they were creating a kind of insurance policy. The stone stelai serve as proof that sacrilege had not occurred.'* The accountability factor is only a small part

of the publication of these special documents on stone: the papyri or whitened boards in the city archive serve that function, while the stelai serve as insurance of the gods’ favour upon the action described in the text. Was there a city archive in the period before the Metroon archive was established in the last decade of the fifth century? The inventories of the Treasurers of Athena began in 434. Where were the papyrus copies kept?

Perhaps the archive at that time was not centralized; but it is clear that many such public records were kept somewhere. Master lists of the registry of citizens, tax incomes and expense accounts, city religious calendars and priest lists, and more documents for housekeeping purposes of administration

must have been written records, which were not published on stone. As Alan Boegehold has recently shown in his discussion of the Patrokleides decree, many of the literary and epigraphical references to oaths, votes, laws, treaties, agreements, certification of the euthunai, audits, and contracts must be referring to documents which record them.'* These documents were

scattered in repositories on the Acropolis and in the Agora, until the formation of a central archive in the last decade of the fifth century, the Metroon.

The chairman of the Freedom of Information Committee of the United States Senate in 1953 stated ‘that inherent in the right to speak and the ‘4 Cf. A. Giovannini, ‘Le Parthenon, le tresor d’Athena et le tribut des allies’, Historia, 39 (1990), 129-48: Thomas (n. 1), 86; Linders (n. 2), 36. ‘> Boegehold (n. 9), 149-62, esp. 152 and 162.

Freedom of Information and Accountability 217 right to print was the right to know. The right to speak and the right to print, without the right to know, are pretty empty.’’® In 1953, Dr Harold Cross published The People’s Right to Know for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.'’ In his study of the steady deterioration of access to government documents and information, he blamed the ‘housekeeping statute’ (5 U.S.C.A. 22) of 1789 which permitted secrecy in the storage and use of information essential to the operation of Government agencies.*® Most ancient civilizations that had inventory practices used them for the

purpose of housekeeping, and accordingly stored them in a facility which prohibited access to the public. The Near Eastern civilizations kept archives of clay tablets, while the Egyptians tended to use papyrus in the Pharaoh’s archives. Athens, and a few other Greek city-states, were the exception: the public had access to financial documents, in keeping with the principle of freedom of information. Information translates into power: Athenian citizens

had access to public documents, which gave them rights and powers over financial and legal information. Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, and Persians wrote accounts, inventory lists, or comparable financial documents, but the people did not have access to them. Aristotle advised tyrants to keep a close eye on their financial records: Power must thus be retained, as an essential condition of tyranny; but otherwise the tyrant should act, or at any rate appear to act, in the role of a good player of the part of King. He must show himself, in the first place, concerned for the public funds. Not only must he refrain from expenditure in lavishing gifts which cause public discontent (and that will always arise when money is painfully wrung from a toiling and moiling people, and then lavishly squandered on harlots, aliens, and luxury trades); he must also render accounts of his income and expenditure—a policy which a number of tyrants have actually practised. This is a method of government which will make him appear to be more of a steward than a tyrant.”?

In other words, monarchs should imitate the practice adopted in open Greek democracies, where financial records were public information. The Athenians after 434 Bc produced three types of temple inventories, all published on marble stelai: tapaédoats, é€eracpds, and xabaipeats.*° The first type is the standard one: the paradosis was produced after the annual euthynai to record the proper transfer of responsibility from one year’s board

of Treasurers to the next. In cases where there were discrepancies, an "© US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary, Freedom of Information Act Source book: Legislative Materials, Cases, Articles (Washington, DC, 1974), 23.

'7 (n. II). 8 (n. II), 215-22. "9 Arist. Pol. 5. 11. 19 (1314°°), trans. E. Barker. 7° On the three types of inventories, see S. B. Aleshire, The Athenian Asklepieion, (Amsterdam, 1989), 107-8; D. Harris ‘Bronze Statues on the Athenian Acropolis: The Evidence of a Lycurgan

Inventory’, AJA 96 (1992), 637-9.

218 Diane Harris additional inventory was conducted, and published as an exetasmos. These occur relatively rarely. Still more rare are the inventories which record the

melt down of older metal dedications in order to manufacture new cult objects: the kathairesis.*’ All of these inventories are concerned with the ‘housekeeping’ of Athena’s treasures. Their publication on stone was a guarantee to the public that the activities of the treasurers were accounted for and became part of the public record. Appropriately, the word for ‘Treasurer’ in Greek is taydéas, literally steward or custodian, and in the domestic sense, ‘housekeeper’. Xenophon describes in his Oeconomicus the duties of a tamias in these terms: The things that we use only for festivals or entertainments, or on rare occasions, we handed over to the housekeeper, and after showing her their places and counting and making a written list of all the items, we told her to give them out to the right

servants, to remember what she gave to each of them, and when receiving them back to put everything in the place from which she took it.*?

This aptly describes the function of the Treasurers in Athena’s ‘house’. The

objects stored in the temples were taken out for use in festivals, and the Treasurers were responsible for ensuring that any treasures removed were then returned to the cella after their use in rituals. Written records kept

track of the items; these are the inventory lists, made just after the Panathenaic procession, when many items stored in the Parthenon came out and were distributed to citizens in the procession. At the conclusion of the festival, the treasures were inventoried and returned to their proper storage places, and the Treasurers were audited.*? The ten Treasurers sent their records to a board of ten accountants (Aoyrorat) and ten advocates (ocuvvijyopor), both groups selected by lot, for review.** A

finding of maladministration would result in a trial before a jury for theft. If the financial records proved accurate, the ten Treasurers then appeared before the Boule. Any citizen could voice a complaint at this public hearing.*”

The ‘better’ class was the one from which the Treasurers were chosen, and their annual audit was performed before the Boule. Their euthynai could

have become a vehicle for the masses to take revenge on the élite. The Boule could find fault with the Treasurers, and the Treasurers would have no means for challenging their judgement. Yet very few of the annual audits demanded an exetasmos or second inventory, to check against the first. * Cf. Harris (n. 20), 637-52. 22 Xen. Oec. 9. 10; trans. E. C. Marchant.

*3 Harris (n. 8), I-2. *4 Ath. Pol. 54. 2; 48. 3-5; cf. Hansen (n. 5), 218-24; R. K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens (Cambridge, 1988), 79; C. Hignett, A History of the Athenian Constitution down to the End of the 5th c. B.c. (Oxford, 1952), 203-5. *> Dem. XVIII. 117.

Freedom of Information and Accountability 219 Usually the Treasurers passed their tests. The publication of the lists represents the final act of the Treasurers as they confront their successors before the Council of 500 on the Acropolis; the publication on stone stelai served to certify the transaction for the public’s interest.”°

Some scholars have suggested that the stone stelai are copies of the papyrus documents or wooden boards which were filed in the Metroon.’’ Rosalind Thomas has shown that our terms original and copies are anachronistic and inappropriate for such cases.”® It is well known from the work of Jacques Tréheux and Tullia Linders that the Greek inventories are not comprehensive in recording all items kept in the temples, and appear to be select representatives rather than actual content lists of the temples.*? “Texts

of inscriptions on stone generally do not faithfully render the texts of the original documents.'*° The records published on perishable material would have been filed in the Metroon along with the other financial records directly related to the supervision of state officials by the Boule.*’ Alternatively, there is one reference to an archive of wooden tablets inside the temple to Athena (it is not clear whether the Parthenon or the so-called Erechtheum is meant): ‘The contractual agreements therefore, as to the sum Aristogeiton owes the city, are the laws by which all state debtors are recorded, and the inscribed stone marker is the wooden tablet that has been deposited in the temple of Athena (épos 6° % cavis 4 mapa tH Oew@ Keyévy). >* Other records were kept

by the Treasurers of Athena, including the list of state debtors, to which names were added and subtracted.?? Regardless of whether the archive for the inventories of the Treasurers of Athena was on the Acropolis or in the Agora, or both places, it is certain that an antigrapheus or copy-clerk assisted the stonecutter by providing a manuscript from which he would carve the stele, whenever an inventory or decree or some other official document was commissioned by the state to be inscribed on stone.** These documents need not have matched word for © T. Linders, ‘The Purpose of Inventories: A Close Reading of the Delian Inventories of the Independence’, in Comptes et Inventaires dans la cité Grecque (n. 10), 37-47.

*7 Posner (n. 3), 100; cf. Boegehold (n. 3), p. 24; G. Klaffenbach, ‘Bemurkungen zum griechischen Urkundenwesen’, Sitzungsberichte Berlin, 1960, p. 21 no. 6.

8 (n. I), 86, and (n. 3), 47. 29 Posner (n. 3), 41; J. Tréheux, ‘Etudes critiques sur les inventaires de 1l’independance délienne’, manuscript, Thése lettres, (Paris, 1959), 266—71; Linders (n. 2 and n. 26). 3° Posner (n. 3), 100. Cf. Boegehold (n. 3), 24: “The document itself or a copy or abstract of

the document is official and valid in whatever disposition it exists, no matter if form and phraseology in the original vary somewhat from that in copy or abstract.’ 3" Posner (n. 3), 108-9, 115-16; cf. Boegehold (n. 3), 24. 3° [Dem.] XXV. 69-70. Cf. Boegehold (n. 3), 26. 33 Boegehold (n. 9), 154: P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), 148-51. 34 Wycherley (n. 3), 160 n. 519; cf. Posner (n. 3), L11~12.

220 Diane Harris word, and the stone version was just as authoritative as the document filed in the Metroon.°*°

To set up a proper system for control of inventory, there are certain prerequisites. There must be a physical repository which is secure, and suitable for the receipt, movement, and use of the objects or records kept inside. The places where items are kept must be properly marked and made

known to those taking the inventory. The administrators must be given appropriate authority, status, and information needed to conduct their inventory consistently.*° Without these essential characteristics, inventories are useless. The administration of the Acropolis was consistent with these principles, as were the other ancient civilizations which kept administrative archives and records. The treasurers probably did keep records inside one or more of the buildings on the Acropolis. Accounts and receipts must have been made when the treasurers withdrew money from the Opisthodomos, and it is likely that dedications were kept track of by writing kept close at

hand. At least one record was certainly kept in the Parthenon: the bronze

stele according to which the chryselephantine statue was taken apart, weighed, and restored: [ro dyaApa év tau ‘Exaroprédu évtedés Kata TV oTHAnv thv] yadKhy thy év tat Tlapbevdvi [6ulorAoyduevov [--- (‘It is agreed

that the statue in the Hekatompedon is intact according to the bronze stele in the Parthenon’).°’ The Treasurers of Athena were drawn from the wealthiest class of citizens,

which ensured that they had some experience in dealing with money and finance.?®> The practical education that they acquired in amassing and maintaining their private fortunes was education enough for handling the financial affairs of Athens. ‘A democratic society requires an informed, intelligent electorate, and the intelligence of the electorate varies as the quantity and quality of its information varies.’*? As Lisa Kallet-Marx has persuasively argued, the aristocrats of Athens seem to have had a special privilege concerning financial information. But the people of Athens had access to financial knowledge, although they may not have had the experience to understand such information. The temple inventory lists were not inscribed on clay and stored in a private room within some king's private palace, but were accessible to the public eye. James Madison wrote, ‘Know-

ledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives. A 3> Thomas (n. 3), 47; Boegehold (n. 3), 23-30. 3© R. A. Hoffman, Inventories: A Guide to Their Control, Costing, and Effect Upon Income and Taxes, (New York, 1962), 24.

37 IG ii? 1407 lines 5-6: cf. 1410 lines 7-8; 1443 lines: 10-11; 1468 lines 6-7. 38 Ath. Pol. 21. 5, 43. 1, 47. 1; cf. Hignett (n. 24), 225-6. 39 US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary (n. 16), 33.

Freedom of Information and Accountability 221 popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.’*° THE NEAR EAST

Writing was an invention of the Sumerians, created to serve the administration of a complex economy. Over 400,000 clay tablets have been excavated in the Mesopotamian lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, and the nearby cultures of Elam, Urartu, the Hittites, and Phoenicians.** Roughly 90 per cent of the excavated tablets may be categorized as economic, including accounts, lists, purchases, receipts, leases, and contracts.** The records concerning the management of the palace economy were kept separately from the political documents concerned with foreign affairs.* Such records may be thought of as ‘housekeeping’ and were thought to be of concern only to the administrators: the tablets were not published in a

public sense but were kept on unfired clay inside palace rooms open only to the scribes and government officers. At-Babylon, each economic transaction was documented with an elaborate system of receipts, requiring a complex system of book-keeping and records archives. The Mesopotamians

had three systems for the storage of tablets. The first is the pigeon-hole system, comparable to the storage of papyri at the libraries of Pergamum or

Alexandria. Room 5 of the Nabu temple in Khorsabad had ‘a group of niches arranged in three horizontal tiers’, and fragments of clay tablets were found inside them.** The open-shelf system was made out of brick, clay, or wood, entailing the construction of benches or shelves, and arranging the tablets like upright books, leaning against each other, held up by book-ends.

The archives at Ugarit and Pylos were evidently arranged in this way.* And thirdly, the container system, utilizing jars, baskets, or boxes held records at Kish and Mari; Pylos and Knossos used this method as well.*° 4° Ibid. 37-8. 4" Posner (n. 3), 16, 23. 4? Tbid. 27.

43 Ibid. 30, 40. 44 G. Loud and C. B. Altman, Khorsabad, v. ii. The Citadel and the Town, (Chicago, 1938), 46; cf. Posner (n. 3), 56. 45 Posner (n. 3), 56-8. 4° Ibid. 58-9. Bibliography for Mesopotamian archive techniques and inventories includes: J. Bottero, Archives Royales de Mari: Textes économique et administratifs (Paris, 1957); E. Chiera, They Wrote on Clay (Chicago, 1938); S. Dalley, Mari and Karana: Two Old Babylonian Cities (Harlow, 1984); G. Dossin et al., Archives Royales de Mari: Textes transcrits et traduits (Paris, 1946-1982); G. Goosens, ‘Classement des archives royales de Mari,’ Revenue d’Assyriologie 46 (1952), 137-54; S. Greengus, Old Babylonian Tablets from Ischali and Vicinity (Leiden, 1979); W. Leemans, Ishtar of Lagaba and Her Dress (Leiden, 1952); A. L. Oppenheim, ‘The Golden

Garments of the Gods’, JNES 7 (1949), 172-93; M. Weitemeyer, ‘Archive and Library Technique in Ancient Mesopotamia’, Libri, 6 (1956), 225-32.

222 Diane Harris In Egypt, the illiterate masses were ordered to file records for many of their most basic transactions and affairs, which in essence made them dependent on scribes and bureaucrats for their daily needs. ‘According to Egyptian law, written complaints and defence had to be filed in lawsuits, and all business matters, such as purchases, leases, loans, and matrimonial agreements, had to be settled in writing if they were to be valid.’*’ Yet few could write such documents on their own, leaving them dependent on the official scribes. Such bureaucracy kept the populace dependent and the state centralized.*°

The Hittites produced inventories for three main purposes: to record receipts for trading journeys, their cargoes and exchange items; to record tribute or coronation goods to the king and queen; and, as lists of cult items (melgetu-lists).*? The Hittites had formal treasuries which kept inventories of the King’s possessions at Hattusa, yet the royal archive containing these lists remains to be found.°° Such lists were kept for archival purposes as records of trade and tribute for the king’s information. They were not public

records in the sense of the marble stelai on the Acropolis.°’ The royal inventories at Nuzi, Alalakh, and Ugarit document the tribute and taxation lists of the empires.°? The most complete Hittite list is the inventory of

Manninni, dating to the 13th century sc.°* Rather than lists of taxes or tribute, they are of a more private nature, recording the possessions of one 47 Posner (n. 3), 77. 48 Bibliography for Egyptian inventories and archive techniques includes: W. Barta, Die altagyptische Opferliste (Mtinchner Aegyptologische Studien 3, Berlin, 1963): J. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, i-v (New York, 1962 [1906]); W. L. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore, 1992); P. Posener-Krieger and J. L. De Cenival, Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum, 5th Ser. The Abu Sir Papyri (London, 1968); A. F. Shore, ‘Votive Objects from Denderah of the GraecoRoman Period’, in J. Ruffle, G. A. Gaballa, and K. Kitchen (eds.), Glimpses from Ancient Egypt: Studies in Honor of H. W. Fairman (Warminster, 1979), 138-60; E. Wente, Letters from Ancient Egypt (Society of Biblical Literature 1, Atlanta, 1990). 49 S. Kosak, Hittite Inventory Lists (CTH 241-250) (Heidelberg, 1982), 19. °° See A. Kempinski and S. Kosak, ‘Hittite Metal Inventories (CTH 242) and their Economic Implications’, Tel Aviv, 4 (1977), 87-93. ‘' For Hittite inventories and archives see C. W. Carter, ‘Hittite Cult-Inventories’ (Diss. Univ. of Chicago, 1962); O. R. Gurney, Some Aspects of Hittite Religion (Oxford, 1977); L. Jakob-Rost, ‘Zu den Hethitischen Bildbeschreibungen’, Mitteilungen des Instituts fiir Orientforschung, 8-9 (1961-63), I61-—217; 175-239; Kempinski and Kosak (n. 50), 87-93; Kosak (n. 49); Kosak, ‘The Inventory from Mannini (CTH 504)’, Linguistica, 18 (1978), 99-123; E. Laroche, Catalogue des textes Hittites (Paris, 1971); Laroche, ‘Catalogues des textes Hittites: premier supplément’, Revue hittite et asianique 30 (1972), 94-133; I. Singer, The Hittite KILLAM Festival: Studien zu den Bogazkoy-Texten 27-8, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1983, 1984). >* Kempinski and Kosak (n. 50), 91-2 with bibliography. 53 K. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, ‘A Note on the Jewellery Listed in the Inventory of Manninni (CTH 504)’, Anatolian Studies, 30 (1980), 85-90; S. Kosak, ‘The Inventory of Manninni’, Linguistica, 18 (1978), 99-123; A. Goetze, ‘The Inventory of IBoT I 3I’, JCS 10 (1956), 32-8.

Freedom of Information and Accountability 223 palace, probably representing gifts and personal tributes ‘to high-ranking officials and members of the royal family’.°*

Itamar Singer in The Hittite KILAM festival analyses the Hittite Ration Tablets (Akk. melgetu).°> The rations are mostly food for ‘the various groups

of cult functionaries during the festival’, but also include clothing and ornaments.*° These items are expressly for temple personnel and ritual use, and in some cases the donors are specified. The texts almost always included

the group of recipients, the provisions, the supplying functionaries or institutions, and additional instructions to the recipients.°’ These differ from the inventories of the Treasurers of Athena by recording disposable products (food and beverages) which were to be consumed and not stored. Yet similar

lists probably existed at Athens for the olive oil and wines stored for ceremonial use and for presenting to the victors of the athletic contests. The best examples of pre-Aramaic Persian accounts come from Susa and Persepolis. From the latter, one group of inscriptions is called ‘the treasury tablets’, dating from 492-459 Bc.°** Most of these were discovered in Room 33 of the Palace at Persepolis, which contained the tablets concerned with the administration of the treasury.°? These are not inventory lists per se, but were records related to the administration of the Persian Empire’s finances.°° The Persian system was most likely the system with which the Athenians were most familiar, and the principles of how to take and inventory, how to keep records, and how to inscribe the weights and tags directly on the vessels were probably learned from the Persians. An examination of the forms and functions of Near-Eastern inventories and financial accounts suggests that the Athenian model is derived from

the Near-Eastern idea, but adapted to be consistent with the democratic principle of freedom of information. The systems of record-keeping are comparable, but the inscribing of these documents on stone and setting them up in public is a departure from earlier Near-Eastern traditions. The only explanation for this departure that makes sense is a political one: the Athenians, with their democratic principles, evidently required a different method of record-keeping from their Near-Eastern antecedents. As Tullia >4 Kempinski and Kosak (n. 50), 92. 55 Singer (n. 51), i, 141. 5° Singer (n. 51, 1983), 141. >? Ibid. 151-2.

5§ Posner (n. 3), 120-2 and fig. 27; cf. E. F. Schmidt, Persepolis, i. Structures, Reliefs, Inscriptions (Chicago, 1953), 173-5 and Persepolis, ii. Contents of the Treasury and Other Discoveries (Chicago, 1957), 4-7.

9 Posner (n. 3), 120-3 and fig. 27. °° For Persian accounts, see E. Cruz-Uribe, Saite and Persian Cattle-Documents: A Study in Legal Forms and Principles in Ancient Egypt (American Studies in Papyrology 26, Chico, Calif., 1985); D. D. Luckenbill, trans., Ancient Records of Assyria, ii (Chicago, 1926-7; repr. New York, 1968); Schmidt (n. 58).

224 Diane Harris Linders has remarked, ‘The inscriptions thus record not so much book-

keeping as the way the administration worked, which was by means of personal encounters and oral communications. What we see is the administrative machinery of the polis.’"°’ That administrative machinery was hidden from public view in the ancient Near East; in Greece, however, such information was shared through édypdora ypdupara. ACCOUNTING PRINCIPLES

Modern theories of accounting would place the Athenian Treasurers under

fiduciary accounting. The Treasurers were responsible to Athena, and by extension the Athenians, for property, revenue, and disbursements— responsible to Athena, but accountable to the Boule. If the board of ten Treasurers of Athena are seen as a fiduciary body, it becomes apparent that their inventories are not the same as the book-keeping of a managed business

such as a Near-Eastern monarchy or a business such as a religious cult. The book-keeping involved for fiduciary management is minimized and there

is no economic summary, as there would be in business management.°’ Instead, ‘the fiduciary (the Board of Treasurers) presents a report or accounting to the authority which conferred his powers upon him’ (the Boule) by ‘stating first the sums with which he is chargeable and then what he claims

in the way of discharge.’”°? Since the Treasurers rarely would discharge dedications (except in the case of kathairesis or melt-downs to make new treasures), the inventory lists only contain the ‘sums with which they were charged’: the sacred treasures. The Athenian lists only record the fixed and permanent treasures. Very few consumables are ever mentioned in the Athenian tablets: we know that oils and wine must have been stored in great quantities on the Acropolis, as well as the ceramic jars which contained

them, but they do not appear in the inventories nor in the accounts of the Treasurers of Athena.** The reason for the Athenian inventory is to audit

the Treasurers for the precious items for which they were responsible; consumables used at the festivals and ceremonies would confuse the issue. These precious items, given by the demos or individuals and other citystates to Athena, are deposits. Sprague, in The Philosophy of Accounts, writes that ‘Thus things convert themselves to rights, and the reverse is true: rights are convertible into things. Rights are but the future tense of things ... But rights are sometimes materialized into kind of artificial things, especially when they are evidenced by some material thing, such as a written document ° Linders (n. 2), 36. °2 C. E. Sprague, The Philosophy of Accounts (Lawrence, Kan., 1907 [1972] ), I50-—I. °3 Tbid. 151.

°4 Harris (n. 8), 457: cf. T. Linders, ‘Continuity in Change: The Evidence of the Temple Accounts at Delos’, in Early Greek Cult Practice (Stockholm, 1988), 267-9.

Freedom of Information and Accountability 225 ...°5 The treasures kept in the Parthenon are things, which are convertible to the rights of the citizens to use them in ceremonies and trade with Athena for benefactions to the city. As Plato said, the Athenians are masters at the ‘art of trading with the Gods’.®°

The right to know about the possessions of Athena was essential to freedom of speech: ‘for the right to speak and the right to print, without the right to know, are pretty empty’.®’ Yet the tyrannies at the end of the fourth century brought an end to the publication of the inventories of Athena, and with that, the loss of the freedom of information.®°® Such tyranny may be reflected in the words of Governor Berkeley of the colony of Virginia, who feared he might lose hold of his power and wrote in 1671: I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these [for one] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best Government. God keep us from both.®?

°5 Sprague (n. 62), 45.

°° Euthyphron 14e.

°7 US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary (n. 16), 23. 8 For the alleged theft of Athena’s gold under Lachares, see Paus. I. 25. 7 and I. 29. 16: Phlegon (?) FGrH IIB 257a F 3 (P. Oxy. 2082); Demetrius, Areopagites, fr. 1, III (p. 357 Kock); cf. J. Mansfield, ‘The Robe of Athena and the Panathenaic ‘‘Peplos’’’, Ph.D. thesis, Berkeley, Calif, 1985, 160-1 n. 29; C. Habicht, Untersuchungen zur politischen Geschichte Athens im 3. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Munich, 1979), I-21; D. M. Lewis, ‘Athena’s Robe’, Scripta Classica Israelica, 5 (1979-80), 29. °? US Congress, Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary (n. 16), 51.

14 Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and the Resources of the Athenian Empire LISA KALLET-MARX The pervasiveness of finance in the life of the Athenian polis in the mid-tolate fifth century is patent when one looks at evidence as diverse as comedy and inscriptions concerned with the financial resources of the city and its empire. From the ubiquity of reference in Aristophanes to tribute, bribery, and pay,’ from the emmisthos polis at home and the extraction and accumulation of revenue from the empire, to the published records of expenditures,

loans, and tribute quota to Athena, the degree of ‘fiscality’ in the public realm, and of public consciousness about money, is remarkable. At the same

time, the cohesion of the democracy depended on the stability of its institutions, but, as has become clear as well, it also relied greatly on rhetoric.” In rhetoric lies a crucial key to understanding the relationship between leader/rhetor and the demos, as it was the means by which their respective claims to power in the democracy were negotiated. But it also reveals how the Athenians collectively thought about the democracy and the empire, and illuminates the collective values, norms, and identity of the polis.

The realms of finance and rhetoric are indeed central to the public life of Periclean and post-Periclean fifth-century Athens; but their intersection has not been examined.’ I would like to show how their linkage enhances our understanding of such fundamental issues as consensus about the empire, It is a pleasure and an honour to dedicate this paper to David Lewis. I am grateful to Robin Osborne and Simon Hornblower for their stimulating comments on an earlier draft. ’ The extraordinary prevalence of money as an explicit subject in the popular consciousness is implied by the overwhelming concentration on this area in many of Aristophanes’ plays. In the Acharnians, e.g., in the course of the first Ioo lines or so, talk about money comes up in the realms of private transactions (its ubiquity is at issue), public service, bribery, theft, foreign embassies, pay for soldiers and rowers, and empire. * See esp. N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens, trans. A. Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1986); J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, NJ, 1989). 3 The study of F. Vannier, Finances publiques et richesses privées dans les discours athénien aux v’ et iv’ siécles (Paris, 1988) is related, though does not overlap with the approach taken here; for rhetoric and wealth in the 4th cent. cf. also Ober, 205-47. Neither is concerned specifically with the rhetorical use of financial knowledge in the construction of ideology.

228 Lisa Kallet-Marx and the relationship between financial knowledge and political power. There is a larger issue at hand here, and that is the nature of democratic leadership.

Josiah Ober has argued that the Athenian demos was in reality a unified political entity, which dictated its collective will to aristocratic individuals, whom it allowed to be rhetores, and who in turn reflected the (unspoken) will of the masses.* This thesis, while highly problematic, in my view, chiefly

because of its presumption of a unified and like-thinking demos and its notion of the way rhetoric works,°> nevertheless redefines the nature of democratic leadership and thus demands a response. One way to approach this broader issue is to consider a concrete and specific area of public discourse and knowledge, namely finances of the polis. I claim no definitive

answers; this paper is a preliminary study intended to suggest a different direction that in my view can be particularly instructive in understanding the relationship between rhetor and demos in Athens and the way that social consensus about the empire and political cohesion in the democracy were achieved during the period of Athens’ empire.

THE EXTENT OF FINANCIAL KNOWLEDGE AMONG THE CITIZENRY

A useful starting-point is to ask how much the average male citizen in Athens knew about Athenian public and imperial finance, and what was the nature of his knowledge. The student of Athenian democracy is rightly impressed by the level of general knowledge about the administration of the polis and empire that the average citizen must have had. From service in

one of the hundreds of annual magistracies, in addition to the annually selected Council of 500, attendance in the Assembly and courts,° to the presence of countless inscriptions on stone scattered throughout the Agora and Acropolis concerned with the public life of Athens, the degree of awareness of the intimate workings of the democracy among the mass populace and of involvement in the political life of the city is, as has often been noted, one of the most extraordinary and singular features of classical

Athens.’ Yet when we come to consider the extent and nature of public knowledge about finances among the mass of the Athenian male citizenry, some important qualifications emerge. The first place one thinks to look is 4 e.g. Mass and Elite, 168. > T examine his thesis more fully in ‘Institutions, Ideology, and Political Consciousness: Some Recent Books on Athenian Democracy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994) 307-335. © For a convenient summary of the number of active participants annually see M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991), 313 (= ADAD). 7 See e.g. Hansen, ADAD 232, 312; R. K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens (Cambridge, 1988), 31-4, 75-6; R. G. A. Buxton, Persuasion in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, 1982), 15.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 229 the Assembly. But much of what the ordinary citizen learned there was filtered through the orator, whose political power through shaping public thought is precisely at issue here. Apart from the Assembly, what opportunities were there for citizens to acquire independent knowledge about finances? A brief survey of the means of obtaining accurate, detailed knowledge about the city’s domestic and imperial, public and sacred finances will be instructive. First, of the large number of annual magistracies in the fifth century, only

a few, relatively speaking, were financial in function and scope, and the most important of these, for example, the Treasurers of Athena, or the Logistai, normally—and certainly in the fifth century—were filled by citizens

of the highest census group.® Even if restrictions against iteration were in effect in this period, still the percentage of the citizen population with direct experience as a treasurer on an important financial board was insignificant. Other magistracies which controlled funds or dealt with financial matters as part of their function, for example, the apodektai, the kolokretai, or poletai,

were less restricted in property qualifications, but likely did not include thetes.?

Service in the Council offered the best chance to acquire knowledge about the public finances, given the Council’s oversight of all important financial administration,’° including its supervision of the receipt of the annual tribute from the empire.'* Bouleutai would have heard the amounts of tribute paid

by each city read out as it was brought into the Bouleuterion,’? and also had a considerable role in determining tribute assessments, as they checked the amounts made by the taktai.'* The Council’s purview over finances is well illustrated by its role in drafting decrees dealing with complex financial matters such as the tribute-reassessment decree of 425, which then moved on to the ekklesia for discussion and a vote.** Unlike service on a specific,

individual financial board, it was as a bouleutes that a citizen had the opportunity to get a good, general impression of the fiscal management of ® See the list in R. Develin, Athenian Officials 684-321 B.C. (Cambridge, 1989), 7 fff.

° Cf. Hansen, ADAD 249, who thinks the formal ban was a ‘dead letter’. But even if true in the late 4th cent., it is unlikely to have been the case in the 5th. Relevant are vacancies on

some boards in the 4th cent. which suggests, as Hansen notes (233), that the Athenians neither used compulsion on the top three property groups, nor necessary recourse to the thetes in the case of such deficiencies. Moreover, one could deny one’s thetic status; but if an individual also owned no property, he would have to dissemble to a far greater extent in response to the questions asked him at his dokimasia. (Arist., Ath. Pol. 55. 3). Also see n. 18, below. "© See P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), 88-113 ( = AB). '' [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3. 2; 1G i*® 34. 5 fff.

* 1G i’ 34. 11-18. 3 1G PB 71. 12-26. '4 [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 3. 2: IG i® 71. 4-7, 12-26, 44-50 (drafted in the Boule); see Rhodes, AB

88-113.

230 Lisa Kallet-Marx polis and empire, and in particular was in a position to know precise amounts of moneys in the sacred treasuries and in the Delian League coffers.*°

What percentage of the male citizenry in the mid-to-late fifth century would have already been bouleutai in a given year?'® Athenians had to be 30 years old (or have reached their 30th year’’), and there seems to have been a formal restriction prohibiting thetes from serving.’® Let us suppose as

a working estimate a minimum figure of 40,000 for the number of male citizens at this time (larger estimates will strengthen my argument):"? if we assume an average age of 40 years for service on the Council,”® with 20

more years in an average life expectancy, no more than 1/4 of the male citizenry would have been bouleutai during one previous year;*' higher estimates are likely, making it most probable that the proportion is nearer to 1/5. The additional question of the social background of the majority of bouleutai certainly bears on the issue, since if the élite were over-represented,

then even fewer of the ordinary mass of citizens will have had experience of this vital administrative organ;** and in any case, we can safely say that in the fifth century, thetes were not represented on the Council. Nevertheless,

I am willing to suppose for the sake of argument the lowest population estimates, and vigilant, informed bouleutic service as broadly spread among

the citizenry as possible; even so, how much continuing, up-to-date, and comprehensive knowledge would this have brought to a former bouleutes? He would undeniably have been in a better position than non-bouleutai to assess financial information with which he was provided in the future, but as for knowledge of the city’s finances for all but one year, my answer would be ‘not very much’.

» T have argued elsewhere that Delian League moneys were kept separate from the Treasury of Athena; see ‘Did Tribute Fund the Parthenon?’, CA 8 (1989), 252-66. ‘© Irrelevant for my purposes are estimates of service at any point in one’s life, since what matters is financial knowledge already acquired by a citizen. ‘7 Rhodes, AB I n. 7. '® Arist. Ath. Pol. 7. 4. See Rhodes, AB 4-6. Hansen, ADAD 108, thinks that a ‘large slice’ of the membership of the Boule came from the thetes (erroneously citing Rhodes, AB 4-6, in

support); cf. also ADAD 249, and, on the basis of Aristotle, that the formal bar was not observed: thetes simply did not note their property status. '? For a useful collection of bibliography see Sinclair (n. 7), appendix Ia—c, and add P. J. Rhodes, Thucydides. History II (Warminster, 1988), 271-7. °° M. H. Hansen, Demography and Democracy (Herning, 1985), 55-6; LCM 13 (1988), 679; ADAD 249; cf. R. Osborne’s comments in JHS 107 (1987), 233. * It is not likely that citizens could serve an additional term in the 5th cent.; see Rhodes, AB 3. ** See Rhodes, AB 4-6; Hansen; ADAD 249; Sinclair (n. 7), 66.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 231 Inscriptions concerned with finances that were published on stone and readily accessible for reading dotted the Athenian landscape, especially conspicuous and numerous in the Agora and on the Acropolis. They included

the tribute quota lists, reassessments of tribute, loans from the sacred treasuries, expenses of military expeditions, inventories, and the like. But inventories did not record ‘cash’, and documents recording expenses and loans are silent on overall income, expenditure, and reserve. The question of who actually read these documents is important, and ultimately impossible

to answer in any comprehensive way. We certainly cannot assume that their existence presupposes wide readership; their functional value was symbolic as well as practical as signifiers of democracy, and the former role is undiminished if the inscriptions were mostly looked at rather than read.*?

But it is clear that the precise contents of inscriptions were a matter of concern as documents to be consulted,** a fact that precludes a purely symbolic function. Still, the extent of readership is uncertain. Nevertheless, let us suppose substantial perusal of inventories, building accounts, lists of

loans, and the like, even so a forest of stelai can hardly have facilitated broad comprehension of the city’s finances; and to reiterate, since these stones are mute on totals of money in the forms of revenue, comprehensive

expenditures, and reserves, neither their nature nor their overwhelming number would have facilitated a good working knowledge of the city’s overall fiscal status.

Two conclusions emerge from reviewing the various means by which male citizens in Athens could learn about finances thus far. First, there was ample opportunity for them to acquire details about specific fiscal areas, from assiduous perusal of inscriptions and, with the (major) exception of thetes and all others under 30, from serving on the Council. But the second point is the one that needs to be stressed: however many pieces of financial information were either circulating in Athens, or accessible to one with a little more diligence, overall fiscal understanding not only of the amounts of money entering and leaving the city, or remaining in reserve, but also of the uses to which the city’s money was and should be put, was not within

his own grasp. Though rudimentary and meagre by modern western standards, the diverse nature and sources of revenue, domestic and imperial, the various repositories of money, temporary and long-term, and the fiscal

decisions involving both the domestic and imperial affairs of the polis all attest to and underscore the complexity, in its context, of Athenian public finance. It may appear somewhat paradoxical that, as I am suggesting, the

*3 As R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 61. has recently pointed out. *4 Cf. e.g. [Dem.] XLVITI. 71: implicit in SEG XXVI. 72, 55-6; Ar. Birds 1050.

232 Lisa Kallet-Marx sheer abundance of publicly accessible information may have impeded knowledge and understanding about the city’s finances. And so we return to the Assembly. For it was there that citizens would receive a barrage of financial details concerned with the polis and the empire, sometimes as a matter simply of being informed, but usually when presented with a proposal on the spot or a probouleuma on which a vote was required.

These decisions could be of the utmost importance to the welfare of the polis. For example, Athenians could be faced with making decisions such as

that at Assembly meetings some time before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War: should they concentrate the treasure of the gods of Athens

and Attica on the Acropolis? Should they deposit 3,000 talents in the treasury of Athena? Should they repay debts to the gods, and, if so, out of what funds?*? Or they confronted on a regular or semi-regular basis questions such as these: do we accept this tribute assessment? Should we do something about the tribute shortfall, and if so, what? In order to maintain our revenue,

should we impose tribute or an indemnity on this ally which has revolted, or send out a clerouchy?

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RHETOR AND DEMOS

Financial information preliminary and necessary to making not only specifically financial decisions, but also decisions about the empire or the polis on

which financial issues had bearing, had to be disseminated in a comprehensible way that enabled the average citizen to make a decision. Even in the case of specific probouleumata, we should by no means assume that the Assembly’s function was to rubber-stamp: the presence of riders in probouleumatic decrees presupposes discussion,”° which, it is reasonable to suggest, might often be far more wide-ranging than the limited issue with which the rider dealt. But even without much debate, or argument over specific financial details, still the Assembly had to have the basic competence

to judge. It is worth stressing that those attending the Assembly between the ages of 18 and 30 will neither have held any magistracy nor served on the Council of 500, and a minority will have seen service in the Boule for a single year, and an even smaller minority would have been magistrates with a financial function. The majority of Assembly-goers, then, would be armed with little knowledge outside what they learned in the Pnyx, or with some details, but comprising only bits and pieces, of the polis’ fiscal picture. Thus they would need instruction as well as advice on this critical area of

public life; for this they depended on the rhetor in assembly, who had, *> These are questions that are presupposed in the first Kallias Decree, IG i*? 52 (Fornara

II9).

2 og IG B71. 51.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 233 correspondingly, to be increasingly specialized in his knowledge, and whose experience as a bouleutes, for example, could be particularly valuable.*” The need for instruction holds true even if, in general, specific financial details were not debated in the Assembly itself. For example, a speaker who dealt with some of the items that preceded the Kallias decree A will have had to

know which specific sources of revenue had sufficient amounts not designated for other purposes with which to repay the gods of Athens and Attica.*®

Now the general expertise of the rhetor may be uncontroversial, and the relative ignorance of the ordinary citizen no revelation. But it is important to illustrate ancient attitudes toward and reflections of this relationship in

order to be able to go beyond mere recognition of the knowledge gap between political leader and the demos: we need to confront the implications

of the fact that, when a rhetor spoke on an issue with which the city’s finances were in any way concerned, he was not as a rule telling the majority of listeners what they already knew, except in so far as he was building on, reinforcing, or reiterating that on which he or another rhetor had instructed them previously, or elucidating and pulling together those bits and pieces gleaned outside the Assembly. Just how much knowledge or expertise is at issue must be explored more fully elsewhere. Here I wish simply to establish the general structure of the relationship between rhetor as teacher and audience as student, and then pursue its implications.

The rhetor as instructor

An important piece of evidence that illustrates the contrast between public ignorance of the city’s overall fiscal status and an orator’s command of such

knowledge is the famous accounting of Athens’ financial resources by Pericles on the eve of the Peloponnesian War (Thuc. 2. 13), in which the statesman refers to the annual total of imperial revenue, and the quantity and nature of Athens’ reserves. This speech has received enormous attention

in the scholarship on Thucydides, the Athenian empire, and Athenian finance. We need not engage at all in the traditional controversies, for what

matters here is the very existence of a combination of detail and of comprehensive knowledge about the amounts of revenue entering the city, amounts of reserve, and their origin. The contents of the passage, given its

nature, while not the statesman’s actual words—after all it is not even related as a direct speech, but is given in oratio obliqua—do, in my view, 27 Cf. Ar. Knights 772 ff., which is usually taken as a reference to Cleon’s role as a bouleutes, and in any case attests to the recognition of the need for expert guidance. 28 1G i} 52. 5-7.

234 Lisa Kallet-Marx reflect what Pericles actually said.*? But the particular value of the passage

for my purposes here, as that of other speeches in Thucydides, does not depend on the ‘authenticity’ of the speech. For if it, like others, was not written with the orator’s original as a guide, then it still was composed with the aim of persuasion of which an essential factor was appropriateness. In this case, the passage illustrates what Pericles the orator would be expected to know and to say. Significantly, the wealth of detailed information, but also its nature, makes clear that the statesman was not rehearsing before his fellow-citizens wellknown information, information they all knew from their experience in the administration of the city; on the contrary he was instructing them.*° In particular, information about totals of cash in income and reserve would not have been widely known unless an orator researched and provided it, especially

as public funds were not housed in one location, but in several, and, with the exception of the annual quota to Athena, were not inscribed on stone.

Confirmation of the implications of Thucydides 2. 13 and a further illustration of the distance between orator and the mass of the male citizenry

comes from the fourth century. Aristotle in the Rhetoric (1359°8) names finances (strictly, wépor) as the first of five general subjects on which people deliberate and on which deliberative orators give advice in public. ‘Orators should know’, he writes, ‘what and how extensive the revenues of the city are ... and all the expenses as well.’?’ Moreover he stresses the importance

of research even into practices in other cities, making clear that the skilled orator was someone expected to possess knowledge unknown to his audience.** Another useful example comes from Xenophon’s Memorabilia (3.

6. 5-6), where we meet Glaukon, an aspiring orator and leader of the polis, whose ambition so exceeded his ability that he made a complete laughing*9 An indication of Thucydides’ careful reporting of the precise details of Pericles’ speech is his parenthetical exegesis in the midst of relating the financial account. Thuc.’s decision to render it in oratio obliqua is obviously deliberate; but what was the reason? As written, it is virtually fused with the narrative, thus raising the possibility that it is near-governed by the principles guiding Thucydides in his composition of the narrative as opposed to the speeches, that is, giving it a higher status of authority. But it is also the case that the use of oratio obliqua allows Thucydides to step in and gloss the speech as he does, which would be impossible in oratio recta.

3° Cf. Plut. Per. 15. 3: Pericles as someone ze(Q@wv kat didacxwv. I find support for the argument that Pericles was instructing his audience in 2. 13. 3-5 in the way that Thucydides ends his report of the speech: édeye dé Kai dAAa oldrep ciwber Tlepuxdryjs és ddderEw Tob TrEepréceabat

T® TroAEuw (2. 13. 9). The phrasing implies that what Thucydides has included in 2.13 was

out of the ordinary, i.e. not typical of an exhortation, but that the rest of his speech was traditional. 31 "Qore epi pev TOpwv tov péAArovTa aupBouvrevaew déou dv Tas mpoaddous THs méAEwWS Eid€évat tives Kat TOGaL ... Ett d€ TAs Samdvas THs méAEwWS Amaoaas. 3? dvayKaiov Kal Tay Tapa Tots dAXots Edpynpévwy LoropiKov elvar mpoOs THY TEPL TOUTWY GUpBovAry,

1359°8.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 235 stock out of himself and had to be dragged off the bema. Enter Socrates, who sets out to dampen Glaukon’s political aspirations. He questions Glaukon to

discover whether he has the knowledge required in an orator. He begins with finances. ‘Tell me the sources of revenue (af zpécodou); for no doubt you've looked into this (€cxesar), in order to eliminate deficiencies.’ ‘Good god, no!’, replies Glaukon. ‘Well, then, what about the expenditures (rds damavas) of the city?’ ‘Fact is, Socrates, I haven’t had time for that either.’ After running through other areas of expertise in which Glaukon is painfully

deficient, Socrates wonders how his young friend will ever be able to persuade his fellow citizens. This amusing anecdote is useful for our purposes in its presumption that an orator had specialist knowledge and, as important, that the general populace lacked a good grasp of knowledge about finances. Of particular importance, moreover, is that it links specialist knowledge with the orator’s capacity to persuade. *? We can appreciate already the connection between financial knowledge, advice, and persuasion from these examples, and they are closely related to

the common democratic image of the orator as teacher, against which Plato polemicizes at length.** But what needs special emphasis is that the conception of the orator as teacher (é:6dcxados) has implications rather different from his other common metaphorical guise, that of its adviser (ctuBovdAos). For whereas the role of the rhetor as adviser can be construed as evidence of the power of the demos, in his capacity as instructor the table

turns, for as teacher instructing students, the orator is endowed with enormous power. Now the professionalism required in rhetores by the midfifth century alone confirms that the distance between political leader and the mass of the citizenry would have been growing through the disparity in

knowledge and thus power. But the question I want to raise is how this knowledge was used. How specifically did orators talk about money? How

did they maintain their power and reinforce democratic cohesion at the same time? What are the implications of this power? Financial knowledge as an instrument of power

Let me return to Thucydides 2. 13. Pericles’ grasp of finances and his instruction to the Athenians concentrates power in him and enables him to produce a certain response in his listeners. As Thucydides presents it, Pericles begins by advising the Athenians on the best strategy to adopt in the coming

struggle, including keeping firm control of the empire. For the Athenians’ strength, he asserts, lay in the revenue of money from the allies, and by 33 The question of how much expertise an orator might normally have is one that requires more attention than is possible here. For now, however, it is sufficient to recognize assumptions about the orator’s superior knowledge in order to establish the disparity between orator and average citizen. 4 e.g. Gorgias 447C3, 453d7-10, 454c-455 ff.; cf. also Arist. Rhet. 140476.

236 Lisa Kallet-Marx means of a combination of yrmun and zeprovoia ypyudtwv Athens would win. Then follows a detailed catalogue of the city’s finances. What effect would it have had? First, we need to appreciate the fundamental emotional or psychological component of this financial list: the purpose of Pericles’

account record is not deliberative; rather it is designed to produce a psychological state, @apcos, one of the emotions Pericles was apparently particularly adept at arousing—and crushing—in the demos.*° How would this result have been achieved? Modern work on rhetoric and communication has elucidated the ways in which the pre-existing authority of a speaker is instrumental to the success and interpretation of a speech, and is inseparable from the set of social relations, or the institution.*° We can see from Thucydides how Pericles’ financial mastery was central to building up his authority as instructor. The same financial list produced by

someone other than Pericles might not have produced acceptance and Oapoos. But his authority was built on the basis of his rhetorical ability, financial knowledge, generalship, and role as instructor in the milieu of the Assembly, constituted and reinforced previously. Indeed, this passage is instrumental for showing precisely how Pericles, by displaying his control over financial information, might thus keep the demos behind his policy and consequently continue to maintain his own power. This display of what, by practice and repetition, was elevated to specialist knowledge would have confirmed his role as instructor—and thus superior—and that of the demos in assembly as student, and fostered acceptance of this unequal relationship as a normal part of the status quo. The effect of Pericles’ authority as financial expert, then, means that his word on financial matters would have been accepted. A good illustration of

this point comes from Plutarch (Per. 23. 1), who records an anecdote of which the authenticity is confirmed by a parody in Aristophanes’ Clouds (858-9), in which the demos approved without question or debate an unspecified expenditure (es 76 déov) of ten talents submitted by Pericles for

the Euboean campaign in 446.*’ This passage illuminates the potential power over both the city’s finances and the demos that a successful orator possessed: his word on financial matters could be accepted without discussion; thus it also implicitly acknowledges that it was acceptable to the demos not to know and judge all financial matters involving its own money. A final illustration of the association made between financial expertise and 35 Thuc. 2. 65. 9. 3® Speech-act theory developed by J. L. Austin is particularly useful as a starting point; see How to Do Things With Words, 2nd edn., ed. J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisa (Oxford, 1975); see also P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), esp. 107-59.

37 Ephoros 70 F193 at schol. Ar. Clouds 859 puts it at 20 talents; see P. A. Stadter, A Commentary on Plutarch’s Pericles (Chapel Hill, NC, 1989), ad loc.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 237 power comes from Aristophanes’ Knights (772 ff.), where Paphlagon tries to

edge ahead of Sausage-Seller in the contest to lead Demos by citing his success in producing ypyuara mAciota év tH Kow@ when he advised the Athenians. Whether or not this passage refers specifically to Cleon’s capacity as rhetor/adviser while he was a bouleutes,>* it implicitly demonstrates that

a rhetor’s mastery over finances which underlies an ability to increase the treasury, should be cashed in for personal political power. These passages, combined with evidence pointing to an increasing tendency of the city’s political leaders to be financial experts throughout the late fifth and fourth century, reveal the critical role of the rhetor as financial specialist and teacher.*? Moreover, inasmuch as an individual leader’s fiscal knowledge shapes an expectation of rhetores necessarily as financial experts, his rivals and successors—such as Thucydides, son of Melesias, or Cleon— would claim and demonstrate their financial skills as well.4° This is significant, for the conception of the orator as financial expert makes him the central focus of instruction and advice on financial matters, not, ultimately, the Council, or some financial magistrate. Likewise, it reinforces the notion that it is in the Assembly that one can expect to learn about finances. What are the implications of this role for understanding the relationship

between leader and demos as well as the broader function of financial knowledge in the hands of the rhetor? First, if the orator is regarded as someone with specialist knowledge and is authorized to instruct, then this gives him potentially enormous influence. For not only does he have the opportunity to convert financial knowledge into political power in democratic

Athens, he does much more than simply disseminate information and give specific advice: he is also in a position to shape public opinion about Athens’

finances and the uses to which they should be put,*’ in short, to set the boundaries and the context within which the demos judges the information

and advice he gives. Plato’s gibe (Gorg. 515e) that Pericles made the Athenians ‘money-grubbers’ (d.iAapydpous), notwithstanding its tendentiousness, is useful in illustrating the power—and recognition of the power—

of the orator not just to affect what people do but their attitudes as well. What precisely these attitudes are and how they are shaped and reflected in popular consciousness is our next step.

38 The verb used for Paphlagon’s advising is BovAedw. Rhodes, AB 88, takes it as certain that this passage in Knights refers to Cleon's activity as a bouleutes. 39 Hansen, ADAD, makes a dividing line between the 5th cent. and the 4th, giving special weight to the fact that rhetores in the 4th cent. were increasingly elected financial officials (270). But the combination of financial expert and rhetor, while not institutionalized in the same way that it was in the 4th cent., begins in the 5th. 4° Cf. Ar. Knights 772 ff.

41 Sinclair (n. 7), 66, though he puts it in terms of policy-shaping.

238 Lisa Kallet-Marx SHAPING ATTITUDES ABOUT FINANCES, EMPIRE AND THE DEMOCRACY

When we come to consider the role of the rhetor and his ability to constitute

collective attitudes about and responses to Athens’ financial wealth, in addition to appreciating the pre-existing authority of the orator that would affect the reception to his words, we need to recognize a further factor, namely, the way in which the effect of a particular speech is intimately

bound up with the ways that a society collectively is preconditioned to receive and interpret a speech, by means of associations with words and ideas, of ideology, and of expectations.** In what I am concerned with here, specifically the realm of public finance, Athenian listeners would have been predisposed to respond in a certain predictable way to financial information

because their attitude toward Athens’ public finances had already been shaped and was constantly being reinforced through a complex interaction between speakers and listeners. Once again, Pericles’ speech in Thucydides 2. 13 is a valuable source for our purposes, for in addition to demonstrating the specialist knowledge of

the rhetor, and his role as instructor, it also shows how a new public discourse about power had developed, at the centre of which was money. Pericles’ speech was produced in such a way as to recreate and reinforce a context within which the demos would understand and interpret his remarks. That the statesman used as a chief means of producing the desired emotional response of confidence, @dpoos, a list of Athenian resources, virtually a catalogue of money—much like a catalogue of ships—illustrates neatly the predisposition of collective Athenian attitudes. The Athenian audience had to have been conditioned to think of Athens’ strength as lying in its money in order to be emboldened by a financial list. By contrast, consider the ephor Sthenelaidas’ argument before his Spartan audience to vote for war against Athens: ‘the Athenians may have money and ships and horses, but we have brave men’ (gdppayor dyabol, 1. 86. 3). Sthenelaidas’ audience, conditioned

to think of its strength as lying in strong and brave manpower, and responding predictably to this traditional and typical formulation, would have had a very different reaction to such a financial list: it may have found it appealing to the ear,**? but there is no reason why it would have been encouraged and emboldened; rather it might have been perplexed. How then had Athenians been predisposed in this way? We need to consider 4° See the useful discussion by J. B. Thompson in his introduction to Bourdieu (n. 36), esp.

6-14. 8 CE Arist. Rhet. 1383°20. We can speculate that it would have had a pleasurable effect as well, given the fondness, typical of oral cultures, for listening to catalogues and lists of various kinds. Cf. the Boeotian school of catalogue poetry; and Plato, Hipp. Maior 285d, on the Spartans’ preference for hearing genealogical lists.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 239 more closely the nature of the Athenians’ collective attitude toward financial resources suggested by the opening of Pericles’ remarks.** The necessity of money and empire for power

There are two formulations that emerge as givens and that have in turn logical and identical corollaries: the first is that money from the empire is necessary for Athens’ strength and survival—and so the empire is necess-

ary—and the second is that money from the empire is essential for the workings of the democracy—and so the empire is necessary. The first is well illustrated by Thucydides in several different contexts in which a key formulaic phrase occurs, namely ‘the revenue from the allies from which our strength derives’ (1) 1pdécodos azo taév Evpydywv bu’ Hv coydopev) or variants. According

to Thucydides, Pericles introduced his exhortation on the eve of war by noting that Athens’ strength lay in the revenue of money from the allies (rH tcoydv avtois amo TovTwr [Ta Evppdaywr| eivar THY ypnudtwr THs mpodddou, 2. 13. 2),

and that the Athenians would win the war by a combination of good judgement (yvdun) and financial resources (srepiovela ypnudrwv). It is important to underscore that Athens’ strength was put in these terms, not in reference to manpower or individual prowess or the like. Thus, implicit in what follows is

the understanding that all of the revenue from the empire flowing into the city’s public coffers had enhanced value through its intimate link with power; this applied as well to the city’s reserve and other revenue.

In the Mytilenean debate, similar phrases appear in both Cleon’s and Diodotus’ speeches: Cleon insists that the Athenians maintain their decision to exact severe penalties for the Mytileneans’ revolt, and when he comes to the rationale behind his view, the larger context is the link between imperial revenue and power: we need a strong deterrent because poleis weakened by lengthy sieges will be unable to provide ‘future revenue by which we are strong’ (rHs ézerra mpocddor, bu’ Hv foxvopev, 3. 39. 8). Diodotus, in his turn,

champions more lenient punishment, rejecting the view that harsh measures were successful deterrents: poleis will revolt anyway; but if they know they will not suffer grievously by coming to terms, they will surrender before their resources are severely impaired. But if they know that the punishment will be harsh no matter what, they will keep resisting until their resources have been exhausted; and then we shall be deprived ‘of its revenue for the future, the cause of our strength against our enemies’ (74s mpooddov rd Aowrov am’ avrhis orépecbar; loxtopev S5€ mpos Tovs mrodAeuiovs Tae, 3. 46.

3). Significantly, though Cleon and Diodotus are at loggerheads in their recommendations to the assembly, the same assumption underlies and 44 Thuc. makes this sort of analysis very easy because of his decision to concentrate attention on Athens’ financial resources to the exclusion of other traditional exhortatory arguments that Pericles apparently used (2. 13. 9).

240 Lisa Kallet-Marx informs both positions, one that presupposes the equation of power with expense, and power with imperial revenue. They both present as a given the necessity of imperial revenue for the city’s strength, that is, they too presume, and reinforce, the equation of money and power. Listeners are forced to judge the strengths and weaknesses of the different proposals; but

just as in Pericles’ speech, the expense/power link is presented in such a way as to engender acceptance, indeed complicity. If the nature of the evidence in Thucydides explored thus far—repeated phrases in speeches by different individuals and especially the unspoken

assumptions that underlie the text—has been understood properly here, then the idea of the necessity of money and empire is not restricted to that author, but rather should be seen as a reflection of fifth-century attitudes more generally.*5 Consideration of the famous building debate in Plutarch, Pericles 12, in which Thucydides, son of Melesias, reportedly assailed Pericles for the (mis)use of allied money on beautifying the polis with costly temples and the like, is instructive.*° Both the attack and Pericles’ response, in which

he is said to have insisted on the validity of using imperial revenues for such expenditures, like the previous example from the Mytilenean debate, reveal an unquestioned, underlying assumption about the empire, namely, that taking money from the allies is normal, and, most important, that taking money in excess of what the military needs of the Delian League demanded was normal as well. Disagreement could arise over the proper use of imperial funds beyond the military demands of the polis; but the exploitation and appropriation of the resources of the allies is treated as a given. The pervasive acceptance of this assumption may find reflection in the apparent absence of any argument by Pericles’ rivals which might question the need or the validity of taking money over and above what was required for the military needs of the polis. It is essential to appreciate that rhetores were choosing to express Athens’

power in these terms—not, for example, that Athens’ strength lay in its men, or in individual bravery and collective training; rather, they were privileging money, more specifically the expenditure of money. In this context a word like Sa7dvy, expenditure, or expense, when used in reference

to the polis and its power is culture-specific and endowed with pregnant associations particular to Athens (though by no means unique to Athens)— 45 This is not to deny that certain aspects of Thuc.’s treatment of power and empire may be unusual or unique, as J. Allison, in Power and Preparedness in Thucydides (Baltimore, 1989), has argued in the case of paraskeue in Thucydides. 46 Of course not all scholars accept this debate either as genuine or reflective of a genuine

debate, e.g. A. Andrewes, ‘The Opposition to Perikles’, JHS 98 ( 1978), 1-8 (on which cf. P. A. Brunt’s comments in ‘Free Labour and Public Works at Rome’, JRS 70 (1980), 97 N. 87): for discussion of the passage cf. also Stadter (n. 37), ad loc; L. Kallet-Marx, ‘Did Tribute Fund the Parthenon?’, CA 8 (1989), 260-2.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 241 expenditure signified power and superiority, for it was Athens whose power was linked through rhetoric as well as in reality to the idea of expenditure. Aamndvy is what Michael McGee would call an ‘ideograph’, a term which in

a particular context is a sort of ‘building block’ of ideology, or collective consciousness.*’ The ideograph ‘expenditure’, expanded explicitly into the formula ‘Athens’ strength lay in the expenditure of money’, has the apparent authority of a given—but it is in fact a rhetorical formulation that became a collective democratic belief. Additional insight into the shaping of assumptions about money, power, and empire comes from Pseudo-Xenophon, whose Old Oligarch puts the basis of Athenian strength in a familiar way: ‘Someone might say that the

strength of the Athenians lies in the ability of their allies to pay tribute’ (eizrou S€ tis av Ste laxds éotw adrn 'AOnvaiwy, édav of adpupaxot duvarolt war xXpyHuata elodéperv, I. 15). It is noteworthy, however, that his formulation is

phrased as a proposition, an argument, typical of the author’s approach whereby two opposing interpretations are presented. The first is that money from the empire brings power to the Athenians. The second, the ‘democratic’ interpretation, is rather that ‘To those of radical democratic views it seems to be more advantageous for individual Athenians to have the wealth of the

allies and for (the allies) to retain just enough to live on, and to work without being in a position to conspire’ (trois 6€ énotiKois boxe? petlov ayabov elval TA TMV OUppadywv yphuata eva exactov AOyvaiwv exew, éxeivous b€ daov

thy, kal épydleoba ddvvarous évras émBovAevew). The existence of alternatives

makes the first not an underlying assumption, but rather an argument, to be rejected in favour of a different way of looking at money and power. It

is instructive for what it says about attitudes about money and power expressed in other contexts: they are all rhetorical formulations, not givens, or truths. A little further on, reference is made to the allies ‘who pay tribute’ (2. 1), a frequent formulation in Thucydides. Indeed the allies do pay tribute; but they need not be referred to in this formulaic way, rather than simply as ‘allies,’ or ‘cities whom the Athenians rule’. Consider as well the alternatives in expressing the relationship between the allies and the Athenians: the allies make the city strong (dvvapuw; [Xen. ] I. 2); but an alternative expression was current as well: the allies make the Athenians wealthy ([Xen.] I. 15). The latter is expressed in such a way as to imply the empire's existence for the sake of wealth as an end rather than

a means. While from the standpoint of the polis this is unsatisfactory in collective Athenian ideology (i.e. the wealth of the polis is acquired to be spent), from the standpoint of the individual citizen such a formulation would be compelling. Indeed, it is on the level of the individual male citizen 47 M. C. McGee, ‘The ‘‘Ideograph’’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology’, Quarterly Journal

of Speech, 66 (1980), I-16.

242 Lisa Kallet-Marx that underlying assumptions about the empire are especially illuminating, a point to which I shall return. It is important to recognize the unusual nature, in its Greek context, of fifth-century Athenian rhetorical conceptions of money and power. Two points will make this apparent. First, that financial resources are essential to military success is a virtual commonplace today.*® But such a view, that war and power cost money, was still novel in the mid-to-late fifth century, not surprising when one recognizes that the traditional milieu of war was

on land and in that sphere the role of public money in waging war was non-existent or minimal—up to the time of the Peloponnesian War, that is. Sparta’s traditional military pre-eminence and extreme financial poverty are the best illustration of this fact. The exigencies of naval power, demanding the heavy expenditure of public cash,*? changed this fact irrevocably, but

not only was it a relatively recent change, it had to be consciously and explicitly introduced to replace old ways of thinking about wealth and power. Inasmuch as such ideas about power were general and not simply a view of some sophist or historian, they must have been produced and given currency by orators, who reformulated the complex of ideas about power to give primacy for the first time in Greek history to the role of expenditure in the acquisition of state power. This was, in short, a development that needed to be taught, to be explained. There is more at issue, however, than the new necessity of public money for military power: for it still does not explain the peculiarity, in its broader Greek context, of attributing credit for power explicitly to money. After all, individual wealth—if not cash—was always essential to waging war; but we

do not hear of a similar formulation in connection with land power. Traditionally, a typical representation of a polis’s power would be its manpower: ‘our strength lies in our brave men’, Thucydides makes Sthene-

laidas say to his fellow Spartans (1. 86. 3). But to be fully analogous to Athenian formulations, we would need something like this: ‘our strength lies in the land that produced the wealth to obtain armour’, or ‘in the wealth of our land’, or ‘in individuals’ money’. This makes clear that the substitution of ‘money’ for ‘men’ is not just a corollary of the change from land to sea power. Athens’ strength could equally have been said to lie in 48 But cf. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, 1987), who as recently as 1987 constructed an argument connecting the rise and fall of world powers with economic strength or weakness, in many respects a variant on Thuc.’s novel arguments about financial resources and power; cf. L. Kallet-Marx, Money, Expense, and Naval Power in Thucydides’

History, I-5. 24 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 6—7. 49 As David Lewis notes, (‘Public Property in the City’, in O. Murray and S. Price (eds.), The Greek City from Homer to Alexander (Oxford, 1990), 246), ‘the role of common defence may not need money/property at first ... but is going to involve it as soon as the cost of the equipment needed (including, for instance, ships and mercenaries) outruns the resources of individuals.’

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 243 its vauvrixdv, its navy.°° Yet a typical land power’s strength is not expressed as lying in its orpdrevua, but in its men. I suggest that the ‘strength comes from money’ formulation would and did sound just as peculiar to a Spartan audience as it made sense to an Athenian audience.

Indeed, it is instructive to compare the way that a Spartan audience would be accustomed to think about money and power. Here Thucydides’ speeches are again valuable, for, whatever position one takes on the extent

to which they are his creation, the contrasting treatment of money and power in speeches directed at Spartan and Athenian audiences discernible in his History demonstrates that members of these two poleis looked at and thought differently about this issue: Thucydides is either being accurate (i.e. reflecting what points Archidamus did make) or appropriate (reflecting the kind of thing Archidamus might say). Archidamus exploits the ‘money = power’ formula, but in a significantly different way: in his speech to the Spartan assembly, he advises against a hasty decision for war, using as his chief argument the lack of financial resources available to the Spartan side. He notes that the Athenians’ allies pay tribute, and that ‘war is not a matter of men |literally, ‘‘arms’’, 67Aa], but of expense, which allows manpower to be put to use’ (1. 83. 2). What is of great interest here is the elementary

and explanatory nature of the comment: Archidamus is instructing the Spartans in an area with which they are unfamiliar, and he is formulating the notion for them.’* War is not a matter of men—i.e., as the Spartans were accustomed to think—but rather of money and expense, i.e. something

different. In this context, that is, the idea reflects not an underlying assumption but shows rather an attempt to foster, to create such a view. Sthenelaidas’ response only confirmed that such an attitude toward money and power was foreign to the Spartans: ‘they may have a lot of money and

ships and horses,’ he says, ‘but we have brave allies’ (1. 86. 3). His formulation, which aimed and succeeded at producing confidence in his audience confirms my point above about the relative emotional power of the equation ‘money = power’: Sthenelaidas’ listeners were emboldened to vote for war by an emphasis on manpower. The origins of the formulation ‘money = power’

As should by now be clear, the formula ‘our strength lies in money’ and its variations, of special importance being ‘the revenue of the allies by which we are strong’, is not a self-evident truth, but a contingent expression that stands in sharp opposition to the traditional formula ‘our strength lies in

our men’. It implies a conscious reshaping of a traditional and typical formulation which it displaces in the public discourse of power among the °° e.g. Thuc. 2. 13. 2: 76 vautixov 7mep loxtovovw. 5) Kallet-Marx (n. 48), 85f.

244 Lisa Kallet-Marx collective citizenry. It takes on the form of a ‘natural’ and obvious given as well by an increased focus on money as an explicitly ‘natural’ concomitant of life. This does not just happen: the rhetorical connection between money and power, as distinct from the use of money to attain power, is artificial and deliberate.

How does the creating and shaping of such thought about money and power, in which money is so consistently privileged, begin? As I have argued, this is no natural consequence of the introduction of large-scale naval power. Of considerable importance, I suggest, is Themistocles and his proposal to use the silver from Laureion for the construction of a fleet.°* In

fact, it is in his role that we can also neatly discern the broad effect of financial knowledge on both the orator and the audience. The exceptional nature of Themistocles’ proposal, involving the use for building a fleet of

money that citizens expected to have distributed to them, would have required justification, explanation, and rhetorical persuasion;** it is clear from Herodotus, Aristotle, and Plutarch that it did.°* Persuasion would have

been necessary not only to convince individual Athenians to forgo their community share of silver, but also to make them reconfigure their assumptions about Athens’ military strength: it did not lie on land (an especially problematic notion, perhaps, after the stunning hoplite victory at Marathon) but rather in a fleet—and a publicly-owned one at that.>> The justification

provided, war with Aegina, obviously worked; but the implications of °* Hdt. 7. 144. 1-2; Arist. Ath. Pol. 22. 7; Plut. Them. 4. 1-3, Arist. 46. Cf. M. Caccamo Caltabiano and P. Radici Colace, ‘Darico Persiano e Nomisma Greco: differenze strutturali, ideologiche e funzionali alla luce del lessico greco’, REA 91 (1989), 213-26, who argue that the emphasis on money in relation to power comes to Greece via Persia. Whether the Persian (military) economy and tributary system were monetized before the Persian Wars is controversial (cf. H. T. Wallinga, ‘The Ionian Revolt’, Mnemosyne, 37 (1984), 401-37). Even if we grant it, however, beyond a general association by Greeks of wealth and power with Persia and other eastern empires, there is insufficient reason to think that the Athenians in the early 5th cent. got the idea of attributing to money the attainment and exercise of naval power from Persia. Their own experience will in any case have been essential to the reshaping of their attitude toward the acquisition of power and the role of money in it. Specifically, large-scale accumulation

and expenditure on military power seem to me to be necessary to prompt such a radical change in thought. >3 Hdt. 7. 144, which implies that a distribution was the expected result of such a surplus. Distributions were the norm on Siphnos (Hdt. 3. 57. 2), as they also seem to have been on a regular basis among the Thasians (Hdt. 6. 46); for the regularity of the practice of distributing revenues, see K. Latte, Kleine Schriften (Munich, 1968), 294-312; S. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks (London, 1978), 145; cf. also P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981), at 22. 7. °4 Each author provides a different version of the justification which Themistocles employed:

but this only underscores the point that he was proposing something unprecedented and extraordinary. *> Lewis (n. 49), 254, notes this fundamental change that accompanied the advent of the navy: it was demosiai.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 245 Themistocles’ role as persuader and instructor on the use of this substantial sum of money*® are important to appreciate: he was able to cash it in for

his own political power—clear enough, thankfully, whether or not the Themistocles decree is genuine—but he also manifestly was instrumental in shaping the way Athenians thought about money: that it could and should

be expended on military power, and that large quantities of immediately usable funds could yield significant military results. We can see, then, in the case of Themistocles, how an orator acquired or enhanced his power through his ability to instruct and persuade on matters involving finances, and also, implicitly, that he was able thereby to influence and shape collective thought. But there may be more explicit indications of

this last point; indeed, it is worth speculating that the new mode of thinking about money and military power stimulated by Themistocles, by

the application of a huge quantity of silver (within its context) to the construction of a polis fleet, and especially by the victory at Salamis, fostered an awareness of the power of money in a military context which otherwise might have taken years of experience to learn, and that it decisively affected

the Athenians’ thinking about the structure and organization of the Delian League. The Athenians asked their allies to use their own financial resources

in a novel way, removing them from their respective poleis, and placing them in a central, common treasury to create something that belonged to all poleis in common, just as they themselves had used their surplus in an extraordinary way in order to create a new military instrument that belonged

to all of them.°’ Henceforth, the Athenians were predisposed to regard money and its use differently, and it accordingly makes sense that this predisposition was instrumental in enabling them to conceive the novel financial organization of the Delian League. I have suggested the possibility that the explicit and remarkable emphasis on money as the source of power as reflected in the ‘strength lies in money’

formulation owes much to the impact of the decision to use at one time a substantial amount of money for the construction of a fleet, which may have consciously focused their attention on money and privileged that as the fundamental explanation of power. But there may be more to it than that; or there may be another explanation entirely. Another possibility, also speculative, and not necessarily an exclusive alternative, is that it reflects °° According to Herodotus (7. 144. 2) the Athenians were to build 200 ships with the surplus from Laureion, but he does not specify the amount of silver to be used, only that each citizen would have received 10 drachmas each, on the basis of which modern scholars have inferred a total of 50 talents, supposing a citizen population of 30,000 males; the Ath. Pol. specifies a figure of 100 talents from, more specifically, Maroneia for 100 triremes; see Rhodes (n. 53), 278, who places more weight on the account in the Ath. Pol.; cf. also F. J. Frost, Plutarch’s Themistocles (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 81-2. 57 Kallet-Marx (n. 48), 54 ff.

246 Lisa Kallet-Marx and is an outgrowth of an aristocratic resistance to attributing to social inferiors—the thetes—credit for Athens’ new strength as rowers in the fleet.>° It is notable that ‘money’, or the abstract ‘navy’, is consistently emphasized to the exclusion of the men who rowed in the fleet and made Athens’ naval

power what it was; significantly, it is the Old Oligarch (1. 2) who, in his typical back-handed way, credits explicitly the ‘common people’ with making the polis strong.

The necessity of the empire for the democracy

Further evidence of the permeation of the assumption about the necessity of empire and the ‘money = power’ equation comes from the comic stage, and it reveals a way of thinking about the empire that expands its role as a given by implying its necessity to the functioning of the democracy. In Aristophanes’ Wasps, performed in 422 at the Lenaia, Bdelycleon asks Philocleon to explain why the empire is great and what he gets out of it (519 ff.). Philocleon notes (548 ff.) his power as a juror (in general, not specifically in cases involving the empire), the ‘flouting of wealth’ (rod mAovTov Katayynvyn, 576) it allows him to do (i.e. when he convicts the wealthy), and, finally and best of all, the pay that it brings (605-6). The

underlying assumption is that the empire is necessary, not just for the money it brings for power, but also for dikastic and other public pay. The famous accounting of the revenues by Bdelycleon that soon follows only proves the point: the revenues from the empire are implicitly connected with jury pay and the power of the juror (655 ff.). Once again, the linkage between

imperial money and jury pay extends the ‘money = power’ /‘necessity-ofempire’ formulation to a belief in the necessity of empire for the democracy. That this linkage reflects a contingency, not a necessity, emerges clearly in the exchange between Bdelycleon and Philocleon in the Wasps. The assumption that the empire is necessary to the operation of the democracy, specifically, the courts, and vital to the well-being of the dikast—in other words, the entire connection between imperial revenues and dikastic pay— is largely rhetorical: pay for dikasts came from funds administered by the kolakretai, at least until 411, not from the Hellenotamiai.°? Athenians were meticulous about keeping moneys from different sources in separate funds, distinguishing imperial from domestic revenue,®® and also in earmarking 55 Cf. Plut. Them. 4. 3: OepusoroxAjs 76 Sdépu Kal ri doniSa tdv Today TapeAdpEovs els Umnpéatov Kal KwWanv auvéatere TOV 'AOnvaiwy Sihov.

*? Rhodes, AB 102. A schol. to Wasps 684, which claims phoros as a source of dikastic pay,

may be an inference on the basis of the implied connection in the play between imperial revenue and jury pay. °° Rhodes, AB 102, contra the view expressed in ATL 3, 360-1.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 247 specific funds for particular public expenditures.°’ They knew well that jury pay was handed out by the kolakretai.°? The connection could convincingly be made and accepted as a given, as is reflected in Aristophanes, by virtue of the fact that the courts handled cases involving the allies, and an apparent source of jury pay was the prytaneia, of which some presumably would have consisted of deposits from allies.°? Of course, the dikasteria handled substantial

domestic litigation, and there is no evidence that tribute was a source of jury pay: in reality the empire did not directly support the democracy, nor was it necessary to its functioning, as its fourth-century history demonstrates. It is noteworthy that Pericles’ rival Thucydides, in his attempt to break Pericles’ influence by alleging the impropriety of spending allied moneys on non-League activities, apparently focused only on the building programme. This argument from silence by itself is hardly compelling given the nature of the evidence—Plut. Per. 12—but if it were true that the democracy was in fact funded with imperial moneys, we should expect to have had some

indication of it. On the contrary, what seems clear is that an intimate connection is made rhetorically, as a way of creating consensus about the empire as something necessary to the strength of the polis but also necessary to the functioning of the democracy. Certainly if the equation of jury pay with money from the empire (without the formulation that this allowed for domestic, non-imperial revenue to be used for political pay) is any gauge, the arguments raised by Thucydides °t A.M. Andreades, A History of Greek Public Finance, trans. C. N. Brown (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 366. °? Wasps 695, 725: cf. Birds 1541, with schol.; Hesych., s.v. kwAaxpérat; Souda, s.v. xwAdaxpérat. The source of the funds is an important question. According to [Xen.], it was the prytaneia. But some scholars, e.g. K. J. Beloch, Griechische Geschichte’ (Berlin, 1912-27), ii. 2, 331; H. Frisch, The Constitution of the Athenians (Copenhagen, 1942), 226, have doubted that this was a sufficient source, on the basis of Wasps 663, which puts the annual (combined) pay of the dikasts at 150 talents; but this is by no means to be taken literally, given the purpose of the passage: cf. D. M. McDowell, Aristophanes Wasps (Oxford, 1971), ad loc. See A. Boegehold, ‘Three Court Days’, Symposion 1990: Vortrdge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte

(Cologne, 1991), 172, for a more realistic estimate of roughly thirty talents. Rhodes (n. 53), 139, refers to the kolakretai as the ‘paying officers of the state treasury’, a similar formulation to that in ATL 3, 360-1, which cites the demosion as the treasury, by which it appears to mean the Treasury of Athena. The Treasurers of Athena handled sacred money in that treasury, while the kolakretai were in charge of ‘secular’ funds, including the tribute reserve. One should keep in mind that the distinction that the Athenians drew was between ‘public’ (8yyd601a) and ‘sacred’ (fepa), as J. K. Davies notes, CAH V* (Cambridge, 1992), 304. °3 (Xen.] 1. 16 and E. Kalinka, Die Pseudoxenophontische AGHNA/QN IITOAITETA (Leipzig, 1913), ad loc.; cf. Pollux 8. 38. On cases tried in Athens, see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, ‘Notes on Jurisdiction in the Athenian Empire’, CQ 11 (1961), 94-112, 268-80; R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford, 1972), 220-33. °4 The only testimony to this effect is a scholiast’s comment on Wasps 684, mentioned in n. 59. but by itself it does not warrant serious attention.

248 Lisa Kallet-Marx son of Melesias would have fallen on deaf ears. For what the assumptions in Aristophanes well demonstrate is that in popular consciousness there

was no taboo at all with respect to the use of imperial money on the domestic operation of the polis. The Wasps shows that clearly. But the building debate in Plutarch—if historical—shows that at one point the question could fairly be raised, and thus it not only confirms that appropriate uses of imperial money could be a matter of policy debate, but it also reveals the process of consensus-shaping. As in the case of the idea of expenditure for the city’s power, expenditure

in the democracy in the form of public pay is seen as power as well. The formulation ‘empire = money = good for ordinary citizen because of misthos’ reflects the social force of rhetoric. The linking of private prosperity with the empire is at least as central to the shaping of public consensus as the linking of public security—i.e. the power of the polis—with money from the empire.

The consensus is specifically that empire is necessary for both public and private self-interest, and a normal fact of life.°°

The relative unanimity about the existence and maintenance of empire achieved in fifth-century Athens has, since Finley, most often been credited to the level of material benefit derived from it by the majority of Athenians.°° But not sufficiently appreciated is the extent to which this consensus was

achieved through rhetoric in public forums like the Assembly and the theatre. The rhetorical link between empire and democracy bears on another discussion as well. Scholars have long cited the existence of democracy in

the fourth century as proof of the fallacy of the argument that the empire was necessary to fund the democracy. We are looking at this issue the wrong way, however, if then we conclude that ancients like the Old Oligarch

and Thucydides made a mistake when they thought that the empire was necessary to the democracy;®” a more fruitful approach is archaeological,

one that examines its foundations and structure. As we have seen, the ‘necessity of empire’ motif is closely linked with democracy and public and private prosperity, and thus is a crucial component not only in engendering acceptance of the status quo but also in the construction of collective identity as Athenians among diverse individuals.®* For, in fact, a collective ideology is not something that the demos simply possesses: it has to be created and °5 Its normality finds reflection in comments like that in Ar. Knights 313. °6 M. I. Finley, ‘The Fifth-Century Athenian Empire: A Balance Sheet’, in P. D. A. Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1978), 103-126 ( = Economy and Society in Ancient Greece (New York, 1982), 41-61). °7 So Ober (n. 2), 24. 68 Cf. Plato, Phaedrus 271d—272a, which recognizes explicitly the variety of thought among Athenians; W. Thompson, ‘Athenian Ideologies’, Prudentia, 19 (1987), 22—33, brings out well the differing values and ideologies of Athenians.

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 249 recreated, and rhetores were central to that process by recreating and shaping a collective set of values, or ideology, one that was instrumental in making a male citizen an ‘Athenian’.

I have suggested that responsibility for shaping attitudes towards the empire, the allies’ money, and their connection with the democracy, as well as toward the rhetor, rests on those with financial expertise and authority who are the ones in a position to instruct and advise, but also to influence

the way Athenians thought about money. We can easily see now the significance of this role for an orator’s own power. For just as it shaped

thinking about the empire as necessary and normal, the formulation ‘money = power also served to reinforce the role of the rhetor as financial authority and instructor as a necessary and normal part of the democracy and to place enormous power in him, which he could use to shape collective

thought. This has important consequences for the view of rhetoric in Athenian democracy proposed by Ober. For it contravenes the idea that orators simply gave voice to the collective will and ideology of, and constructed by, the demos; rather the orator has a much larger role in creating and shaping collective beliefs and attitudes, a role made possible and effective by the power concentrated in him as a teacher. This has larger consequences

than simply that for a particular, individual orator’s power: the position of orator-as-expert is institutionalized, and regarded as normal and necessary by the stress placed on finances for the city’s power and for the functioning of the democracy, a condition requiring an instructor, a superior, at the

helm. The attitudes toward the role of finances and their connection to power, the democracy, and individual prosperity, and the orator’s key role as teacher and expert in maintaining the city’s wealth, establish expectations and beliefs within the polis that over time become the norm: the ordinary citizen is student, listener, receiver of information and knowledge, and, finally, judge, and is conditioned rhetorically to accept this de facto hier-

archical, unequal relationship as a normal part of the democratic status quo.

In an important respect this conclusion is an extension of Finley’s ‘structural demagogues’ thesis;°? but it lays special emphasis on the social force of rhetoric as the means by which consensus was shaped about the two areas most vital to Athenians, the democracy and the empire, interlocked

to the rhetor, for whom financial knowledge was a powerful tool and technique of persuasion, and who created a rhetoric of expenditure and the necessity of empire. As Finley commented, ‘All writers accepted the need for political leadership as axiomatic.’”° I would extend that to ‘Athenians’: as I

have tried to show, by exploring the area of financial knowledge, they °9 M. I. Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’, Past and Present 21 (1962), 3-24. 7° Tbid. 5.

250 Lisa Kallet-Marx collectively were persuaded to view as legitimate and normal the concentration of power in individual leaders. Yet the demos as audience and students should not be seen as passive or powerless, nor, as we have seen, is the rhetor occupying a place unaffected

by anything but his expertise. The rhetorical process and the social and political environment make the relationship between the rhetor and demos considerably more complex. First of all, the citizen’s direct experience of money exchange in both public and private spheres, through receipt of payment for participation in the democratic institutions of courts, magistracies, Council (and later, Assembly), and through private commercial activity, predisposed him to be interested in and receptive to financial information, especially as it was tied to his welfare, and this will have affected and influenced the rhetor. Moreover, the rhetorical process is in any case one that involves negotiation between speakers and listeners and is at the same time governed by the field within which it operates, by the larger

matrix within which popular attitudes are constructed, one in which key underlying assumptions and predispositions about money and the empire are critical factors. As Bourdieu and others have shown, in any society, in the field of activity

within which participants think and behave, there is a practical and unquestioning belief, a fundamental accord within which various strategies

and relationships are played out, and within which communication and power function.’’ We can see this clearly in the case of Athens, and it is particularly evident when one looks at conflict within the polis, for example, between Cleon and Diodotus, or between Pericles and Thucydides, son of Melesias—all share the same fundamental presupposition of the necessity of

money from Athens’ allies for conversion to naval empire and power, as well as its normality.””7 Thus the empire is both normal and necessary

because of the tribute it supplies, not to be holed up in a treasury as a signifier of power, but rather accumulated for expenditure on power. No opening is given within the social/political field by which to contest these assumptions. A significant illustration of this is the (apparent) absence of any questioning of whether imperial revenue beyond what was necessary for the military demands of the polis and league should continue to be extracted. This reflects the entrenchment of the belief that the removal of substantial local resources to the imperial city for accumulation as well as for expenditure was uncontested. The kind of consensus that I have been sketching, however, raises a serious question, with which I end, though it cannot be answered here, one that pertains to the role and nature of debate in the democracy: given the 7* (n. 36), esp. 61-5. 72 Cf. Ar. Acharn. 642 (bringing in the phoros).

Money Talks: Rhetor, Demos, and Resources 251 effective control of the terms of discussion and its boundaries that we have seen produced by orators, such as is reflected. for example, in an unquestioning attitude toward the removal of the wealth of the allies, how open and varied was debate in fifth-century Athens?

IS Public Auctions in Ancient Athens MERLE LANGDON

In the glossary that accompanies a recent collection of essays on Athenian law the poletai are defined as ‘a board of public officials whose principal duty

was to sell state property by auction’.’ This definition does no more than state a commonly held view, one that I accepted in a recent study of the poletai.* As the volume of essays containing this glossary was being published

a study by Klaus Hallof also appeared, challenging the belief that poletai sales were conducted by auction.’ Hallof claims that what evidence there is points to the exact opposite procedure, sales to preselected individuals. He further believes that the same system of preselection was applied by the poletai in their other major realm of activity, the leasing of mining and tax collecting concessions.* Since Hallof’s study appeared after my own was in

press, I would like to take this opportunity to examine its merits. It is, I Robin Osborne and Simon Hornblower have read several drafts of this paper and made numerous suggestions that improved the argument. After the oral presentation D. M. Lewis also made valuable comments that I have incorporated. I thank them all for their attentive care. I am responsible for any weaknesses that remain. * P. Cartledge, P. Millett. and S. Todd (eds.), Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics and Society, (Cambridge, 1990), glossary, s.v. poletai. The glossary is compiled by Todd. * ‘The Poletai of Athens’, introduction to a corpus of poletai inscriptions from Athens, in Agora XIX, 57-69. > ‘Der Verkauf konfiszierten Vermogens vor den Poleten in Athen,’ Klio, 72 (1990), 402-

26. A number of the questions raised by Hallof were adumbrated by D. Behrend, Attische Pachturkunden: Ein Beitrag zur Beschreibung der u¢éo8wars nach den griechischen Inschriften (Munich,

1970). + Hallof rightly discounts the relevance of papyrological material from Hellenistic Egypt, in

which the evidence for auctions is abundant, for increasing our understanding of Athenian financial transactions. The fullest use of the papyri in reconstructing the Greek auction is made by F. Pringsheim, “The Greek Sale by Auction,’ in Scritti in Onore di Contardo Ferrimi, iv (Milan,

1949), 284-343. Hallof wrongly claims that the belief in auctions by the Athenian poletai originated with Pringsheim. This belief was standard well before Pringsheim’s time: cf. T. Thalheim, RE i (1896), 2269-70, s.v. Auction; J]. Headlam, Election by Lot at Athens (Cambridge,

1933), 139-40; U. Kahrstedt, Untersuchungen zur Magistratur in Athen (Stuttgart, 1939), 9. The epigraphical evidence for public auction sales beyond Athens has not greatly increased since Thalheim collected it. Delos provides the fullest epigraphical dossier: cf. J. Kent, Hesperia, 17 (1948), esp. 269-71.

254 Merle Langdon think, especially fitting to do so at this venue, as David Lewis has done so much to increase our understanding of the Athenian poletai. A number of Athenian boards and other officials were involved in selling or leasing state properties, and a brief glance at their activities is in order before the poletai are taken up in detail. Sales are epigraphically recorded by

the epistatai of the Parthenon (UG I? 436-51. 296, 298, 320, 324, 389, 392) and the Propylaea (IG i? 462. 22), the superintendents of the fleet (IG ili 1629. 417-20, 1133-6; 1631. 177), and the Eleusinian epistatai (IG ii? 1672. 282-3, 287). Some are sales of raw materials left over from building projects. In these instances it may be doubted that auctions rather than the going market price were used to determine the selling price. Others, however, are sales of manufactured articles. Here it is tempting to see auctions, but in no case is the method of sale described. The same lack of information surrounds the sale of booty by military commanders in the field or back in Athens.*> Aside from these examples there may exist one further group of epigraphically attested sales in Athens, IG ii? 1594-1603, the problematic Rationes centesimarum. In them several different groups are involved in

disposing of property all over Attica, and most view the inscriptions as records of sales. Recently Robin Osborne has questioned this view and raised

the possibility that they record leases.° Whether sales or leases are behind the transactions, the legitimate desire for seeing auctions as the means of transferring the properties runs into difficulty because all the prices are divisible by the same number. Since commentators show little enthusiasm for positing a manipulated auction here, I am loath to count these documents as records of auction sales.’ For leasing there is an abundance of evidence, both by state and local entities.* Several leases provide information about the procedure involved, and in them the mechanism for determining the lessee is an auction. The most explicit testimony comes from two deme leases, IG ii? 2492. 36, and land lease of Aixone dating to 345/4, and SEG XXVIII 103. 23-4, an Eleusinian quarry lease of 332/1. Both specify that the lease be given ‘to the one who gives the most’ (ra 76 wAeiorov b1d6vT"). In the well-known state decree of 418/17, IG i> 84, the evidence is scarcely

less direct. Here the archon basileus is empowered to lease the temenos of Kodros, Neleus, and Basile. The phraseology used for the amount of the lease—ll. 14-15: ‘for as much rent as the temenos brings in’ (6z|6]cev 8’ dv > On the disposal of booty see W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War, v (Berkeley, Calif., and

Los Angeles, 1991), 416-25. ° Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge, 1985), 56-9.

’ The lack of enthusiasm stems from the absence of evidence for such a proceeding in ancient Athens. The dilemma of fixed prices and an auction is most lucidly discussed by D. M. Lewis, in M. Finley (ed.) Problémes de la terre en Gréce, (Paris, 1973), 194-5. * Two recent discussions of the evidence are R. Osborne, Chiron, 18 (1988), esp. 281-7; and M. Walbank, Agora XIX, 152-62.

Public Auctions in Ancient Athens 255 dAder pic|Oloow 76 téyevos ...), and |. 24: ‘for as much as it is leased’ (6760

dv ptcbdcera ...)—is most easily explained by assuming that the rate will be the highest bid offered. Finally, in a phratry land lease dating to 300/299, IG ii? 1241, provisions are made so that if the current leaseholder defaults

on the rent the members of the phratry are to lease the land (I. 53) ‘to whomever they want for the most money’ (a: dv BotAwvrat Tob mA«eiorov). The rest of the preserved Attic leases do not contain such clear statements,

but there is no reason to believe that similar procedures were not followed in most of them for setting rates and determining lessees.’ This brief survey shows that auctions connected with the disbursement of leases and concessions by the poletai would be quite in keeping with Athenian practice, while in the matter of sales there is no basis for safe comparison with the procedures used by any other public group in Attica. Here the assumption of poletai auctions is based not on the explicit testimony

of ancient authorities but on inferences drawn from a small number of sources, and on a line of reasoning which assumes that in selling confiscated

goods a state wants to realize the highest price it can from them. Auction sales are the best means of accomplishing this. Therefore the sales of the Athenian poletai were transacted in this manner. Plausible and logically

sound as these assumptions may be, Hallof argues that they are not supported by probative evidence. What evidence there is prompts him to conclude that true auctions were not involved in the selling and leasing activities of the poletai. The archons, according to Hallof, exercised real control over these transactions by setting prices and selecting purchasers and lessees from among those who put up their names as candidates. The names of selected individuals and prices were then passed on to the poletai for processing. The ‘auction’ was merely a pro forma act that ratified the archons’ decision. Hallof supports his contention by first taking up the epigraphical evidence. This tells us very little about how the poletai made their sales, which is not surprising since what was published on stone was the result of a sale: the names of purchaser and guarantors, the purchase price and the amount of sales tax, but not the procedures by which the sale

was conducted. Yet Hallof does cite one document in support of his contentions. This is the large piece belonging to IG ii? 1582 found in the

° In the absence of wording indicating how the leases were conferred M. Walbank, Hesperia, 52 (1983), 218, reasons that prices in a series of leasing documents from the Athenian Agora,

SEG XXXIII 167-71, are best explained as the results of competitive bidding. Possible exceptions could be cases where the leasing body wanted to charge a rent that was a certain percentage of assessed value of the property: cf. Walbank (n. 8), 166, and Hesperia (above), 216-17. How the lessees were determined in these cases is not known. Also, suspicion attaches to a few deme leases which may have been conferred as awards: cf. D. Whitehead, The Demes of Attica 508/7-ca. 250 B.c. (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 158.

256 Merle Langdon excavations of the Athenian Agora and published over half a century ago.*° It contains the records of two poletai sales made at around 340Bc. One of

them is of a multiple dwelling in Peiraieus belonging to Meixidemos of Murrhinous, who in consequence of defaulting on payments owed to the state became a public debtor (ll. 118-53). The selling price of the dwelling,

3705 drachmas and two obols, matches exactly the total amount of Meixidemos’ indebtedness to the state. This is after a fine for default matching

his original debt of 1852 drachmas and four obols had been added on. The correspondence in the figures has drawn little attention from commentators, except to arouse the suspicion of Moses Finley.** A sale by auction should not result in a price that equalled the exact amount of the debt. Hallof thus takes the logical step of discounting the possibility of an auction at all in this case. As he sees it, other considerations took precedence in determining that the poletai oversaw the sale of the dwelling at a fixed price. The same inscription records a second sale that Hallof also regards as not fitting the circumstances of an auction. A field belonging to Nikodemos of Oinoe was confiscated and sold in order to satisfy a claim of 666 drachmas and four obols outstanding to the tribe Aiantis (ll. 153-85). In this instance the selling price was 680 drachmas, an amount that exceeded the debt by 13 drachmas and two obols. Hallof points out that this is exactly 2% of the amount owed to the tribe. His understanding is that the poletai sold the field not at auction but at a predetermined price equalling the debt to Aiantis, with a 2% sales tax or herald’s fee added in. Hallof uses another Agora inscription in his discussion, SEG XII 100, which contains a completely preserved record of the disposal of confiscated property by the poletai in 367/6. The guilty party, Theosebes of Xupete, lost a house through denunciation for impiety. The house was burdened with

a hypothecation of 150 drachmas, and three other claims totalling 154 drachmas were sustained against the defendant. The house sold for 575 drachmas. Here there are no correspondences among the numbers and no predetermined pricing. In treating this case Hallof points out that it differs from the two just discussed in one important respect. Theosebes’ estate was

confiscated not because he had been found delinquent in the matter of a public debt but because he was convicted on a charge that carried confiscation with it as part of the penalty. The poletai stepped in merely to supervise the selling of the estate. Since no public debt was involved, no target figure was set for the sale, and the procedure was different from that used in conducting the two sales just discussed. Hallof is nowhere explicit © B. D. Meritt, Hesperia, 5 (1936), 393-413, no. Io. I re-edit the inscription, with few changes to the text, in Agora XIX, 105-17, no. P 26. In the present study the line numbering of the editio princeps is retained in order to harmonize with Hallof’s citations. "t Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 500-200 B.c.: The Horos-Inscriptions (New Brunswick, NJ, 1951), 256 n. 77.

Public Auctions in Ancient Athens 257 about the nature of this difference. He simply concludes that it manifests an interest of the state that was directed not so much toward punishing a person as receiving the money that it was owed. Presumably while maintaining that, when there was a public debt to be satisfied, the poletai sold an estate at a predetermined price which matched the amount owed, Hallof would allow

that an auction took place when the poletai merely served as a board of impartial sellers.

Discounting Theosebes’ estate, the selling price of which is apparently none other than the highest bid made to the poletai for it, the epigraphical dossier for fixed-price sales remains the lone Agora document recording the sales of Meixidemos’ dwelling and Nikodemos’ field. Yet it is not necessary

to follow Hallof in using it as evidence against auction sales. A further examination of the two cases is in order. To take Meixidemos first, we have seen that his indebtedness to the state was 1852 drachmas and four obols, yet his multiple dwelling sold for double this amount. Telemachos of Acharnai was the purchaser. We cannot recover the reasons that induced Telemachos to pay the amount recorded. He may, as Hallof believes, have simply paid a figure quoted to him by the poletai.

Or, if the structure was sold at auction, he may have deliberately bid a figure no one else was willing to top that exactly covered the full amount of debt and penalty. In doing this he could have been motivated by the spirit of civic and religious involvement for which his family is known.** Or

again, there may have been factors at play that are now irretrievable. A recent proposal sees the possibility of collusion among those involved in sales like this one which resulted from the apographe process.** If this were so Telemachos could have purposely paid the full amount owed by Meixidemos in order to enable his friend to resume full civic rights. The circumstances of the sale are not susceptible to a full explanation, but from what we know of it an auction of Meixidemos’ dwelling in Peiraieus cannot be ruled out. The other case presented in the Agora inscription, the default of Nikodemos of Oinoe to the tribe Aiantis, is surrounded by greater difficulties. Hallof makes several valuable observations that improve our understanding of the affair,’ although I do not agree with him that the quoted purchase price of the field, 666 drachmas and four obols, is the doubling of an original debt

of 333 drachmas and two obols and not the amount of the original debt ‘2 The purchaser is a known rhetor and dedicant: PA 13562, and the grandson of the Telemachos who introduced the cult of Asklepios to Athens in 420/19. ‘3 Osborne (n. 6), I-5, explores the possible connections among the parties involved in the Meixidemos case that may have led to a not quite proper transaction. He amplifies his discussion by exploring possible collusive activities in other sales resulting from apographai in ‘Law in Action’, JHS 105 (1985), 44-7. ‘4 Hallof convincingly shows that some of Finley’s notions about this case are mistaken.

258 Merle Langdon itself. More attractive is his explanation of the discovery that the selling price of his confiscated field, 13 drachmas and two obols, is exactly 2% and that it represents a sales tax or herald’s fee added on to a preset price which

matched that debt. One is left wondering, however, why a 2% add-on appears here but apparently is absent from the sale of Meixidemos’ multiple dwelling. The 2% figure is not very compelling evidence for concluding that Nikodemos’ field was sold at a fixed price and not at auction. Concerning prices it is instructive to look at the largest related group of them from any poletai transaction, those on the Attic Stelai, which record the sale of moveable and real properties of individuals convicted of mutilating the Herms and profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries. Do the inscribed prices tell us anything about how the properties were sold? For those items whose prices are well enough preserved on stone to allow comment what we notice most often is that the price is lower than that for comparable items sold in demonstrably commercial, free-market settings. Furniture, real estate, slaves, and amphoras all went for amounts well below the standard market values revealed in other sources, while wheat is the only commodity that sold for a higher than average price.** Modern commentators explain the low selling

prices by reminding us that the items listed in the Attic Stelai were used, not new, and that they were tainted by having been owned by persons convicted of extremely serious offences. These two factors would indeed have been influential in keeping prices low, whether they were preset by the state before the sales took place or resulted from an auction. Yet to my mind the depressed prices are more easily explained by seeing them as the results of competitive bidding. The unfavourable economic climate of the mid-war years played an important role in keeping bids down. Those who bid and prevailed sometimes came away with real bargains. In addition to inscriptions Hallof uses the prime literary source on the poletai, Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia, to reinforce his opposition to auction sales by them. He also finds support in this document for extending his argument to cover their other major activity, the leasing of mine-working rights and tax-collecting privileges. The most important passage is 47.2: 7a, wéraArrAa wAotar (SC. of mwAntat) Kal ta TéAN plera Tlod Tauiou Ta oTpaTiwTiKar Kal T@v emt TO Dewpikov Hipnuevwv evavtiov ths [BovAjs], Kal Kkupodaww, Stun av 4 BovdAr

xetpotovyon, Kal Ta mpabévTa péradAda ... Kai Tas ovaias THY €€ ‘Apetou mayou pevyOvTwv

Kat &AA[wr] évavt[dov tis] BovAjs mwAotow, Kataxupotar 5€ of 0 dpxovres. Kal Ta TEAY

"5 See W. K. Pritchett, Hesperia, 25 (1956), 196-7 (wheat), 210-12 (furniture), 269-76 (real estate), 276-8 (slaves); and D. Amyx, Hesperia, 27 (1958), 174-5, 279 (amphoras). The higher-than-normal price for wheat is not surprising in view of the volatility of prices in general in the grain market. On fluctuations in grain prices at Athens see P. Millett in Nomos (n. 1),

192-3.

Public Auctions in Ancient Athens 259 7a. els eviaut|d]v wempapéva dvayparybavtes els AeXevKwpéva ypappateia Tov Te mpidpev[olv cai 6[ala dv mpinrac rhe BovdAje mapadiddacw."®

We learn from this passage that the poletai let the rights to work the silver mines and collect taxes and sold property of those exiled by the Areopagus court and other exiles.’’ No more explicit information is given about the nature of these transactions, but Hallof does not believe that an auction was involved in any of them. He denies that the leasing of mine-working rights and tax-collecting privileges were ever given at auction by pointing to the qualifying clause 6rux dv % BovdAr yerporovnon: (‘to whomever the Boule chooses by vote’), which he believes is incompatible with an auction. The choice of individuals to work mines and collect taxes rested with the Boule, not the chance results of competitive bidding. Hallof would extend this limiting clause to the second group of goods disposed of by the poletai, confiscated property. He recognizes a parallel construction between 7a wéTadAa twdrodat ... évavtiov ths BovAys, Kal Kkvpotow on the one hand and Tas ovolas ... évavtiov THs BovAjs mwAotaw, Kataxvpotar on the other. The clause érwi av 4 BovAr xerpotovyont does not appear in the latter sentence,

but given the clear balance between it and the former, Hallof approves the explanation that this is an example of Aristotle’s telegraphic style. So it is to be understood as qualifying the selection of purchasers of properties no less than the lessees of mines and taxes. With respect to mine leases Hallof and others are correct in thinking that

many of them were let at fixed rates of 20 and 150 drachmas and that auctions did not come into play in the granting of these concessions. Instead other rules applied. R. J. Hopper gives the most satisfactory reconstruction of them, concluding from the preserved epigraphical data that fixed prices were assessed only when there was no competition for a given lease, when but one prospective lessee came forward to bid for it. Otherwise a competitive

auction was held, which explains the not inconsiderable number of other mine leases issued at variable rates." '© ‘'The poletai] lease the mines and taxes, along with the treasurer of the stratiotic fund and those elected to manage the theoric fund, in the presence of the Boule; and to whomsoever the Boule chooses by vote, they ratify the leased mines ... And in the presence of the Boule they sell the property both of those men exiled by the Areopagus and of other exiles, and the

nine archons ratify the sales. And they record on whitened tablets the taxes leased for the current year, and the purchaser, and for how much he bought it, and they hand these tablets over to the Boule.’ ‘? On the difference in meaning of 7wAeiv in the contexts of mines and taxes and property see P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981), 552,

er BSA 48 (1953), 234-7. The chart published by M. Crosby, Hesperia, 19 (1950), 286-92, lists 68 leases whose prices may be safely determined without relying on restored numerals. Of these 68 some 23 are variable-rate leases. The literary evidence adds several others: cf. Crosby, 202.

260 Merle Langdon As for the other group of leases overseen by the poletai and mentioned in the Ath. Pol., tax-farming rights, other ancient sources provide sure ground

for stating that the privilege was let at auction. Andocides, for example, narrates how Agurrhios conspired with a group vying for the collection of the pentekoste to keep the bidding down (7) bzepBaAdAovor) for their own gain

but that he saw through their game, and as no one came forward to bid against them (dvrewveiro), he did so himself and outbid (évepéBaddAov) them.*?

And Plutarch relates how Alcibiades forced a lover to bid against and outbid (drepBaAAew avtwvovpevov) the usual crowd of tax-farmers because he had a grudge against them.*° The verbs are the same in both passages, bmepBaAAw and dvrwvéopat. They clearly reveal that auctions were the means by which

the privileges of tax-farming were let. The passages do not mention the poletai, and it has been doubted that they played much beyond a clerical role, mainly because in order to place his counterbid Andocides came eés tThv Bovdnv (‘to the Boule’) rather than mpos rots mwAnrds (‘before the poletai’).** No one can question the Boule’s authority in most financial matters involving the state, including the collection of taxes. But in view of Aristotle’s comments, neither can one question the active role of the poletai in overseeing the leasing of privileges to collect taxes. Andocides’ wording

was prompted by the fact that taxes were auctioned by the poletai in the presence of the Boule. It was natural for the speaker to mention the collective

sovereign body of councillors who had the final say in the matter rather than the financial board that simply served as its agent.*”

The Ath. Pol. does not discuss other types of leases controlled by the poletai, and other evidence is sparse. The single relevant inscription known to me is SEG XVIII 13 from shortly after 338/7, in which the poletai are restored as leasing some state-owned land ra 76 zlAeiorov diddvr7e] (Il. 7—

10). The restoration of this key phrase seems reasonably secure, as it is paralleled by the preserved wording of the two deme leases mentioned earlier, IG ii? 2492 and SEG XXVIII 103. Hallof seems to concede that the phrase ‘to the one who gives the most’ best fits the context of an auction, but he does not openly admit that poletai leasing activities were carried out

in that manner. Let us return to the problematic clause in the Ath. Pol. that provided Hallof with his argument against the auctioning of leases by the poletai, 6Twi av 7 BovAr) xetporovyont. We now see that these words cannot have the

limiting sense that Hallof forces upon them. The poletai auctioned off taxes and very probably some mines as well, yet both were given ‘to whomever YT. 133-4. 7° Alc. 5. I. 7 Dem. XXIV. 54. *2 Rhodes (n. 17), 553, adds the point that in those cases of mining concessions awarded without competitive bidding a vote of approval by the Boule may have been crucial.

Public Auctions in Ancient Athens 261 the Boule voted’. The Boule’s vote should be seen as part of the ratification

process. After the auction the Boule gave its sanction as a necessary safeguard because the state adhered to a policy that all sales and leases were final.’> The use of the indefinite pronoun in the Ath. Pol., so troubling to Hallof, is merely the author’s way of acknowledging that anyone could

emerge from the auction as highest bidder, so that the vote of approval would go to whomever won the bidding.** Then the poletai immediately dispatched mining and tax concessions. In the case of confiscated properties approval of the nine archons was also necessary before the sale was finalized. Under this interpretation it matters little whether Hallof is correct in claiming that the clause governs the sale of confiscated property or not. He could be

correct that it does, in which case the Boule also had veto power over the purchasers of condemned estates.*>

The only other ancient testimonia that have any possible bearing on the matter of poletai sales are two passages in the Lysianic corpus. In Lysias XVII (On the Property of Eraton) the speaker recounts to the jurors the legal proceedings that had previously taken place respecting a private debt in which the state became involved by confiscating the defendant’s property. The speaker informs the jury (XVII. 7) that ‘after the confiscated properties

have been sold at auction, the state will receive the surplus’ (after the speaker's own claims are satisfied): dmoxnpuxydévtrwv Td mepittov % mO6As

Anwerat. The poletai are the agents who are to be thought of as in charge of the sale. The second passage is a small fragment from an oration possibly by Lysias”® which I present in the context in which it is preserved, Pollux 7. 13-14: 7a 0 €x TOO dednpctoIat mimpacKkdpeva Syutompata ... 6 5 of viv daci tovs olkéras mpadow airetv, €oTw evpetv év tais 'Aptotodavous “Qpats ... 70 8 avatysdobat Kai TO Tht mréov Odv7. ebéAELW TimpdoKe mAEtoTynpidlew av A€yois, *’ év tat pods

"Avdoxidnv eimévtos “‘otre tyuis Ttetaypévns mwdAotow, arr’ ws dv Sdvwvrat mAevoTnpidoavres TrAEioTtou amébovTo .

** P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), 97, concluding from this that ‘the decision

to place the contract with one man or partnership rather than another rested with the Boule’.

*4 Rhodes also cites Aeschin. I. 119, where it is stated that the Boule sold the tax on prostitutes. This is another case of an orator telescoping the activities of a lesser and greater body by referring only to the higher authority. *> Though less detailed than Ath. Pol., Pollux, s.v. poletai likewise makes no distinction between the procedure used in leasing tax-farming privileges and in selling confiscated estates: Ta TEAN TimpdoKovat peTa TwV emi TO OewpiKoV Hipnuévwy, Kal Tas TaV e€€& 'Apelou madyou pera

mpotepov Adyov duydvtwy odvaias Kai ta dednpevpéva (‘They sell the taxes, along with those elected

to manage the theoric fund, and the goods of those exiled by the Areopagus after the earlier speech and confiscated properties’). © Lys. fr. 20 (Gernet) = 8 (Thalheim). *”? The epitome of Pollux has here ’Jca‘ov. We know from Harpokration, s.v. pleisteriasantes and epigeion that Against Andocides was ascribed to Lysias in antiquity.

262 Merle Langdon The final words of this passage, those of Lysias’ speaker, certainly pertain | to auction sales, but the broader context in which the quote occurs does not provide any reference points to which it may be applied. In this part of Book 7 Pollux is discussing words connected with buying and selling. Here he begins with a definition of dyycé7para which calls to mind the poletai: ‘Things sold from being confiscated are demioprata.’ Next he cites verbs used of slaves wanting to be sold: ‘Whereas nowadays people say that slaves ask for a sale, there is in the Horai of Aristophanes the expression “‘find a sale’’.’ Here the poletai have no involvement.*® He then quotes a Lysianic passage

in support of his definition of wAevornpiafew: ‘For raising the price and wanting to sell to the one who gives the most you might say ‘pleisteriazei’, from in his Against Andocides.’ Pollux is here following his practice

of conveying information about words, not connected facts, to his readers. We can, therefore, neither determine the broader context of the Lysianic passage from Pollux’s use of it nor positively associate it with the mention a few lines earlier of demioprata, which would bring it into direct association with the poletai. I still believe, however, that the Lysianic fragment can be used to advance the case for poletai auction sales. It is worth bearing in mind that the fragment is from a speech delivered against Andocides. The matter under consideration is thus very likely to be the defendant's confiscated estate. In expanded form I would render the speaker’s words so: ‘Nor do they (sc. the Athenians or the poletai) sell confiscated property at a fixed price, but they sold his (sc. Andocides’) for more, as much as they could increase the price.’ In addition to epigraphical and literary sources Hallof raises several points of a more general nature that he believes weigh in favour of a type of poletai transaction that does not fit the circumstances of an auction. For example, he examines the role of the herald of the poletai and concludes that this functionary performed important organizational duties connected with the apographe process that led to the sale of the property of someone condemned -by the state. This would include working with the Boule to set prices for the items offered for sale. It is risky to enlarge so the role of the poletai herald in view of the silence of ancient authorities. We should instead hold to a definition of his duties that is more in keeping with his title: announcing up-coming sales and auctioning off all goods sold and concessions let by the poletai. A good parallel for this official is the praeco publicus in Rome, who served as both herald and auctioneer.*? Besides, ‘auctioneer’ is a well-

?8 Slave sales conducted by the poletai took place at the poleterion (Pollux 3. 78). Here slaves are requesting private sales by going to the Theseion. *2 On the Roman herald/auctioneer see most recently N. Rauh, ‘Auctioneers and the Roman Economy’, Historia, 38 (1989), 451-71.

Public Auctions in Ancient Athens 263 attested meaning of kerux,?° and the herald’s fee may be seen as payment for rendering the service of knocking down goods and leases at the highest possible bids. Despite this the results did not always come up to expectations.

Lysias’ speakers in particular note cases of shortfall in the liquidation of estates, both real and hypothetical, in which the state was disappointed in the outcome.?* Such situations would be unthinkable if confiscated goods were sold at prices set by the Boule and the herald of the poletai instead of by auction. Another official who attracts Hallof’s attention is the demarch, whose participation in the confiscation and sale of property is seen as casting doubt

on an auction process by the poletai. If I understand Hallof correctly the argument runs as follows. Because there are some correspondences between

the deme of individuals who denounced items eligible for confiscation, especially real estate, and purchasers (and very occasionally they are the same person), this reveals that the demarch’s role was quite influential in determining to whom the poletai made sales. A demarch would be concerned about keeping land within his deme in the hands of fellow demesmen. He

accordingly worked closely with the poletai to engineer sales that would achieve this end, something that the unpredictability of an auction could not insure. The point is far from being convincing. Demarchs did sometimes issue apographai against condemned property, but they had no monopoly in

this process. Private persons could also submit them.** And if there is a discernible tendency for buyers of confiscated real estate to be from the same

deme in which the land they purchased was located, it is not necessary to point a finger at manipulative demarchs as responsible for this. Buyers would be tempted to bid vigorously when a parcel of land in their deme came up for sale not from any sense of local solidarity but with an eye to enlarging their own local holdings. The same phenomenon can be seen in land leases of demes. When a parcel of land is put up for lease the lessee frequently belongs to the deme in which the piece of land is located.*? None of the evidence reviewed above encourages the belief that the business of the poletai was conducted by any means other than public auction. This ° For references see RE xi (1921), 357, S.v. keryx. For Athens add Hesychius, s.v. éxa@icaro: "Artixot? dtav Tis Wvovpevos Te THV UTO KTpPUKL TUTpacKkopLévwY Tapaxphua avTO 7) aTayne...

(‘ekathisato: Attic: when anyone acquires any of the things sold by the herald and does not remove it immediately ...’). The phrasing here is similar to that found in a Delian inscription that is discussed by P. Gauthier, BCH 101 (1977), 203-8. Gauthier is probably correct in

writing that Hesychius’ definition refers to public auctions, although I would allow the possibility that the lexicographer had private sales in mind, not those of the poletai specifically. | Cf Lys. XVIIL. 20: XIX. 34, 38. 3° For numerous examples of private initiative in denouncing property cf. A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens: Procedure (Oxford, 1971), 211-17. 3¥ See Whitehead (n. 9), 157-8.

264 Merle Langdon probably was always so** but is most certainly substantiated for the fifth and fourth centuries when Athenian democracy had attained its full development. This is a relief, for we tend to regard auction sales, in which there is an equal opportunity for all to participate, as inherent to democracies. A glance at Ptolemaic Egypt or Imperial Rome shows that the practice of open state auctions was not confined to any one system of government, but it

would be hard for most of us to think of a democratic Athens without democratically conducted auctions. Yet not all the financial business conducted by the state of Athens was completely democratic. P. J. Rhodes provides a good discussion of the leavening process observable in its financial

administration in the fourth century.*> The poletai were not untouched by this process, as the Ath. Pol. makes quite clear in mentioning the involvement

of the treasurers of the stratiotic and theoric funds in their sales. Could it be, therefore, that Hallof is correct after all, that in Aristotle's time the poletai

were conducting staged auctions? He does build his strongest case on the

Agora fragment of IG ii* 1582, from about 340Bc, which, frankly, the counter-arguments are not compelling enough to demolish decisively. Also, the best evidence of dated contexts for competitive auctions conducted by

the poletai falls before 380, in Andocides, Lysias, and Plutarch’s Life of Alcibiades. This could be seen as reflecting a change in the way the poletai went about their business. Could, but I think not. SEG XVIII 13, from after 338/7, is a solid piece of evidence in the way of such a view. As we have seen, this inscription authorizes the lease of some state land to the highest bidder. We have no explicit evidence from sales documents of this time, but it would be unwise to claim two separate procedures. If leases were granted at open auction in the time of the Ath. Pol., then sales should have taken place in the same fashion. The only possible abridgement of

rights in the whole process could take place with the final vote of the Boule. If the auction produced someone who was deemed inappropriate or unsuitable to the councillors, the results could be nullified. Otherwise the highest bidder took home the goods. Hallof raises valid points. In selling the estates of public debtors the state was concerned about recovering the full amount owed, and it did vitally want to get good prices from the leases and concessions that it offered. This

concern did not, however, translate into a tempering of the democratic process used in determining buyers and lessees. A free and open auction was regarded as most fair. It allowed anyone to participate who had the means and wished to, and it resulted in spirited competitive bidding, which,

34 The earliest instance known to me of the public liquidation of goods by auction in Athens is the sale of Pisistratos’ property after one of his exiles: Herodotus 6. 121.

°° CJ 75 (1980), 309-15.

Public Auctions in Ancient Athens 265 despite the occasional shortfall, normally generated the desired revenue. In the arena of poletai activity at least no tempering of the democratic process was considered necessary.

Ill RITUAL

16 Something to do with Athens: Tragedy and Ritual CHRISTIANE SOURVINOU-INWOOD-

This paper is a small fragment of a larger investigation; it offers some very tentative suggestions pertaining to the ritual context in which tragedy was generated, the festival of the City Dionysia.” I explore elsewhere? other aspects of the tragedy’s ritual context and also the implications, if any, for

our reading of the surviving tragedies. There are major methodological problems involved in this investigation—besides the usual ones implicated

in any reading of another culture to which we have limited access:* the evidence pertinent to our Problematik is extremely fragmentary, and the different fragments come from different periods and many from late sources, which entails the possibility that the ritual nexus may have changed in the

course of time, and that either the surviving evidence relates only to the ' First I want to express my deep gratitude to the honorand, David Lewis, not only for discussing aspects of the present paper with me but also, and especially, for all his invaluable help and support over very many years. I am also grateful to colleagues who kindly discussed various aspects of this paper with me, Jim Coulton and Michael Jameson, and especially Robert Parker and Oliver Taplin. For reasons of brevity footnotes and references are reduced to the minimum. Abbreviations: Agora X1V = H. A. Thompson and R. E. Wycherley, The Athenian Agora, xiv. The Agora of Athens. The history, shape and uses of an ancient city centre (Princeton, NJ, 1972). Guide = The Athenian Agora: A Guide to the Excavation and Museum, 4th edn. (The American

School, Athens, 1990). * Also called Great Dionysia or simply Dionysia. Unless otherwise desirable, I refer to DFA 57-125 for the literary and epigraphical texts relevant to the City Dionysia and a discussion of the evidence and of the festival. On the festival, cf. also L. Deubner, Attische Feste? (Vienna, 1969), 138-42; H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (London, 1977), 125-36; E. Simon, Festivals of Attica: An Archaeological Commentary (Madison, Wis., 1983), 102-5; S. Goldhill, in J. J. Winkler and F. [. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton, NJ, 1990), 97-129; S. G. Cole, in R. Scodel (ed.), Theater and Society in the Classical World (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993), 25-38. > In the Carl Newell Jackson Lectures delivered at Harvard in April 1994 and in the book in which the lectures will be published. 4 Which I have discussed in C. Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Reading’ Greek Culture: Texts and Images, Rituals and Myths (Oxford, 1991), passim, 3-23.

270 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood later versions, or that its different fragments refer to different periods and what we have is an amalgam containing elements that had not belonged together in ritual reality. One strategy that can be methodologically helpful is to pursue independently the different lines of investigation that pertain to different sets of evidence. This procedure, which I have tried to follow

as much as possible here,’ avoids cross-contamination from fallacious assumptions and unconscious adjustments to make the different parts of the

evidence fit, and also permits some cross checks: if the results of the independent lines converge this provides some validation. The myth associated with the City Dionysia says that Pegasos of Eleutherai brought Dionysos’ statue to Athens, but the Athenians did not receive the god with honour. Dionysus was enraged and struck the male sexual organs with an incurable disease. They consulted the oracle who told them to bring

in the god with every honour; they manufactured phalloi, both privately and publicly, and with these they honoured the god, commemorating their misfortune.°

Let us consider the festival’s ritual. In a preliminary rite, which was not

part of the City Dionysia proper, the statue of Dionysos was taken to a temple in the Academy and back to the centre of Athens again. The process of the statue’s transport to the theatre (escorted by ephebes and at nighttime in the inscriptions) is said to involve a ‘leading in from the eschara’ (efoaywy7 amo THs éaydpas). This is normally understood to refer to the transfer of the statue from the shrine at the Academy to the theatre.’ The main festival involved a pompe, sent by the archon who was the official responsible for the festival. This procession had a kanephoros parthenos with a kanoun carrying aparchai and it included the carrying of phalloi. It also included at least one bull and cattle, subsequently sacrificed in the sanctuary, sometimes in large numbers.® There were also bloodless offerings that had been carried in the procession, such as loaves and wineskins. Metics as well > Though the need for brevity has not allowed me to follow this principle systematically in the presentation of my case. © Schol. Ar. Ach. 243a begins to set out the aition for the rite of phallophorein, and eventually

comes to speak of much more, since it refers to the oracle advising the Athenians that there was only one remedy, ei agoien ton theon with all honour, and to the Athenians’ decision to make phalloi privately and publicly and carry them in honour of the god and in memory of their misfortune. That the scholiast here gives information about the City Dionysia is clear by the schol. ad 242a on the kanephoros, which refers to the noble girls being kanephoroi and carrying gold kana containing aparchas hapanton at the City Dionysia. That this myth of the first introduction of the cult of Dionysos to Athens, brought (the myth says) from Eleutherai, concerns the City Dionysia is clear: this was the polis festival celebrated in honour of Dionysos Eleuthereus. On the myth cf. also DFA 57-8; R. Garland, Introducing New Gods: The Politics of Athenian Religion (London, 1992), 159; Cole (n. 2), 26. ’? DFA 60.

> DFA 61, 60 nn. I, 4; Cole (n. 2), 29.

Something to do with Athens 271 as citizens took part in the procession. The metics were distinguished from the Athenian citizens by their dress and by the objects they were carrying: they wore purple garments and carried skaphai, small tubs or basins, while the citizens wore whatever they liked and carried wineskins. There is every

reason to think that women participated in the procession.? Athenian colonists were required to participate actively.*° The pompe culminated in the sacrifices in the sanctuary of Dionysos. On the same day a komos may have taken place—if the komos was a separate revel procession, which is unclear. Then there were agones, the classical form of which involved three tragedians presenting three tragedies and a satyric drama each, dithyrambic competitions in which twenty choruses competed, one from each tribe of men and one of boys, and after 487/6 also comedies, normally five. Thus, the pompe, which is the core of the festival, and, as far as we can tell, also the whole festival apart from the agones, resembled the Panathenaia in articulating, and being articulated by, the whole Athenian polis as one unit—as opposed to articulations into, and through, polis subdivisions (for example, the phratries at the Apatouria and part of the Thargelia). The polis

system articulated in the City Dionysia and the Panathenaia is an open system that included foreign residents and colonists. It is because the City Dionysia and the Panathenaia were a locus for articulating symbolically the polis as an open system that they became the locus for the articulation of the wider system of the Athenian empire: for this was one of the results achieved by the fact that the Allies’ tribute was brought to Athens at the Dionysia and displayed in the theatre, while at the Great Panathenaia the ? Menander fr. 558 Kock makes clear that in Menander’s time women certainly took part at least as spectators. Then, the female gender was symbolically present among the active participants in the figure of the kanephoros, a parthenos of marriageable age, performing an office symbolically associated with beauty and marriageability. Finally, according to Demetrius of Phaleron (FRGrH 228 F 5) metics were obliged by law to carry skaphai, and metics’ daughters to carry hydreia and skiadeia en tais pompais. This expression would suggest that the City Dionysia procession was one of those in which this happened, since it was the second most important pompe after the Panathenaia, a hypothesis which gains very strong support from the fact that the metics certainly carried skaphai in the pompe of the Dionysia (Suda s.v. askophorein (‘in the Dionysiac pompai’, which must include this, the most important Dionysiac pompe) ). Consequently, it would appear that metics’ daughters and metic women in general took an active part in the Dionysia procession. If this is right, the participation of girls from noble families as kanephoroi on the one hand, and of metic women on the other indicates that women in the middle of the spectrum between the two, ordinary Athenian citizen women, would also have participated. ‘© When the colony of Brea was sent out in the 440s the colonists were required to send a phallos to the Dionysia and boun (cow) and a panoply to the Panathenaia (ML 49. 11-13, cf. p. 131). According to a 4th-cent. decree the Parians, as colonists of the Athenians, also had to bring a cow and a phallos to the Dionysia and a cow and a panoply to the Panathenaia (cf. the text in S. Accame, La lega ateniese del secolo IV ac. (Rome, 1941), 230 (Il. 3-5); cf. S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, i. Books I-III (Oxford, 1991), 69-70).

272 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood Athenian allies were required to bring a cow and a panoply like colonists."* It is undoubtedly also due to the same character of the Dionysia as a locus for the articulation of the whole polis, which generated particular ideologies

of self-definition at particular times, that it was at the theatre before the performances that the orphan sons of the war dead that had been raised at

the expense of the polis and had come of age were paraded in the full armour given them by the polis, and that the honours given to citizens and foreigners for great services to the polis were proclaimed. At the City Dionysia articulation by polis subdivisions was limited to the

agones, and even there only the dithyrambic contests had a fully tribal articulation reflecting the Cleisthenic subdivisions. The theatrical agones had a whole-polis articulation, in that both the selection of the poets and of the

choregoi by the archon is personal, and not by polis subdivision; Ath. Pol. 56. 3 tells us that the archon appointed three choregoi for tragedy from all the Athenians; so it is the whole polis that constitutes the selection unit;

only the selection of the judges involved a tribal articulation.’* This is comparable to the situation in the Panathenaia, where some of the competitions were organized by tribes.** That in festivals of this type more activities could become subsequently articulated through new polis subdivisions, thus strengthening symbolically a new polis articulation, can be seen also in the Panathenaia, the Athenian whole-polis festival par excellence,

in which, first, it was the demarchs that mustered the procession, and second, the meat of the sacrificial victims was distributed deme by deme, among the participants sent by each deme.** At the other end of the spectrum,

the Panathenaia had a Panhellenic facet; for the musical, rhapsodic and athletic games were Panhellenic.'* Similarly, in the City Dionysia a nonAthenian poet could be given a chorus and the flute player could also be a foreigner. The pattern of the City Dionysia and of the Panathenaia is both comparable

to, but also different from, that of the Thargelia, which, like the City Dionysia, was under the control of the archon.’® It is comparable, in that the Thargelia also had dithyrambic agones arranged by tribes juxtaposed to

a ritual nexus that was otherwise articulated. It is different, in that that ritual nexus was twofold, one part involving articulation by polis subdivisions ‘' ML 46. 41-2, cf. pp. 120, 121. '? On this selection, DFA 95-8. "3 D. G. Kyle, in J. Neils (ed.), Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens

(Princeton, NJ, 1992), 94-7. ‘4 LSCG 33 B 25-7, cf. 10 A 19-21: cf. R. Parker, in T. Linders and G. Nordquist (eds.), Gifts to the Gods (Proceedings of the Uppsala Symposium 1985; Uppsala, 1987), 140~-1. ‘> Kyle (n. 13), 97; H. A. Shapiro, in Neils (n. 13), 57-8, 72-4. ‘© Ath. Pol. 56. 4-5. On the Thargelia, Deubner (n. 2), 179-98; Parke (n. 2), 146-9; Simon

(n. 2), 77-9.

Something to do with Athens 273 other than tribes, namely phratries, while the other focused on an expulsion

that purified the community. Since there can be no doubt that the Panathenaia was founded at the latest in the second quarter of the sixth century, and the Thargelia is generally believed to be early, these comparisons suggest that in the case of the City Dionysia also an older festival with a whole-polis

focus had been reorganized to include, at the edges of the core ritual, an articulation through the new polis subdivisions. It is usually assumed that the City Dionysia arose from, and celebrated, a real life annexation of a cult of Dionysos from Eleutherai when the latter became part of Athens. But there are problems with this view, which was recently reformulated by W. R. Connor.*’” Connor thinks that the pattern of the City Dionysia was appropriate for a festival of integration following the

annexation of Eleutherai that could easily grow into a celebration of Athenian freedom and might; he compares this hypothetical annexation and ensuing ritual to those of Eleusis. Personally, I do not think that the Eleusinian cult was annexed; in my view it had been part of Athenian polis

religion from the beginning of that polis. But the ritual does express the integration of this outlying part of the polis and its intimate relationship with the centre in spatial movements. However, the ritual grammar of the Eleusinian ritual and of similar cults involving symbolic integration with

the centre is radically different from that of the City Dionysia. For a fundamental element in the ritual articulation of such integrations is a procession from the centre towards the ‘outlying’ sanctuary, as is the case with Eleusis, Brauron, the Argive Heraion, and so on. Though we do not know the route of the Dionysia pompe we do know that it did not go to Eleutherai. Eleutherai is, of course a long way from Athens, but it is not all that much further than Brauron. Even the movement of the statue to and from the shrine at the Academy, which on the annexation theories should be a kind of symbolic representation of Eleutherai, is not ritually prominent

and is not part of the Dionysia proper. If the Dionysia were an integration/annexation festival, the movement of the statue from the Academy to the sanctuary would have been a central part of the festival, not a separate, preliminary rite. Far from fitting the integration procession schemata the Dionysia ritual is radically different from them. Indeed, we may wonder why the statue was not taken to Eleutherai in the preliminary part of the ritual, and why Eleutherai was not important in that ritual. | shall be arguing that even the shrine at the Academy may have been less important than is usually assumed. But in any case, the focus of the festival is in the centre of the city. It is not the process of the bringing of the cult

‘7 In W. R. Connor, M. H. Hansen, K. A. Raaflaub, and B. S. Strauss, Aspects of Athenian Democracy (Copenhagen, 1990), 7-32.

274 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood and its place of origin that are focused on, but the receiving and honouring of the god who arrives.

The focus of the myth is not the introduction of the cult of Dionysos Eleuthereus from Eleutherai to Athens; the myth is about the first introduction of the cult of Dionysos in Athens—which, it says, came from Eleutherai—and it is this introduction of the cult of Dionysos in general that the City Dionysia celebrates. Of course, this festival was not perceived to have been the oldest Dionysos festival; it was the Anthesteria that was considered ta archaiotera Dionysia.‘® But—at whatever historical moment the myth was generated— the festival celebrates the installation of the cult of Dionysos in Athens, and the title and cult of Dionysos Eleuthereus honours specifically the occasion

and the persona of the god that was manifested in this particular myth, the arrival of his cult in the shape of the statue brought by Pegasos, and the particular version of the resistance myth associated with this event. Resistance to Dionysos’ first arrival was an important part of the god’s persona. Here the resistance schema shapes also this myth of the introduction of his statue and cult, in interaction with another schema, which I shall discuss

in a moment. First it is important to note that the other Attic myth of resistance to Dionysos, which involves an actual visit by the god, gives one reason why things Dionysiac were (in myth) received with hostility. Dionysos was received by Ikarios to whom he gave the gift of wine, which Ikarios offered to guests, who thought they had been bewitched and killed him.*? This myth expresses the notion of loss of control of the self, parallel to the disturbance of order in society created by Dionysos’ cult in the myths of Pentheus and Lykourgos. For, of course, the myths of resistance to Dionysos and his cult do not reflect historical reality; they articulate ritual tensions and symbolic oppositions, a contrast between divine madness and human order.*°

The story that the statue and cult came to Athens from Eleutherai belongs

to the same category of myths as that told by Euripides in IT 1450-7, the myth that the statue of Artemis Tauropolos was brought to Athens from the Taurid by Orestes and Iphigeneia. Such myths make up one modality of distancing, and thus underplaying and almost eliding, the human origins of cult statues, and ultimately of the cults. The mythico-ritual schema involving *8 Thuc. 2. 15. 4; on this passage cf. Hornblower (n. 10), 266-7. "9 On Ikarios, E. Kearns, The Heroes of Attica (London, 1989), 172, 167; M. Robertson, Greek Vases In the J. Paul Getty Museum, iii (1986), 83-6. Cf. also H. A. Shapiro, Art and Cult under the Tyrants in Athens (Mainz, 1989), 95-6. 2° W. Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 177-8. With regard to the history of the cult of Dionysos, we now have a Linear B tablet from Chania which mentions Dionysos in an unambiguously religious context, because it registers offerings sent to Zeus and to Dionysos at a shrine of Zeus (E. Hallager, M. Vlasakis, and B. P. Hallager, Kadmos, 31 (1992), 76-81).

Something to do with Athens 275 a cult introduced from a locality with an especially important version of that cult can be seen in Athenian cult practice; the cult of Asklepios was introduced in the last quarter of the fifth century from Epidaurus, and this origin was reflected in the cult, not least in the name of one of the god's festivals, the Epidauria. What of Eleutherai? It was Thebes that was the god’s birthplace, and it was from Thebes that a statue of Dionysos Lysios was taken to Sikyon by the Theban Phanes at the command of the Pythia (Paus. 2. 7. 6). But there does seem to have been a connection between Dionysos and Eleutherai as well. There may have been a perceived connection

between the cult of Dionysos at Thebes and Eleutherai.** Then there is a myth (in Diodorus 4. 2. 6) that Eleutherai was founded by Dionysos. If it was early, the myth of the bringing of his cult from Eleutherai to Athens would be almost claiming an indirect foundation of the cult by Dionysos himself. It is conceivable that the similarity between the name ‘Eleutherai’ and the notion of ‘liberation’ brought about by Dionysos in a variety of ways, a notion which is also expressed in Dionysos’ title Lysios,** may have

created a perceived special connection between the god and Eleutherai. I am not denying the possibility that Eleutherai being ‘in the news’ as far as the Athenians were concerned, for whatever reason and for however long or short a time, may also have been a factor in shaping the myth. But I think it is clear that the festival of the City Dionysia must not be interpreted as an annexation ritual and its origins must not be tied with the history of Eleutherai.

The established view that a Pisistratid City Dionysia was reorganized during the Cleisthenic reforms and that this is why the victors’ lists would appear to begin at 502/1, because they tell us about this reorganization and cannot be assumed to be reflecting the beginning of the festival, was recently challenged by Connor.*? He argued that the City Dionysia were created at the end of the sixth century in the context of the Cleisthenic reforms, possibly around 506. He also argued that the first form of this festival had involved a komos, a ritualized revel which may have included dithyrambic choruses, and that soon thereafter tragic and then comic performances were added to it until its fully developed classical form was achieved. On his view the plays of Thespis and several other early Attic tragedians were performed in the Rural Dionysia and only later were tragic

performances held at the city festival. Besides the fact that this thesis is based on the downdating of the annexation of Eleutherai, which, I argued, >t Timagoras, FGrH 381 F 1: A. Schachter, Cults of Boiotia, i (London, 1981), 175. 2 On Dionysos Lysios see (with bibliography) H. S. Versnel, Ter Unus. Isis, Dionysos, Hermes: Three Studies in Henotheism (Leiden, 1990), 139, 166, 193. On Dionysos Eleuthereus/Eleutheros, Schachter (n. 21), 175. Cf. also R. Seaford, in T. H. Carpenter and C. A. Faraone (eds.), Masks of Dionysus (Ithaca, NY, 1993), 146 n. 132.

> (n. 17), 7-32.

276 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood is not relevant, there are two objections against it. First, we saw that the juxtaposition of an agonistic segment articulated partly through the Cleisthenic tribes, and a more centrally religious segment, which is closely

comparable to that of the Panathenaia but to some extent also to the Thargelia, suggests that, as in those cases, the articulation into Cleisthenic tribes of the agonistic segment was superimposed onto an earlier nexus that was otherwise articulated, and that therefore the City Dionysia was earlier than the Cleisthenic reforms and was reorganized during those reforms. In addition, there is another objection to Connor’s hypothesis of the primacy of the dithyramb at the City Dionysia in the late sixth century, as I shall now argue.

This argument focuses on the physical realities of early theatres, our understanding of which has changed since the various hypotheses about the origin and early history of tragedy were formulated. We now know that early theatres did not have a circular orchestra; the earliest orchestras were irregular, vaguely and irregularly rectangular.** In the early phase of the theatre of Thorikos, which dates from between the late sixth century and

480, the orchestra was about 13 metres deep and between 19 and 23.50 metres wide. The two earliest (surviving) altars situated in the orchestra of a theatre, far from being in the centre of that orchestra, were very much off centre, and off centre in different ways, which suggests that their position

was not significant. In the theatre at Isthmia, built some time before 390, the altar stood slightly to the east of the central axis and near the proskenion.”°

At Thorikos the surviving altar belongs to the second phase of the theatre, dated to the third quarter of the fifth century, but the fact that the east end of the cavea bends here to accommodate the altar shows that there had been another altar in that position in the theatre’s first phase.*® Though too little is preserved from the first phase of the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens for us

to be able to reconstruct it with any certainty, the combination of the following facts suggests that its orchestra was vaguely rectangular and was very unlikely to have been a circular orchestra centred on an altar.’’ First, the fact that the surviving stone seats of a later fifth-century phase belonged to a rectilinear cavea. Second, the fact that the arrangement at the Thorikos theatre is likely to be reflecting the Theatre of Dionysos, especially since

the same spatial arrangements are found in the other fifth-century Attic theatres, at Ikaria and Rhamnous. Third, the absence of a circular orchestra *4 See esp. E. Gebhard, Hesperia, 43 (1974), 428-40 with bibliography. 75 KE. Gebhard, The Theater at Isthmia (Chicago, 1973), 13. © Gebhard (n. 24), 431-2; J. Travlos, Bildlexikon zur Topographie des antiken Attika (Tubingen,

1988), 430-I, 437, fig. 550. *?7 Gebhardt (n. 24), 432-4; E. PohImann, MusHelv 38 (1981), 129-46; cf. also J. R. Green, Lustrum, 31 (1989), 19-20. L. Polacco, Il teatro di Dioniso Eleuterio ad Atene (Rome, 1990) offers an adventurous reconstruction of the early history of the theatre.

Something to do with Athens 277 in the other early theatres and the non-centrality of the altars at Isthmia and Thorikos, theatres which are unlikely to have been unaffected by the theatre of Dionysos, in combination with the fact that the circular orchestra as a defined and self-contained unit did not develop until some time in the fourth century.*® This state of affairs suggests that the orchestras of the earliest theatres were shaped by spatial movements that were not circular, and did not involve dancing around the altar. We are told’? that performances were transferred to the theatre of Dionysos from the Agora after the collapse of the ikria for the spectators, an event we can date from pottery in the theatre as not much later than 500. Since the earliest orchestra of the theatre of Dionysos reflected the same performance needs as, and would have been influenced by, the orchestra in the Athenian

Agora, it is almost certain that the latter was not circular and was not shaped by the needs of performances involving circular dancing around an

altar. Thus, it appears that in the late sixth century at least the orchestra was not shaped by the performance needs of dithyrambs, which were kyklioi choroi, or of anything with significant dithyrambic elements, but was shaped by the needs of dramatic performances such as those of known tragedy. In the Panathenaia the central ritual act in the performance of which the whole polis articulates itself was the offering of the peplos to Athena Polias, Athens’ poliouchos deity. The procession is above all a gift-offering procession. What of the Dionysia and its procession? If the myth expresses the core of the festival as perceived by the participants, then this core was the reception

and welcoming of the god. We shall find some reasons for thinking that such a ‘god-welcoming schema’ fits better than any other what we can reconstruct of the ritual. There is also another piece of evidence that points

us strongly in the same direction. Plutarch, Demetrios 12, tells us that someone proposed that the polis should receive Demetrios [Poliorcetes| every time he came tois Demetros kai Dionysou xenismois, with the same [rites of] guest entertainment|s| as those offered to Demeter and Dionysos. The context makes clear that what is at issue here is ‘entertainment on the god's arrival’.

The first reason for concluding that the rites of entertainment offered to Dionysos referred to here were part of the City Dionysia is that the comparison

of the myths associated with Dionysiac festivals in Athens show that it is the City Dionysia that is focused on the reception of Dionysos. In addition, the fact that it is to the City Dionysia that the Athenians attached festival days in honour of Demetrios, adding them to the festival and giving to the City Dionysia the double name Demetria and Dionysia,*° points in the same 8 Gebhard (n. 24), 436-40. *9 Phot. s.v. ikria. © C. Habicht, Gottmenschentum und griechische Stdadte, (Zetemata 14; 2nd edn., Munich, 1970),

51-5.

278 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood direction, an association between Demetrios, xenismoi for Dionysos, and the City Dionysia.

Apollodorus 3. 14. 7 tells us that the two deities said to receive xenismoi, Demeter and Dionysos, came to Attica at the same time, at the time of king Pandion; Demeter was received by Keleos, and Dionysos by Ikarios. Pandion’s

name was probably derived from that of the festival Pandia.** This was a festival of Zeus, but it was intimately connected with the City Dionysia, since the assembly in which the conduct of, and any offences committed during, the Dionysia were discussed took place on the day following the Pandia. Pandion’s mythological connection with the Pandia is not attested. In my view, the coincidence between, on the one hand, the festival's intimate relationship to the Dionysia and, on the other, the myth according to which

Pandion was king in Athens when Dionysos arrived in Attica and was received by Ikarios, suggests the possibility that—-whatever the mechanics

of the creation of this association may have been—it is some role that Pandion played in that visit or the events that followed that may have motivated his involvement in a festival connected with the Dionysia, and that the Pandia involved a reference to Dionysos’ arrival in Attica. If so, this would indicate that Dionysos’ arrival in Attica had been attracted into the orbit of the City Dionysia and ritually connected with the installation of his cult, so that the god’s visit and the arrival of his statue and foundation of his cult were woven into one festive system focused on the City Dionysia. This would be the ritual correlative of the mythological nexus that connects the two in the story in Pausanias I. 2. 5: the Delphic oracle helped Pegasos introduce the cult of Dionysos by recalling that Dionysos had visited Ikarios. If this is right, it would provide a little further confirmation for the importance of Dionysos’ xenismoi in the City Dionysia.

Let us now try to reconstruct tentatively what we can of this ritual. In trying to reconstruct the pompe we should look at spatial relationships. The one symbolically significant route leading to, and out of, the sanctuary and theatre of Dionysos is the Tripodes, the Street of the Tripods, along which choregic victory monuments were erected. Pausanias I. 20. I tells us that

the Street of the Tripods started at the Prytaneion; it connected the Prytaneion with the Theatre of Dionysos. (It may well have continued beyond

the Prytaneion and joined the Panathenaic way, but if so it changed its name and was no longer the Tripodes.)** The fact that victory monuments

were set up along it leads us to expect that the Tripodes may have had a 3 Deubner (n. 2), 177; Parke (n. 2), 136; Kearns (n. 19), 81 n. 7. On the festival cf. Deubner, 176-7; Parke, 135-6; Kearns, 81, 192: cf. also DFA 66. On Pandion, U. Kron, Die zehn attischen Phylenheroen: Geschichte, Mythos, Kult und Darstellungen (Berlin, 1976), 104-19;

Kearns, 81, I9I-2. 32 §. G. Miller, The Prytaneion: Its Function and Architectural Form (Berkeley, Calif., 1978), 49.

Something to do with Athens 279 symbolic significance pertaining not only to the pompe but also to the performances. Let us approach this question from another angle. The Prytaneion was, among other things, the symbolic centre of each polis with, among other things, important religious functions.*? In Athens the Prytaneion was also the headquarters of the archon who had control and responsibility for the festival and sent the pompe.** In addition, and most significantly, given that this is a festival concerned with the reception of a

god whose cult arrived from the outside and had not received proper honours, the Prytaneion is where honoured foreign guests as well as honoured citizens are dined and entertained by the polis. Pompai from the Prytaneion to a shrine are a known modality of procession in Greek religion in general and Athens in particular. In Athens, the pompe for the goddess Bendis, whose cult was introduced in Athens some time before 429/8, started apo tes hestias tes ek tou prytaneiou and ended in the shrine at the Peiraeus.*> This ritual schema, then, seems to fit the modality of ritual for a new god. Dionysos was not a new incoming god in terms of real cultic history, but he was so in myth; indeed, as we saw, his persona

as incoming god is at the centre of the mythico-ritual nexus of the City Dionysia. This would suggest that the ritual schema deployed to celebrate his reception at the City Dionysia would be the schema which in Athenian ritual articulated the cult of a new, incoming, god, since the real incoming gods’ rituals would themselves have been modelled on what was perceived

as the ritual for the reception of a new god in festivals such as the City Dionysia. Thus, two different lines of argument, the topographical and the

one based on ritual grammar, and also, perhaps to a lesser extent, the involvement of the archon, lead us to believe that the Prytaneion, situated in the Old Agora, which, we now know, was in a different place from the excavated one, on the East of the Acropolis,*° was an important locus in the City Dionysia. In these circumstances, we would expect the pompe of the City Dionysia (which was centred on the god’s reception as an honoured

divine guest), a pompe which articulated the notion of the whole polis participating in the foundation of, and honouring, the cult of Dionysos, to have gone from the Prytaneion to the sanctuary of Dionysos. But this cannot 33 On the functions of the Prytaneion, Miller (n. 32), 4-24; on the Prytaneion in Athens: Miller 38-54. 34 Ath. Pol. 56. 4; Athen. 12. 542e. The archon based in the Prytaneion: Ath. Pol. 3. 5. The archon’s headquarters may have moved if it is not an error that makes some sources (cf. Suda s. v. archon) place his headquarters near the eponyms (cf. P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the

Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981), 105, ad 3. 5; cf. also J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (London, 1971), 210, who thinks that the original statues had stood in the Old Agora).

5 IG ii? 1256. 6-7, 15. For an example from another city cf. e.g. the text A 308 in Miller (n. 32): Elaea, for Asklepios. 3° G. Dontas, Hesperia, 52 (1983), 48-63.

280 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood have been the case in Xenophon’s time, at least not by a straight route. For he tells us,?” in a context that is concerned with pompai, which, he argues, ought to go round all the shrines in the Agora, that at the Dionysia, which in this context clearly refers to the pompe of the Dionysia, the dances of choruses gratified, in addition [to Dionysos], the Twelve Gods and other gods. The formulation may suggest a special emphasis on the Altar of the

Twelve Gods, which may indicate that whatever the significance of the choruses dancing at various shrines may have been, other than simply honouring the gods—and there must have been more to it than this, for otherwise it would have been more common in all pompai than is suggested by Xenophon’s formulation—it would have been stronger in the case of the Altar of the Twelve Gods. Is then the notion of a pompe from the Prytaneion to the sanctuary of Dionysos a complete fiction? Or had there been a change between the early form of the festival and Xenophon’s time? The Altar of the Twelve Gods was dedicated by Peisistratos, son of Hippias

(Thuc. 6. 54. 6-7), who was probably archon in 522/1. If it is right that the festival had been instituted earlier, if we continue to take Thespis’ date

in any way seriously, and if the temple of Dionysos is to be dated to the third, rather than the last quarter of the sixth century, the pompe would have predated the foundation of the Altar of Twelve Gods. Given that we know that some changes did take place in the course of the centuries of the festival's history, not least the introduction of the tribally organized agones,

we are not entitled to assume that the overall shape of the ritual had remained unchanged. Thus, it cannot be excluded that there was an early version of the festival in which the statue was taken from the Academy to the Prytaneion for a rite of xenismos which involved, among other things, the thing out of which tragedy developed, taking place in and probably

outside the Prytaneion. That the space around the Prytaneion was not crammed is suggested by the story in Zenobius 4. 93 that there was a limou pedion, a field consecrated to famine, behind the Prytaneion. The fact that

the statue of Dionysos was present in the theatre during the dramatic performances and watched the performances in the classical period (and later)?® may offer a little tentative support for the view that what became tragedy was a ritual performed for, and in front of, the statue of Dionysos Eleuthereus during a ritual which, given the context, should be one of xenismos at (and probably outside) the Prytaneion where the god was received and entertained. Then would have followed a pompe to the sanctuary—whether or not it already visited other shrines in the vicinity of the Prytaneion or on the route, as it did later in the Agora—perhaps escorting the statue and thus re-enacting the cult’s installation in commemoration of 37 Xen. Hipparch. 3. 2. 38 Cf. e.g. Ar. Knights 536; cf. also Philostr. Vit. Apoll. 4. 22.

Something to do with Athens 281 which, and the events preceding it, the myth tells us, this pompe took place. The Cleisthenic reorganization of the festival, which I cannot attempt to reconstruct here, but which at the very least introduced the tribally organized dithyrambic contests, involved an expansion of the agonistic performance part. I would like to suggest as a possibility that after this reorganization the tragic and dithyrambic performances expanded into a long sequence of agones so that they could no longer be accommodated within the sequence ‘xenismos—pompe’ even if they had been before (as in the tentative reconstruction I proposed), and became detached from them, and that it was in this context that they moved to the New Agora which offered more space and which was developing into a major religious and civic centre. As we saw, dramatic performances had taken place in the Agora until the collapse of the ikria, when they were transferred to the theatre of Dionysos.

The Altar of the Twelve Gods in the New Agora was in some ways equivalent to the Prytaneion in terms of meaning and function; for it came to be considered the centre of Athens, since it was the central point from which distances were measured.*? Also the Altar of the Twelve Gods was, like the hestia at the Prytaneion above all other hestiai, a locus for foreign suppliants (Hdt. 6. 108). Thus, this altar became another centre of the polis, the importance of which grew as the New Agora developed into a major religious and civic centre: for from the end of the sixth century onwards,

the ‘New’ Agora became increasingly important, and an annexe of the Prytaneion came to be instituted there, the prytanikon, the earliest form of which appears to be datable to the end of the sixth century.*°

Since we know that the statue of Dionysos was present during the dramatic performances in the classical period (and later) the ritual grammar

of the festival entails that it should have been present also when the performances took place in the Agora. If that is right, is the involvement of the Altar of the Twelve Gods in the pompe entirely unrelated to the statue's erstwhile presence in the Agora, even though that altar had a meaning in some ways paralleling that of the Prytaneion where, it was suggested here on entirely separate grounds, some rites of xenismos of Dionysos are likely

to have taken place, and even though it is in the immediate proximity of the area in which the performances would have taken place?*’ In front of the Altar of the Twelve Gods, between it and the performance

area, at the precise time when, on the hypothesis suggested here, the dramatic performances would have moved to the Agora from outside the 39 Hdt. 2. 7: cf. Dontas (n. 36), 60 and n. 37. On the Altar of the Twelve Gods, Travlos (n. 34), 458-61; and most recently Shapiro (n. 19), 133-41 with bibliography. 4° On the prytanikon, Miller (n. 32), 54-65; on the date of the archaic prytanikon cf. esp. 65. 4! Guide 23, fig. 3 (plan of the Agora at c.500) and 25, fig. 4 (plan of the Agora at c.400, with the likely position of the orchestra marked); cf. also 90. On the ikria and the orchestra cf. also Agora XIV, 126-9.

282 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood Prytaneion, in the closing years of the sixth century, a new structure was built, a ground altar of the type that would have been referred to by the Greeks as an eschara. The function of this eschara has never been established.

It had been suggested that it was the shrine of Aiakos, the Aiakeion, but that proposed identification has been shown to be fallacious by Professor Stroud who has conclusively shown’? that the Aiakeion was in another part of the Agora. Let us set the parameters for the reconstruction of the function of this eschara.** First, it was sited in a very prominent location, near the

entrance to the Agora on the north-west very close to the Altar of the Twelve Gods. Second, it had the same orientation, and similar material and workmanship, as the Altar of the Twelve Gods from which it was separated by a narrow passage. As H. A. Thompson noted,* their relationship suggests that the eschara was sited in relation to the Twelve Gods. Third, it was of

substantial size and of substantial construction, which, together with its location, has led scholars to conclude that it had served a cult of some civic importance.** It consisted of a rectangle floored with field stones enclosed by a poros curb of 1.76X3.77 metres which rose at each end. Then, shortly

after it was constructed it was surrounded by a pavement, wider on the west wide, and the whole was enclosed by a wall with an entrance in the form of a recessed porch on the east side and probably a doorway on the west. Finally, it went out of use ‘probably’ in the Hellenistic period, and then was overlaid by an exedra facing north. The Altar of the Twelve Gods replaced, or at least became an alternative

to, the Prytaneion as the centre of the polis. Is it possible that the eschara which is closely related to it may have been in a way duplicating the hestia at the Prytaneion—perhaps complementing some functions of that hestia in a way comparable to that in which the prytanikon became the annexe of Prytaneion in the New Agora? At Kos there was a hestia, a hearth altar to Hestia, in the Agora, clearly not in a building. Could it be that through the

construction of this eschara and its incorporation into the nexus that included the Altar of the Twelve Gods the Cleisthenic democracy symbolically

‘appropriated’ that altar and symbolically neutralized its tyrannic associations? It is certainly in the context of this democracy that the eschara was

constructed and related to the Altar of the Twelve Gods, whatever its function may have been. We may approach this question from another angle, by refocusing our

attention on the Dionysia. We saw that there are very good grounds for 4? In a paper delivered at the conference on which this volume is based, to be published elsewhere. 43 On the eschara, its form, orientation, construction, and history, H. A. Thompson, Hesperia,

22 (1953), 43-6; Agora XIV, 132.

* (n. 43), 45. 45 Agora XIV, 132; cf. also Thompson (n. 43), 45.

Something to do with Athens 283 thinking that the statue of Dionysos was present during the dramatic performances in the Agora. Let us now consider the preliminary rite before the Dionysia proper began, during which the movement of the statue took place in later periods. Inscriptions of the second century Bc tell us that the ephebes led in Dionysos from the eschara to the theatre (efonyayov b€ Kal Tov Avdvucov amo THs éoxdpas els 76 Oéarpov). It is normally assumed that this

means that they took the statue from the shrine at the Academy where it had stood by an eschara altar. But this is simply an inference. My tentative suggestion is that the ‘leading in’ from the eschara refers to the bringing of the statue to the theatre, not from the temple at the Academy, but from the eschara in the Agora, which was its first stop in the centre of Athens. This would make sense of the expression ‘from the eschara’, which is surely a very odd way of referring to the bringing of a statue from the Academy. In addition, since it is unlikely that the term eschara was used loosely in this context, it is puzzling why the Academy shrine should have an eschara altar since, to my knowledge, there is nothing in the cult of Dionysos Eleuthereus

to account for it. It is true that such distinctions in altar types and the terms used for them are less than straightforward, and mostly beyond our

reconstruction, but the fact that the altars in the sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus are not of the eschara type adds, I submit, some strength to this

argument. More importantly, on this hypothesis, the statue of Dionysos

would be located exactly where we would expect it to be during the performances.

The hypothesis would also make ritual sense. The Dionysos-welcoming rites would be in a way duplicated, in the same way as the eschara in the

Agora near the new centre of the polis may have been in a way partly duplicating the hestia at the Prytaneion. During the pompe, the chorus’s dances at the altar of the Twelve Gods and at other shrines would be a further expression of Dionysos’ relating to the other, already established gods, especially since the Twelve Gods would, I think, have been perceived as also a metaphor for the polis’ pantheon. In terms of function and ritual logic the eschara in the Agora fits much better than a hypothetical eschara in the Academy shrine. If the Academy shrine had indeed stood symbolically for Eleutherai, the place the statue had come from, it would certainly have been inappropriate as a locus of the statue’s and cult’s reception in Athens. Even if it had not, whatever its precise symbolic meaning may have been,

it was neither at the centre, where the central reception of the cult was clearly located—given the location of both the sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus and of the main part of the festival of Dionysia—nor extraurban, in which case it could have been standing symbolically for the statue’s first reception on unequivocally Attic soil.

The hypothesis that the statue of Dionysos stood by the eschara in the Agora after it was brought back from the Academy can be supported by

284 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood further arguments. As we saw, shortly after its construction the eschara acquired a pavement and an enclosing wall. This may be a complete coincidence, and it cannot count as serious evidence, though it may add a little to the cumulative weight of the evidence all of which points, I submit, to the same direction, but the hypothesis proposed here would account for this change: a few years after the Cleisthenic reforms the ikria collapsed and the performances were transferred to the sanctuary of Dionysos where the first theatre was constructed. Thus Dionysos’ statue standing by the eschara would no longer have watched the performances, and it would have been no longer necessary to have a free view-line to the performance space; certainly, the eschara would no longer have had an intimate cultic relationship with the area to its south. Thus, it acquired an enclosure, and the east— west axis which was important for sacrifice was emphasized. The hypothesis that the statue of Dionysos stood by the eschara in the Agora would also explain the puzzling fact that the ‘leading in from the eschara’ took the statue to the theatre, not to the temple, despite the fact that its first active role would have been not in the theatre, but before that, in the sanctuary at the culmination of the pompe. On my hypothesis, it was taken to the theatre because the theatre was the locus of the second activity with which the statue had been involved at the eschara, the functions of which as a ritual locus were now split between two spaces, with a ritual movement, the ‘leading in from the eschara’, connecting the two: and second, correlatively with the first, because ritual logic could require that the statue

should not be installed in the sanctuary until after its xenismos at the Prytaneion and its arrival with the pompe. Finally, is it a coincidence that the ‘leading in from the eschara’ disappears

from later texts,*° and that some time during the Hellenistic period the eschara in the Agora was abandoned,*’ while at least by Pausanias’ time Dionysos had a space sacred to him somewhere to the north-west of the north-western part of the Agora (in which was located the eschara), along the road from the Academy to the Agora, which he did not have in the classical period? Is it not possible that the three facts could be correlative? Pausanias I. 2. 5 mentions a temenos to Dionysos in a stoa; the dedication of the building that was Dionysos’ shrine certainly took place after the fifth century, for in the fifth century it had been the house of Poulytion in which

the profanation of the Mysteries had taken place. After the sanctuary of Dionysos, Pausanias continues, there is a building in which there are clay statues representing Amphictyon entertaining with a feast other gods and 46 DFA 60. 47 The excavation report says (Thompson (n. 43), 43) ‘probably already in the Hellenistic period’, which indicates that the date at which the eschara was abandoned cannot be determined

with precision or certainty. Consequently, my tentative suggestions inevitably lack a firm anchoring.

Something to do with Athens 285 Dionysos; Pegasos of Eleutherai, who introduced Dionysos to the Athenians,

is also represented; Pausanias adds that Pegasos had been helped by the Delphic oracle, which had recalled that Dionysos had visited Ikarios. The proximity to the sanctuary of Dionysos, the presence of Pegasos in Amphic-

tyon’s represented entertainment of the gods, and the myth reported by Philochoros (FGrH 328 F 5b) that Amphictyon had learnt from Dionysos to mix wine, which allowed people to ‘tame’ (as it were) their wine drinking,

retain control, and remain upright—a myth clearly connected with this sanctuary of Dionysos, since it contained a representation of Akratos (Unmixed) described by Pausanias as an attendant demon of Dionysos—lead us to conclude that the group of statues did indeed represent Amphictyon’s reception of Dionysos in the presence of the other gods.** This is part of the mythological nexus of Dionysos’ reception in Athens, a companion myth to

that of the cult’s introduction by Pegasos that articulates the notion of taming, bringing under control the aspects of the Dionysiac nexus that had seemed threatening. It is clear, then, that this Dionysiac nexus relates to the persona of the god as Dionysos Eleuthereus, his reception at Athens, and the festival of the City Dionysia. This is hardly surprising, since this sanctuary is on the road from the Academy to the centre of Athens, indeed at the edge of the centre.* A very late source, Philostratus, offers more evidence in support of the

notion that the area around/beyond the north-west corner of the Agora played an important role in the celebration of the Dionysia, and in particular

in the preliminary stage of the festival. He tells us°° that whenever the Dionysia came round and the statue of Dionysos ‘went down to the Academy’ Herodes Atticus would furnish wine at the Cerameicus to both citizens and foreigners ‘lying down on a bed of ivy’ (katakewpévous emi ottBadwr KiTTOb).

The formulation suggests that he is reporting a benefaction during a part of

the festival that he refers to elliptically because he assumes it to be well known, he is not describing something unknown. The stibades kittou, bed of leaves of ivy, fits an established ritual schema for ritual dining at a sanctuary during a festival, reclining on beds of leaves of the relevant deity’s sacred

plant and wearing wreaths of the same plant. This is, for example, what happened at the Samian Heraion where at the festival of the Tonaia the worshippers wore crowns of lygos and reclined on stibades of Iygos, the goddess’s sacred plant at that sanctuary.*’ Since crowns of ivy were certainly 48 For a similar view cf. M. Detienne, Dionysos a ciel ouvert (Paris, 1986), 52-3. 49 To this mythico-cultic nexus probably also belongs the myth reported by Pausanias (1. 3. 1) that the eponymous hero of Cerameicus, Keramos, was the son of Dionysos and Ariadne. °° Philostr. Vitae Sophistarum 549. 5! Stibades of lygos and lygos the sacred plant of Hera at Samos: Menodotos, FGrH 541 F I; Nikainetos, ap. Athen. 673a-—c; U. Kron, in R. Hagg, N. Marinatos, and G. C. Nordquist, Early Greek Cult Practice (Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium at the Swedish Institute

286 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood worn in the course of the Dionysia*’ the pattern is the same here. Thus, the ritual schema that underlies this use of the god’s sacred plant suggests that Philostratus is reflecting benefaction at a correctly reported ritual which took place either at, or in connection with, a sanctuary. This cannot have been the shrine at the Academy, since the text distinguishes when the statue ‘went down to the Academy’ from the dining ‘in the Cerameicus’. Given

that, after the archaic city wall was abolished and the boundaries of the Inner Cerameicus ceased to be well defined, the northern lower part of the Agora also came to be called Cerameicus, and given that Philostratus himself calls the Odeion of Agrippa, which was, very roughly, towards the centre of the north-south axis of the Agora, ‘the theatre in the Cerameicus called

the Agrippeion’,*? it is likely that this ritual dining took place in the sanctuary of Dionysos somewhere to the north-west of the Agora. On my hypothesis this rite would have shifted there at a later period, while earlier it had taken place in the Agora in association with the statue of Dionysos

standing temporarily at the eschara. That ritual activity took place in connection with Dionysos’ statue while it was at the eschara is clear: IG ii? IOII mentions a sacrifice, which may not have been a regular part of the rite,°* and hymns were sung every year to ep’ escharas Dionysos.°> On my

hypothesis this ritual would have eventually shifted to the sanctuary of Dionysos described by Pausanias—or conceivably only the reception ritual had shifted to the sanctuary while the ritual dining continued to take place

in the Agora. In any case the ritual dining did not take place in the Academy, but at the centre, in a place Philostratus considered to be ‘in the Cerameicus’.

Lack of evidence means these suggestions have to remain speculative. However, what evidence there is gives us very good reasons for thinking that there was a strong connection between the area to the north-west of the north-western corner of the Agora, Dionysos’ reception in Athens, and

the City Dionysia, that at least some of it was a later expansion and development, and that there was ritual activity associated with that area and connected with the movement of the statue to and from the Academy. My suggestion that that ritual had earlier been associated with the eschara by the Altar of the Twelve Gods is undoubtedly based on insufficient at Athens, 26-29 June, 1986; Stockholm, 1988), 138-41. On stibades cf. also e.g. Theocr. 7. 67 ff.

°* Alciphron 4. 18. 16; cf. 4. 18. 10-11; Philochoros, FGrH 328 F 171. 53 Philostr. Vit. Soph. 571.

54 DFA 60 and n. 2. 55 Alciphron 4. 18. 16. Of course, on my hypothesis, in Alciphron’s time there would have been no eschara, but as the narrative time is the 4th cent. Bc, and the writer purported to be Menander, and as Alciphron was widely read in classical sources, the ritual would be reflecting classical ritual.

Something to do with Athens 287 evidence, but it would fit the ritual and topographical structure of the ritual. The space associated with Dionysos in the later period was on the road from

the Academy to, and on the edge of, the centre of the polis, and it was associated with Dionysos’ reception. Since those parts of Dionysos’ reception

ritual that can be located took place at the very centre, it is possible to see this space as an extension of that centre, with the cultic focus having moved further to the north-west, perhaps because since the Agora ceased to be a civic centre the eschara as a civic structure duplicating the hestia of the Prytaneion had come to be perceived as redundant and the desire for larger space led to a relocation. This whole argument is, of course, inconclusive. However, I suggest that the fact that a series of independent, if inconclusive arguments lead in the same direction suggests that this direction is likely to be correct. In these circumstances, I suggest that the following reconstruction of different stages in the ritual of the City Dionysia fits all the known facts, accounts for all the apparent oddities and difficulties, and is in harmony with both Greek ritual logic and the historical circumstances.

In the earliest stage the statue was brought from the Academy to the Prytaneion, a rite that presented itself as a re-enactment of the cult’s first introduction. The statue was received at the hestia of the Prytaneion and a ritual of xenismos took place. Part of that ritual xenismos involved a ‘performance’ in front of the Prytaneion to which I will return. Then a pompe accompanied the statue to the sanctuary along the Tripodes; on arrival sacrifices took place. Then, when the festival was reorganized during the Cleisthenic reforms the performance part was expanded and could not be accommodated as part of the xenismos—pompe nexus; also more space was

probably required. Thus the performances moved to the New Agora. The statue was taken from the Academy to the Agora where it was received at

the Altar of the Twelve Gods and stood at the eschara in front of it which duplicated symbolically the hestia of the Prytaneion. It watched the

performances and at a subsequent stage two things happened: first the pompe took place, and second the statue returned to the temple. Given that

we know that the pompe went to the Agora and choruses danced at the Altar of the Twelve Gods, the most likely reconstruction is that the pompe began (as, on this hypothesis, it had done before and as fitted the ritual’s

grammar) at the Prytaneion, then went to the New Agora, and then, escorting the statue of Dionysos, went from New Agora to the Prytaneion,

where rites of xenismos would have taken place, and from there to the sanctuary where the sacrifices were performed.

After the ikria collapsed the performances moved to the theatre now constructed in the sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus. The statue was first received at the eschara/Altar of the Twelve Gods nexus, where a rite of reception took place, and then it was taken to the theatre because the

288 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood theatre was the locus of the second activity with which the statue had been involved at the eschara, the locus that was now split into two spaces, with a ritual movement, the eisagoge apo tes escharas, connecting the two. If it is right that the xenismos of Dionysos was central to the Dionysia, since the

eisagoge was a preliminary rite, the statue was probably taken to the Prytaneion for the main rites of xenismos, probably just before the pompe; for the fact that the statue watched the performances suggests that in this

rite the active presence of the god in the form of his statue was central.

Eventually the eschara was abandoned, and at least part of the ritual reception took place at the sanctuary of Dionysos at the north-west of the Agora.

Because of the severe limitations of the available evidence, these sugges-

tions can only be put forward very tentatively. If they are very roughly right, the meanings of the festival would have changed in the course of time, and not simply at the time of the Cleisthenic reforms; for the structure of the festival, the relationships between its different parts, and the spatial relationships and their symbolism contributed significantly to the creation of meanings. But it is clear from the evidence discussed above that the rite of the xenismos of Dionysos remained central. I suggested that the thing that developed into tragedy was performed as part of the ritual of Dionysos’ entertainment at the Prytaneion. With regard to its name, it is Burkert’s interpretation of tragodos as equivalent to epi tragoi aidon that seems to me convincing.*® I do not know if a tragos was won as a prize in the earliest performances, because I do not know if those performances had been agonistic, or whether any evidence that may have survived from that period had been subsequently perceived through filters that assumed that tragic performances at the City Dionysia involved agones. Both interpretations of epi tragoi aidon are possible, and, as Burkert pointed

out, they come to the same thing in the end; for the prize animal would have been sacrificed to Dionysos. The fact that the normal sacrifices at the Dionysia involved bulls and cattle would not, on my reconstruction, affect this. For on this hypothesis the tragos sacrifice would have taken place not

at the end of the pompe in the sanctuary of Dionysos, but in connection with the ‘entertainment of Dionysos’ ritual at the Prytaneion, which included the tragic performance. A tragodos would be someone who sang at the stage of the ritual connected with the sacrifice of the tragos—as opposed to the main sacrificial ritual involving bull and cattle sacrifices at the completion of the pompe in the sanctuary. The interpretation does not necessarily entail that sacrifice was central to

the tragedy; it was important, for, being an important part of religion and 5° W. Burkert, Wilder Ursprung: Opferritual und Mythos bei den Griechen (Berlin, 1990), 16— 18.

Something to do with Athens 289 life, it was a privileged locus for articulating order and disorder, which are central concerns in tragedy; but I do not think that sacrifice was the ritual core out of which tragedy was generated.

I cannot discuss here the problems associated with the form of early tragedy and its relationship to the dithyramb. I will only say a few words about a very big question. Why did tragedy develop out of this particular ritual performance out of all others? What were the factors that were conducive to this development? Such developments do not, of course, have a single cause; they result from complex interactions. Here I am going to give a very tentative and very partial answer suggesting that one particular set of circumstances was crucially conducive to the generation of tragedy.

The ritual centre of the festival, we saw, involves first resistance to, and then the welcoming of, Dionysos. I suggest that it is this myth, and possibly

also other myths of such resistance, that were the subject matter of the performances at the centre of the early City Dionysia. In those myths men’s control over themselves and their world is under threat, and their human logic tells them that to save them they must oppose the forces of disorder and the threat of loss of control associated with Dionysos. But, as Lykourgos,

Pentheus, and others found out, that perception was mistaken. It turned out that only by surrendering control and embracing disorder in the service of Dionysos can men ultimately maintain order and avoid the catastrophic loss of control resulting from the false seeing experienced by Lykourgos or Pentheus’ mother. This is a paradox, and paradox characterizes religion and

the world of the gods which is unknowable to men. The resisters’ false understanding pertains to the crucial problem of the limits of human understanding concerning the divine world and religion, and the limits of, and fear of getting wrong, the socially established religious discourse. Such myths, then, articulate the tension between perceived reality and order as established in human society and a deeper unknowable reality that lies beyond the limits of human rationality.°’ The cult of Dionysos articulates this state of affairs and offers protection from the dangers potentially flowing from it: by honouring Dionysos’ order-bringing disorder, by placing oneself

in disorder under the protection of Dionysos, by surrendering control, literally or symbolically, to the state of entheos mania in the context of his

ritual, one is protected from the dangers of anomic disorder that, these myths say, can be sent by the god in whose domain disorder and loss of control lies, who, in a way, patrols the limits of human rationality. Some of

the tensions, problems, and human limits articulated in these myths of resistance to Dionysos were explored by the three major tragedians, Euripides in Bacchae, Aeschylus in Edonoi, Sophocles in the fourth stasimon of Antigone. In my view, tragedy was, among other things, very importantly a discourse 5? C. Sourvinou-Inwood, BICS 36 (1989), 147-52.

290 Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood of religious exploration. I suggest that it is these fundamental questions inherent in the myths at the centre of the ritual performances of the early City Dionysia and the explorations they generated that were crucially conducive to the generation of tragedy. In a religion in which the divine is ultimately unknowable, the pre- and proto-tragic articulations pertaining to the myths of resistance to Dionysos created a dynamic matrix of exploration of other aspects of the divine that appear difficult to fathom, of the proper way of relating to the gods, and of man’s place in the cosmos, and ultimately of aspects of the human order that are grounded in the divine order, so that tragedy expanded its explorations, and developed its forms, in a variety of directions.

The explorations in the early performances centred on the festival myth would have been generated as a result of the polis’ attempt to articulate its relationship to the god. The polis conducting the ritual was directly implicated

in the resistance myth; in so far as there was continuity between mythical Athens and the ‘present’-day Athens conducting the ritual, among other things, because the present-day religious system was set in place in the former’s age, the present participants were atoning for the past mistake in the guilt of which they share, though in their own religious system Dionysos has an honoured place. This involved a double perspective: on the one hand the present ritual was a re-enactment of that past incident, and on the other it was a present-day festival that resulted from that incident and which protected the polis by gaining Dionysos’ benevolence, through, among other acts of worship, the re-enactment of that incident and its rectification. In my view, this double perspective remained fundamental in tragedy and was developed in rich and subtle ways, manipulated through the textual strategies

I call ‘distancing devices’ and ‘zooming devices’, which, I have argued elsewhere,°® manipulate, among other things, the symbolic distance between

the world of the tragedy and the world of the audience. But that is another story. 55 JHS 109 (1989), 136, cf. 144-6.

17 The Politics of Dedication: Two

Athenian Dedications at the Sanctuary of Apollo Ptoieus in Boeotia ALBERT SCHACHTER

This paper focuses on two inscriptions accompanying dedications made by well-known Athenians of the sixth century Bc at the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoieus north of Thebes. Arising from this are some observations on the use and non-use of their ethnika by individual dedicators during the archaic and early classical periods."

THE TEXTS

(1)IG iF 1469: A Dedication by Alkmeonides son of Alkmeon? (A) [®oi]Bo pwév etu’ dyadA|ya Alaz[o]éa xadld]v- | [ho & "A]Akpéovos huts "AAkpeovidses |

(B) [h]ézovore vixéloas elOexé pp’ [dxéars], | has Kvomildda]s éXauv’ ho [- x -- -] |

(D) hér’ &v Adavats [ladados travélyuprs].

(A) Iam a fair gift for Phoibos, son of Leto: Alkmeonides, the son of Alkmeon (B) Dedicated me after the victory of his swift mares, Which Knopiadas, the --, drove (D) When there was a festive gathering for Pallas at Athens.

Found at the Ptoion. Capital of a column on which stood an as yet unidentified object. Lines 1 and 2 (= A) are inscribed on the face between * The customary abbreviations for epigraphical works apply (citations of LSAG are from the 1990 edition). The following works are cited by the author’s name: Ducat: J. Ducat, Les Kouroi du Ptoion (Paris, 1971).

(1976). |

Lazzarini: M. E. Lazzarini, Le formule delle dediche votive nella grecia arcaica = Mem. Linc. 8.19

* CEG i. 302 (which see for earlier bibliography). I give the text of IG, where the sides are lettered in accordance with the original edition. P. A. Hansen (CEG) labels them A, B, C. The inscription is illustrated in Ducat, pl. Lxxu.

292 Albert Schachter B on the right, and D on the left. The fourth side is uninscribed. The stone is apparently local: the inscription was therefore carved at the Ptoion. There have been various attempts to restore the text. The most difficult line is the fourth, particularly the second half:+ an ethnikon or patronymic is most likely. Ducat’s hesitantly proposed hé[xpardieds zére?| is attractive, but perhaps too long for the space available.

IG notes that the text is in the Attic dialect, except for Aaroféa and ’Aéavats, Which are there taken to be poetic rather than Boeotian forms. Perhaps therefore the charioteer’s name might be restored Kvomi[dde|s?

The lettering apparently allows a date around the middle of the sixth century.’ All that can be said for certain about the date from the text itself is that it is probably after the reorganization of the Panathenaia in 566/s.° The dedicator, it is generally agreed, was the son of Alkmeon and brother of Megacles.

The name of his charioteer has been connected with Boeotia because of the place called Knopia, which, according to Strabo, was in the Thebaid,

and the river Knopos, which, according to Nicander, emptied into the Kopais; the scholiast to Nicander identifies the Knopos with the Ismenos, named after Knopos a son of Apollo; the same source notes that there was a polis called Knopos, through which the Ismenos flowed.’ All this would put Knopia or the Knopos in the area between Thebes and Mount Ptoion. (2)IG 13 1470: A Dedication by Hipparchos son of Pisistratus® hintapyos avébe[xe ho ITevous|tparo.

Hipparchos son of Pisistratus dedicated (me).

Found at the Ptoion, on the side of the remains of a circular base. The inscription is complete in the sense that there was nothing inscribed either before or after the surviving letters. The base is apparently of local stone,

from which it follows that this inscription was also carved on the spot (wherever the object offered came from, whatever it was). Maurice Holleaux had already noted the similarity of the lettering to that on the altar of Apollo 3 Ducat, 242. 4 Hansen suggests ho [- x -~ -]. For proposed restorations see Hansen, ad loc., Ducat p. 246, and J. Ebert, Griechische Epigramme auf Sieger an Gymnischen und Hippischen Agonen (Berlin, 1972), 38 and 41-2 (Ebert’s collection, although published a year later than Ducat’s work, went to press the year before the latter appeared). > ¢.540?: IG, CEG, LSAG 73; c. mid-6th cent.: Ebert; 550-540: Ducat. ° During the archonship of Hippokleides: Marcellinus, Vita Thucydidis 3. Davies, APF 2945. See L. Ziehen, RE xviii (1949), s.v. ‘Panathenaia’, 474-6. ? Strabo 9. 2. 10 (404): é« Kywmrias 8€ tis OnBaixjs pebdpt0n/wetrwKiobn Kata xpynopsv detpo (that is, to the vicinity of Oropos) 76 'Audiaperov. Nicander, Theriaka 889: trep Syowjds Te pdos Kvirroid re BaAAex (discharging into the Kopais). Schol. Nicander, Theriaka 887-8: Xyowevs S€ kat Kv@mos of d00 motapol tis Bowwrtias etait. Kv@ros 5é 6 ‘lounvos efpnrat, ao Kvwrov rob AmérXAwvos. ott 5€ Kai wédts Kvdtros, 8's péperar 6 ‘Topnvos motapds.

5 = LSAG 38. 78 = Ducat 251. 142 and pl. LxxIv.

The Politics of Dedication 293 Pythios in Athens erected by Pisistratus son of Hippias to commemorate his

own archonship.’ He held office 522/1Bc, and the altar is dated soon thereafter, as is the inscription, although the lettering is held to be slightly in advance of its time. A. E. Raubitschek suggested that both inscriptions, the one on the altar and the Ptoion dedication, were carved by the same

mason. H. R. Immerwahr, on the other hand, could find no similarity between the two hands, although he conceded that the epsilon and alpha

were comparable.’° If we accept the earlier date for the altar, and the identity of the masons, this Hipparchos would be son of the first Peisistratus and brother of Hippias; Hipparchos was assassinated in 514 Bc, so that the dedication must antedate 514. It is variously dated between 520 and 514,"'

although some—because of the highly developed state of the lettering—

have placed both the altar inscription and in consequence the Ptoion dedication in the 480s or even later.’* I follow Meiggs and Lewis, who point to the use of the early forms of theta and chi to support the early dating for the altar.

THEIR CONTEXTS

The motives for these two dedications are usually explained within the context of Athenian politics. The dedication of Alkmeonides has been connected with the exile of his family after the return of Pisistratus and his sons in 546,'?, which had been partly financed by friends in Thebes.** It has also been suggested that Alkmeonides made his dedication in order to 9 IG. 948 = i*. 761. M. Holleaux, cited by L. Bizard, BCH 44 (1920) 239. *° Raubitschek, quoted by B. D. Meritt, Hesperia, 8 (1939), 65 n. 11 (‘The similarity has been confirmed in a communication to the author from A. Raubitschek, who believes that both texts were inscribed by one man’). Immerwahr, Attic Script: A Survey (Oxford, 1990), 76. 454 (on IG i’ 761): ‘The crucial letter-forms are already found in the sixth century’ ... ‘The inscription is not at all similar in general appearance to 455, LSAG 78. 38, Hipparchus’ Ptoan dedication, with which it has been compared, although the epsilon and alpha are comparable (I am judging from the published photograph of the Ptoan inscription).’ S. Dow, in S. V. Tracy, The Lettering of an Athenian Mason = Hesperia Supplement 15 (Princeton, NJ, 1975), p. xx: ‘A. E. Raubitschek suggested that the base dedicated in the Ptoan sanctuary in Boiotia was by the same mason as the famous Peisistratid dedication in Athens I.G.; I?,761 (Meiggs and Lewis support the identity of the mason, but advocate different persons and put the date earlier).’ 'T ¢€.520/515?: IG; c.520/514: LSAG 78. 38, Lazzarini 219. 301; c.520: Ducat 258, but cf. his statement in BCH 97 (1973), 66 (‘vers 515’). ‘* Bibliography in Ducat: to which add AA 1983, 573-84 = SEG XXXIII. 27. 3 e.g. L. H. Jeffery, Archaic Greece (London, 1976), 78 (but see below). The idea is that since Alkmeonides was barred from setting up the dedication at Athens, he therefore did so at the Ptoion: see Ducat 247 for references. One may ask, why the Ptoion, and why not Delphi? ‘4 Hdt. 1. 61.

294 Albert Schachter countervail with the Thebans against Pisistratus, precisely because the latter had been supported by the former;** or that Alkmeonides made the dedication

at the Ptoion as a riposte against the Thebans, the sanctuary being at the time still in the possession of Akraiphia.’® In addition, the probability that Alkmeonides’ charioteer came from Boeotia is cited as a factor.’’” The dedication by Hipparchos is attributed to the general interest shown by the Pisistratids in oracles, to the fame of the Ptoion in particular, and as evidence of the good relations between the Peisistratids and Thebes and the strained relations between them and Delphi.*® The purpose of the present enquiry is to see whether changing the centre of attention from Athens to Boeotia can help to explain the reasons for these dedications. Why were they made at the Ptoion, and why at those particular times?

1. The Ptoion (and Alkmeonides)

The sanctuary of Apollo Ptoieus is one of a number of oracular sites of the same type which are dotted around the Kopais.'? Others—Tilphossa, Thourion, the Trophonion, and Tegyra—are located alongside major traffic arteries. Tilphossa is on the main route from east to west;*® Thourion is along the route which leads to and from the north; the Trophonion is on the route followed by visitors to Delphi;?" Tegyra is on a route which leads to and from the north and west, enabling travellers to bypass the Kephissos valley.** At least three of the four—Tilphossa, Thourion, and the Tro'’ Bizard (n. 9), 236, accepted as the best hypothesis by Ducat 248. ‘© This would imply not only that the Ptoion was still controlled by Akraiphia rather than Thebes, but also that Akraiphia and Thebes were at odds with each other, and that, even if this were the case, the people of Akraiphia were sufficiently confident of their ability to deal with the consequences of an open insult to their powerful neighbours. "7 Ducat 247: ‘Le fait que l’aurige était un Béotien, comme I’atteste son nom quel qu’il soit, n'est certainement pas une coincidence: par la mention de son nom, Alcméonideés veut le glorifier auprés de ses compatriotes en méme temps qu’il se glorifie lui-méme.’ But he accepts that a political motive is not thereby excluded, and that ‘l’origine béotienne de Knopi- peut fort bien n'‘avoir été que l'occasion d’une opération qui dépassait largement sa mince personne’. L. H. Jeffery, in her final words on the subject, CAH IV’ (Cambridge, 1988), 359, was less certain: ‘Was this politically motivated—Alcmaeonid exile’s bid for Theban help to re-establish him? Or was it merely a compliment to his driver offered by an Alcmaeonid who (like his fellow clansman Cleisthenes) may have continued in Athens, even held office there, during the tyranny?’ Ebert (n. 4), 39, is sceptical about a political motivation, and notes that the Boeotian origin of the charioteer would be a valid motive. '® Bizard (n. 9), 240; Ducat 256-7; and cf. D. M. Lewis, in CAH IV? (Cambridge, 1988), 294. "2 See BICS 14 (1967), I-16. 2° See Cahiers des Etudes Anciennes, 24 (1990), 333-40. *" Cf. Eur. Ion 300-2: Xouthos stops off en route to Delphi to consult Trophonios. ** For the location see J. Knauss, Kopais 2 (Munich—Obernach, 1987), 187-90.

The Politics of Dedication 295 phonion—and possibly Tegyra as well are limitary sanctuaries, Tilphossa

marking the western boundary of the Haliartia, Thourion the western boundary of the territory of Chaironeia and of Boeotia itself, the Trophonion the south-western edge of the territory of Orchomenos,’? while Tegyra may have marked its north-eastern point. The Ptoion is similarly placed in relation to overland routes leading from

the north-west (the Athamantine Plain, dominated by the Mycenaean fortress known as Gla) and the north-east (from the port of Larymna). Despite its apparently secluded location, it was obviously accessible to fairly heavy traffic, as is clear from the amount of foreign stone imported for the

manufacture of kouroi.*4 It too may be regarded as a limitary sanctuary, being at or near the eastern extremity of the territory of Akraiphia, and at the northern edge of that of Thebes: its popularity in the Archaic period— particularly the sixth century—could mean that, like Delphi—which on a smaller scale it resembles in appearance and setting—it was treated as neutral territory, open to citizens of more than one polis. We are at a disadvantage in attempting to reconstruct the history of the

Ptoion before the Persian Wars, since the only contemporary data are archaeological. The author of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo fails to mention

it at all—while at the same time devoting considerable attention to Telphousa. There must be a reason for this, and I shall consider it in due course, aS well as the silence of the pseudo-Hesiodic Aspis.

The data, then, are deficient and difficult to interpret, as such things usually are. If I focus on a limited range of them, it is with the knowledge that the picture they produce may be distorted. I rely upon the pattern of activity reflected by the fluctuations in the numbers of kouroi and korai dedicated in the Archaic period at the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoieus. The dates of the kouroi and korai at the Ptoion range from the last third of the seventh to the beginning of the fifth centuries.*° From a single kore late in the seventh century, the figure goes to two kuoroi at the end of the seventh, and two more during the first two decades of the sixth. It then rises sharply to six at the end of the first quarter, falls equally sharply to one, then begins a steady climb over the next twenty years or so to ten. Then, during the period about 550-540/530Bc, it leaps suddenly to eighty, falling off equally suddenly over the next decade or so to eight; finally, during the last quarter of the sixth century and the first decade of the fifth, the number recovers slightly to eighteen. It looks very much as if there was

a distinct high-point of activity at the Ptoion during the sixth century *3 A. Schachter, Cults of Boiotia, iii (forthcoming), s.v. “Trophonios’.

*4 Ducat 453: ‘Au total, les marbres ‘‘étrangers” se répartissent ainsi, avec, bien entendu, une certaine marge d’erreur possible: Paros, 39 fragments; Naxos, 30; ‘‘Pentélique’’, 5; ‘Insulaire’’, 3. Les fragments en marbre “‘béotien’’ sont au nombre de 69.’ *’ See Ducat’s chart on p. 459.

296 Albert Schachter between 550 and 540/530, preceded by a smaller peak late in the first quarter of the century, and followed by a period of revival—on a lesser scale—during the last quarter of the century. Expressed as percentages, the

statues dedicated at the Ptoion between about 550 and 540/530 amount to 60 per cent of the total. The dedication by Alkmeonides belongs within the period 550—540/530, the dedication by Hipparchos to the last quarter of the sixth century. After the Persian Wars, the oracle went into eclipse, at least as an attraction for outside visitors. How are the dramatic rise and equally sudden fall in the rate of activity at the Ptoion during the first part of the third quarter of the sixth century to be explained? To a certain extent they are matched by an increase in the pace of activity at the Theban Kabirion, where ten out of twenty inscribed metal miniature bulls are dated at about the middle of the sixth century,”° but at the Kabirion there was no corresponding falling-off of activity: there was, instead, a change in the nature of the dedications, probably reflecting a shift in or addition to the activities and preoccupations of the people who worshipped there.*’ Nor is there any apparent correlation with the prosperity of Akraiphia, where, of twenty-eight tombs in the cemetery dated in the sixth century, eight are from about 580Bc (coinciding with the first peak at the Ptoion), and seven from about 520 (coinciding with the third), with a trough in between, exactly during the period of greatest activity at the Ptoion.”® At the other major source of data from Akraiphia—the sanctuary

shared by the Hero Ptoios and his trophos—the signs are that, after its beginnings in the second half of the seventh century, there was a substantial increase in the middle and third quarter of the sixth century; but here too,

as at the Kabirion, there was no sudden falling-off. Indeed, the period of greatest activity runs from about 525Bc to about the middle of the fifth century, and is marked primarily by a series of monumental tripods dedicated to the Hero by the polis of Akraiphia. The beginning of this series coincides with the last period of increased activity at both the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoieus and the cemetery at Akraiphia, and taken together with these, must reflect the beginning of a period of steady prosperity and stability.”

By way of comparison, of forty-six sixth-century graves at Rhitsona, 7° P. Roesch in Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Boiotian Antiquities (Amsterdam, 1985), 135-51 = Teiresias Epigraphica E. 85. 29 = SEG XXXV. 412. It is not possible to make such use of the uninscribed bulls, which are much more numerous, as their dating, which is based on stylistic criteria, is unreliable: see the chart on p. 144 of P. Roesch’s article (the dates assigned to three of the bulls postdate the dates which he gives to the inscriptions by 50 years, and one by 100 years). *7 See my Cults of Boiotia, ii (London, 1986), 91-2, 98, 107-8. 8 A. K. Andreiomenou, T6 Kepapeixov 'Epyacripiov ris "Axpaidias (Athens, 1980), 93-5. *9 Cults of Boiotia, iii (forthcoming), s.v. ‘Ptoios, Hero’.

The Politics of Dedication 297 sixteen—that is 35 per cent—fall between 600 and 570Bc, thirteen—28 per cent—between 560 and 525 (of which ten—22 per cent—are dated 560—-540/530), and seventeen—37 per cent—are from the last quarter of the sixth century.*° The period 550—-540/530Bc at the Ptoion is therefore noteworthy, not

only for the intensity of activity, but also for its sudden appearance and disappearance, as well as its relative independence of the pace of activity in other parts of Boeotia.?’

If the cause is not to be found in a Boeotian context, then it must be sought elsewhere. What would have prompted so many new worshippers to come to the Ptoion and enrich it so? Alkmeonides would have been only one of many such. The suddenness and unexpectedness of it all is reflected even in the fact that the bulk of the kouroi created during this intense period of activity were of local manufacture, as if there had been a sudden demand which had to be met suddenly.*” It may also be significant that the earliest known name derived from Apollo's epithet at the Ptoion—Ptoiodoros—was

borne, not by a Boeotian, but by a Corinthian who must have been born sometime during the second half of the sixth century.*?

Can it be a complete coincidence that the beginning of this period of intense activity at the Ptoion coincides with the destruction of the second 3° The Rhitsona graves are listed and dated by B. A. Sparkes, JHS 87 (1967), 128-30. 37 Roughly contemporary with the middle period at the Ptoion are a bronze helmet dedicated at Olympia to celebrate a victory of Orchomenos over Koroneia (Lazzarini 994 = LSAG 95. 11), and a vase in the British Museum the scene on which probably represents the sanctuary of Athena at Koroneia (BM 80). Where Alcaeus (fr. 147 Page, LGS = 86 Lobel = 325 Lobel and Page = 3 Diehl? = 325 Voigt) at the beginning of the century describes this sanctuary as

that of Athena, it is clear from the vase that by the middle of the 6th cent. there were two gods worshipped there, Athena and a snake god, whom | take to be Zeus Karaios/Laphystios. Athena Itonia was the ethnic goddess of the Boiotoi in Boeotia and their Thessalian homeland, while Zeus was associated with the Minyans of Orchomenos and Thessaly. The scene on the vase may reflect the amalgamation of the two peoples, and the helmet suggests that this could have taken place as the result of military action. As I read the evidence, in the 3rd quarter of the 6th cent., Orchomenos consolidated its position in the western part of Boeotia. Another dedication from Olympia, this one a bronze shin-guard dated near the end of the 6th cent., records a victory of Thebes over Hyettos (LSAG 434. 12a); this may be a tangible sign that the traditions of a war between Thebes—led by Herakles—and the Minyans of Orchomenos led by Erginos, the father of Trophonios and Agamedes, actually refer to events in the latter part of the 6th cent., which ended in the consolidation of Theban power over western Boeotia. What we have is the victors’ account of the story, in which the Minyans are cast as oppressors of the Thebans, who were liberated from being forced to pay tribute: see my comments in H. Beister and J. Buckler (eds.), Boiotika (Munich, 1989), 80-1. 32 See Ducat’s chart on p. 459. 33 Pindar, Olympian 13. 41, dated 464 Bc by the scholiast; if the commentators are correct and Ptoiodoros was the grandfather of the celebrand Xenophon (Schol. to 13. 58a, 58b), then he could well have been born some time between 548 and 530.

298 Albert Schachter temple of Apollo at Delphi?** To me it looks as if the Ptoion may have benefited from the partial disruption of activity at Delphi, and as if some at least of the people who would normally have gone to Delphi, redirected their steps to the Ptoion; indeed, the similarity of its topography, and its easy accessibility despite its apparent seclusion could have been determining

factors. This would explain not only the boom in statuary dedications, but also the heavy capital investment represented by the water reservoirs built at the Ptoion.*> That it did not in the long run pay off is another matter.

Those who believe that the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and the pseudoHesiodic Aspis were at least in part politically motivated may find added comfort in this interpretation of events: it would explain why the poet of the Hymn not only ignored the Ptoion—and the Theban Ismenion— but also pretended that the arrival of Apollo at Krisa took place before Thebes had even been thought of. He would have been meaning to remind his audience that Delphi did, after all, have priority in time over the Ptoion, The second, Pythian, section of the Hymn could in fact be taken as an appeal to the faithful to return to help rebuild the temple. This requires that the two poems be dated soon after 5488c, which is rather later than the latest datings given for them. However, there appears to be little internal evidence which would help to date them, although it is agreed that they belong sometime between the late seventh century and the first half of the sixth. On the other hand, the Hymn to Demeter, the Hymn to Pythian Apollo, the Hymn to Hermes, and the Aspis have been grouped together on the level

of style and language, yet the dates given to them range from late in the seventh to late in the sixth century. Most recent attempts to assign dates to them rely on matters extraneous to the works themselves, for example the First Sacred War and/or an imagined feud over the Ptoion between Thebes and Akraiphia for the Hymn to Apollo, and the depiction of the duel between Herakles and Kyknos on Attic vases for the Aspis. Therefore, although it is not precisely anybody’s guess, I do not think that a date between 548 and 540/530 for these two poems would deserve outright dismissal. It would at least put them within an historical context which is no less credible than

34 548/7Bc. See H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, i (Oxford, 1956), 143-4 (still the best account of the history of the sanctuary); J. F. Bommelaer, Guide de Delphes: Le Site (Paris, 1991), 20, 95-8. 35 P, Guillon, Les Trépieds du Ptoion, ii (Paris, 1943), 142 (‘dés le v1° s. sans doute’). Compare R. Ginouvées, Balaneutiké (Paris, 1962), 327 and n. 8, 344 ff.; Ducat pp. 40-1. These installations were believed to have had an iatro-mantic purpose. It is more likely that they, and the cisterns

which replaced them in the 4th cent., were meant to provide drinking water for those who frequented the sanctuary.

The Politics of Dedication 299 any other which has been proposed.?° And, if the goal of the poet—speaking

on behalf of the Delphic priesthood—was to re-establish the primacy of Delphi, first by emphasizing its links with Delos and Olympia, then by disposing of or ignoring potential rivals, and near the end concentrating on

the religious legitimacy of Delphi, then the fact that he ignores both the First Sacred War?’ and the Pythian Games** is irrelevant. The poem would actually make sense as a tract if taken in this way. On this re-reading of the evidence from the Ptoion, a possible motive for Alkmeonides’ dedication there would have been the fact that Delphi was— temporarily at least, and perhaps as far as anyone at the time knew, even permanently—out of action, and its place as the main oracular sanctuary

in central Greece was being taken by the Ptoion. As for the supposed Boeotian—Theban—Akraiphian origins of his charioteer, they are by no means certain.*? Nor is it any longer necessary to single out Alkmeonides’ dedication as an outright political statement in any supposed propaganda battle between

him and Pisistratus, or among Athens, Thebes, and Akraiphia. 2. The Ptoion (and Hipparchos)

As far as Hipparchos is concerned, it is generally agreed that relations between his family and Delphi were cool, particularly while the Alkmeonidai 3© R. Janko, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns (Cambridge, 1982), 132, maintains that on grounds of style and language the Hymn to Pythian Apollo ‘belongs firmly in the mainland tradition, and more closely to a group including Dem, Aspis and Herm.’. The first of these three

he dates ‘in the latter half of the seventh or the early sixth century’, with a preference for a date early in the period (p. 183); the second to the same time as the Hymn to Apollo II (pp. 78 and 93: ‘dated historically to the opening decades of the sixth century’); the third ‘towards the

close of the sixth century’ (p. 143). He dates the Hymn to Pythian Apollo ‘to c. 585 to be precise’ (p. 132), but does so largely because he accepts Pierre Guillon’s arguments concerning the interrelationship of Thebes, Akraiphia, and the Ptoion, which are not supported by the data. N. J. Richardson, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Oxford, 1974), 11, prefers a date in the 7th cent. for the Hymn to Demeter (archaeological evidence suggests a terminus ante quem

of the middle of the 6th cent. (p. 10), and he proposes his preferred date as ‘a subjective opinion’ (p. 11), and the 6th for the Pythian section of the Hymn to Apollo. M. L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1985), 136, accepts a date of not long after 570 for the Aspis (because it ‘reflects the visual art of that period and was perhaps composed not much later’). He (same page) dates the Hesiodic Catalogue some time between 580 and 520, perhaps ¢.540-520. Perhaps the date I propose in the text is after all not much worse than any of the others.

37 The existence of which has been cast into doubt by N. Robertson, CQ 28 (1978), 38-73, and defended by G. A. Lehmann, Boreas, 6 (1983), 37~-8. 38 The traditional date of their institution as a Panhellenic agon is 582/581: Lehmann, 35

n. II. 39 For example, the only other known name from the same root is Kvwzias, a Cretan active in the last quarter of the 3rd cent. Bc: P. M. Fraser and E. Matthews (eds.), A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, i (Oxford, 1987), 268.

300 Albert Schachter were so heavily involved there,*® and so his presence at the Ptoion can be viewed both as an expression of friendship towards the body to which the sanctuary belonged, and, up to a point, as a slight to Delphi. Herodotus says that in 480-479 the Ptoion belonged to Thebes (8. 135), but this may be just another way of saying that it belonged to the Boiotoi, since the confederacy of the latter part of the sixth century was dominated by Thebes. Indeed, it seems to be clear to Herodotus that Thebes was the hegemon of the Boeotians at this time.** During the lifetime of the Hellenistic koinon, the Boiotoi used the Ptoion as their official oracle;*’ this arrangement

may have been a revival of earlier usage, rather than something new. The main difference, of course, is that for much of the later period Thebes was not the dominant member of the confederation that she had been in the sixth century. Pierre Guillon, who developed a theory that the sanctuary of the Hero Ptoios was established by the people of Akraiphia as an act of defiance after their expulsion from the sanctuary of Apollo by the Thebans, dated this event early in the sixth century. However, his argument fails on several counts, not least because there is no evidence to indicate either hostility between Akraiphia and Thebes, or the barring of Akraiphians from the sanctuary of Apollo; on the contrary, Akraiphians do turn up at the Ptoion during the relevant period.*?

Jean Ducat, on the other hand, places the Theban putsch at roughly 520BC. He relies partly on the use of ethnika in inscriptions from the Ptoion. I offer them in the order which follows Ducat’s dating:

(i) Ducat 201. 124. On the base of a bronze statuette; second half of the sixth century, perhaps c.540-520BC. -Ovaoios OeBailo)s érole.

‘Onasimos of Thebes made (me)’ or Omasimos made (me) at Thebes.

(ii) Ducat 379. 232 + 379. 233 + 380. 234 =A. Jacquemin, BCH 104 (1980), 74. 3 = SEG XXX 478. On three limestone blocks; c.540520BC. Deo? vdes errotece [dxpardreds x’ "APodarros x’ Avridapis 'Tkidua [avéBevav] x’ ’Emcyapes ho OeBlaios].

Theokydes of Akraiphia made (me) and Akousilos and Antipharis, sons of Ikidmas, and Epichares of Thebes dedicated (me). 4° See e.g. Lewis (n. 18), 294. 47 N. G. L. Hammond, JHS 112 (1992), 144, in discussing the events of 519 Bc at Plataea, distinguishes between what the Boeotians as a whole did and what the Thebans did. I think that this reads too much into Herodotus. 42 Cults of Boiotia, i (London, 1981), 70. 43 The arguments are summarized and discussed in Cults of Boiotia, i. 56-8. 44 Re-edition according to manuscript notes of M. Holleaux = Teiresias E. 80. 39.

The Politics of Dedication 301 (iii) Ducat 355. 202. On the left and right legs of a kouros in Parian marble; C.5OOBC.

(Left leg) ITv@éas héxpard[ced]s | Kat Acyplov dvéb[ecav]

(Right leg) du [------ apy |ypordyaou | [Troulei -----(Left leg) Pythias of Akraiphia and Aischrion dedicated (me) (Right leg) ------ for the Ptoian of the silver bow.

With regard to inscription (i), Ducat, electing the ethnikon @eBai(o)s rather than the locative @éBais, comments: ‘Quoi qu'il en soit, cet Onésime était

Thébain, et il est intéressant qu’il éprouve le besoin de le préciser: il ne se sent pas, au Ptoion, ‘chez lui’; ceux qui ne donnent pas leur ethnique sont donc, selon toute probabilité, Akraiphiens.’ This assumption is not valid: sculptors did occasionally use their ethnika even with their own poleis.*? The use of an ethnikon by the sculptor Onasimos therefore tells us nothing about the political adherence of the oracle at the time.

In inscription (ii), the restoration of the verb is secure enough. The restoration of the first of the two ethnika is not absolutely certain. There are others which end in -veds: Boeotian examples include Qeomevs, [TAatateds. The final word of the inscription could have been a patronymic rather than an ethnikon—for example, ho @ef[aéa]— to distinguish Epichares from the two sons of Ikidmas. For the form, compare Ducat 410. 259: TipacidiAds p' avéBexe témdXrAov. tot TTtovet ho II padAdevos (“Timasiphilos son of Praolles

dedicated me to Apollo Ptoieus’), inscribed on the top of the base of a bronze statuette (end of the sixth century, at the earliest). So the evidence provided

by this inscription is not unambiguous. Even if Epichares were a Theban (we can dismiss the political adherence of the sculptor as being irrelevant), it would not follow that the Ptoion was not in Theban hands at the time, for there are other examples of local dedicators using their ethnika: they may

be few in number, but there are enough to make it unwise to use the employment of ethnika as the sole criterion for ownership of a sanctuary: see below.

The same argument holds for inscription (iii), in which, it may be noted, the second dedicator does not identify himself by ethnikon. He, Aischrion,

may well have been a non-Akraiphian, to put it at no more than that; on the other hand, it would not be impossible to restore the second line on the left leg and the first on the right as Acypiov dvé6[ecav| | di[Aos huss ----- ] vel sim.*° 45 e.g, the Parian in Lazzarini 726 = IG xii. 5. 216 (middle of the 6th cent.); and up to three Athenians on the Acropolis: DAA 53, 107, and 166.: J. Marcadé Recueil des signatures de sculpteurs grecs, i (Paris, 1953), 28 and n. 1, has doubts about Raubitschek’s restorations of

nos. 53 and 107, but there is no doubt whatever about no. 166. 4° Cf. IG i?. 529: [révde ITbpe|s dvéBexe TloAvpvéoro pido[s hurds] | edyadpevos Sexdrev [TadAdd«

tpitroyeve’ | Kudouéras Kpeoidas épydooaro. And surely dve6[érav] would be preferable for the verb: see Lazzarini 122.

302 Albert Schachter The result of this is that almost all we are left with is Herodotus’ assertion

that in 480/79Bc the Ptoion belonged to Thebes, or, as I would put it, to the Theban-led Boeotian confederacy of the time. To this can be added two dedications made by the Boiotoi at the sanctuary of Apollo Ptoieus, and another at the nearby sanctuary of the Hero Ptoios (which belonged beyond doubt to the polis of Akraiphia):

(iv) Ducat 409. 257. On the base of a bronze statuette; early in the fifth century BC. Boworot [Ipovaiar.

The Boeotians (dedicated me) to (Athena) Pronaia.

(v) Ducat 419. 269a. Two fragments of a bronze vase; ‘archaique’. Boltotot ‘Adavai r]ée [Tpovaiat.

The Boeotians (dedicated me) to (Athena) Pronaia.

(vi) Ducat 448 n. 5 = REG 77 (1964), 288: references to a dedication by the Boiotoi to the Hero Ptoios (unpublished).

The last of these inscriptions should suffice to prove that there was no hostility between Akraiphia and Thebes/the Boiotoi, whoever may have ‘owned’ the Ptoion at the time. And if, as seems likely, the Theban-led confederacy was functioning as such by at least the beginning of the last quarter of the sixth century, there is no particular reason not to believe that this situation pertained at that time as well. Indeed, the evident prosperity of Akraiphia in the fourth quarter of the century would suit a community which was benefiting from a ‘pax Thebana’, content to live at peace under the aegis and protection of its powerful neighbour.*’ The circumstances in which Hipparchos might have been moved to make a dedication at the Ptoion would clearly have depended on the state of relations between Athens and Thebes. These were, as far as one can tell, friendly until 519Bc, when the two fell out over Plataea. Thucydides (3.

68. 5) dates the alliance between Athens and Plataea in 519. There is disagreement over the date: some prefer to change the text of Thucydides to give 509 or even 506, but there is no need to do so.*® Herodotus (6. 108) provides the details: the Plataeans were being hard pressed by the 47 Prosperity of Akraiphia: see my comments in Beister and Buckler (n. 31), 75. Archaic Boeotian coins with A on the reverse normally attributed to Akraiphia might be a further sign of the town’s prosperity. D. Knoepfler, who makes a good case for removing the coins with the mint mark H from Haliartos and assigning them to Hyettos (BCH Supplément 3 (1976), 218-

26), suggests (221 n. 768) that the coins with A might belong to Haliartos. The coins in question are from B. V. Head's ‘Period II’: Coins of Boeotia (London, 1881), 13-14. 48 Summaries of arguments for and against both dates: D. Hennig, Chiron, 22 (1992), I516, and Jeffery (n. 17), 538 n. 9, to which add E. Badian, in Beister and Buckler (n. 31), 103

n. 16, and Hammond (n. 41), 144 n. 3.

The Politics of Dedication 303 Thebans, and turned to Cleomenes of Sparta, who happened to be in the vicinity, and offered themselves to Sparta in return for protection from Thebes. Cleomenes pointed out that Sparta would be too far away to be of any use in the event of an emergency: far better to ask the Athenians who were nearby and would not be slow to help. This the Plataeans did, and an Athenian force came to the rescue. There ensued a period of negotiations between Athens and Thebes, with Corinthians—who also happened to be there—arbitrating. The Corinthian decision favoured the Plataeans, in fact foreshadowing the Peace of Antalkidas: the Thebans should leave those Boeotians who did not wish to belong to the Boeotian League alone. After the Corinthians left, the Athenians marched out and were immediately attacked by the Thebans, whom they defeated. Athens was then enabled to extend the northern boundary of Plataea as far north as the river Asopos. In the set debate in Thucydides which preceded the destruction of Plataea

in 427Bc, the Thebans blamed their problems with the Plataeans on the alleged fact that they—meaning themselves, that is, the Boiotoi—had settled

the Plataeid last and been obliged to expel inhabitants of mixed backgrounds.*? This may be so, but such early inscriptions as have been found in the Plataeid employ the Boeotian dialect and Boeotian script,°°? which suggests that the people who lived along the foothills of Kithairon were as much Boiotoi as the Thebans, if not more so. It might even be argued that the rest of the Boiotoi were more ethnically pure than the Thebans, who seem to have formed their polis out of a mixture of people from a variety of places.°’ What the Thebans were really saying in 427 was they they—the Thebans—had been unable to impose themselves on the Plataeans, towards whom they had directed their attention only after dealing with the rest of Boeotia. 49 Thuc. 3. 61. 2. Compare Ephoros, FGrH 70F21 (Ammonius, De Diff. Verb. p. 70 Valck.): @nBaior cat OnBayeveis diadépovaw, Kabws Aidupos év vropvyipatt t@ mpwrw trav Tladvev ITwédapou (p. 238 Schm.) dyotiv: Kai rov rpizoda aro rovtov OnBayeveis wépmrovar Tov ypvaeor ets 'Tounviov mparov. ris 8 éori Ssadopa OnBayevéwv mpds OnBatous, 'Edopos év 7H Sevtépa dyat? Odror ev ovv auvetaxOnoav ets tHV Bowrtiav: tovds d€ ‘AObnvaious d6udpouvs mpocotxobvras idiar OnBaior

mpoanyayovro ToAAois éreaw vorepov, [dé] of adupixtoe joav mroAAaydbev, evépovro dé TH bro KiOatpa@va ywpav Kal rH amevavtiov tis EvBoias, éxadoivto 5€ OnBayeveis, étt mpoceyévovto Tots

dAAots Bow tois 51a OnBaiwy, and Diodoros of Sicily 19. 53. 4: wera yap rov emi AevKadiwvos KataxAvopov Kdduou Kricavtos tiv an'adtot mpocayopevbeicay Kaduelav ovviAbev én’ adriy dads 6v Twes ev Ltraptov mpoonydpevaay dia 76 TravTaydbev avvaxOivat, ties 5€ OnBayevi dia 7rd Hv dpxiv ex THs mpoerpnuevys médAews ovta dia TOV KaTaKAvOpOEY exTrecEiv Kal StaoTapHrat.

5° Dedications: IG vii 1670, 1671; sepulchral inscriptions: [JG vii 1685, 1689, 1690, 1691. While dedications, being formal documents, might arguably have been rendered in dialect for political reasons (although in the Hellenistic period, documents meant for non-Boeotian eyes were invariably presented in koine), there is no political reason for a private person to use the Boeotian dialect on the tombstone of a loved one unless the dialect was what was normally spoken and read locally. >! See my article in La Béotie Antique (Paris, 1985), 150-1.

304 Albert Schachter Perhaps not entirely unrelated is the story of the Gephyraioi of Eretria and/or Tanagra, the ancestors of the tyrannicides. As Herodotus would have

it, they were pushed out of the Tanagraia by the Boiotoi, and migrated to Athens. Their own version of events was that they had come from Eretria.°”

There is nothing improbable in either account, given the connections between the Tanagraia and Oropia on the mainland, and Eretria. The population movement represented by the migration of this extended family could very well have been one result of Theban expansionism in southern and eastern Boeotia.*? As for the Hipparchos inscription, even if it were not by the same mason who did the inscription on the altar, it ought to date before 519, since it is hardly likely that a dedication by Hipparchos at a major Boeotian sanctuary would have been welcome after the defection of Plataea and the removal of half of the Parasopia from Boeotia at the hands of the Athenians.** If this is correct, then the friendly relations thus revealed between Boeotians, that

is, Thebans, and the rulers of Athens in the latter part of the 520s would go some way to explain Cleomenes’ seizing the opportunity handed to him by the Plataeans in 519 of driving a wedge between Thebes and Athens. This is the motive imputed to him by Herodotus, and it may be correct.®> It

would have been natural for the Plataeans to turn to the Spartans first: they knew that Athens and Thebes were friendly to each other; they were not, presumably, to know that the Athenians, when faced with a choice between expanding the territory under their control and maintaining friendly

relations with Thebes, would opt for the former. This might also explain why they approached the Athenians as suppliants, rather than by means of a formal or at any rate less emotive route.°° FURTHER OBSERVATIONS: ETHNIKA, THEIR USE AND NON-USE?’

I suggested above that it may not be safe to take the use of an ethnikon by a dedicator at a sanctuary as an indication of who owned the sanctuary at the time. Some individuals identify themselves by ethnikon, others do not. In °* Hdt. 5. 55 (antecedents of Harmodios and Aristogeiton); 5. 57. 1-2 (the story of the Gephyraioi as told by themselves and by Hdt.); 5. 61. 2 (placing of the emigration of the Gephyraioi within the framework of Theban prehistory). °3 Ephoros in fact implies as much: see above, n. 49. 4 Cf. Lewis (n. 18), 294: ‘Since it [the Ptoion] was a Theban shrine (Hdt. viii. 135. 1), it too may have been closed to the brothers after 519.’

*> | wonder if the fact that the Boiotoi adopted the Aeginetan rather than the Euboic standard for their coinage might not also have been a result of this rupture. 5° On the nature of the relationship between Athens and Plataia, see Hammond (n. 41),

I43-5. "7 Pam indebted to D. M. Lewis for his help in this section; I alone am responsible for what is written here.

The Politics of Dedication 305 dedications by ethnic or political groups the ethnikon is the sole means of identification, and is used not only by outsiders but by the local community as well. Most individuals who give their ethnikon are outsiders, but many of these are found at what might be termed Panhellenic sanctuaries: not only at those of the first rank, that is, Olympia and Delphi, but also at others with Panhellenic reputations: Delos, Dodona, Epidauros, Nemea, Isthmia. At sanctuaries of purely local appeal, the picture is less clear: to be sure, there are more outsiders, but enough locals to render any statistical use of the practice meaningless.*° Not all individual dedicators use an ethnikon. This is conventionally taken

to mean that such people were citizens of the polis to which the sanctuary belonged. But this does not follow: a curious and—as far as I know—hitherto

unremarked feature of the dedications by Alkmeonides and Hipparchos is

that neither found it necessary to identify himself as an Athenian. Presumably, they were well enough known—or regarded themselves as such— to dispense with the need to identify themselves in greater detail. They were

not the only well-known Greeks to have done so: Miltiades dedicated a helmet at Olympia; Hieron of Syracuse made a dedication, without ethnikon,

at Delphi, and probably at Olympia too. But many others did so as well, including a Spartan called Alkibiades at Delphi, and perhaps a Mycenaean called Kleandros at Nemea. And there were a large number of dedications by individuals at Delphi and Olympia during the archaic and classical periods made without reference to political or ethnic origin.°? It has to be conceded

that it is possible that at least some of the dedications made at less wellknown and local sanctuaries, and which do not employ an ethnikon, could have been made by outsiders: we simply have no way of knowing. All that can be said is, first, that the use of an ethnikon cannot, on its own, be used as evidence for identifying the polis to which a sanctuary belongs; second, that the use of an ethnikon does, on the other hand, tell us that its owner—

and presumably his fellow-citizens, or at any rate those of the same 58 Lazzarini 74 and 75 (father and son at Hermione); 155 (Delos); 778 (man from Iulis in Keos). There are also the Akraiphians and possibly a Theban at the Ptoion: see above. Aside from these there are a Kleonaian at Nemea (847) and an Argive at the Heraion (747). The latter has been used to support the contention that Argos lost control of the Heraion in the 460s: Lewis (n. 18), 106.

59 Lazzarini 114 (Miltiades); 307 (Hieron at Delphi); 295 (Hieron at Olympia); 857 (Alkibiades); 721 (Kleandros). Alkibiades the Spartan: G. Daux, in BCH Supplément 4 (1977), 51-7 = SEG XXVII. 315 = LSAG 447. 47a. Kleandros the Mycenaean: LSAG 173. 7 = CEG i. 366. Ot eighteen dedications by individuals at Delphi in Lazzarini’s collection, seven (including Hieron and Alkibiades) do not use their ethnika. At Olympia it is more difficult to tell, because many of the dedications are in the form of armour, some of which (but not Miltiades’) must have been group dedications; eliminating dedications on pieces of armour or weaponry, we are left with twelve without ethnika, and four or five with ethnika.

306 Albert Schachter persuasion as he—is welcome in the polis to which the sanctuary belongs; and third, that this would apply also to any outsider whose ethnikon is not given, as well as to any non-local sculptor. SUMMARY

I have suggested that the presence of a dedication by Alkmeonides at the Ptoion may have had more to do with conditions at Delphi than at Athens or the Ptoion, while the dedication by Hipparchos was—as others have concluded before me—more likely to have been politically motivated. I have suggested as well that the practice of using—and not-using—ethnika in the archaic and early classical periods to identify dedicating individuals is one

which requires further attention: it goes beyond the scope and purpose of this paper.

18

| The Ritual of the Athena Nike Parapet MICHAEL H. JAMESON

The performance of animal sacrifice, the ritual core of Greek religion, was deeply affected by the rise of democratic and imperial Athens, as were many other forms of traditional behaviour. The ambition and wealth that marked the city’s ritual calendar engaged an extraordinary proportion of its population in its many festivals, and hence in its sacrifices. In material terms a great deal of meat was distributed in accordance with egalitarian principles; in religious terms the citizenry participated broadly and frequently in the propitiation of its gods. The Athenians also brought the members of the arche into the performance of their most important festival by means of the contribution of a cow and a panoply from each city for the Greater Panathenaia (ML 46. 41-2 = 1G i> 34 (Fornara 98); ML 69. 57-8 = IG i* 71 (Fornara 136) ). Here we may be tempted to see only the flexing of Athenian muscle, which indeed it was. But the provision of victims was in effect sharing in the privilege of sacrificing to Athens’ goddess, a privilege not lightly granted by Classical cities. Athens seems also to have invited allied contributions to the construction of temples

on the Acropolis, one of which was the small but conspicuous shrine of Athena Nike on the Mycenaean bastion at its entrance (IG i? 64A = i? 889). There the iconography of ritual shows another aspect of Athenian religion in the fifth century. This paper focuses on the ritual represented on the larger and more visible of that shrine’s two friezes, the sculptured parapet that surrounded it on three sides. The Archaic shrine of Athena Nike was Earlier versions of this paper have benefited from the comments of audiences at the universities of Odense and Uppsala. I am also most grateful for the opportunity of discussing some of these issues with Professor E. B. Harrison and for advice from Dr J. Binder. For the honorand, from whom I have learnt so much, it is meagre repayment. ‘ The most recent text and discussion is by I. S. Mark, The Sanctuary of Athena Nike in Athens: Architectural Stages and Chronology (AIA Mon. Ns 2 / Hesperia Suppl. 26; Princeton, NJ, 1993),

108~10, 138-40, who sees allied participation in selecting plans for a new temple. I suspect material contributions were at least as important. Developing a proposal of J. A. Bundgard (in Mélanges helléniques offerts a Georges Daux (Paris, 1974), 43-9), Mark relates ML 46 to the mid-s5th rather than the late-5th cent. building.

308 Michael Jameson destroyed by the Persians in 480 Bc. In the mid-fifth century a modest structure was built to house the statue, which seems to have been taken to safety during the Persian occupation, and a priestess was appointed from all Athenian women (ML 44 = IG 2 35 (Fornara 93)). Construction of a more ambitious temple for the goddess probably took place in the 420s, the last task being the carving and installation of reliefs surmounted by a metal grill, to serve as a protective parapet around the edge of the bastion, perhaps

between 416 and 413 Bc.’ Before the end of the war and the Athenian defeat, in any case, it was complete, an elegant little Ionic temple with a rich sculptural programme in its akroteria, pediments, frieze, and, most originally and strikingly, in the metre high and 40-metre long balustrade, to be seen from outside and below, as one approached the Acropolis. In addition to four Nikai almost hidden from view along the short stairway at the north-east, each of the three outer faces of the bastion, south, west, and north, presented an Athena and a series of Nikai, winged female figures of unprecedented sensuous grace (Figs. 18.4—7). The impact on Greek art in all forms was immediate and long-lasting. The aesthetic qualities of the sculpture have tended to be seen in isolation from its context and from the meaning of its subjects. To quote a respected interpreter of Greek art, Jerome Pollitt: [The Nikai give an impression] of being calligraphic designs ... [which] is reinforced by their arbitrary and only vaguely functional actions ... [T]he animated Nike from the north side of the parapet ... who is enwrapped in a beautiful flourish of waving furrows [Fig. 18.3, #11; 18.5] seems to lay her hand on the head of the adjacent bull only as a token to duty ... [T]he Nikai may be thought to be engaged in a very casual processional movement toward Athena ... The Nikai perform a beautiful ballet, but the choreography seems designed to divert one from giving too much thought to the question of just what the dance is about.’

Unlike the frieze circling the outside of the temple walls whose subjects, an assembly of the gods on the east over the entrance, and generic or historical battle scenes on the other three sides, have been much discussed, and unlike the much less visible frieze of the Parthenon, the subject of the sculpture on * The dates are those proposed by Mark, 76-92, in agreement with much other current opinion (see also A. F. Stewart, ‘History, Myth, and Allegory in the Program of the Temple of Athena Nike, Athens’, in Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Studies in the History of Art 17; Washington, DC, 1985), 55 and n. 17, who notes support for a somewhat later date). Mark’s analysis of the archaeological and architectural history of the site supersedes all others, whatever disagreement there may be on particular points. Mark also prints and discusses all the relevant testimonia and inscriptions, including ML71 ( = IG i?® 36, Fornara 140) and IG ib 64A and B. 3 J. J. Pollitt, Art and Experience (New York, 1972), 115~18. Stewart (n. 2), 73 n. 64, agrees with Pollitt to some degree but rather than seeing the art of the parapet as ‘purely escapist’ he describes the style as ‘a device to ‘‘bewitch’’’, suggesting analogies with late 5th-cent. rhetoric.

The Ritual of the Athena Nike Parapet 309

!\ {| — ®|a

roa Tay

jfihat 4 in) f lS a el 4 fi] @ f Sse fj f “3 ~. dA y}A |fi|See @) 7 F Ree) Ye#J ivA Sy” SF

sJ _ EZ “a Pee NSp —Pot | , ene an ELLE !_ ee ee_ LEE

— ne Ss af toy | ite

ohpage gece /C—O Q 1 ton flEEE a TS! "ee, Fic. 18.1 Plan of the Nike bastion in the late 5th cent. BC

the parapet has received little attention or seems to be thought of as trivial or irrelevant. Patient study up to 1930 by Kekulé, Heberdey, Dinsmoor, and Carpenter (whose 1929 ordering of the fragments is shown in Figs. 18.2

and 18.3) went a long way towards recovering the relationship of the fragments and restoring the scenes depicted.* Since then more fragments have been found and some adjustments in the restoration have become necessary; not all of this new information has yet been published. Each face (of unequal length) is, in effect, a repetition of the same scene—

a seated Athena; winged Nikai some of whom are setting up trophies to mark victories over Greeks and Persians and on sea as well as on land, to judge from the objects being fixed on the trophies; and a single Nike controlling a sacrificial ox (Figs. 18.2—7). Unlike the Parthenon frieze, this is not one continuous scene. Only momentarily would the visitor climbing

up have more than one face in view: where one sees an overlap, on * R. Kekulé von Stradonitz, Die Reliefs an der Balustrade des Tempels der Athena Nike (Stuttgart,

1881); R. Heberdey, JOAI 1910, Beiblatt, 85-8, and 1922-4, 1-82; R. Carpenter, The Sculpture of the Nike Temple Parapet (Cambridge, Mass., 1929); W. B. Dinsmoor, ‘The Sculptured Parapet of Athena Nike’, AJA 30 (1926), 1-31, and ‘The Nike Parapet Once More’, AJA 34 (1930),

281-95.

__

| & = re || eek KID &

_ iy iS

| + , __ _

on ee Cy -SSpe o =2

rY) ay ——— — | Sr) _—_— Pe ON I~ | | 136. 29-30, as restored by W. S. Ferguson, ‘Orgeonika’, Hesperia Suppl. 8 (1949), 134. This cult was introduced shortly before 429/8 Bc, cf. IG i? 383. 143 and Pl. Rep. 327a-328a: cf. also IG i’ 136. For further discussion, see R. R. Simms, ‘The Thracian Goddess Bendis’, AncW 18 (1988), 59-76; R. Garland, Introducing New Gods (Ithaca, NY, 1992), I1114. Athena Nike: IG i’ 35. 4-6 (c.450-445 or c.430-427): this priesthood was apparently created out of the priesthood of Athena of Athena Polias. In any case, the cult long predates the creation of a separate priesthood; terracotta figurines and an inscribed altar (DAA 329) attest the existence of the cult on the bastion of Athena Nike at least as early as the 6th cent. For discussion of the history and nature of the various structures under the temple of Athena Nike, see A. E. Raubitschek, Dedications from the Athenian Akropolis (Cambridge, Mass., 1949),

359-64: J. Travlos, Pictorial Dictionary of Ancient Athens (London, 1971), 148-9; I. S. Mark, AJA 93 (1989), 268. Asklepios: cult introduced in 420/19Bc (UG ii? 4690 + 4961 = SEG XXV 226. 19-20); the annually rotating priesthood began only c.350; cf. S. B. Aleshire, The Athenian Asklepieion (Amsterdam, 1989), 73-81, for further discussion of the evidence and the method of selection of the priest. Other rotating priesthoods of this type are well known among the Athenian cleruchs on Delos in the 2nd cent. sc (cf. ID 2610 for the priests of Sarapis and IG ii? 2336 for the priests of Artemis, Anios, Sarapis, and Hagne Aphrodite). '4 For only a single Attic genos, the Salaminioi, do we have explicit evidence concerning their choice of their priests: SEG XXI 527. 12-14 specifically states that, for the future, priests and priestesses of the genos are to be allotted from the combined membership of the Salaminioi of Heptaphylai and Sounion. This information cannot, however, be used as the basis of a more

328 Sara Aleshire over the precise means, most have assumed that all of these priesthoods were filled by the same one method. Martha alone considered several possibilities but came to no firm conclusion except in the case of the gene Eteoboutadai (sortition) and Eumolpidai (election);'> more recent scholars have indicated, often without discussion or reference to specific priesthoods, that gentilician priests were chosen by election,’® inheritance,‘ or sortition."® In the light of this diversity of opinion among modern authorities, it may be well to consider what ancient evidence we have on the subject. In reality,

there are only two testimonia. [Plut.] Vit. X Or. 843e-f, in discussing the KaTaywyn tod yevous Of the priests of Poseidon Erechtheus, tells us that Habron (son of the orator Lycurgus), having been allotted from the genos Eteoboutadai to be priest, stepped aside in favour of his brother Lykophron. Apparently, although using a word which can mean ‘inheritance’ to characterize the succession of priests, the author of the Life of Lycurgus thought that in the fourth century sc the means of selection for the tenant of this priesthood was sortition.

Of more importance is a lemma preserved in its fullest form under the rubric gennetai in a Byzantine lexicon of terms used by the Attic orators, usually referred to as the Patmos Lexicon to Demosthenes; this material is most accessible as Arist. Ath. Pol. F2 (Chambers) = F3 (Oppermann).'? This lexicographic entry, in part derived ultimately from the lost initial chapters of the Aristotelian Constitution of Athens begins with a description of the general assumption concerning the selection of gentilician priests because only one priesthood

held by the genos, that of Athena Skiras, possibly served a state cult. In this context it is important to note that while the priests of Herakles at Porthmos and of Eurysakes clearly served genos cults and the priestess of Kourotrophos probably did, comparison of the sacrifices listed in SEG XXXIII 115. 12-14 with those listed in SEG XXI 527. 85-97 indicates clearly that the priestess of Aglauros and Pandrosos—who has since the discovery of the Salaminioi inscriptions been held (e.g. by R. Garland, ‘Religious Authority in Archaic and Classical Athens’, BSA 79 (1984), 86-7) to have served the state cult—was restricted to serving the cult of the genos. I hope to discuss this point in greater detail elsewhere.

° (n. 4), 35-9. '© K. Clinton, The Sacred Officials of the Eleusinian Mysteries (TAPhS 63:3. Philadelphia, 1974) 45 (hierophantia), 67 (daidouchia). ‘7 J. Toepffer, Attische Genealogie (Berlin, 1889) 125-7; P. Stengel, Die griechischen Kultus-

alterttimer (Munich, 1920), 44; C. Hignett, A History of the Athenian Constitution to the End of the Fifth Century B.c. (Oxford, 1952), 64; Davies, APF 172-3; E. Kearns, The Heroes of Attica (BICS Suppl. 57, 1989), 71 n. 37. ‘8 Kearns, 71. *? More severely abridged versions of the same material are found in Harpocration, s.v. yevvytat; Poll. 8. 109, I11; EM 226. 13; Suda s.v. yevvijira, I. 516-17 Adler; Moeris p. 99 Pierson-Koch; and in Eustath. ad Il. I. 364. 30 van der Walk. For discussion of other aspects of Athenian religious and social organization touched upon by this fragment see now N. D. Robertson, Festivals and Legends: The Formation of Greek Cities in the Light of Public Ritual (Toronto, 1992), 58-63, 77-81.

The Demos and the Priests 329 citizen body of Athens before the time of Cleisthenes. First, Athenian citizens

are described as having been divided into farmers and artisans. Then, the author, apparently shifting from what we would call social divisions to constitutional, states that the citizen body was also divided into four tribes, each consisting of three subdivisions called phratries or trittyes, each in turn

made up of 30 gene of 30 men each. He adds that these men were called gennetai and that they were ‘those from whom the priesthoods belonging to each genos were allotted, such as the Eumolpidai and the Kerykes and the Eteoboutadai, as Aristotle records in the Athenaion Politeia, speaking as follows’ ( wv af tepdcvvar éExdatois mpoojKovoat éxAnpotbyTo, otov EdpoAriéat cat Kypuxes cai 'EtreoBouradar, ws tatopet év TH 'AOnvaiwy moXtred

'AptorotéAns Aéywv odtws). It is important to note here that the word used to specify the selection of priests is éxAypotvro. The lexicographer then

repeats the information concerning the tribes, the phratries, the gene, and their members, with explicit reference to the parallels between this organization and the division of a year into seasons, months, and days, but

omitting any reference to priesthoods and to the manner in which they were filled. This obviously artificial comparison to natural phenomena does not inspire confidence that the author—whether Aristotle or another—had

any real knowledge of these aspects of pre-Cleisthenic Athens, and the fragment has usually been rejected in toto as having little or no relevance to discussions of that period.”° But little attention has been paid to the possibility that the source for the initial portion of the fragment interjected the remark about the gentilician priesthoods not from his notions of Athenian society before Cleisthenes but from familiarity with contemporary (apparently

fourth-century or Hellenistic) Athenian practices. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that Harpocration, although not including the material

about the tribes and their constituent divisions in his lexical entry, nevertheless gives the same information about the priesthoods in almost the same words, omitting only the names of specific gene. The two divergent versions

of this section may represent another example of what P. J. Rhodes has termed ‘insertions’ in the Athenaion Politeia and may, in fact, be another indication that two editions of that work were in circulation in antiquity.’ In this case, there is no obvious reason to reject the testimony of the Patmos lexicographer, and it seems possible that sortition, at least in some form, was widely used to fill gentilician priesthoods. As a test of this hypothesis, let us consider the priesthoods controlled by the three gene which the Patmos lexicographer mentions explicitly. 7° P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981), 68-71. 71 J. J. Keaney, ‘The Date of Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia’, Historia, 19 (1970), 326-36; Rhodes (n. 20), 51-8; id. The Composition of Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia: Observation and Explanation (Oxford, 1992), 6, 16 n. 25.

330 Sara Aleshire The Eumolpidai provided the hierophant, the chief priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries. In his study of the hierophantia, K. Clinton opted explicitly for election as the means for choosing the priest, with the argument that among

36 known hierophants, two separate pairs, widely separated in time, are known to have been closely related. Clinton”* considers, however, that ‘this

small number [of related hierophants] ... would lead one to infer that inheritance was not the manner of appointment. At the same time, the number of related hierophants is large enough to cast doubt on allotment as the manner of appointment... .’”? The Kerykes controlled the daidouchia, the sacred magistracy of nexthighest rank in the Mysteries. The tenancy of the daidouchia in the fifth century Bc by a grandfather and grandson both named KaAXias ‘Imzovixov "AAwmexyGev has led a number of scholars to declare explicitly that this sacred magistracy was inherited.** Furthermore, the repeated shifts in the third and second centuries between sda:dotyo. from the family of Leontios of

Acharnai and those from that of Philistides of Hagnous*> are usually considered to confirm inheritance as the method for transmission of the daidouchia within the genos Kerykes. Nevertheless, Clinton concludes: ‘For long stretches of time one or two families dominated this priesthood ... At any rate, certainly by the second century Bc the daduchs were being elected by the Kerykes, and often certain families were so prominent and powerful that their candidates had little or no difficulty in being elected.’”® The Eteoboutadai controlled two important priesthoods, those of (Poseidon) Erechtheus and Athena Polias. The former’’ has often been stated explicitly to have been passed from father to son in the family of the orator Lycurgus.”®

This interpretation is based solely on the phrase xcataywyy rot yévous in 2 (n. 16), 45. *3 Clinton does not cite Martha, but he, too, argued for election here, (n. 4), 37. *4 e.g. APF 254; Kearns (n. 17), 71 n. 37. *> Cf. Clinton (n. 16), 58, for stemma. For further discussion of the chronology of their tenancy of the daidouchia as well as representations of this sacred official in both sculpture and vase painting, see W. Geominy, ‘Eleusinische Priester’, in H.-U. Cain, H. Gabelmann, and D. Salzmann (eds.), Festschrift ftir Nikolaus Himmelmann (Mainz, 1989), 253-64. © Clinton (n. 16) 67. *7 For discussion of the introduction of the cult of Poseidon to the Athenian Acropolis c.460Bc, see L. H. Jeffery, ‘Poseidon on the Acropolis’, [Tpaxtixda tov XII AeOvots Luvedprov KnAaoixns Apyatodoyias: 4-10 LemrepBpiov 1983, iii (Athens, 1988), 124-6: J. Binder, ‘The West Pediment of the Parthenon: Poseidon’, Studies Presented to Sterling Dow (Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Monographs 10, Durham, NC, 1984), 15-22. Binder’s identification (p. 21) of Avxopydys Boutdéns, the great-grandfather of Lycurgus, as the first priest of Poseidon on the Acropolis is attractive, and it is probable that he became priest of Poseidon because he already held the priesthood of Erechtheus. See also Kearns (n. 17), 210-11, for the nature of this

priesthood. |

8 Note e.g. H. N. Fowler’s (Loeb edition) translation of the phrase Aaydy éx tod yévous THY fepoovyvny in [Plut.] Vit. X Or. 843f as ‘received the priesthood by inheritance’.

The Demos and the Priests 331 [Plut.] Vit. X Or. 843e, discussed above, and on the genealogy of Lycurgus'’ descendants found in sections 843a—c of this same work. This genealogy mentions only a single priest of Poseidon Erechtheus in addition to Habron, whose tenancy of the priesthood escapes notice here. The sole priest named explicitly in the genealogy*®? is Myéeios Mnédeiov Ileipasreds, the famous politician of the late second century Bc, whose connection with the family of Lycurgus is through the female line. Other priests of Poseidon Erechtheus are known from epigraphic sources and include three of the first and second centuries after Christ;3° in addition to these two tribal priests of Erechtheus are known.*’ None can be shown

to have any connection with the family of Lycurgus.** One of the tribal priests of Erechtheus is, however, clearly not a member of the tribe Erechtheis,

and the other is unlikely to be. A similar situation, in which the tribal priest

was chosen from some group (presumably a genos) other than the tribe itself, is known for others among the Cleisthenic tribes and is probable for at least one of the post-Cleisthenic phylai.*> That these priests were not *9 Some (e.g. Clinton (n. 16), 56) have interpreted the final sentence of the paragraph containing the genealogy (843c), dverafato dé Kal tiv lepoodynv rob Tlocetd@vos 'EpexPéws, as indicating that QepcroxAjs Oeodpdarov ‘Ayvodaios ‘undertook’ the priesthood of Poseidon Erechtheus alongside the daidouchia. For a number of reasons, it is clear that dveradéaro cannot mean ‘undertook’ here, but must signify something more like ‘set in order’ or ‘reorganized’ (see Luc. Astr. 25. 2 for a parallel for this usage of the word); I hope to return to this passage in the near future in a discussion of the nature of the Athenian reform of c.21 Bc 3° TiBépios KaAavdios Oeoyévns Tacanets (IG ii? 3538. 8-11, AD 54-68); TiBépios KAavédxos

Anudcorparos Swamdos Mediteds (IG ii* 4071, mid 2nd cent. ap); and an unknown son of ‘Arépvios “ABpwv Ilacavieds, who is himself perhaps a tenant of this priesthood (IG ii* 3992, 2nd cent. AD). 3) "Aptotrwmvupos 'Aptorwvipov [TBeds, in office c.250Bc (Agora XV, 98. 20-26, 99. I-2) and KadXias [---], in office c.150 Bc (Agora XV, 231. 31).

3° If one were to follow K. Jeppesen, The Theory of the Alternative Erechtheion: Premises, Definition and Implications (Acta Jutlandica 63:1, Humanities Series 60, Arhus, 1987), 30, in identifying SiArwv, the proposer of IG ii? 1146, with ®Arwyr ITepiBoiSsns (PA 14791, a member of the tribe Oineis), as a member also of the genos Eteoboutadai, then he might be a third priest of Erechtheus with no known connection with the family of Lycurgus. There is, however no evidence that Philton was a priest of any god or hero; further, this interpretation presupposes rejection of Jeppesen’s contention that IG ii? 1146 is a decree of the Eteoboutadai and a return

to the (inherently more plausible, cf. ll. 5-6) explanation that it is a decree of the tribe Erechtheis.

33 The selection of the tribal priest from a group which included persons who were not members of the Cleisthenic tribe served by the priesthood is known for two tribes in addition to Erechtheis. All known priests of Hippothoon seem to come from a single family from Gargettos and therefore belonged to Aegeis. This priesthood may have been inherited, but the evidence is too scanty for certainty; in any case, the priests of Hippothoon were apparently members of a genos which controlled the priesthood. (For further discussion of the family to which these priests belonged, see S. Dow, Prytaneis (Hesperia Suppl., 1, 1937), pp. 121-4.) The priest of Kekrops was similarly not drawn from the tribe Kekropis; this priesthood is known to have constituted a major magistracy controlled by the genos Amynandridai (IG ii? 2338; SEG

332 Sara Aleshire members of the tribe Erechtheis suggests that they were, in fact, chosen from the members of the genos Eteoboutadai, and, if Kirchner’s restoration of IG ii? 1146, lines 2-5 is correct, they were chosen by allotment. On the basis of this evidence, if the Life of Lycurgus did not include a genealogy and a claim about the catraywya of the priests, no one would ever have suggested that this priesthood was transmitted from father to son by inheritance.

The priestess of Athena Polias was also drawn from the genos Eteoboutadai.** This priesthood is often cited as our strongest evidence for the inheritance of gentilician priesthoods, and Toepffer has on occasion been cited as having shown it to have been inherited in the female line.’ Six of the first eight known priestesses are clearly related to one another.*° The seventh, [Nix|sAAy, cannot be shown to be related to anyone but could

certainly be a member of the same family and fits into a gap in the sequence of priestesses. The eighth, KaAdA:|[---], has been said to be ‘quite unidentifiable’” but may well constitute evidence for a relatively early link

between the family from which the earlier priestesses are drawn and the descendants of the orator Lycurgus discussed above. Such a link provides a much-needed explanation of the relationship between the tenth priestess on the list, ®:Arépa, and the first nine.>°

The stemma of the family of Drakontides of Bate was constructed by Davies, who admits its patently hypothetical nature but rightly adds that he ‘can see no other that fits’.3? On the basis of this stemma, it is relatively easy to devise a rule of inheritance to explain the pattern of transmission here: the priesthood passes from a priestess to the eldest female whose male ancestors can be said to have been ‘carriers of the line’, or, in more explicit terms, from a priestess to her eldest brother’s eldest daughter.*° A rule of XXX 99). For further discussion of these priesthoods and of their position in Cleisthenes’ reform, see E. Kearns, ‘Change and Continuity in Religious Structures after Cleisthenes’, in P. Cartledge and F. D. Harvey (eds.), Crux: Essays Presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th Birthday (History of Political Thought, 6; Exeter and London, 1985), 189-207. For the post-

Cleisthenic tribes, we have very little evidence. However, if the first tenant of the tribal priesthood of Ptolemais was either Eurykleides or Mikion of Kephisia, as suggested by L. Moretti,

Iscrizioni storiche ellenistiche (Florence, 1967), 58-60 (cf. C. Habicht, Studien zur Geschichte Athens in hellenistischer Zeit (Hypomnemata 73, Gottingen, 1982), 107 n. 128, for discussion of this identification), then that priesthood had in some way been divorced from membership in

the tribe, but it is not likely to have been made hereditary in that family, as argued by P. Treves, ‘Les documents apocryphes de Pro Corona’, Les Etudes classiques, 9 (1940), 147.

34 Aeschin. II. 147. 35 Turner (n. 12), 250. 3© See below, Appendix, for a list of the priestesses of Athena Polias who served in the period covered in this paper. 37 APF 173. 38 Cf. IG ii? 3474. 5 for her descent from Lycurgus. 39 APF 172-3. 4° This rule of inheritance was proposed by Turner (n. 12), 249-51.

The Demos and the Priests 333 this type means that, since the office was a lifetime magistracy, if a priestess lived to a great age, whole generations might be skipped between a priestess

and her successor. In addition, rules of this type may be seen as a typical adaptation by a patrilineal society to the fact that the tenant of the priesthood

was required to be female. Inheritance of this type is quite similar to, and may be thought of as a mirror image of, patterns of inheritance frequently found in matrilineal societies (such as the Navaho), where status often passes from a man to his eldest sister’s eldest son.** In fact, patterns of inheritance of similar type are to be found elsewhere in the ancient Greek world.*?

It is, therefore, arguable at the very least that none of the gene mentioned by the Patmos Lexicon filled their priesthoods by allotment: the Eumolpidai elected the hierophant, and the Kerykes elected the daidouchos, while the Eteoboutadai transmitted the priesthoods of Poseidon Erechtheus and Athena

Polias by inheritance. Should we then conclude that this portion of the lexicon is as worthless as the surrounding matter? I think not. No earlier discussion of this problem, including mine above, has considered the possibility that allotment was applied, not to the genos as a whole, but to a short

list which had been preselected in some manner. This manner of filling magistracies finds good parallels at Athens in the selection of the nine archons*? and the priest of Asklepios,*+ and is explicitly attested for at least some of the priests of the cults in the demes.**> Such a method of selection might well, under the circumstances indicated by our evidence, produce a list of sacred officials indistinguishable from one produced by election or by

inheritance. If gene such as the Eumolpidai were as large as has been suggested,*® and if all or a large proportion of the members of the requisite sex were eligible to serve in a specific priestly capacity, the number of eligible members would almost certainly be large enough to produce results of the +" For kinship and status among the Navaho, see D. F. Aberle, ‘Navaho’, in D. M. Schneider and K. Gough (eds.), Matrilineal Kinship (Berkeley, Calif., 1961), 96-201, esp. 169-71. 4 Inheritance of the priesthood of Poseidon at Halikarnassos seems to have been controlled

by a similar rule whereby the priesthood was passed from brother to brother (presumably beginning with the eldest) until all surviving members of a given generation of the family had served as priest (cf. SIG? 1020 = JOAI 1 (1908), 64-5, no. 5); that the first priests listed in

this inscription were of heroic rather than human status does not affect the principle of inheritance. The priesthood of Asklepios at Pergamon was transmitted among the descendants of the founder of the cult, Archias, by inheritance (cf. Inschr. Perg. 251 and Pergamon VIII(3) nos. 45-51 with IG iv’ 1. 60), but there is insufficient evidence to allow us to infer the rule controlling the transmission. For further discussion of this priestly family, see E. Ohlemutz, Die Kulte und Heiligttimer der Gétter in Pergamon (Wurzburg, 1940), 166-8. 43 Arist. Ath. Pol. 8. 1, 22. 5; cf. Rhodes (n. 20), 146-8, for further discussion. 44 See Aleshire (n. 13), 75, for further discussion. 45 Dem. LVII. 46-8, 62.

4° See Bourriot (n. 8), 1321-47, for discussion of the typical size of those corporations known as gene.

334 Sara Aleshire sort which led Clinton to suggest election as the manner of appointment to the hierophantia. If, conversely, the pool of genos members eligible for sortition

was restricted in some way, perhaps on the basis of descent from a specific earlier priest or ‘carrier of the line’, the small size of that pool would tend to produce a list of successive priests or priestesses which greatly resembles those where we know that the method of transmission is direct or indirect inheritance. I suggest, therefore, that we must consider restricted allotment as having been one of the means, or perhaps even the primary means, of

filling gentilician priesthoods at Athens in the period between the fifth century and c.21 Bc. A note of caution is, however, in order here: we must

not assume that because we can show that an individual genos used a specific method for filling its priesthoods that all other gentilician priesthoods were appointed in the same manner. This hypothesis allows us to reconcile the evidence of the Life of Lycurgus and that of the Patmos Lexicon, on the one hand, with that provided by epigraphy and prosopography on the other. Because unqualified sortition é€ 'A@nvaiwy dadvrwv was a feature of the

developed democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries, we may speculate that the system of restricted sortition I am suggesting is not likely to have been in use earlier than the fifth century, perhaps spreading from one or two gene to all those which came eventually to choose their priests in this way.’” Any attempt to date the introduction of this means of choosing sacred officials more specifically must be purely speculative (for lack of evidence) and is inextricably interwoven with and dependent upon opinions concerning the date of the introduction of sortition, and more specifically KAjpwars éx mpoxpitwy, for archons. Those who, with Abel,** accept Aristotle's

statement (Ath. Pol. 8. 1) that it was Solon who introduced kAjpwots éx mpoxpitwy in the selection of the archons will no doubt prefer to see the employment of similar means of priestly selection as having developed or been introduced in the late seventh or early sixth century. Conversely, those who, with Hansen,*? believe that xcAjpwous éx wpoxpitwy of archons is a feature of fifth-century Athenian democracy and that in this method preliminary election was replaced by preliminary allotment at some point before

355Bc will similarly favour an interpretation which sees the use of the same or similar methods for the selection of priests as having come into use

in the early fifth century. I personally incline to the latter position but emphasize that any position on this issue must be purely speculative because 47 For discussion of the evolution of the institution of the Attic genos from the archaic period

to the end of the 4th cent. Bc, see Bourriot (n. 8), 702-7. 48 Vv. L. S. Abel, Prokrisis (Beitrdge zur klassischen Philologie, 148, Meisenheim am Glan, 1983), 15-30. 49 M. H. Hansen, ‘KAHIJTIQZI2Z EK IIPOKPITQN in Fourth-Century Athens’, CPh 81 (1986), 222-9; ‘When was selection by lot of magistrates introduced in Athens?’, ClMed 41 (1990), 55-61; and The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Oxford, 1991), 229-37.

The Demos and the Priests 335 of the complete absence of evidence directly relevant. A corollary to this position is clearly that the Athenians of the archaic period—as reluctant to trust their spiritual as their military welfare to the lot—may have chosen their priests by election. The hybrid of sortition from a short list with the lifelong tenure of most of these priesthoods is apparently unique among Athenian magistracies and may be thought somewhat anomalous. The ideological justification for the

use of sortition lies no doubt in the fact that the use of the lot was felt to reflect the god’s will in the choice of those who served him,°*° while lifelong

tenure probably represents the retention of traditional practice inherited from the archaic period or earlier. In any case, it is the lifelong tenure of the sacred magistracies—both gentilician and democratic—that is itself anomalous if considered solely in the context of other magistracies in the fully developed Athenian democracy. Nevertheless, this evolution and adaption in the methods of priestly selection provide a vivid illustration of the fact that Athenian religious institutions were in no way static. And, what, you may ask, happened in c.21 Bc? Obviously, I have neither

time nor space to discuss that topic in any detail here. I must, therefore, content myself with pointing out that there is substantial evidence to indicate that the reform of that period affected religious organization at Athens far more significantly than it did constitutional organization; furthermore, there is explicit evidence that in the second century after Christ certain gentilician priests were elected.°*' I suggest, consequently, that one feature of religious reform at Athens c.21 Bc®* was a change in the method of appointment for

many, if not all, gentilician priesthoods from restricted sortition to direct

election, probably by the members of the genos which controlled the priesthood. °° For explicit statement of this notion, see Pl. Laws 6. 759c, and cf. 3. 690c. 1 SEG XXIX 127. 6-7. 5? For the date of the reform and its supposed constitutional implications, see J. H. Oliver, ‘From Gennetai to Curiales’, Hesperia, 49 (1980), 30-56. I intend to return to discussion of the nature and effects of this reform in a future paper.

336 Sara Aleshire Date* Name Sources

APPENDIX: Priestesses of Athena Polias before c.21 BC

I €.430-365 Avousdyyn (I) Apaxovridov (I) IG ii* 3453; Plut. Mor. 534¢c;

Barjbev bvyarnp Plin. NH 34. 76

2 341/0 Pavoorpdtyn A

axovridov” IG ii? 1456. 31, 36; Berlin SK

(II) Barjydev Avydrnp 881

3 €.325 [Nex |vAAr‘ IG ii? 4601

4 ¢.300—290 Avomdxn (IL) Avovorpadrov IG i? 3455, 3464° Baribev (Ovyarnp)

5 ¢.260-256° [---]rm [ToAvednrov Barybev IG ii* 776 duyarnp

6 C.250 Qc0d67Tn ITodvednrov IG ii? 3472. 5-6 ’Auditporbev (Ovydrnp)'

7 €.250-235 ITevrernpis ‘IepoxAéovs PAvéws IG ii* 928, 3470. 9-10, 3471 (Ouydrnp)’

8 220/19 Kadri - - -|® IG ii? 3461. 6

9 C.215-The reading of the initial letter of the patronymic was made from a squeeze at the Institute for Advanced Study. Kirchner had read 'Avax[---] here, and Lewis 'Avaxo[---]. However, despite Bechtel’s suggestion (Historische Personennamen p. 44) that a name like ‘Avaxdédwpos might exist, no such name has turned up in the epigraphic corpus, and only a single example, “Avaxos ®iyadevs, is known from Greek literature (Ath. 14. 26); “Ava[xos], restored at IG iv 616. 2, has now been reduced to 'Ava[---] (cf. SEG XXXII 370). Given the reading of the

initial letter as 4 and the lack of names in 'Avaxo[---], the N in the second space of the patronymic must be a mason’s error. For the identification of ®avoorpary as the priestess in the relief Berlin SK 881, see A. G. Mantis, [TpoBAjpara tys ecxovoypadias Twv repermv Kat TwY \epéwy aTnv apyaia eAAnuixy réxvyn ( = Anyootedpara tov ApyatoAoyixod AeAtiov 42) (Athens,

1990), 41-3. “Lewis's doubts (n. I, 12) about this woman’s service as priestess of Athena Polias do not

The Demos and the Priests 337 seem entirely justified. It is true that IG ii* 4601 contains no explicit mention of Athena: nevertheless, this badly battered dedication was found on the Acropolis, and all other dedications preserving the phrase ézi fepetas ts detvos found there are dated by identifiable priestesses of Athena. The identification of this woman with the Mx«vAda ITpeoBiou of IG ii? 1472. 9, herself not identified as a priestess, is, however, highly suspect, especially in view of the restoration of the first three letters of the name. The date is based on letter-forms.

‘The sculptor Nikomachos, who signed the base IG ii? 3464, has sometimes (e.g. by G. Lippold, RE xvii(1) (1936), 467, Nikomachos 23) been dated as early as the 360sBc on the basis of the archon date restored in IG ii? 3038; cf. SEG XXVII 11, however, for the restoration of this line as naming the object dedicated. With the loss of the archon date, the only evidence for the date of Nikomachos is IG ii? 3464 and the identification of the priestess named on it, and the date of the sculptor’s floruit should be lowered correspondingly. °For the date of the archon Alkibiades of IG ii? 776, see M. J. Osborne, ‘The Chronology of Athens in the Mid Third Century Bc’, ZPE 78 (1989), 241. ‘The sequence of priestesses nos. 6 and 7 is suggested by the signatures on IG ii? 3472 and 3470. The former is signed by Kaikosthenes alone, while the latter is signed by Kaiakosthenes and Dies; since Dies is generally agreed to have been the younger brother (cf. G. Lippold, RE xX (1919), 1503), the base signed by both should be later. The dates assigned above are based on a new date for IG ii* 928, for which see S. V. Tracy, Attic Letter-Cutters of 229 to 86 B.c.

(Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 259.

®T intend to return elsewhere to discussion of the restoration of this name as KaAAu{orw] and of her relationship to the family of Lycurgus.

"The inscription which attests to the priesthood of Philotera is dated ‘med. s. II a.’ by Kirchner. Tracy, 58, 60, has, however, recently shown that it should be dated 226/5-c.190 Bc. This raising of the date of Philotera’s priesthood indicates that she cannot be identified with the priestess ®iArepa (no. 11), the base of whose statue is signed by Eucheir and Euboulides and should be dated c.130 (see Tracy, 190-1). ‘As noted by Tracy, 141, 180, IG ii? 3477 must date after 138/7, but Habryllis’ tombstone (IG ii? 6398) should not be much later than that. Habryllis is now also known as priestess of Demeter and Kore from an unpublished inscription from the Roman Agora; I wish to thank M. Hoff and J. S. Traill for alerting me to the existence of this inscription. ' Three additional women whose tombstones are dated within this period have been identified as priestesses of Athena Polias by Mantis, 44~5): Dopyw ®iAwvos Topiov Gvydrnp, known from IG ii? 7244 of c.300; Mad@dxn [---] ‘Ayvovatov bvyarnp, Geogévou [---] yuvy, known from IG ii? 5271 of the 2nd cent. Bc; and QeodirAn Pavodicou ‘Payvovatov Ovyarnp, known from IG ii?

7356 of the Ist cent. Bc. All three of these columella tombstones show in low relief below the name the outline of a sacerdotal key; Mantis’ identification of these women as priestesses of Athena is based on the presence of a similar sacerdotal key on the tombstone (IG ii? 6398) of no. 10 above, who is known as priestess of Athena from other sources. However, IG ii? 6398 shows not only the sacerdotal key but also tainiai wrapped around it, as does the tombstone of no. 12; the tombstones of the three priestesses identified by Mantis show no tainiai. For this reason, although they seem certainly to be sacred officials of some deity or deities, they should not be identified explicitly as priestesses of Athena.

20 Athenian Religion Abroad ROBERT PARKER

‘Religion and the Athenian Empire’ is a theme that can be approached from many different sides. There has been much discussion of the use of cult and

myth as instruments of empire, means of establishing bonds between the inhabitants of Attica and their subjects abroad.’ Less attention has been given to the religious life of the many Athenians who went to live abroad in colonies and cleruchies implanted within the empire. For the political historian the subject is no doubt of little importance. But for the student of religion new settlements have an especial interest, because they represent the point of impact, as it were, between an established religious order, that of the founding state, and quite new circumstances. The Attic settlements, often short-lived, ill-documented, and untypical of Greek colonies as a whole, have scarcely been investigated from this perspective. But they provide, as we shall see, at least one remarkable case-study. The foundation of colonies was, on the traditional Greek conception, preeminently religious work.” A colony of textbook type received the preliminary blessing of Delphi; on arrival, the oikist presumably selected gods and heroes

for the new settlement, and assigned precincts to them; and after his death he was himself worshipped as a hero. The Athenian settlement of the sixth century in the Thracian Chersonese had been exemplary in most of these respects, unorthodox though according to Herodotus it was politically, an I have benefited constantly over many years from the combination of David Lewis's extraordinary learning, extraordinary acuity, and extraordinary willingness to help others; it is a privilege to have the opportunity to pay a small tribute of thanks. I am very grateful to participants at the conference for their reactions to this paper’s oral predecessor, to Nicholas Purcell and Peter Rhodes for subsequent written suggestions, and to the organizers and editors for their comments and for kind encouragement. " See now above all the admirable monograph of B. Smarczyk, Untersuchungen zur Religionspolitik und politischen Propaganda Athens im Delisch-Attischen Seebund (Cologne, 1990), which also contains much valuable material on our theme. > Cf. esp. I. Malkin, Religion and Colonisation in Ancient Greece (Leiden, 1987); also W. Leschhorn, Grtinder der Stadt (Stuttgart, 1984). On Athenian colonization in the fifth century see most recently T. J. Figueira, Athens and Aigina in the Age of Imperial Colonization (Baltimore,

1991), part 2; on the 4th cent. cleruchies W. Schmitz, Wirtschaftliche Prosperitdt, soziale Integration und die Seebundpolitik Athens (Munich, 1988), 298-310.

340 Robert Parker unofficial undertaking led by the elder Miltiades to escape Pisistratid rule.?

Of the fifth-century ventures, the most important, the re-foundation of Amphipolis in 437, perhaps came closest to the type: if we believe a late source, the Athenians consulted an oracle (doubtless that at Delphi), and were advised, credibly, that they would succeed only if they fetched the remains of the local hero Rhesus from Troy. The colony certainly had an oikist, Hagnon, to whom it would have granted heroic cult but for its secession to Sparta in 424—although, untraditionally, he did not remain in Amphipolis, and untraditionally again was perhaps already receiving heroic honours, during his lifetime, until the revolt.4 Before other foundations, diviners and divinatory sacrifices evidently remained important, and the colonists might make a collective dedication on the Acropolis, doubtless for good luck, before departure; consultation of an oracle, however, is not recorded (except for the Panhellenic colony of Thurii), and was perhaps dispensed with.’ The role of the ‘founder’ too lost its sharpness of outline, amid a haze of characteristically Athenian boards

of ten and the like.° The founder’s traditional religious functions had, however, still to be performed; and it is scarcely chance that much the most prominent of the ten commissioners who established the colony at Thurii was the seer Lampon.’ Probably it was he who wrote its sacred calendar. The settlement that the Athenians resolved to establish in the Adriatic in 325/4 BC, aS a ‘protection against the Etruscans’, was to have an oikist of, in name at least, very traditional stamp, none other than a Miltiades.® Different Athenian settlements were, of course, of very different type. In the fourth century, one distinctive form was the ‘cleruchy’, a community > Hdt. 6. 34-6; Nepos, Miltiades, 1. I-3. On this, and yet earlier Athenian colonial ventures in the Troad, see Figueira, 132-42. 4 Polyaenus, Strat. 6. 53 (oracle); Thuc. 5. 11. 1; for the view that Hagnon was already treated as a hero see Malkin (n. 2), 228-32; and on Rhesus see too Ph. Borgeaud in id. (ed.), Orphisme et Orphée (Geneva, 1991), 51-9. A transfer of bones on oracular instruction also famously occurred in connection with the capture and colonization of Skyros by Cimon in the 470s (Plut. Cim. 8 etc.: cf. Crux (n. 5 below), 308 n. 37); but here it is not stated that the instruction ‘bring home the bones of Theseus’ was issued in answer to the question ‘how can we settle safely on Skyros?’, nor is this likely (since the island did not gain but lost a precious relic).

5 or R. Parker, in F. D. Harvey and P. Cartledge (eds.), Crux: Essays presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix (History of Political Thought, 6; Exeter and London, 1985), 306f., on Ar. Clouds 332,

Birds 959-91, IG i’ 46. 9, 40. 64-7 (add Ar. Peace 1047). Dedications: see IG i* 513 and perhaps (but cf. n. 11 below) 514 (ML 66, Fornara 129). © Cf. Leschhorn (n. 2), 128-47, on inter alia the Brea decree (IG i> 46 (ML 49, Fornara 100) ).

? Cf. Leschhorn (n. 2), 131-7. On the assignment of precincts at Brea see I. Malkin, Chiron,

14 (1984), 43-8. ® See Tod, no. 200 (an extract from IG ii? 1629); cf. S. Hornblower, in J. M. Sanders (ed.), ®[AOAAKQN (Oxford, 1992), 151-2.

Athenian Religion Abroad 341 with limited local autonomy that remained, none the less, part of the Athenian state, of which its residents continued to be citizens. Almost all the Athenian ‘colonies’ of the fifth century were, it has been plausibly argued, not independent poleis such as those of earlier ages had been, but cleruchies of this type (though not yet so described); the groupings that actually bore the name ‘cleruchy’ in the fifth century become on this view yet more dependent.? However that may be, it is not in doubt that the fifthcentury foundations, instruments of imperial policy, differed in many ways from their Archaic predecessors. It may be that the explanation for some of

the divergences that we have just discussed in fact lies here. Was it appropriate, for instance, to consult Delphi about the foundation of a colony that was viewed merely as an extension of Attic territory?

Another distinctive feature of the fifth-century settlements is that they

were almost all placed not on virgin soil but within the territory of an existing Greek state, whether one that continued to exist or that had just been evacuated through expulsion or massacre. Clearly the religious life of

a new community was likely to be affected by its emplacement on land which Greek gods had already long inhabited. A term sometimes applied to Attic colonists, ézo:xor, ‘additional settlers’, could express, it seems, a sense

that the new settlement was a kind of continuation or extension of a predecessor. °°

Two aspects of the religious life of the Attic colonies seem to derive from these special characteristics. (The distinction between cleruchy and colony will be largely ignored in what follows, since it cannot be usefully deployed;

members of both types of settlement will be called cleruchs.) On the one hand, cleruchs not seldom made collective dedications in the temples of Attica itself: the celebrated ‘Lemnian Athena’ of Pheidias on the Acropolis, for instance, was so called ‘from those who dedicated it’, the Athenian settlers on the island.'* So they maintained contact with the gods of what in some and perhaps all cases remained their own city. Some cleruchs— those in Aegina and Salamis—were in fact physically closer to Athens than were inhabitants of the outlying demes, and may have continued to attend the city festivals; Plato portrays one from Naxos consulting an Athenian 9 See Figueira (n. 2), 72 (cf. 10, 238); cf. P. A. Brunt, Studies in Greek History and Thought (Oxford, 1993), 131 (from Studies ... Ehrenberg, Oxford, 1966, 87). ‘© See Smarczyk (n. I), 115 n. 180; Figueira (n. 2), 32-3 (on Thucydides’ use of this term for the settlement on Aegina). But sometimes ézo:xo. were ‘additional’ not vis-a-vis indigenous inhabitants but an earlier batch of Attic colonists (Tod, p. 287).

"' Paus. 1. 28. 2 (LIMC II.1 s.v. Athena, 976 no. 197); cf. (probably) IG i> 522 bis: IG 339. 13 KAepotyo avéfecav; perhaps IG i’ 514 = ML 66 (Fornara 129) (cf. Figueira (n. 2), 27): IG ii* 1437. 20 (Samos, 4th cent.) and still IG ii? 1224b. 6-7 (Myrine on Lemnos, 2nd cent. Bc); cf. too the ‘departure dedications’ (n. 5 above). The Samian cleruchs also dedicated aptoteia to Apollo of Delphi, SEG XX 200-2.

342 Robert Parker exegete about a problem of pollution.’* And, as is well known, all Attic ‘colonies’ were expected to dispatch offerings to the Panathenaia, to the Dionysia and to the goddesses at Eleusis.*?

On the other hand, it is clear that, as newcomers to territories with established religious traditions, cleruchs regularly respected the gods who were there before them. What else indeed could they do, when these gods

were present not merely in name and myth but in temples, rich with dedications, which it would have been impious to neglect or desecrate? According to a speaker in Thucydides, ‘the rule among the Greeks is that whatever power controls any territory, large or small, also owns the shrines, which should be tended in such traditional ways as are practicable.’** Thus it was surely Athenian cleruchs who, late in the fifth century, inscribed in Attic dialect lists of the property of two principal Aeginetan cults (Aphaia,

and ‘Mnia and Auxesia’), just as Attic ‘treasurers’ are found busy with inventories on Samos in 346/5 sc during the period of the fourth-century cleruchy on the island.*’ What is distinctively Athenian about all this is not

the respect displayed for established cults but, of course, the democratic passion for public listing, accountability. (No inventory survives issued by the native administrators of either cult before the cleruchs came.) Again, if a shrine of Asklepios was available for consultation on Aegina in 422, this must be because an existing cult of the hero continued to function in the Athenian cleruchy. And it has been suggested that boundary-stones of a joint precinct of Apollo and Poseidon, Attic in dialect but found on Aegina, attest another native cult kept going by the settlers.’® Of course, even those who live in furnished accommodation tend to make adjustments to please their own taste. And in fact, if a portion of the land of each cleruchy was set aside ‘for the gods’ when the rest was divided,'’ some "2 Euthyphro 4c-d.

"3 See esp. IG i* 34. 41-2 (ML 46. Fornara 98), 46. 11-13 (ML 49, Fornara 100), 71. 568 (ML 69, Fornara 136), 78 (ML 73, Fornara 140), Ar. Clouds 586. For the contributions of the cleruchies to Eleusis in 329/8 Bc see IG ii? 1672 (SIG’ 587) 274-9. '4 4, 98. 2; 3. 68. 3 is a good illustration of the principle, as Smarczyk (n. 1), 125 n. 207, observes.

'S IG iv 39, 1588 (IG i} 1456, 1455); C. Michel, Recueil d'inscriptions grecques (Paris, 1900), no. 832, re-edited by D. Ohly, AM 68 (1953), 46-8: cf. n. 10 above, and G. Shipley, A History of Samos (Oxford, 1987), 157-8.

'© Ar. Wasps 122-3: cf. Smarczyk (n. I), 126 n. 210. Apollo and Poseidon: IG iv 33-6 (=IG i 1483-5), with Smarczyk, 120-9 (whose low dating is, however, epigraphically controversial). ‘7 So Thuc. 3. 50. 2, on the cleruchy at Mytilene. The matter is not clear, however, as it is possible that these temene belonged to (i.e. earned revenue for) cults celebrated in Athens, not locally; this was certainly true of those assigned to Athena in the Lelantine plain (Aelian, VH 6. 1) if the widely held view that there was no cleruchy at Chalcis is correct (cf. Smarczyk (n.

1), 99). Smarczyk suggests (105, 109) that the temene belonged to the gods of Athens itself but that the cleruchs had use of some proportion of the revenue to finance local filial cults.

Athenian Religion Abroad 343 new cults were perhaps always introduced at the time of foundation. The cleruchies of the fourth century were little replicas of Athens, with their own councils and assemblies (though of very restricted powers); and it is scarcely

surprising to find such a basic amenity of Attic life as a tragic festival of Dionysos soon attested. Less predictably, we find reappearing on Lemnos the characteristic institution of a group of prosperous orgeones devoted to the cult of a hero (‘Herakles at Kome’).’® An inscription found on Samos perhaps shows that the Athenian tribal system, with its individual sacrifices to the ten tribal heroes, was reproduced in the cleruchy in miniature; but it may rather refer to the tribes and the cult back home.”? Still less secure is the identification of a

mysterious sacrificial calendar of the fifth century as that of a cleruchy at Chalcis in Euboea, where it was found. Were it that, we would learn that the settlers here (at a spot of course very near home) honoured a mixture of Attic gods and heroes much as they might have done in their native demes, with the addition of a single Euboean hero. But the calendar appears to refer to actual Attic cult sites, and is probably just a stray.”° Details therefore normally escape us of the accommodations between Attic and native that must have been characteristic of religious life in the cleruchies. In one case, however, a little more can be said; untypical and remarkable, it has been kept to the end. An Athenian force under Miltiades first occupied

Lemnos (and, no doubt, neighbouring Imbros, which shared its history) around the year 500. The settlement underwent various vicissitudes, but whatever their political status the colonists always regarded themselves as culturally Athenian. According to Herodotus, the Athenians were the first Greeks to possess the island, the previous inhabitants having been ‘Pelasgians’ (Thucydides calls them Tyrrhenians*’). And in fact Lemnos has '® Dionysia (4th cent. evidence): Arist. Ath. Pol. 54. 8 and IG ii? 3093 (Salamis), IG xii 8. 4 (Myrine, on Lemnos); ? SEG I 349; cf. IG ii? 1223. 8-9 and notes to IG ii? 3093. Orgeones: IG xii 8. 19, 21; cf. W. S. Ferguson, HThR 37 (1944), 92.

'9 G Klaffenbach, AM 51 (1926), 36, no. 5: a decree of ‘the tribe’ concerning unpaid revenue without which, it seems, the sacrifice to Pandion cannot occur; if the revenue derived from land on Samos owned by the Athenian tribe Pandionis, the presence of a copy of the text on the island is perhaps explicable. Shipley (n. 15), 161, and N. F. Jones, Public Organization in Ancient Greece (Philadelphia, 1987) 196, think of local tribes; but by analogy with other cleruchic formulae one might expect such ‘branch-tribes’ to be ‘the Pandionids on Samos’ vel. sim., rather than ‘the tribe’ tout court. 2° IG i> 255. It was assigned to the cleruchy by L. R. Farnell, CR 19 (1906), 27-31, who could appeal to the Boeotian/Euboean hero Glaukos (A 14, cf. Jameson in IG 2 ad loc.); but see Jameson ad. loc. and Smarczyk (n. 1), IOI n. 142. Attic cult sites: A 11-12. >! Hdt. 6. 137-40, Thuc. 4. 109. Miltiades colonized Lemnos not direct from Athens but from the Chersonese, but the early casualty list IG xii suppl. 337 (= 1G i* 1477) already (on the general view) lists Lemnians by Cleisthenic tribes; other texts variously relevant to AthenoLemnian relations are IG i? 518, 522 bis, 1164-5, 1466, and (Imbros) 1507 (cf. the editors’ notes ad. loc., Figueira (n. 2), 253~—5, and in general on Lemnos L. Bernabo Brea in EAA s.v. Lemno, and the works he cites). Of the cults of the third cleruchy in the region, Skyros, very little is known.

344 Robert Parker yielded a famous non-Greek inscription and a non-Greek form of archaic pottery. In so far as they are Greek, the cults of Lemnos are therefore in a certain sense Athenian, no other polis having been there first. We have already noted two instances of importation by the cleruchs of characteristic forms of Attic worship (Dionysia, and groups of orgeones). Other good Greek gods are also attested in Lemnos and Imbros in due course (the ‘12 gods’ and Asklepios, for instance).*” These, however, were not the

cults for which the island was famous. Lemnos provides, in fact, a model instance of that phenomenon so often sought, so seldom reliably identified:*? the enthusiastic adoption by Greek colonists of pre-Greek forms of worship. The religious jewel in the island’s crown, which was to attract the attention of king Philip V of Macedon,”* was the mystery-cult of the ‘Great Gods’ or ‘Kabeiroi’ (or whatever name may be most pleasing to them). These ‘Great

Gods’ are obviously not Attic; Herodotus held the related Kabeiroi of Samothrace to be ‘Pelasgian’; and the actual sanctuary of the Great Gods

on Lemnos was laid out in the pre-Greek period (if we can trust the results of an excavation conducted in haste, with the Second World War imminent).*°> Yet what Demeter and Kore were to the Athenians of Athens, that it seems the Great Gods were to the Athenians of Lemnos and Imbros. The excavation of the Kabirion on Lemnos yielded a remarkable series of decrees, issued by the ‘citizen-body of the initiated’, S405 trav reTEACopévwv.””

What is probably the earliest of these decrees, of the late fourth or early third century, runs: In the archonship of [ ], in the tenth prytany, that of Hippothoontis, on the

[ ] of Skirophorion, assembly of the initiated, on the [ ] of the prytany. Put to the vote by Antikrateus of Prasiai from the proedroi: joint proedroi (cvpmpdedpor) were (eight names are listed, with patronymics and demotics). It was resolved by the *2 IG xii 8. 63, 77 (with dating by a priest): note too 76 (Dionysos), and, much later, 78 (Zeus Hypsistos), 79 (Nemesis), 80 (Tyche Demokratia), ASAA 15-16 (1932-3), 293, no. 2 (a priest of Apollo); note too Phylarchus 81 FGrH fr. 29 (ruler-cult, in the 3rd cent.). *3 Cf. CR 39 (1989), 271; Malkin (n. 7), 44. *4 SEG XII 399. The ‘Great Gods’ were also much honoured on Imbros: IG xii 8. 51, 714, 87-9; B. Hemberg, Die Kabiren (Uppsala, 1950), 37-43. *> Hdt. 2. 51; D. Levi, ‘Il Cabirio di Lemno’, Xapiorjpiov eis A.K. 'QpAdvdov (Athens, 1966), iii. 110-32. Similarly, the island had the same two main towns both in Pelasgian times (Hdt. 6. 140) and under the cleruchy; and there is continuity of use in the necropolis of Hephaestia (D. Mustilli, ASAA 15-16 (1932-3), 8). 76 §.Accame, ASAA NS 3-5 (1941-3), 75-105 (whose interpretation I report). Earliest decree: Accame’s no. 2, pp. 76-7; theoroi: ibid. 79, no. 3. Peter Rhodes kindly advises me that Accame’s dating after 307 of all the texts which mention the ‘demos of the initiated’ (on the assumption that Lemnos retained 10 tribes even when Attica had 12) is not obviously wrong; no. 2, however, could in principle move upwards a little, since lists of cuumpdedpor are attested in Athenian Samos in 346 and in Athens from 333 (S. Dow, Hesperia, 32 (1963), 335-65). The name of the body that honoured (epouvyjoves in an earlier text, no. 1 (5th/4th cent.), is lost.

Athenian Religion Abroad 345 demos of the initiated, Nikeratos son of Nikomachos of Melite proposed: since Nikostratos son of Archedemos of Phegae, the treasurer of the sacred funds,

administers them well and scrupulously [ ]

The proedroi are listed in the normal order of the Attic tribes (with the expected omission of Hippothoontis, whose prytany it was), except that one tribe is absent and one represented twice. It has been convincingly suggested that these officials of the ‘demos of the initiated’ were identical with those of the nearby cleruchic town of Hephaestia, a substitution however being made when a given tribe had no initiated councillor. The ‘demos of the initiated’ in turn must have resembled rather closely the demos of Hephaestia. Cleruchy

and mystery-cult could scarcely be more intimately associated. Sacred ambassadors (theoroi) were sent to festivals at the sanctuary by ‘the demos of the Athenians at Myrine’, the island’s other town. Can the case be pushed further? The most important goddess of the island is Artemis (Athena by contrast is nowhere attested): she had two precincts in or near Myrine by the fifth century, one of which (or yet another) was the chief civic sanctuary of the town, while on the other side of the island it was a priestess of Artemis who collected and sealed the famous Lemnian red clay (‘terra sigillata’) of Mt. Mosychlos. Does this strange prominence indicate that ‘Artemis’ was the settlers’ name for the native ‘Great Goddess’ ??”

Is Hermes’ popularity on Imbros an inheritance from the Pelasgian tradition of ithyphallic gods of which Herodotus speaks?** Both suggestions are very plausible; but there is an obvious danger of circularity if, when gods Greek

in name appear on the island, they are to be set down as Pelasgians in disguise. A most remarkable continuity of ritual is attested if we accept that a new-fire festival still celebrated in the second century Ap goes back to very early times, being in fact the ritual basis for the ancient myth of the Lemnian crime.*?

In two instances a somewhat firmer case can be made. ‘Orthanes’ is a god about whom almost nothing is known except that he is ithyphallic. In Attica he is a minor figure, honoured only it would seem in unofficial thiasoi. In Imbros, however, he has a public cult with processions, sacrifices, and a

priest. It is surely easier to suppose that a central god of the colony was

introduced to Athens but stayed on the margins than that a marginal Athenian god was taken out by the settlers and achieved respectability abroad. Even if the reverse is true, it was doubtless the local tradition of *7 Artemis: IG i* 1500-1; IG ii? 1224. 24 (cf. ZPE 99 (1993), 122); (clay) Galen, vol xii. 169, 173 Kuhn. Great goddess: Aristophanes fr. 384 K—A; C. Fredrich, AM 31 (1906), 72-9: might she be the ‘goddess’ of IG xii 8. 51 (cf. Hemberg (n. 24), 38 n. 6)? 8 1G xii 8. 67—70, the last mentioning initiations to Hermes; Hdt. 2. 51; cf. Steph. Byz. s.v. "TuBpos vijcos éart Opaxns, fepa KaBeipwv xai ‘Eppot, 6v “IpBpayov Aéyovaw of Képes; Hemberg

(n. 24). 39-40. *2 See W. Burkert, CQ 20 (1970), I-16.

346 Robert Parker honouring gods of this type that allowed Orthanes to become so successful.

And similarly, the naked ithyphallic god who appears on Imbrian coins, however he is to be named, must surely reflect these Pelasgian traditions.*®

This account of the colonists’ receptivity to non-Greek culture does, certainly, require certain glosses. Though Lemnos was inhabited by barbarians before the coming of the Athenians, it lay well within what for the Greeks counted as the known world. Homer already tells of Jason’s dalliance

there with Hypsipyle, and of the son born of that union, a friend to the Greeks at Troy; Lemnos for him is already ‘dearest of all lands’ to Hephaestus.

(The importance of Hephaestus is another pre-Athenian trait that persisted throughout the island’s history.**) Throughout the archaic period, Greek goods were imported; and Hellanicus even speaks of the original inhabitants, Thracians in his view, as ‘semi-Greeks’ (wiééAAnves).2? Greeks had got to nearby Samothrace earlier, and had already assimilated a related pre-Greek cult of the Kabeiroi. The Athenians were certainly not confronted by a land and gods as strange as faced for instance the first Greek settlers in the West. Some familiar cults were introduced from Athens; and even if that of Athena

was not among them or not prominently so, settlers could keep in touch with the gods at home by the dispatch of offerings. They were, of course, very well familiar with the idea of a mystery-cult; and safety at sea, probably the chief good in the Great Gods’ gift,*? was very evidently one of which they stood in need. As we have seen, it was precisely in relation to the foreign

mystery-gods that they gave their own Cleisthenic political institutions a striking new application,**+ in the ‘demos of the initiated’. All these qualifications having been made, however, it remains true that the religious life of Lemnos was not quite like that of an ordinary Attic deme. 3° Orthanes on Imbros: IG xii 8. 52 (2nd cent. Bc): cf. Herter, in RE s.v. Orthanes; Hemberg

(n. 24), 40 n. 4. In favour of a Greek origin it is sometimes urged that the name Orthanes makes good Greek sense for an ithyphallic god. Coins: B. Head, Historia Nummorum? (Oxford,

I9II), 261. 3" Hom. Il. 7. 467-9, Od. 8. 282-3: cf. Burkert (n. 29), 3; SEG XXVIII 718. 32 4 FGFHH fr. 71a. Imports: J. Boardman, The Greeks Overseas* (London, 1980), 85 f. 33 Cf. L. Robert, AE 1969, 7-14 (Opera Minora Selecta, vii (Amsterdam, 1990), 71 3-20).

34 Accame (n. 26), 79, wonders whether the ‘demos of the initiated’ had an Athenian equivalent; he stresses the supervisory functions of the boule in relation to the Eleusinian cult (Andoc. I. 111; cf. P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), 35, 159-60). But the argument from silence has considerable counter-weight, when so many decrees regulating Eleusinian affairs and honouring Eleusinian officials survive, none issued by the postulated demos.

21 Representing Democracy: Women at the Great Dionysia SIMON GOLDHILL

for DAVID LEWIS

There are five books on my shelves which are often used as reference works, but which, when read cover to cover, changed my academic life. Three of them are Fraenkel’s edition of the Agamemnon. The other two are Pickard-

Cambridge’s Dramatic Festivals of Athens. I say two because the second edition, revised by John Gould and David Lewis, the honorand of this volume, is really a new book. Reading this second edition along with the first provides

a marvellous example of careful, scholarly criticism that is never less than instructive. It is with this remarkable volume in mind that I offer the present study, which approaches one of the thorniest and most passionately debated

issues in theatrical history, namely, the presence of women at the Great Dionysia. My aim here is not so much to answer the question—though it will become clear that I have quite strong views on the sort of answer that should be given—but rather to think further about how the question is to be formulated and what sort of material needs to be brought to bear on it. In short, my interest is in historiography as much as in the Realien. I have called this chapter ‘Representing Democracy’ as a mark of the range of questions that are (to be) invoked by the narrower enquiry into female attendance at a particular festival. I shall begin by reviewing briefly how the topic is approached by Gould and Lewis. It is typical of most recent discussions, and it is followed in particular by Podlecki and Henderson.’ Henderson’s article, which develops This paper was first delivered at the conference in honour of David Lewis’s 65th birthday, where he responded with characteristic vigour. My thanks to the participants there for useful comments; to the editors of the volume for subsequent editorial tact, and to Paul Cartledge, who sometimes thinks I might become a historian. This paper would not have turned out like this but for a continuing discussion with Pat Easterling. ' A. Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens (Oxford, 1953), rev. J. Gould and D. Lewis (Oxford, 1968) [hereafter DFA]. A. Podlecki, ‘Could Women Attend the Theatre in Ancient Athens? A Collection of Testimonia’, Ancient World, 21 (1990), 27-43; J. Henderson, ‘Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals’, TAPA 121 (1991), 133-47; see also N. Wilson, ‘Observations on the Lysistrata’, GRBS 23 (1982), 157-63.

348 Simon Goldhill the stance and strategies of Gould and Lewis, has very rapidly achieved a position of authority—it is the new orthodoxy—and it is his piece, which makes the best case for the presence of women at the Dionysia, that will emerge as the focus of criticism by the end of my discussion. Gould and

Lewis turn first to passages in the ancient sources, and to Plato and Aristophanes in particular, to see if there are explicit indications in contemporary or near contemporary texts of the presence of women in the theatre. These are well known and often collected—most extensively in Podlecki’s recent article. I will not discuss them at any great length here, but I will look briefly at the two passages which are said to make the strongest claim for the attendance. The first is from Aristophanes’ Peace, where the hero, Trygaios and his slave are throwing barley into the audience (Peace 962-7):

Tp. Kai tots Beatais pinte TH KpiOav. Or. id06 Tp. €dwkas 767; Ou. vi rov “Epp adore ye ToUTwY GaoLTEp efor THV Dewpevwr ovK €oTw ovdels ov KpLOny exer.

Ov. ody af yuvairés y'édXaBov. Ou. GAX’ ets éorépav dwoovow adttais avopes.

Tr. Now throw the krithai to the audience. Se. Look! Tr. You've given it already? Se. Yes, by Hermes! There’s not one man of the audience who hasn’t got a krithe.

Tr. Yes, but the women haven't got any! Se. But come night-time Their husbands will give it to them.

The joke is clear enough, if untranslatable: krithai, ‘barley groats’ puns on krithe, ‘penis’: ‘all the spectators have barley/a penis’ ... ‘women don’t have barley/a penis’ ... ‘their husbands will ‘‘give it to them’”’ tonight’. (‘Get their oats’?) This sexual humour clearly does not depend on the presence of

women in the theatre at all (and indeed the passage has been taken as conclusive proof for women’s absence, although it appears in both Henderson and Podlecki as strong evidence for their presence’). Conversely, it has been assumed that the women sit too far back to be thrown barley—I will return

to seating later—and thus the joke has a spatial as well as a bawdy point. Since both a reading that assumes women’s presence and a reading that assumes women’s absence provide acceptable sense for the lines, critics have tried to decide between the two readings by claiming that one reading gives

a ‘better joke’ than the other: the ‘bawdy joke ... could easily have been set up less awkwardly. The passage sounds more natural on the assumption not that the women were absent but that they were sitting too far back to * Podlecki (n. 1), 33; Henderson (n. 1), 141-2; contra Wilson (n. 1), 159.

Representing Democracy 349 catch the barleyseeds.’* It is not easy to see how this sort of argument—or expression of opinion—could be adequate for proving or disproving the

presence or absence of women in the theatre. Gould and Lewis, with customary understatement, call it ‘not quite decisive’ evidence. The second passage or set of passages comes from Plato. In the Gorgias,

Socrates argues that music and poetry, unlike philosophy, aim at the pleasure of an audience rather than its education. Even tragedy, he claims, the most serious art form, is a kind of demagoguery. This argument is part of an extremely rhetorical attack on rhetoric, where poetry and drama (but not philosophy) are assimilated to rhetoric. Socrates concludes his critique of the arts as follows (Gorgias 502d): ‘Therefore we have now found a type of rhetoric aimed at a populace [demos], such as is composed of children,

and men, and women together, slave and free, a rhetoric I do not much admire; for we have said that it is a type of fawning [kolakeia].’ Although tragedy has been Socrates’ last and most difficult example, his conclusion is not solely about tragedy, and does not mention any performance context at all. Rather, he is concerned with all the arts as types of demagoguery. His conclusion certainly does not require or imply an audience of slaves and women for the Great Dionysia. Rather, Socrates is denigrating the promiscuity and amorality of a rhetoric which can only pleasure its audience:

the failure of this type of (democratic) rhetoric to distinguish properly between its audiences or to recognize how an audience may be bettered is expressed in a typically aristocratic way within the Greek politics of pleasure by suggesting that such a rhetoric mixes hierarchical social categories that should be kept separate (adult/child; male/female; slave/free). It is a passage better glossed by reference to the Old Oligarch than to the history of theatre. The passage of Plato that usually takes pride of place in the argument for the presence of women in the theatre at the Great Dionysia is Laws 7. 817b— c. Gould and Lewis, followed by others, write that in this ‘more decisive’ passage ‘tragedy is said dyunyopeiv mpos maidds Te Kal yuvaixas Kal TOv TaVTa

dyAov’,* to ‘offer demagoguery for children and women and the whole crowd’. When the context of this quotation is widened, however, a wholly different view emerges: for our tragic poets and their so-called serious compositions, we may conceive some

of them to approach us with a question in these words or the like: ‘may we pay your city and its territory a visit, sirs, or may we not? And may we bring our poetry along with us, or what decision have you reached on this point?’ What would be the right answer to such men of genius? Why this, I believe: ‘Respected visitors, we

are ourselves authors of a tragedy; and that the finest and best we know how to make. In fact, our whole polity has been constructed as a dramatization of a noble and perfect life; that is what we hold to be in truth the most real of tragedies. Thus 3 Henderson (n. I), 142, my emphasis. 4 DFA 265.

350 Simon Goldhill you are poets, and we also are poets in the same style, rival artists and rival actors, and that in the finest of all dramas, one which can indeed be produced only by a code of true law—or at least that is our faith. So you must not expect that we shall light-heartedly permit you to pitch your booths in our market square with a troupe of actors whose melodious voices will drown our own, and let you offer demagoguery for children and women and the whole crowd.’

The Athenian Stranger is dismissing some tragic poets and players from visiting the new city of the Laws, and, once again, contrasting the ‘teaching’ of tragedy and the philosophical wisdom embodied in the Laws. He forbids

these travelling companies from setting up their tents in the market-place and performing before the whole crowd (ochlos—more denigratory than demos). This tells us nothing about the Great Dionysia in Athens, though much about Plato’s rhetoric of denigration. These travelling players are banned from the market-place and banned from having an influence over those most likely to be influenced by such artists—children, women, the whole crowd. In a similarly dismissive move against tragedy at Laws 2. 658 he specifies tragedy as the pleasure of ‘educated women, young men and almost all the general public [plethos]’. ‘Educated’—pepaideumenai—may be added here specifically to imply that only educated women knew and took pleasure in tragedy, and hence the phrase may refer not to a theatrical audience but to the far smaller category of reading (female) public.* In this light, there is a further passage in the Laws which has only very rarely been quoted in this debate, but is, to my mind, interesting: the Athenian Stranger is discussing comedy and the ludicrous, which, he says, ‘one must watch and recognize’

(anagke ... theasasthai kai gnorizesthai). The reason he gives is that ‘one cannot understand the serious apart from the laughable, and indeed any other contrary apart from its contrary’. So, he concludes, ‘we shall enjoin the representations of such things to slaves or hired foreigners. There shall never be any serious consideration of them whatsoever; no free person, neither man nor woman, shall be found learning them, and there always must be something new in a performance of the kind.’ The Athenian Stranger is concerned that his wise citizen will know the difference between the serious/important (spoudaios) and the laughable/trivial (geloios); consequently, comedy must be watched (theasasthai—as in a theatron), but under no account is it to be given serious attention (spoude) which would lead to a loss of self-control and self-awareness. Hence comedy is to be enacted by slaves and hired foreigners—the other of the self-controlled citizen—and no free person, ‘man or woman’, may learn, that is, internalize and assimilate,

the ridiculousness of comedy. The education of the free citizen of the > On female literacy see esp. S. Cole, ‘Could Greek Women Read and Write?’, in H. Foley (ed.), Reflections of Women in Antiquity (London, Paris, New York, 1981).

Representing Democracy 351 Athenian Stranger’s Utopia clearly does not tell us much about the Great Dionysia in Athens; but the image of a free woman ‘learning’ comedy may be a useful gloss for the ‘educated woman's’ pleasure in tragedy.

These, then, are the passages that are taken as the strongest evidence for women’s attendance at the theatre during the Great Dionysia, and I have begun with them partly to recall just how poor such evidence is,

and partly to show how difficult it is to call any of these passages ‘decisive’: indeed most of this material depends on highly selective and partial reading to make any point about the Great Dionysia at all. The other testimonia, if they can be so called, have been collected most fully and usefully by Anthony Podlecki (n. 1). These passages will no doubt continue to be read and reread—inconclusively. The debate needs to be

redefined in more broadly conceived terms. With this much ground

clearing, therefore, I want to turn to look at the more interesting historical questions that this enquiry provokes. The first overriding question is this: is the absence of any direct mention of the presence of women in the theatre at the Great Dionysia a chance effect of our lacunose sources? Or, since women’s presence in male company

is surrounded by many taboos in Athenian culture, is there an Athenian protocol of invisibility for women at this most public of occasions? Or is the silence a significant indication of the difference between the Great Dionysia and, say, the Great Panathenaia (to which I shall shortly turn)? There is in other words not just the common problem of trying to construct an argument

from silence, but rather the more significant and specific problem of the ‘conspiracy of silence’ with which women’s history is particularly concerned.

To pursue an answer to these questions, I wish to begin with some general remarks about the spatial discourse of Athens; second, to offer some

comments on the festival culture of the democratic polis; and finally, to consider some material about the Great Dionysia, the significance of which has not been adequately realized. First, then, civic topography. Cleisthenes’ reforms and the establishment of democracy restructured the socio-political space of Athens. On the one hand, demes, tribes, and other new civic organizations redeployed the citizens and their opportunities for

office throughout the territory of Attica; on the other, the remodelled ceremonial calendar continued to articulate a significant relation between the urban centre and the rural and coastal land (as de Polignac and Osborne

in particular have analyzed with great insight®). In the city itself, the institutions of democracy created different sites for the displays—and contests—of status, and for the projection and promotion of civic ideals. The Homeric sense of space—the Odyssean oikos or the Iliadic city of Troy—with © R. Osborne, Demos: the Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge, 1985); F. de Polignac, La Naissance de la cité grecque (Paris, 1984).

352 Simon Goldhill its map of cultivated lands and urban centres and wilderness is reorganized by this restructuring.’ The lawcourt and the Assembly as the key institutions of democracy require now a massed citizen audience, public debate, and a collective vote to reach a decision. The lawcourt and Assembly constitute a specifically democratic civic space for such competitive performance. Indeed, since democracy made the shared duties of participatory citizenship central elements of political practice as well as political ideology, to be in an audience is not just a thread in the city’s social fabric, it is a fundamental political act. When Thucydides’ Cleon refers dismissively to the Athenians as theatai tén logén, ‘spectators of speeches’, he is in part complaining of a lack of action

(erga) by the citizens, but in part he is also rhetorically distorting the very principles of democratic participation—what was known proudly in Athenian ideology as the commitment to putting things es meson, ‘into the public domain to be contested’.® To be a spectator in democratic Athens is to play the role of the judging citizen. The architectural programme led by Pericles may be thought to support this sense of reorganized socio-political space. Two brief examples will suffice

here. The Parthenon is often analysed as a statement of civic ideals. The frieze, if Robin Osborne is correct, is the first example of temple architecture to represent the civic body.? As the citizen processes around the temple to

its entrance, his viewing of the Parthenon frieze’s representation of a procession implicates him as spectator in a particular engagement with an idealized aristocratic image of the democratic citizenry performing its religious

practice. It binds the viewer in a reciprocal process of self-definition. If, as others contend,*° the frieze represents the heroes of the state, the processing citizen is engaged in a different process of negotiation of and through the idealized image of male figures, processing. Like the topoi of the funeral

oration, with their links between the heroes of the past and the soldiercitizens of the present, the topography promotes and projects the ideologically charged role of the citizen. So too with the Stoa Poikile, a much less discussed

example of civic architectural programming, which was placed along one side of the Agora—the locus of all forms of social exchange and prime site for the more informal, but necessarily public, displays of being a citizen (as 7 On Homeric landscapes, see esp. J. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: the Tragedy of Hector (Chicago, 1975); P. Vidal-Naquet, ‘Valeurs religieuses et mythiques de la terre et du sacrifice dans |’Odyssée’, Annales, 25 (1970), 1278-97, trans. with additions in R. Gordon (ed.), Myth, Religion and Society (Cambridge, 1981).

® Thuc. 3. 38. 4. See also the conclusion of this speech (3. 38. 7) where Cleon seems to be complaining that the citizens are behaving as a passive audience ‘like spectators of sophists’

(sophist6n theatais eoikotes) rather than as active and judging debaters (peri tés poledés bouleuomenois). Thanks to Simon Hornblower for putting me straight on this (on more than one occasion), ? R. Osborne, ‘Viewing and Obscuring the Parthenon Frieze’, JHS 107 (1986), 98—105. *° The forthcoming work of Joan Connolly is eagerly awaited on this.

Representing Democracy 353 opposed to the religious, military, and economic capital of the Acropolis).*’ Here, there were paintings which juxtaposed Athenian victories over Sparta with the sack of Troy—affiliating past and present glories.’ These paintings were buttressed by dedicated armour, and by the famous Marathon epigram, celebrating another Athenian-led triumph over the forces of the barbarian

East. By the time of Pausanias, the colonnade was also adorned with a statue of Solon, a founding father of democracy—though it is unclear when

the statue was dedicated, and it may date from the fourth century, when the image of Solon the democrat was extensively developed.*? Again, the novel architectural experiment seems designed to face the citizen spectator with a patterning of normative images and words, to engage the viewer in

a (multi-media) recognition of the military and political obligations of citizenship.

These impressionistic remarks on well-known monuments and institutions are designed to emphasize a single but fundamental point. The development of democracy required and enforced a reorganization of socio-political space, and its new institutions along with its new architecture redefined the spatial relations of the city, and constructed new spaces for the exercise of citizenship where both to act before an audience and to participate in an audience are defining characteristics of democratic obligations. A second point follows (and follows necessarily, if Geoffrey Lloyd’s account

of self-reflexivity as a defining characteristic of the fifth-century enlightenment is found persuasive’*t): namely, along with this reorganization of space comes a metadiscourse—an explicit, self-reflexive commentary on topography. So, at one level, the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places offers in fifth-century scientific terms a redefinition of the Homeric question

of what it means to live in a place (an enquiry that runs through Herodotus’’). At a further level and later, Aristotle includes in his Politics a normative, theoretical description of the size and shape of an ideal city— much as sophistic thinkers of the fifth century were actively involved in city planning for new colonies.'® Xenophon’s Oikonomikos maps the oikos in a ‘’ A contrast between the Acropolis and the Agora is well drawn in spatial and ideological terms by N. Loraux, Les Enfants d’Athéna (Paris, 1981), esp. 41-5. * See for a recent reading of the Stoa Poikile with bibliography D. Castriota, Myth, Ethos and Actuality: Official Art in 5th Century B.C. Athens (Madison, Wisc., 1992). "3 See R. Thomas (above ch. 7); C. Mossé, ‘Comment s’élabore un mythe politique: Solon, pere fondateur de la démocratie athénienne’, Annales, 34 (1979), 425-37: E. David, ‘Solon,

Neutrality and Partisan Literature of Late Fifth-Century Athens’, MH 41 (1984), 129-38; P. B. Manville, ‘Solon’s Law of Stasis and atimia in Archaic Athens’, TAPA I10 (1980), 213-

2I. "4 G. E. R. Lloyd, The Revolutions of Wisdom (Berkeley, Calif., 1987). "> See e.g. J. Gould, Herodotus (London, 1989), 86-109; F. Hartog, Le Miroir d’Hérodote: essai sur la répresentation de l'autre (Paris, 1980).

‘© Both at the level of laws (e.g. Protagoras for Thurii) but also at the level of city planning (e.g. Hippodamus for Thurii, and the Peiraeus at Athens).

354 Simon Goldhill similarly theoretical way. At a further level still, and the one that concerns

me most at present, Athenian drama itself is much concerned with the representation of space to the city. The opening scene of Aristophanes’ Acharnians dramatizes the role of the citizen within the Assembly, setting

up a complex play between the political/theatrical actor and the political/theatrical audience. The plotting of the Ecclesiazusai depends on taking an oblique and self-reflexive view of the gendering of political space

in Athens and its Utopian ideologies. The Birds offers the fantasy of a redefinition of the (structuralist) topography of man/beast/god: city/ wilderness/Olympus, a fantasy led, it seems, by contemporary theoretical discussion of what form a polity should be. Tragedy also traces a fascinating engagement with the representation of socio-political space. Consider the Oresteia, the most influential of all Greek plays. The Agamemnon’s strongly developed sense of a house and a doorway— well discussed from a theatrical, and these days even a metatheatrical, sense by Oliver Taplin’’—moves via the Choephoroi with its violent assault on and

in the house, towards Athens and the redefinition of the normative space of the house within the topography of the polis, a redefinition which is achieved, crucially, by the establishment of a new civic space, the lawcourt—which is discussed, along with its site, by Athene—and by the establishment of a new topos for the Semnai on the Acropolis. When Sophocles turns in his Electra to the same moments as the Choephoroi, he creates a wholly new

sense of space, not least by repressing the resolution of the Eumenides. Sophocles’ play is set in the liminal space between the off-stage rituals at the tomb and the rituals off-stage in the house. The stage becomes the space which must be crossed to where the ‘significant action’ takes place—a space dominated by the woman out of place, Electra. The loss of the civic frame which Sophocles enforces is corollary to the redefinition of the acting space. So Euripides in his Electra once again remaps the topography, by setting his

Electra in a country cottage by the boundaries of the territory of Argos—

and by introducing with his typical irony a set of what can be called distancing devices into his narrative. These different constructions of space

are not merely back-drops, nor are they simply variations on a theme. Rather the socio-political force of each drama is articulated in and through significant topography. How these plays represent the issues of democracy

depends in part on a representation of space, and a commentary on that representation. How is the reorganization of democratic Athenian civic space gendered? Women, as Nicole Loraux has argued,"® are af 'Arrixai, ‘women of Attica’, *? O. Taplin, The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford, 1977), 340 ff.; P. Wilson and O. Taplin, ‘The ‘‘Aetiology” of Tragedy in the Oresteia’, PCPS 39 (1993), 169-80. '*8 Loraux (n. 11), 119-53; she has further defended her view in The Children of Athena:

Representing Democracy 355 and not ‘Athenians’, not politai, ‘citizens’. They are the wives, mothers, and daughters of citizens, at best. Consequently, the Assembly, the prime gathering for citizens as citizens for civic purposes, excludes women at all levels.

Women cannot attend, speak, or observe. zis BovAerar dyopevew, ‘who wants to address the assembly?’, that most symbolic question of democratic procedure, expects a male voice in response. Participation in the gymnasium, the space in which men enter the contests of manhood, is also specifically

limited to men, and usually to citizens (slaves were excluded from competition—unlike e.g. Roman games).’? The Olympic games, the grandest of occasions in the calendar of physical competition, explicitly debars women;

that Spartan women could be thought to exercise in a male way—naked, agonistic, athletic—is a taunt or marvel for Athenian writers. In Athens, I would draw attention also to a further particular competition that took place at the Panathenaia. The competitions here were generally international and the prizes extensive, and several scholars of late*® have emphasized how the Panathenaia seems to have been Athens’ attempt at producing a grand

Panhellenic occasion to match the Olympic games, say, or other such festivals, in a manner suitable to the glory that was Athens. The euandria, however, is a more interesting case. It was probably a ‘beauty competition’

(so Athenaeus suggests, 13. 565f), in which the criteria were size and strength (so Xenophon suggests, Mem. 3. 3. 137"). Since the contest involved strength, argues Crowther in one of the few articles to discuss this event in

any depth, ‘more than mere posing was involved. The competitors had to perform. The euandria as far as can be ascertained was a team event which incorporated elements of beauty, size and strength.’ If there is doubt about the precise nature of the activities and the prizes, there is no doubt about what to my mind is equally important: that the competition was organized on a tribal basis, and was (thus) limited to citizens.*? Judging euandria, ‘good manliness’, here was a contest for citizens organized in their socio-political Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes, trans. Caroline Levine (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 237-50. '? See D. G. Kyle, Athletics in Ancient Athens (Leiden, 1987) for the civic role of athletics. *° See in particular the contributions to J. Neils (ed.), Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival in Classical Athens (Princeton, 1992), with very useful further bibliography, and W. R. Connor's forthcoming study. *" Iam following D. Kyle, ‘The Panathenaic Games: Sacred and Civic Athletics’, in J. Neils (n. 20), who is following in turn Crowther (n. 22). As far as I can see, Xenophon is actually talking about euandria in general and not the competition in specific, although the context is one of civic training and representation. ** N. Crowther, ‘Male Beauty Contests in Greece: the euandria and the euexia’, Antiquité Classique, 54 (1985), 285-91, at 288. *3 This is in contrast with the euandria which was held at the Theseia, and which was for three categories of competitors, epilektoi, ethne, hippeis, ‘select’, ‘foreigners’, ‘cavalry’; see Crowther (n. 22) for other ‘beauty competitions’.

356 Simon Goldhill units. Although there is no explicit comment on the presence of absence of women for this competition, it seems extremely unlikely according to ancient

protocols of bodily display that women in general (let alone Athenian citizens’ wives and daughters) would be spectators of such a physical (and

presumably naked) competition of men, where the judging gaze of the audience is so important to the public status of the participants. Indeed, it is unclear that women could attend even the poetry competitions of the Panathenaia. Henderson** asks (without citing any evidence) whether women would have been excluded. Shapiro in his fine study of music and

poetry at the Panathenaia argues that women were present for bardic competitions on the basis of a single pot (ARV 1039; Villa Giulia 5250).*° This shows a young performer ascending a bema. One woman, seated on a

pot, to the right appears to observe. A second female stands to the left, holding objects that are hard to identify. Lezzi-Hafter calls her a slave, presumably bearing offerings of some kind; Shapiro calls her a woman bearing prizes. Not only is any association with the Panathenaia dubious here, since the bema is used for a variety of performance purposes, but also

all identification of the characters and their roles is contested. It is hard indeed to take such an image as an unmediated snapshot of Athenian practice, as Shapiro requires. One might as well claim that it was normal for women at the Panathenaia to sit on pots. The Panathenaia, however, does provide a crucial comparison for the Great Dionysia. The pompe of the Panathenaia certainly included women: metic wives with parasols, Athenian maidens carrying offerings, the priestess who received the procession on the Acropolis. The metic or citizen women were presumably not all metic or citizen women, but representatives. How

such women were chosen is quite unclear, and in the absence of evidence the variety and implications of selection procedures outlined by Sara Aleshire in this volume make guessing the selection procedure of even the kanephoros

seem very hazardous indeed. What we also do not know, but would very much like to, was how the audience for the procession was constituted. Was it just a throng of people? Or did some or most sit on banked seats (of a type that is imaged on pots for athletic competitions”°)? Did women watch from the secluded roofs of houses, as in the Acharnians Dicaeopolis tells his wife to do, when he celebrates the rural Dionysia??’ The Panathenaia was 74 Henderson (n. I), 137. 75 *Mousikoi Agones: Music and Poetry at the Panathenaia’, in J. Neils (n. 20). The pot is well illustrated in A. Lezzi-Hafter, Der Schuwalow Maler (Mainz, 1976), pl. 146. © For a good image of ikria, see the fragment of Sophilos in Athens ABV 39. 16, well illustrated in P. Arias, M. Hirmer, B. Shefton, A History of Greek Vase Painting (London, 1962), pl. 39. This represents the funeral of Patroclus, and has only men as spectators. 27 Ach. 262; the mother is presumably on stage at 245, and is sent up to the roof for the procession.

Representing Democracy 357 a remarkable occasion in the civic calendar in that it allowed all Athens to be represented in the procession—an image of the city to itself as an inclusive body. There were many foreigners, both competitors and sight-seers too. So

how is attendance at this festival to be conceived? It is not the same as the Assembly, where to be a theates ton logén is to enact a civic obligation as a citizen. The premium on the judging gaze of the male citizen is differently emphasized. The religious frame of the Panathenaia, which allowed men to look at (some) processing women also diffuses the sense of an audience space and of an audience as an organized collective of citizens—as the

procession, representing the whole city to itself, maps its way through the city towards the Acropolis. The different days of the Panathenaia— and the contrast between the pompe and the euandria is telling—create different frames, different senses of a citizen audience, different ideals and instantiations of citizen performance within the one festival.

With the lawcourts, we have a further democratic institution that is gendered in a fascinating way. The formal audience—the jury—of a lawcourt

is always and only male, and always only citizens. The attendance at the lawcourt is buttressed by financial payment, and is a key institution in constructing the image—or ideal—of the democratic citizen as judging, voting, deciding, participant. Yet law, unlike the issues of the Assembly, may

be thought to involve women necessarily, however rarely. The restrictions surrounding women and the lawcourt are quite remarkable, however, and often misrepresented by scholars. A woman, when bringing cases or when charged, is always represented by a man (a kurios) in court. No woman may speak in court. MacDowell, Harrison, and Todd** agree that there is

no passage which adequately demonstrates that women ever did give evidence as witnesses in court, and that they may indeed have been barred from so doing—a restriction that produces shock and incredulity among legal historians, as Todd notes, not least in cases like Lysias I which seem to cry out for a woman’s testimony. A woman could take an evidentiary

oath, which is sometimes represented by modern scholars as a way of circumventing the restriction on acting as a witness.*? Yet such evidentiary oaths are to be taken in a religious site away from the court (usually at an

altar in the Delphinion), and it is quite unclear how public an event this would have been. What is more, in the extant corpus only once is such an oath said to have been performed, and then it is explicitly declared to be 8 §. Todd, ‘The Purpose of Evidence in Athenian Courts’, in P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. Todd (eds.), Nomos (Cambridge, 1990), 25-7: D. MacDowell, Athenian Homicide Law in the Age

of the Orators (Manchester, 1963), 102-9, and The Law in Classical Athens (London, 1978), 243; A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1968-71), 136. *2 So Todd (n. 28), 26 n. 13, following R. Bonner, Evidence in Athenian Courts (Chicago, 1905), talks of ‘the regular appearance of women ... in court “in a capacity only technically distinguishable from witnesses’. As we will see, this is not true.

358 Simon Goldhill outrageous that the oath was actually performed rather than requested or offered!*°

It is also often claimed that crying women could be brought before the court for sympathy—the well-known Roman topos. Todd, like many others, refers to Bonner’s standard study for support for this contention;** Bonner

offers one reference, Demosthenes 48. 57. There, the speaker invokes a mother, sister, and wife—but adds ‘imagine that they are here in court’— which makes it plain that they are not in court at present. Children—with all the ideological force of the continuity of the oikos through patrilineal inheritance—may be brought into court to help raise sympathy, and there are passages in the extant speeches that discuss precisely such an event; most famously, Plato’s Socrates denies himself such an opportunity in the Apology 37c. There is, however, no case that brings women on to the stage

of the court, or discusses the possibility for the speaker. There are two speeches that mention occasions when a woman might have appeared in court for rhetorical purposes. In one case, Isocrates XVIII, Against Callimachus, an earlier legal drama is described. Callimachus is said in a previous

case to have testified (along with fourteen others) that a slave woman had been killed by Cratinus. Cratinus and his friends, however, found the slave woman concealed in a house and dragged her by force into the court. The woman is a slave, and since her existence is the subject of the debate, the

exceptional act of force, dragging her before the court, is a winning argument—a piece of ‘material evidence’. There is no question of the woman

speaking, or acting in any other way. Except in late fiction, and usually where the heroine is mistakenly treated as a slave,*’ there is no equivalent tale for such a clinching display of the wife/daughter/mother of a citizen. (Twice, however, Demosthenes introduces a male figure who is technically debarred from court in order to make such a rhetorical point.**) In a pseudo-

Demosthenic speech XXV, Against Aristogeiton, the accuser attempts to remove the last resort of the sycophantic Aristogeiton by demanding that

the jury show no pity, pardon, or common humanity to him, since he showed no pity or pardon in the past to his victims ([Dem.] XXV. 84): ‘The

bitterness, the bloodthirstiness, the cruelty of this man was evident and 3° The famous case of Plangon, debated in Dem. XX XIX and XL, especially XXXIX. 3f. and XL. 10f. I owe this reference and the argument to the fine forthcoming thesis of Eugenie Fernandes. C. Carey, and R. Reid, Demosthenes: Selected Private Speeches (Cambridge, 1985),

170, ad XXXIX. 3. are wrong when they say that at ‘Isaeus XII. 9. we are told that the plaintiff's mother swore to his paternity’. It merely says ‘she was willing’ [ebouleto| to give an oath at the Delphinion. 3! Todd (n. 28), 26 n. 13, quoted in n. 28 above. Children in court: below pp. 281 f. 32 See Achilles Tatius, Leukippe and Cleitophon, esp. 7. 15-16, where Leukippe re-appears during Cleitophon’s trial for her murder (though the rediscovery does not in fact take place in court itself). The sudden reappearance of a believed lost or dead lover is a topos of the novels. 33 Dem. XX XVII. 44; XXI. 95.

Representing Democracy 359 proven. This man was not accustomed to pity the children, nor the old mothers of some of those being judged, when he saw them brought forward.’ It is difficult to evaluate this remark: it is offered as a generalization about

Aristogeiton’s past vile behaviour as a sycophant and like most of this speech is dependent on a hyperbolic and scurrilous rhetoric. If wapeorwoas, ‘brought forward’, necessarily means ‘brought forward physically into court’, this passage would be the only evidence for any appearance for sympathy of female relatives. Significantly, it is not cited by Bonner or others who see the appearance of crying women as a standard topos. Bonner—who is again the authority most often cited by legal historians

here—writes: ‘There was ... no objection to [a woman] being present in court, if she chose.’3+ The idea of a citizen wife simply ‘choosing’ to go to

court scarcely conforms to standard Athenian constructions of gender relations. But the two sources Bonner cites do point to an interesting case where a woman may indeed be in court. The first is the use of a deictic in [Dem.|LIX. 14, In Neairam: ‘this Neaira’, Néatpa airyi. This use of the strengthened deictic, which usually though not always implies presence, occurs repeatedly throughout the speech, and the exceptional frequency of

the deictic is a constant injunction to consider the person of Neaira, on which so much of the prosecutor’s case depends. This strategy climaxes in a telling phrase (LIX. 115): ‘Take a look at her appearance, and consider only this, whether she (Neaira!) has committed these acts.’ Dover and Carey

disagree about what the jurors are meant to see when they do look at Neaira, but this passage does seem to imply the presence of Neaira in court.°°

Neaira is the person being prosecuted, and she is a prostitute. These exceptional facts may explain the exceptional display of a woman before the

jury. The second passage Bonner cites also concerns a prostitute being prosecuted. This is the late story of Hypereides’ mistress baring her breasts

to win her case.*° This story is evidently based on comic sources (and ultimately on the story of Helen on board Menelaus’ ship escaping punishment by the same seductive ruse), and can only be used with the greatest caution. (That there was a case about Phryne indicates nothing, of course, about her presence in court.) Strikingly, Antiphon I, a speech against a step4 Bonner (n. 28), 32. 5 K. Dover, Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1968), 34-6,

suggests it means that Neaira was still attractive; C. Carey, Apollodorus: Against Neaira, [ Demosthenes] 59 (Warminster, 1992), 144, suggests it means that her make-up and dress would show her to be a prostitute. What do you see when you look at a woman in court, if not your own stereotypes or prejudice? ° (Plut.] Hyp. 849e for this story; see also Athenaeus 13. 591e, where a passage of the comic poet Poseidippus is quoted which asserts she won her case by crying and by taking each juror by the hand (dexioumene); at 13. 59I1c it is said that Phryne was called ‘stripper’ because she stripped her clients of cash. Quintilian 2. 15. 9, who also tells the story, seems to regard it as apocryphal: ‘[Phrynen] ... putant periculo liberatam’.

360 Simon Goldhill mother—and a citizen's wife—for poisoning, at no point indicates that the woman herself was in court. The Athenian court seems to have been remarkably unwilling to allow any female presence in the civic space of the lawcourt itself, and any female engagement with legal procedure is carefully and ritually regulated, and indeed severely limited. Even—or especially—cases with female figures at their very centre remained occasions for citizens to contend with citizens. The difference between slaves, prostitutes, and citizen wives may help explain the very few exceptions to the general rules of exclusion (as the very naming

of women in the public court seems to have followed firm regulations of propriety). The lawcourt remained fundamentally a citizen audience judging the contests of citizens. What I hope to have shown so far is that the socio-political reorganization

of space under democracy—what I have been calling its topography— involves some complex imagining of the city, some complex definitions of boundaries, and some complex redefinitions of roles. The Assembly and the lawcourt—the major political institutions of democracy—constitute the judging citizen audience as the participatory performance of the democratic subject. There are strongly articulated boundaries for that performance,

boundaries that exclude women almost completely. The Panathenaia, however, as the name suggests, is the most inclusive rite of the city, but even here, after the pompe, which involves a more diffuse sense of celebratory

participation as well as a specific religious agenda, more restrictive competitive spaces are marked out. So are the theatre and the Great Dionysia more like the Panathenaia or more like the Assembly? What sort of civic space is it, and how is it articulated? Let us begin with an uncontested fact, namely, that there was a kanephoros

in the procession of the Great Dionysia, and thus at least some female presence—a parthenos chosen for this particular occasion. ‘It is hard to believe’, writes Jeffrey Henderson, ‘that the basket carrier who led the procession at the Great Dionysia was the only female present or was barred from watching the plays, to say nothing of the Basilinna, the official wife of Dionysus. *’ He defends this claim by reference to the evidently important role of women in religious matters, and the relaxation at times of festival of the normal restrictions on female mobility. This seems to me to be a poorly argued point, and there are many other elements of the pompe and women’s

role in religion that need to be considered before one could assent to Henderson's appeal to likelihood. First, the basket carrier is a parthenos, a category in Greek thought surrounded by particular taboos;3* a parthenos 37 Henderson (n. I), 136. 38 A big bibliography could be given on this now: see H. King, ‘Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women’, in A. Cameron and A. Kuhrt (eds.), Images of Women in Antiquity (London and Melbourne, 1983); G. Sissa, Greek Virginity, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);

Representing Democracy 361 would normally appear before male eyes only when protected by ritual, as in the pompe of the Great Dionysia, and other pompai. But what of other parthenoi? Does Henderson mean to suggest that they too would process? There are many cults and processions with specific roles for parthenoi, but the many examples collected by Fehrle do not bear out Henderson's assertion that a single parthenos in a procession necessarily implies anything for the class of women as a whole.*? Furthermore, if there was a komos at the end of the pompe (it is debated whether the komos mentioned in the sources is merely a description of the celebration of the pompe or a separate event after the pompe), is it to be assumed that citizen wives and daughters, who could not attend a symposium in their own houses, took part in such an informal ‘revel’? (Here the difference between citizen wives, prostitutes, and slaves, that was important for the lawcourt, is also crucial. It is, of course, much easier to imagine slaves and prostitutes at a komos, as they attended symposia and were not subject to the same regulation as citizens’ wives and daughters. )

There are two fourth-century passages which talk, albeit briefly, of the celebration of the pompe at the Dionysia, and which have not been adequately analysed. The first and less instructive is from Aeschines, who is scornfully describing the ridiculous way that Timarchus behaved (In Tim. 43): The occasion was the pompe of the Great Dionysia. Misgolas, who had got hold of Timarchus, and Phaedrus, son of Callias, from the deme Sphettus, were to process together [sumpompeuein]. Timarchus had agreed to process together with them, but

they were busy with the rest of their preparations, and he did not come back. Misgolas was annoyed at this business, and went with Phaedrus to look for him. They got word and found him in an inn having breakfast with some foreigners. Misgolas and Phaedrus threatened the foreigners and ordered them to follow straight to prison, because they had corrupted [diaphtheirein] a free youth. The foreigners were so frightened that they dropped everything and left.

For sure, this story does not tell us much about the pompe—it is more concerned with the ridiculousness of the public, sexual, tiff between the men—but it does seem to imply that the decision to process and with whom seems to have been taken by the participants themselves, at least when in

an unofficial capacity as here (though this is perhaps not an inevitable conclusion from the passage); and that Timarchus’ failing to arrive for the procession because he was eating with a group of foreigners is especially galling to Misgolas and leads to a public row. Granted the usual Athenian worries about public contact with the display of women, it may be arguable that the greater the degree of fluidity in the pompe and its organization, the less likely it is, despite the ‘increased mobility’ of women at festival time, A. Rousselle, Porneia, trans. F. Pheasant (Oxford, 1988); and most recently L. Dean-Jones, Women's Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford, 1994).

39 E, Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum (Giessen, 1910/1966).

362 Simon Goldhill that the wives and daughters of citizens simply marched along (sumpompeuein), rather than processed in a more formal, representative mode. Unfortunately, the passages from the late lexicographers which describe metic women’s activity in processions, which are sometimes cited to suggest that metic wives or daughters processed at the Great Dionysia as they did at the Panathenaia, in no case specify the pompe of the Dionysia; rather, just a generalized plural en pompais, ‘in processions’ is repeatedly used.*°

The second passage is more instructive, since it specifies contact between the genders at the pompe of the Dionysia. It is a fragment of Menander that reads (fr. 558 K): It was the pompe of the Dionysia ... He followed me right to my door. Then with constant visits and flatteries, He got to know me and my mother.

This passage is translated or adapted by Plautus in the Cistellaria (8993). A female tells how she came into contact with a man, who flattered his way into her company, after following her home, presumably from the pompe of the Great Dionysia. In Plautus, the character is a prostitute, and in Menander the contact imaged between the girl and the man does not suggest the normal restrictions of the patriarchal citizen household. The lacuna in the text—which has often been filled from Plautus—and the fragmentary nature of the quotation, make it hard to analyse. But I assume from it that in at least the fourth century there was some opportunity for at least some—perhaps mainly lower class or non-citizen—women to watch

the pompe and, as importantly, be watched. Perhaps ‘nice girls’ watched from the roof ... It is significant that both of these passages refer to some sort of illicit (sexual) contact stemming from the events around the pompe, and that the female, of dubious background, is subject to the prying male gaze and seductive behaviour. From this far from satisfactory material it is perhaps possible to conclude that there was some female presence at the pompe, certainly in a ritual capacity, and, with the usual class and age negotiations to be made, as spectators of the procession. But even if some women did attend the pompe and even the komos, what does that imply about the days on which the plays were performed, and about the space of the theatre itself? The days— and space—of theatrical performance are quite separate, and could—like the different days and events of the Panathenaia—involve different senses of participation, different notions of performance. Let us consider two 4° For a concerted attempt to read this evidence to show the presence of metic wives at the Great Dionysia, see Sourvinou-Inwood (above, p. 271 n. 9).

Representing Democracy 363 other Dionysiac festivals very briefly to make this point more widely. The Anthesteria is a particularly interesting celebration in this light (though hard to analyse securely).*’ While the festival may have included a ritual involving girls and swings (perhaps on the last day), what is to be made of

the drinking competition, the central involvement of the festival in the Dionysiac sphere of wine-making? It is clear that even slaves attended the Choes in the spirit of Dionysiac liberational celebration, and that the final drunken procession of drinkers ended at a sanctuary in the marshes run by

a priestess and the graiai, fourteen venerable women, attendants to the queen, whose sacred marriage with Dionysos is one of the most obscure and speculated about elements of the day. But are we to imagine that women, the wives and daughters of citizens, participated in the drinking and the drunken revels also? For all the associations of women and excessive wine-drinking in Athens, that connection is never made for the Anthesteria

to my knowledge by ancient or modern writers: I have never seen it suggested that any women, let alone citizens’ daughters and wives, attended

the Choes (though the silence of our sources does not strictly preclude it, and a shared ancient and modern sense of propriety may be the cause of the invisibility). Again, it is useful to distinguish on the one hand between regulated ritual roles for women and the more chaotic participation of children, slaves, and citizens at the Choes, and on the other between slaves, or prostitutes, and citizens’ wives and daughters. So too at the Lenaia it is possible that female maenads participated in the ritual pompe, but there is no suggestion in the sources of a group of maenads in the audience for the plays (or of more general female attendance).*’ Different days, different types of ritual event, different spaces with different boundaries and expectations, can and often do combine in a single extended festival—and involve different

participation, different articulation of the roles within the Athenian polis. Both Podlecki and Henderson wonder rhetorically if it is believable that the parthenos who led the pompe of the Great Dionysia did not attend the plays the next day. It is both believable and likely. As opposed to the pompe, there is no evident ritual role for the women in the theatre. Let us move finally inside the theatron, however. I have written at length elsewhere about the pre-play ceremonials of the Great Dionysia, and the development of a particular image of citizen obligation and duty before the dramas themselves.*? I need add here only that there is no place in any of

these ceremonials for any female participation, nor (thus) for the rep4" Standard account in W. Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. J. Raffan (Oxford, 1985), 237-42: lengthier and more speculative account in M. Daraki, Dionysos (Paris, 1985); detailed work on the material evidence in R. Hamilton, Choes and Anthesteria (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992). 4? The very difficult evidence is marshalled in DFA 25-42. 43 ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, in J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin (eds.), Nothing To Do with Dionysus? (Princeton, NJ, 1990).

364 Simon Goldhill resentation of female ideals (as opposed to citizen ideals) on this civic stage, except in their absence. I want here to extend the sense of a civic audience

with regard to the topography of lawcourt, Assembly, and festival culture that I have been discussing. First, seating. The kerkides of the theatron are divided according to socio-political divisions. The Council of 500 sat in a special section called by Aristophanes the bouleutikon.*+ They were attended

by the eight servants of the Council, who had special seats also, and who were there, although slaves, precisely because of their special civic function in the democratic polis. It should be remembered that the Council had a compulsory topographical spread of fifty from each tribe, and that the Dithyrambic competitions were also organized on a tribal basis (and involved a great number of citizen participants), and that the judges for the theatrical competitions were selected also from tribal rosters. The ephebes who were paraded as war-orphans also had special honorific seats, and Winkler somewhat uncritically follows the scholia to Aristophanes

and Pollux in assuming the class of ephebes itself had special seating even in the fifth century.*> At very least, the war-orphans distinguish— ceremonially and spatially—the class of those about to adopt full citizen duties. The prohedriai, or front stalls, were further reserved for dignitaries of the state and foreign ambassadors. Most controversially, it has been suggested that each kerkis was reserved for a particular tribe (with a further kerkis at least for foreigners and/or metics, who may also have been mixed into each block).4° The evidence for this is poor. Late inscriptions show that this was the arrangement in Hadrianic times (which proves nothing for the classical polis). A fragment of a comedy called Female Power (Gunaikokratia) by Alexis has a character complain of having to sit in ‘the last kerkis like foreigners’, which may imply that particularized blocks of seating did exist (at least for

foreigners or metics). Without a context, however, and in a play whose topsy-turvy world is proclaimed by its very title, the fragment can only remain tantalizing. The best evidence for tribal seating is the lead tokens which have survived from the fourth century or earlier, and which are usually taken to be tickets for the theatre.*” These are inscribed with tribal 44 Birds 794. 45 J. Winkler, ‘The Ephebes’ Song: tragdidia and polis’, in Winkler and Zeitlin (n. 43), 39-40.

Sourvinou-Inwood (above) also may not be cautious enough in using such late evidence to uncover fifth-century ritual. 4° Winkler 39—41. If it were certain that the seating on the Pnyx were tribal (as asserted by e.g. E. Staveley, Greek and Roman Voting and Elections (London, 1972), 81-2; F. Kolb, Agora und Theater, Volks- und Festversammlung (Berlin, 1981), 93; and G. Stanton and P. Bicknell, ‘Voting

in Tribal Groups in the Athenian Assembly’, GRBS 28 (1987), 51-92), then this might offer further support for tribal seating in the theatre (where an assembly was also held). Since, however, it is not certain (see M. Hansen, ‘How Did the Athenian Ecclesia Vote?’, GRBS 18 (1977), 135-6), I merely note the possibility. 47 For the evidence see DFA 270-2.

Representing Democracy 365 names. This may imply that tribal organization for seating was important even in the Classical city. What is more, the theoric fund was distributed according to the deme-roll, and thus money for attending the theatre was distributed according to the same socio-political divisions of the state. Certainty is not possible here, but tribal seating would find a strong analogy in the other elements of tribal organization in the festival. In very general terms, at least, it can be concluded with Winkler that the audience in the theatre maps the citizen body, its hierarchies, and socio-political order: “The layout of the auditorium formed (at least ideally) a kind of map of the civic corporation, with all the tensions and balances.’*° What place, then, for women? Henderson assumes—on the basis of the fragment of Alexis that I have just quoted, and the passage of the Peace that I began with—that women had a special section for themselves to the rear

of the theatre—too high for krithai. What worries me here is not just the extremely poor evidence—a factor in most of this discussion—but that the implications of this claim are not explored adequately. Henderson writes ‘women attended in the company of other women’ since ‘husbands would be unlikely to come to the theatre or depart with their wives’.*? This to my mind gives an extraordinary picture. ‘It is hard to believe —to use Henderson’s own argumentative technique—that well-born Athenian women wandered to the theatre and home again with their friends through the crowded festival city. Without a ritual role to protect them, walking in full view of men, to sit in the gaze of the citizens without male protection. Could

any woman attend or were there tickets, as there were for the men? How would such tickets be regulated? Would differences between citizens’ wives and daughters, prostitutes, slaves, and foreigners be maintained—and how?

It seems to me that the case for women’s presence in the theatre has to produce a more plausible picture both of where women sat and how they travelled to, entered, and left the theatre.

Henderson goes on to write that ‘if women attended and were seated separately from their husbands the dramatic festivals like others would have allowed a certain scope for hanky-panky, and the comic poets occasionally

play with that idea’.°° He gives two examples. The first is a well-known passage from the Birds which is usually quoted to support precisely the opposite claim, namely, that women did not attend the theatre (785-96): ‘There’s nothing better or more agreeable than to grow wings ... if there’s any one of you who happens to be having an affair with a married woman, and he sees the lady’s husband in the Councillors’ seats, he could have flown off, fucked her, and flown from her house back here.’ These lines do not indeed prove that no woman attended the theatre, but I see no evidence

here for ‘hanky-panky’ in the theatre at all. It seems rather to assume . 48 (n. 45), 38-9. 49 (n. 1), 142. 5° (n. 1), 142.

366 Simon Goldhill exactly the opposite: that you can leave the theatre because you know that your lover, by design or necessity, is not in the theatre. The second passage is from the Thesmophoriazusai, where a woman complains that Euripides makes her husband suspicious (395-7): ‘So when our husbands come from the theatre the first thing they do is give us a suspicious lookover and check the house for a hidden lover.’ Again, there seems to be no comment here

on ‘hanky-panky’ in the theatre, but rather the assumption that women stay at home and men watch plays about women. Indeed, Henderson remarks ‘were this passage a fragment, it would be evidence compatible with the hypothesis that women, or at least some women, did not attend the theatre’. But, he continues, ‘earlier in the passage the speaker mentions seeing the plays herself (386 épwoa), so that her argument about unreasonable suspiciousness may gain force if the husband looks for a lover even though he knows his wife has been at the festival’. The lines in question,

however, simply do not refer to the wife seeing plays, except by a most tendentious and selective translation (384-8): AAG yap Bapéws hépw radaiva trodvv dn ypdvov

mpoomnAakilomévas 6p@oa ds bd

Edpiidov tot tis AaxavorwAntpias Kat TOAAG Kal TavTO’ aKOoVOvGaS KAKG.

but the reason is that I take it badly, and have done for a long while, long-suffering that I am, when I see that we are insulted by Euripides, the vegetable-woman’s son, and that we are slandered in foul and numerous ways.

The woman is upset when she ‘sees’ how Euripides insults women. The participle ép@oa, as often in Greek, means here a more general sense of perception or recognition, and implies nothing about a theatrical audience at the Great Dionysia. I have discussed these two examples and what is a very strained argument because they are the best that Henderson—or any one else—can come up with for any male/female interaction in the theatre—and significantly both specify not merely a scene outside the theatre but also a scene in which the

woman has not been at the theatre. This is in marked contrast with the evidence, scanty as it is, for contact between the genders at the pompe, and also with the very different sense of an erotics of the theatre in Roman and later cultures. A final range of evidence that needs to be considered is the fantasy world of the comic stage: the Ecclesiazusai depends for its humour on the founding

conceit of reversal, where women take over the all-male space of the Assembly. Is there an equivalent for the theatre? There are two possibilities

Representing Democracy 367 known to me, and both are difficult to analyse with any certainty. The first is the Alexis fragment that I have already mentioned from the Female Power. It is the complaint of a female character concerning seating in the theatre: ‘We women have to sit here to watch in the very last kerkis, like foreigners.’ Henderson argues that this passage indicates (a) that women were usually in the theatre; (b) that the plot depends on women outrageously sitting in the men’s seats.°* Neither conclusion seems necessary or even convincing to me. It is at least equally plausible that the play is about females taking over the theatre (as a ridiculous reversal of norms) and then arguing among themselves about the perks of their new authority, as in the Ecclesiazusai or the Lysistrata. Without a context or speaker, the fragment is particularly hard to utilize. The second case is equally fragmentary: Aristophanes’ X«jvas KatadapBavovoar, ‘Women seizing the skenai’. cataAauBavew is the verb used

of the women taking over the Assembly in the Ecclesiazusai, and skenai is

used regularly of the stage. The fragments ‘strongly suggest a theatrical festival with women spectators’, writes Henderson, who then concludes that the play is about ‘women competing with men ever booths or shelters, not seats at a theatrical festival’—a conclusion that seems precariously based indeed. Henderson suggests that the booths are ‘temporary shelters for those attending a festival’. If the play is a drama of gendered reversal, as the title suggests, are such booths enough of a male preserve to found the conceit? Neither fragment or title, it seems, can be used as supporting evidence for the presence of women in the theatre.

Most scholars offer a certain conclusion for or against the presence of women, despite the evident uncertainty of the evidence. One reason for this

haste towards certainty is that considerable implications for our understanding of the festival and its place in the city follow from such conclusions. The force of drama is determined by its audience. If there are only men and

predominantly Athenian citizens present, then the plays’ evident concern

with gender politics and with social debate and with the practice of deliberative life within the city become questions addressed to the citizen

body as a body: it is as citizens that an audience may be expected to respond. The issues of the play are focused firmly through the male, adult, enfranchised perspective. The festival begins with the pompe and related celebrations, which involve less closely defined participatory activity, together with a ritual frame which allows at least a delimited, representative female participation. In the next days, as we move into the theatron itself, we find

an audience seated in a way to map the socio-political divisions of the polis—representing democracy. The hierarchies of official seats (prohedriai), the sections for representatives of the polis, the possible tribal seating as well as tribal organization of the festival competitions, together with the tickets 5* (n. I), 140-1.

368 Simon Goldhill and eventually theoric funding organized on a deme basis, all enforce the sense of the democratic, participatory theates. As the city constituted by the audience represents democracy, so this audience is faced in the theatre first

by rituals that promote and project an ideal of civic engagement and behaviour, and second by plays that represent democracy in a quite different way. At the same time, the actors are funded by the polis, while the chorus is supported by a liturgy—the choregos selected by a state official to represent

a democratic contribution. At these different and overlapping levels, the Great Dionysia is concerned with representing democracy. As a civic event, the scene in the theatron would be much closer to the Assembly than to the Panathenaia, while sharing elements of both. The Assembly that closes the

festival and that discusses the festival’s running (a typically democratic institution of accountability) is held in the theatron itself— which draws the theatron as civic space closer still to the central political institutions of the polis.

If women were present, although, as Henderson rightly argues, the proper

or intended audience remains the citizen body, and although the citizen perspective remains dominant, it is in the gaze of the citizens and their wives

that the plays are enacted. So Henderson can write: ‘some passages in Aristophanes virtually call out for partisan cheers from ... undecorous and unruly women’>’—as if the tensions on stage are to be rehearsed in the audience. (He does not make the same point for foreigners, metics or slaves.) Democracy’s institutions of self-reflection and self-representation would be

an event shared between male and female; the implications for power relations and gender relations could be immense. If citizen women did walk through the streets, sit in the theatre, watch plays, be watched, walk home— much modern writing on the role of women in the oikos and polis would need a new emphasis. Whether women are to be thought of as a silenced presence on the map of the city, then, or as an absent sign, what I want to emphasize is the way that the Great Dionysia is at all levels of the festival and in all senses represents

democracy. This is one reason why the question of female attendance at the Great Dionysia has been debated so long with such little evidence. For the question of how the polis represents itself to itself is also the question of

how modern historians wish to represent the first democracy. What is at stake for the modern historian in the questions of representing democracy and representing gender is a continuing issue. What I hope to have shown in this chapter is not whether women were present or not at the Great Dionysia. The evidence on either side simply will not allow such a firm conclusion. (By framing my remarks as a critique of Henderson, there is inevitably a slant to my comments, however.) Rather, I ? (n. I), 146.

Representing Democracy 369 would see the point of this paper as widening the question away from the

re-reading of a few well-known so-called testimonia, towards thinking about the Great Dionysia as a socio-political event, and as a socio-political institution within the new topography of democracy. (History cannot be written merely by collecting testimonia.) The Great Dionysia is an institution

that represents democracy and needs to be seen in comparison with the other great institutions and spaces for citizens in Athens—the Assembly, Lawcourt, Panathenaia, gymnasium, etc. I have offered a largely synchronic

view; but these institutions are not only in a relation with each other in the topography of democratic Athens, but also change over time. Elements of tribal organization presumably post-date Cleisthenes’ reforms; the display

of tribute must be dated to a time after the transfer of the treasury from Delos; the parade of orphans seems not to have been practised in 330BCc; inscriptions show a changing role for ephebes as a group. A diachronic perspective should make us not only cautious in using later evidence to illumine fifth-century practice, but also acutely conscious of a changing and developing socio-politics of theatre that can affect each aspect of the questions I have been broaching. With changing senses of citizenship, public display,

and the politics of participation, what it means to ask about attendance at the theatre changes. This sense of the scope of enquiry is essential. The question of audience attendance cannot be divorced from the question of what it means to be a theates in democratic Athens; and the question of the gender of the audience cannot be divorced from issues of female attendance at other festivals—a sadly underdiscussed topic—and from ancient discourses of gender, visibility and participation. Indeed, even to frame the question as

‘were women at the Great Dionysia?’, as we have seen, is to distort the crucial distinctions between citizens’ wives and daughters on the one hand,

and slaves, prostitutes, and foreigners and metics on the other. It is as a stimulus to further research on such social and topographical issues that I offer this chapter, out of respect for David Lewis and the critical verve and intellectual insight of The Dramatic Festivals of Athens—second edition.

22 Children’s Rights, Children’s Speech and Agamemnon MARK GOLDEN

In South Africa, as in many other countries, the voting age is 18. Recently however, Nelson Mandela proposed to give 14-year-olds the vote. ‘They say a person under the age of 14 can’t think correctly and make wise choices,’ Mandela told an audience in Natal. ‘We reject that.’ Mandela’s announce-

ment apparently took the rest of the ANC leadership by surprise; the reaction of the National Party government was simply hostile. ‘If 14-yearolds can vote, one may as well ask why not I2-year-olds or even 10-yearolds,’ said Home Affairs Minister Danie Schutte. The idea, he went on, would

not receive serious consideration in any civilized country." We need not linger over Schutte’s response. After all, his civilized country long resisted recognizing the democratic rights of even adult South Africans unless their skins were white, but was willing to treat demonstrators as young as 8 the Same aS grown-ups: police shot them too. And in fact, there are nations whose citizens vote before 18. North Koreans may vote at 17, Nicaraguans

at 16. In Afghanistan, at least before the establishment of an Islamic Republic in April 1992, voting was restricted to males only, between 15 and 50 years of age. It is tempting to be rather cynical about this, and to suggest that North Koreans could have the right to vote at 17 months for all the difference it would make in the world’s longest-lived dictatorship. More persuasive

perhaps, many jurisdictions provide some important adult rights and responsibilities to those much too young to vote—and maintain some political restrictions even on voters. In my own province of Manitoba, for Thanks to Simon Hornblower and Robin Osborne for organization, hospitality, and editing;

to Bob Carr and Shawn Greenberg for free legal advice; to Christopher Carey and Lene Rubinstein for comments at the conference; to Simon Goldhill, Emmet Robbins, and Mac Wallace for subsequent advice. Unfortunately, this final version is still about four per cent short of perfection as a result of pay cuts at the University of Winnipeg.

" My source is The Globe and Mail, national edition, 25 May 1993, p. A8. At the other end of the political spectrum, Canadian Reform Party leader Preston Manning has proposed that teenagers as young as 13 should be able to vote in non-binding national referenda (Winnipeg Free Press, 16 October 1993, p. AIO).

372 Mark Golden example, teenagers may be tried in adult court at 12, drive at 16, and vote and run for office at 18—by which time they may already have been earning wages and paying income and consumption taxes for several years; but they

will not be eligible for the Canadian Senate until they reach 30. Some American states permit teenagers to drive as young as 13, to marry as young as I4. As these variations suggest, the question of children’s rights in a democracy is a complicated one. It is made still more so by the fact that it involves two contradictory currents. One (which we may call ‘liberationist’) focuses on the active exercise of rights enjoyed by adults, such as voting and office holding. The other, the concern of ‘protectionists’, is older, at least in North America.’ The first legal recognition of children’s rights in the USA stemmed from the ‘Mary Ellen affair’ of 1874. In the absence of any laws against the abuse and neglect of children, a social worker persuaded the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals to prosecute a young girl’s parents, on the grounds that children are of an animal species and so likewise entitled to protection against mistreatment. Special status for children has since become one of the marks of membership in the family of nations, so much so that

a study of 139 national constitutions concludes that ‘the ideology of childhood has been incorporated in the structure of the state throughout the world’.* Neither technological development nor availability of resources seems to affect the claim of governments to control and (allegedly at least) to protect children. People’s democracies and Catholic countries have aimed at a more pervasive presence in children’s lives than bourgeois democracies

and nations in which Protestantism is the state religion. But the main variable the authors of this study could identify was time: the expansion of state authority over childhood has steadily increased everywhere since 1870. If I concentrate today on the active exercise of citizen rights, then, it is not because there is insufficient material for a comparative study of the right of children to protection. Rather, it is because positive political rights, the right to vote in particular, seem most straightforward to deal with. Simply put:

while some children’s rights activists object to child labour laws, child welfare legislation, truancy acts requiring school attendance, and similar measures as paternalistic, and others condemn them as unconstitutional curtailments of civil liberties, none objects in principle to the extension of the franchise so far as I am aware. But what to compare? All democracies (however defined) place an age qualification on their electorates, and though these thresholds do differ, they * For these currents, see P. Goodman, ‘Introduction’, in P. Adams et al. (eds.) Children’s Rights: Toward the Liberation of the Child (New York, 1971), I-8. 3 J. Boli-Bennett and J. W. Meyer, ‘The Ideology of Childhood and the State: Distinguishing Children in National Constitutions, 1870-1970’, American Sociological Review, 43 (1978), 797—

812, at 804.

Children’s Rights 373 tend to cluster in the late teens. It is the justifications for this limitation of the franchise which ought to prove more variable, and so more revealing of both conceptions of democracy and definitions of and attitudes towards children. This is hardly the stuff of constitutions; they tend to accentuate the positive. The best source of modern comparative material, I suspect, is the mass of debates in the many legislatures which have decided to reduce

the voting age (often from 21 to 18) over the last couple of decades. Unfortunately, there are no Greek Hansards on this subject. What I propose, therefore, is to glance at a few examples of educated, expert opinion on the citizen status of the young, ancient and modern. I expect to show that this is one area where the Greeks, much maligned (by my students at least) for their failure to enfranchise women, were as advanced (or as backward) as

we. I will then suggest one reason for their failure to consider children fit to participate in their political process: the legacy of the Homeric ideal of excellence in speech as well as in battle. I will conclude by stressing the importance of children’s communication of meaning for our understanding of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. It was from this text that this inquiry began; I trust readers will not think that !ve made a mountain out of a Goldhill. I

The experts, then. On the Greek side, we can round up three of the usual suspects, varied enough in genre, time, and origin to be representative of conventional wisdom denying the political competence of the young. Heraclitus (so says Diogenes Laertius) advised the men of archaic Ephesus to hang themselves for expelling his friend Hermodorus and to leave their city to the under-age (tois anhébois).* The sting, of course, is that even the unfit would run the polis better than they. Perhaps one hundred years later, Thucydides has the popular leader Athenagoras address the Syracusan assembly. ‘You young men (06 nedteroi)’, he says, ‘what do you want? To hold office is against the law, since you are incapable (ek tou mé dunasthai humas).’> Aristotle’s Politics provides fourth-century evidence. Children are

referred to as qualified citizens only, citizens by assumption, as they are ateleioi, not yet fully grown; the mark of the citizen pure and simple is the capacity to participate in judicial functions and serve in office.° Much could be said about each of these comments. What matters here is that in none of these well-known texts do we find anything like an argument; nothing is 4 Heraclitus 22 B 121 D~K ( = Diog. Laert. 9. 2), cf. Strabo 14. 642. > Thuc. 6. 38. 5. On such generational conflict during the period, see now B. S. Strauss, Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1993), esp. 130-211.

6 Pol. 3 1275°14—-33, cf. I 1260°20, 3 127874, 8 1339730; EE 2 1219°5; MM 1194°IS: . [Arist.] Probl. 10. 46 896719.

374 Mark Golden said as to how and why the young are unfit for political life. This is perhaps

most striking in Athenagoras’ speech, since the young men here are old enough to attend the assembly. Yet even here assertion alone suffices to exclude them from office-holding.

Time passes. The leaves fall. The snow sprinkles, the snow swirls, the snow spreads. Yes, we are in Canada, in the 1980s. This was the decade of the new Canadian Constitution and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees all individuals equality before and under the law unless the state can show that limits on rights are ‘demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society’: this Charter (unlike, say, the US Bill of Rights) explicitly extends its rights and freedoms to those of any age. At the same time, studies of child development indicated that the transition to the highest stage of reasoning, involving formal operations, begins at about age 12, and is consolidated during adolescence;’ of course, some children mature more

rapidly—Fred Greenstein found that six per cent of eighth graders (about 13 years old) make the same kinds of statements as his most politically aware adults, referring to ideological differences among parties and the class composition of their constituencies.* Besides, it is apparent that development is not determined solely by biological factors but depends as well on social and cultural influences.? Considerations such as these had already led one

mainstream American political scientist to conclude that young people should be enfranchised at 15, at least for school board elections and similar

matters which directly affect their lives.‘° Furthermore, appeals to adult electors in the 80s were based more and more on image and emotion, not the use of any cognitive skills. And when voters did cast their ballots on the basis of rational evaluations of policies and programs, they discovered that parties in power did not carry them out. Anyone who watched the behaviour

of Labour and other supposedly social democratic parties in office likely recalled the old anarchist adage: if voting could make a difference, it would be illegal.

Yet, despite all this, many commentators at the time (and since) continue to regard the exclusion of children even from voting (let along office-holding)

as self-evident. I offer three more texts; all from lawyers or law professors ” See e.g. H. Ginsburg and S. Opper, Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development: An Introduction

(Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1969), 450-1. For a more recent survey of research on the child’s cognitive development, see J. Wilson, ‘Children and Equality Rights’, in A. F. Bayefsky and M. Eberts (eds.), Equality Rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Toronto, 1985),

293-322, at 298. ® F. I. Greenstein, Children and Politics (New Haven, Conn., 1965), 68-9. ? See e.g. A. Skolnick, ‘The Limits of Childhood: Conceptions of Child Development and Social Context’, Law and Contemporary Problems, 39.3 (1975). 38-77. "° F. Schrag, ‘The Child’s Status in the Democratic State’, Political Theory 3, (1975), 441-— 57:

Children’s Rights 375 writing in the mid ‘80s on the likely implementation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Here is Walter Tarnopolsky, now an eminent judge:

‘Age and natural or physical disability are clearly subject to bona fide qualifications or requirements.’’’ Here are Bala and Cruickshank, in a book on children’s rights: ‘While s. 3 of the Charter guarantees every citizen of

Canada the “right to vote’, it would not be difficult to ‘‘demonstrably justify’ the need to deprive children of the right to vote, although there might be some disagreement as to the age and circumstances under which young people should be free of this deprivation.’*” Finally, Lynn Smith, a law professor discussing the relation of the Charter to British Columbia law.'? Smith notes that the Charter had already been used to strike down the disenfranchisement of convicts, and remarks, ‘To build an ability quali-

fication into the definition of the ‘right to vote’ is to open the door to legislation seriously infringing what most Canadians would consider to be one of their most basic rights.’ Someone, Smith goes on, might use such precedents to argue for the enfranchisement of children. But surprisingly ‘these challenges would ... have little chance of success given the obvious

need for such restrictions and the comparisons with other jurisdictions which would be made.’ Not only does Smith not explain why this restriction

is easier to defend than that on convicts (who at least make up a class of citizens who might be thought to have distinguished themselves from others);

her reference to comparisons with other jurisdictions contradicts the wish, expressed earlier in her article, that Canadian courts not confine themselves to references to the practices of other jurisdictions in rejecting challenges under the Charter. Don’t get me wrong. I'm not interested in arguing that 4-year-olds or even I4-year-olds should vote. My point is simply that many contemporary Canadian commentators have felt free to rely on assertions about what is clear or obvious when they discuss children’s democratic rights. Argument and debate seem as unnecessary to them as they did to Greeks 2500 years

ago. Maybe they are right; in fact, no one has yet tested the Canadian Charter in this area (though another once disenfranchised group, judges, has recently benefited from its provisions). But remember: if we had met at Oxford 100 years ago, some of the participants at this conference might have noted that the Greeks excluded women from political life just as we Canadians or Americans or whoever did back then, and most would probably ‘' “The Equality Rights’, in G.-A. Beaudoin and W. S. Tarnopolsky (eds.), The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Commentary (Toronto, 1982), 395-442, at 422.

'? N. Bala and D. Cruickshank, ‘Children and the Charter of Rights’, in B. Landau (ed.), Children’s Rights in the Practice of Family Law (Toronto, 1980), 28-92, at 36. ‘3 L. Smith, ‘Charter Equality Rights: Some General Issues and Specific Applications in British Columbia to Elections, Juries and Illegitimacy’, University of British Columbia Law Review, 18

(1984), 351-406, at 381-2 and 384.

376 Mark Golden have felt little need to make much of it. Surely, if we learn anything from the past, it is to call into question our own assumptions.'* I suspect that a full debate on the political rights of children would clarify a lot of our beliefs and illusions about our own democracies. Goodness knows they could stand some examination. I]

What would our Greek authorities say if you asked them why the young, and children all the more, are unfit for political participation? Aristotle, for one, would probably be hard put to see the problem. Developmentally inclined, he clearly assumes the exclusion of boys at least to be only a temporary measure, and so of little consequence. In the end, however, physical weakness, the inability to fight effectively, would probably be the main reason. Poor judgement, moral inferiority would also play a part; these were attributes children shared with other disenfranchised groups, women and (perhaps especially) slaves.**> But I expect that children’s perceived deficiencies in communication would figure too. Peleus sent Phoenix along with Achilles to teach him to be a speaker of words, not just a doer of deeds, and other heroes in the Iliad attest to the need to excel in both deliberation and battle.*® Rhetorical persuasion retained its importance long after. This was of course especially true in the classical democracies, where verbal skill had so much influence in forming public policy. Pericles, himself a notable

orator, sums up its role in the last speech Thucydides gives him: the man who knows what is best for the polis but can’t explain it might as well not have his idea at all.*’ Achilles was still népios, an attribute for those not fully connected to the community, long believed (whether rightly or not) to be related to roots referring to speech.’® Later too young men were not likely to win a hearing in public affairs. So Thrasymachus of Chalcedon prefaces one of his public speeches (démogorik6n logén) with an apology for speaking out and a pious

preference for the good old days, when young men (hoi nedteroi) were ‘4 An excellent model is provided by Marilyn Katz’s recent examination of the roots of modern scholarship on women in antiquity, ‘Ideology and ‘‘the Status of Women” in Ancient Greece’, in A.-L. Shapiro (ed.), History and Feminist Theory (History and Theory Beiheft 31: Middletown, Conn., 1992) 70-97. *5 See M. Golden, ‘Pais, ‘‘Child’’ and ‘‘Slave’’’, AntCl 54 (1985), 91-104, and, for more on the qualities which rendered the young unfit for political involvement, K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Berkeley, Calif., and Los Angeles, 1974) 1028.

© Il. 9. 443, cf. I. 258, 2. 201-2, 9. 53, ete. ‘7 Thuc. 2. 60. 5-6. '8 See S. T. Edmunds, Homeric NH/JTIOZ (Diss. Harvard 1976), summarized in HSCP 81 (1977), 299-300.

Children’s Rights 377 expected to remain silent.'? There is an amusing account of the consequences of belying this expectation in Xenophon’s Memorabilia.*° Young Glaucon is

eager to address the assembly (démagorein), and none of his friends and relatives can stop him, though he is dragged from the béma and ridiculed. Serving as a kind of cult deprogrammer, Socrates finally gets him to shut up by asking him how he intends to help the city. When Glaucon does at last express an opinion, it is to demonstrate wrong-headed notions about the defence of Attica: he falls short of the Homeric hero in both crucial realms. Socrates points the moral: it’s dangerous to speak or act when you don't understand. The reactionary refrain that only the expert should lead the city is cloaked in democracy’s prejudice against participation by the young.

If even young men past the age of majority cannot yet speak sensibly, what can we expect of children? The inability to speak at all was one of the shortcomings which assimilated newborns and infants to animals. As the nurse says in Choephori, ‘It’s hard to look after something which has no sense, like a beast ... For the child still in swaddling clothes doesn’t say anything when it’s hungry or thirsty or needs to urinate.’?* Young children are said to bleat, blékhanein, like sheep and goats, or to roar, brukhasthai, like beasts and storms.*” The Argive elders in Agamemnon, no stronger than

children, are taunted for their népiois ulagmasin, ‘infantile barking’—the word is usually reserved for dogs.*? Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: in the beginning, says Empedocles, fire sent up undifferentiated shapes of earth,

without the voice and organs proper to humankind; the Eleatic Stranger of the Politicus regards the ability to talk to the animals as one of the features of the long-lost Saturnia regna.**

When children do find their voices (notes Aristotle), they cannot control their tongues or talk clearly, they mumble and lisp.*> Among later writers, Chrysippus thought that children learning to speak do not use real words at all, but quasi-talk; no better than ravens or crows, they do not put each word in its place with understanding.”° How long does that take? According to Diogenes of Babylon, Chrysippus’ pupil and Zeno’s successor as head of the Stoic school, ‘While the voice or cry of an animal is just a percussion of *? Thrasymachus 85 B 1 D-K ( = Dion. Hal. Demos. 3). *° Xen. Mem. 3. 6. *" Cho. 753-7. For children and animals in the philosophic tradition, see the references in M. Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore, 1990), 185 nn. 32, 33, and the discussion in B. Inwood, Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford, 1985), 72-5. *? Sept. 348, Ar. Wasps 570, Eupolis fr. 112 K—A; Men. fr. 1004 Edmonds. *3 Ag. 1631. *4 Empedocles 31 B 62 D-K ( = Simplicius, in Phys. 381. 29); Pl. Plt. 272bce. *S Arist. Aud, 801°5; HA 4 5365; [Arist.] Probl. 11. 1 898°33, 11. 27 902°5 (exceptions). © Chrysippus 2. 143 SVF ( = Varro, LL 6. 56).

378 Mark Golden air brought about by natural impulse, man’s voice is articulate, an utterance of reason, and comes to maturity at 14’— that is, at the end of the second hebdomad.”’ To speak good sense earlier was a special sign; those so gifted included Cyrus at about 10, Alexander while still a boy, the son of Hermeias of Alexandria at seven months.”®

So, before they speak, children are rather like animals, and their early vocalizations are not dissimilar. Correct speech comes slowly, and is mastered only in their teens. Even then, of course, they are not yet ready to participate

in political discussions, and will not be until some time after they come of age. This set of ideas is put to comic use in Antiphanes’ Sappho.*? What is it, asks the Lesbian poet, which is female in nature and has children, brephé,

under the folds of its garment—children who are voiceless yet set up a ringing shout? Why (comes the first answer) it’s the polis (feminine in gender), and the children she rears are the public speakers, tous rhétoras. The passage goes on to satirize their venality and quarrelsomeness and to reveal that they lose their right to speak through convictions for unconstitutional proposals. For our purposes, however, what matters is that children are mute, as brephé normally are, yet able to communicate; the paradox is made still more pointed by its translation into the political sphere usually closed to the young. IT]

And so to Aeschylus. To read the Oresteia is to be sentenced to hard labour in the prison house of language. The text itself is difficult, often corrupt— an ideal medium, it may be, to express ‘the gaps, confusions, and doubts

surrounding the use of language’ in the trilogy; the Medicean is the message.*° The tritest sentiments (Clytemnestra’s) prove to be double-edged, *?7 3 Diogenes 17 SVF ( = Diog. Laert. 7. 55). 28 Hdt. 1. 114-16, Plut. Alex. 4-5, Dam. Isid. 76 = Phot. Bibl. 341b. 79 Antiphanes fr. 194 K—A ( = Athen. 10. 450e). Cf. the use made of the proverb ‘No knife for the boy’ by Eupolis fr. 133 K—A (discussed in Golden (n. 21), 38). 3° §. Goldhill, Language, Sexuality, Narrative: The Oresteia (Cambridge, 1984), 48. Studies since Goldhill include F. Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and other Classical

Poets (Ithaca, NY and London, 1985), 230-3; G. Elata-Alster, ‘The King’s Double-Bind: Paradoxical Communication in the Parados of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon’, Arethusa, 18 (1985), 23-46; W. G. Thalmann, ‘Speech and Silence in the Oresteia 1: Ag. 1025-1029’, Phoenix, 39 (1985), 98-118, and ‘Speech and Silence in the Oresteia 2’, ibid. 221-37; R. Tosi, ‘Alcuni esempi di polisemia nell’ Agamennone di Eschilo. Esegesi antica e filologia moderna’, Lexis

1989, 3-24; J. I. Porter, ‘Patterns of Perception in Aeschylus’, in M. Griffith and D. J. Mastronarde (eds.) Cabinet of the Muses: Essays on Classical and Comparative Literature in Honor

of Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (Atlanta, 1990), 31-56; P. Pucci, ‘Human Sacrifice in the Oresteia’, in R. Hexter and D. Selden (eds.), Innovations of Antiquity (New York and London, 1992), 51336.

Children’s Rights 379 ironic; the truest words (Cassandra’s) are uttered by one who did not scruple to lie to a god. And why not since even a lie may be theion, ‘divine’ (478)? It is often inanimate objects—the palace, the beacon fires, persuasive oil—

which can or could communicate most clearly. Indeed, who (or what) speaks is sometimes as significant as what is said. That the trilogy’s first words come from the humble watchman, that the nurse recounts Orestes’ infancy, that Pylades speaks at all—in these and other instances, what is crucial is the signifier, not the sign. And silence signifies too. As Rosemary

Harriott writes, ‘In the case of the animal imagery which pervades the Oresteia the animal’s inability to speak, its reliance on wordless action, is only one element, but on some occasions it is the important element.’?* Harriott’s main example is the lion cub, bright-eyed and fawning on the hand for food; a man takes it in his arms like a newborn child (717—26). There may be another reference to animal young, unable to vocalize, in a more mysterious passage in the play. Explaining Artemis’ loathing for the eagles’ feast, Calchas characterizes her as well-disposed towards fierce lions’

dewy offspring and pleasant to the breast-loving young of beasts which roam the fields (140-3). The offspring are further described as aeptois. What

does this rare word mean here?** An ancient commentator notes that young animals cannot follow their parents. This gives good sense, but the etymology, from hepesthai, is insecure. Furthermore, this interpretation does not fit the only other use of the word in Aeschylus’ extant plays at Suppliants 908, where the meaning must be something like ‘unspeakable, terrible’; this may be what aeptos means in the fragmentary Proteus too (213R), but it seems out of place for cubs under Artemis’ protection. What we need, then, is a translation reflecting a derivation from eipein, ‘to speak, say’. I suggest that the word may be active here rather than passive, ‘unspeaking’ rather than ‘unspeakable’. It is admittedly disconcerting to find Aeschylus using a

word, especially a verbal adjective with a privative prefix, in two such contrary senses, but not unparalleled even within this trilogy. Agelastos, ‘unsmiling, gloomy’ at Agamemnon 794, recurs in Choephoroi with a passive sense, ‘not to be laughed at’ (30); askopos means both ‘unperceptive’ (Ag. 462) and ‘imperceptible, difficult to perceive’ (Cho. 816). These lion cubs, then, are speechless. This accentuates their helplessness, 3" R. M. Harriott, ‘The Argive Elders, the Discerning Shepherd and the Fawning Dog: Misleading Communication in the Agamemnon’, CQ 32 (1982), 9-17, at 13. On animal imagery in general in the Oresteia , see now B. H. Fowler, ‘The Creatures and the Blood’, ICS 16 (1991),

85-100. "a For a summary of opinions, see J. Bollack, in Bollack and P. Judet de La Combe, L’Agamemnon d’Eschyle (Lille, n.d.), I. I. 165-7. The fullest recent treatment is H. Neitzel, ‘denros Oder éanros? Zur Interpretation von Aischylos, ‘Agamemnon’ 140-145’, Glotta, 56 (1978), 212-21 (arguing for the reading aaptois and the translation ‘untouchable, unable to be grasped’).

380 Mark Golden and also Artemis’ tenderness towards them: she succours even those who cannot cry out for her help. In addition, their inability to speak links them

more securely with the fawning pet who turns on its master and with another of Artemis’ favourites—Iphigeneia. She, of course, is a young girl, not only unmarried but (in Aeschylus’ version of the story) not about to be

married, sacrificed like an animal (232, cf. 1415), gagged with a beast’s bridle which allowed no sound (238) though she wished to speak (242).

The pathos of this picture is heightened by the contrast with happier occasions, when she would sing in her pure voice at her father’s feasts, honouring his propitious paean at the third libation (243-7). Such celebrations were private. Here, Iphigeneia is a participant, however unwillingly, in a public act performed for a political purpose: her voice would be out of place.

Iphigeneia is not the only child to be slaughtered in this bloody play. Cassandra's oracular visions include the feast of Thyestes, Atreus’ butchery of his brother’s boys, then served for their father’s supper. The prophetess’s

language in this scene is highly charged and suspected at first to be less than human rather than inspired by a god. Clytemnestra canvasses the possibility that she possesses only some unknown barbarian tongue, like a

swallow’s (1050-2); the chorus, noting that she is like a beast newly captured, says she is likely to need an interpreter. In the event, of course, she speaks clearly enough for those willing to hear. Still, it is a swan song she sings at the end (1444). Thyestes’ children are thus likened to Itys: he too was killed and fed to his father, and another bird, a nightingale (so says the chorus), laments his loss in strains like hers (1140-5). More important for our present purposes, the children, like Iphigeneia, appear in a public setting. In their case, however, their voices are heard. The words with which Cassandra introduces her vision of Thyestes’ feast (1095-7) as printed by Fraenkel and accepted in most other current editions and discussions are:

KA. paprupio. yap toicd’ émumeopat: KAaudpeva TA0€ Ppéhy odhayas 6mTas TE OdpKas TpOos TrTaTpos BePpwprevas.

This may be translated:** ‘Here is the testimony I trust: here are infants crying because of their slaughter and their roasted flesh, devoured by their father.’ By this interpretation, the brephé are to be recognized as providing 33, E. Fraenkel, Aeschylus Agamemnon (Oxford, 1950); cf. P. Groeneboom, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (Groningen, 1944); P. Mazon, Eschyle II’ (Paris, 1961); H. Lloyd-Jones, CR 26 (1976), 8; H. Neitzel, ‘Das Thyestes-Mahl im ‘‘Agamemnon”’ des Aischylos (1096-1097, 1217-1222,

1590-1602)’, Hermes, 113 (1985), 403-16, at 416, D. J. Conacher, Aeschylus’ Oresteia: a Literary Commentary (Toronto, 1987), 42; M. L. West, Aeschyli Tragoediae cum Incerti Poetae Prometheo (Stuttgart, 1990).

Children’s Rights 381 evidence of this horrible crime. There is, however, another view, preferred in the commentary by Denniston and Page, supported in the second edition of Thomson’s commentary on the Oresteia, and represented in the text of Page's OCT.** This involves removing the punctuation after epipeithomai and regarding marturioisi toisd(e), the evidence, as consisting of the manslaughter and ground sprinkled with blood mentioned in Cassandra's previous speech, two lines earlier (1092). I will close here by arguing briefly that the first alternative, in which the children are envisaged as proving a prosecutor’s case, is preferable, not least because it furthers some themes I’ve already identified in this play and in this paper. Of course, there is much

more that has been, and still could be said, about the children of the Oresteia.*> Here I intend merely to urge that Thyestes’ too be given the attention they deserve. On any reading, marturioisi toisd(e) is yet another use of the legal language which permeates Agamemnon and is translated, as so often, into stage action in Eumenides.*° So too the appearance of the children furthers the theme of

generational conflict, developed by the matricide in Choephoroi and the opposition of old and young gods in Eumenides. This conflict is intensified if Thyestes’ children are themselves involved in revealing the horrific history of the house, all the more so if the denunciation is not directed only at their

uncle Atreus but also at their father; the phrase pros patros bebromenas stresses that the outrage of the murder is compounded by Thyestes’ act, however unwitting. Finally, the critical role played by these children in the legal process Cassandra envisions contributes to the pervading impression

that something is out of kilter in Argos, where a woman with a man’s resolve will soon slay the king and proudly proclaim it to the people. It’s not that children were absolutely excluded from the courtrooms of the Athenian democracy. Though we know next to nothing of the legal procedures and litigious tactics of Aeschylus’ time, only shortly after—in Aristophanes’ Wasps—comedy could parody the practice of bringing in children to sway a jury’s sympathy, and we have regular references to such 34 J. D. Denniston and D. L. Page, Aeschylus Agamemnon (Oxford, 1957); G. Thomson, Aeschylus Oresteia* (Amsterdam and Prague, 1966); D. L. Page, Aeschyli Septem quae Supersunt Tragoediae (Oxford, 1972).

35 See e.g. O. Masson, ‘Le mot iis fils, fille chez les poétes et dans les inscriptions’, REG 88 (1975), I-15; J. M. Freyman, ‘The Generation Gap in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon’, in S. Bertman (ed.), The Conflict of Generations in Ancient Greece and Rome (Amsterdam, 1976) 65-73; A. R. Rose, ‘The Significance of the Nurse’s Speech in Aeschylus’ Choephoroe’ CB 58 (1982), 49-50; J. S. Margon, ‘The Nurse’s View of Clytemnestra’s Grief for Orestes: Choephori 737-740’, CW 76 (1983), 296-7, R. J. Rabel, ‘The Lost Children of the Oresteia’, Eranos, 82 (1984), 211-13,

and ‘Aeschylus, Ag. 393-95: The Boy and the Winged Bird’, CJ] 82 (1987), 289-92; P; Mureddu, ‘Rileggendo un brano delle Eumenidi (vv. 185-190)’, GFF 12 (1989), 75-87. 3© Another unusual witness with family connections has appeared earlier in the play— thirsty dust, mud’s sister (Ag. 494-5).

382 Mark Golden appeals by defendants in fourth-century oratory.*” There is no reason, I suppose, why children could not appear as exhibits for the prosecution as well—that is all that marturia strictly are. But Cassandra surely suggests

that they play a more active part, that they offer testimony virtually as witnesses. This is extraordinary: it is unlikely that children could give evidence as witnesses, even in homicide trials.2* And of course there is no question of such a capability for children as young as these. For Thyestes’

children are brephé: the word can occasionally refer to toddlers or even somewhat older children in later Greek prose, but instances in classical and earlier literature always denote newborns or infants. (Among other relevant

comparanda, I note the uses of brephos by Danaé to soothe the sleeping Perseus in Simonides’ poem, by Pindar for the baby Euadne, by Euripidean speakers to refer to the infants Ion, Paris, Astyanax. Such passages bear out the dictum of Aristophanes of Byzantium that brephos was appropriate to designate the child straight from birth.+’) The babies Cassandra sees, then, are too young to speak; they are pictured as klaiomena—crying is as much communication as they can command.*°

Nevertheless, just as Cassandra, a woman, a foreigner and a slave, can clearly see what is about to happen in the house, these children can indicate the truth about its awful past. Once again in Agamemnon it is communication without words, the vocalizations of people or things normally voiceless, which carries most conviction. And, as often, we must await the trilogy’s final play for a fitting resolution to the contradictions of its start. Aegisthus, the sole survivor of Thyestes’ children (as he himself reminds us: 1606), returns in Agamemnon to avenge them through murder. He calls this justice

(1578, 1611), but it brings no end to strife. Only in Eumenides are the weeping infants replaced with the adult Orestes, an Argive man who not 37 Wasps 568-71, 976-8; Pl. Ap. 34c; Andoc. I. 148; Lys. XX. 34; Dem. XIX. 310, XXI. 99, 186-8, LIII. 29; Aeschin. II. 152; Hyper. IV (Euxen.) 41. See also above p. 358. 38 For evidence and discussion see D. M. MacDowell, Athenian Homicide Law in the Age of the Orators (Manchester, 1963), 102-9. Cf. S. Todd, ‘The Purpose of Evidence in Athenian Courts’, in P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. Todd (eds.) Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics and Society

(Cambridge, 1990), 19-39, at 26-7; J. C. Trevett, ‘The Date of [Demosthenes] 49: a Reexamination’, Phoenix, 45 (1991), 21-7, at 22-5. This, incidentally, is one area where there has been a recent change in children’s role in Canadian criminal law: their unsworn testimony may now be accepted without corroboration. It is significant, however, that this development belongs to the ‘protectionist’ stream in children’s rights, responding as it does to the growing concern over child abuse, and is not primarily intended to provide more democratic rights for children. 39 Simonides 543. 21 P.; Pind. Ol. 6.33; Eur. Jon 16, 31, 280, 1339, 1399, 1599, Tro. 921, 1165; Ar. Byz. fr. 37 Slater. Among later uses for older children, note IG xii. 5. 677. 2 (Syros, (?) 2nd cent. ap), Luc. Philopatr. 6 (brephullia fear their teachers). 4° For brephé crying in a tragic fragment, see Trag. Adesp. 701. 4 K—S (where, however, the editors suggest that dakruetai, a likely supplement, may mean that the children are bewailed).

Children’s Rights 383 only speaks for himself in an Athenian courtroom but wins his case (Argeios haneér: 757).

Peter Rose has recently argued that the Oresteia offers an antidote to the misogynistic reflex of Greek patriarchal culture; what is more, ‘the emphasis on female intelligence and political competence confronts the disruptive consequences of too narrow a restriction of female roles.’*' I would not go so far, nor enlist Aeschylus as a supporter of children’s liberation. Still, the text of Agamemnon, like that of Antiphanes’ Sappho, does seem to me to be shaped by the ironies of the lack of democratic rights for children. Such an

awareness is of course a necessary precondition for any fully conscious treatment of this problem. I thus return to the starting point of this paper— a circular movement befitting an issue where there has been so little change in the history of democracy, ancient and modern. 4. P. W. Rose, Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece

(Ithaca, NY, and London, 1992) 185-265, at 265.

INDEX (Compiled by Simon Hornblower)

The index includes the names of modern scholars mentioned in the main text, but not those of contributors to this volume.

Abel, V. L. S. 334 Agamemnon 44, 46

abstraction(s) 57, 68, 314 Agamemnon of Aeschylus 40, 347, 354, 371,

Abydos 321-2 373, 379-83 abuse 100 see also Choephoroi; Eumenides; Oresteia see also Kakegoria age of speakers in Assembly 147 f.

Academy 270, 273, 280, 283, 285, 287 Agis III of Sparta 142

Acharnai (deme) 257 Aglauros 328n. 14

Acharnians of Aristophanes 81n.3,95n.58, Agones, agonistic features 271 f., 276, 280,

105n. 10, 227Nn.1, 354, 356 299n. 38, 313

Achilles 39-41, 44n. 4, 48-9, 67, 108, see also competition; games

319Nn. 20, 320, 376 agora (Athenian) 6, 15, 18, 124n.15, 173,

Achilles Tatius 358 n. 32 18In.12, 216, 231, 256, 264, 277,

access, accessibility 165, 168, 215 279-81, 282-4, 286-7, 317, 324, 352 accountability, accounting, accounts 2, 14f,, tribal or deme 3

ch. I2 passim, 216, 220, 246, 368 aggression 104, I13 Acropolis, Athenian I, 13-14, 47, 204, 206, agrarian economy, society 163-4

215f., 219-20, 222, 231-2, 279, Agrippa, Agrippeion 286 301N.45, 307, 330N.27, 340, 342, Agurrhios 260

353-4, 357 Aiakos, Aiakeion 282

actors 368 Aiantis (tribe) 4, 87, 256

Adams, John 26, 30 Airs Waters Places (Hippocratic treatise) 353 administration 4, 14, 20I, 204, 2II, 215, Aischraios 187

221, 224, 345 Aischrion 301 adoption 80 Aithiopis 40 Adriatic sea 340 Aixone (deme) 254

adviser, politician as 235 Ajax 40-I, 45-7, 48-50, 319Nn. 20, 320

advocati fisci 204 Ajax of Sophocles 50, 59

Aegean sea 189 Akousilos 300

Aegeis (tribe) 87, 331 n. 33 Akraiphia 296-6, 298-302 Aegina 50, 183, 244, 304n.55, 341-2 Akte 179n.5

Aegisthus 382 Alalakh 222

Aelian 211, 212n.42 Albania I102n. 3, III Aeneas Tacticus 55n. 10 Alcaeus 297 Nn. 31

Aeschines 18f., 30, 32, 60, 79, chs.7 and 8 Alcibiades 30, 60, ch 5 passim, 148, 205,

passim, 361 211, 260, 264

‘Letters of’ 142 and n. 53 Alciphron 286n. 55

Aeschylus 40 Alexander the Great, of Macedon 153-5, 378 see also 108, III, 289, 320, 347, 354, Alexander of Pherae 181 371. 373, 377-83 Alexander I, Tsar of Russia 36

Aetolia 56 Alexandria 221

Afghanistan 371 Alexis 364-5

Agamedes 297 n. 31 Alkibiades (Athenian), see Alcibiades

Index 385

Alkibiades (Spartan) 305 Antiphon (alleged arsonist) 153 Alkmaionids 19n. 47, 25n. 2, 26, ch.17 Antiphon (archon) 87

passim Antiphon (orator) 60, 97n. 66, 98n. 68,

Alkmeon 291 f. IOI, 133n.44 Alkmeonides son of Alkmeon 291-9, 305-6 Antisthenes of Lamptrai I-2, 4

Alopeke (deme) 178, 182, 330 aparche 216, 270

allies of Athens 6, 13, 90, 235, 239, 241, see also tribute, (quota) lists

245, 250-1, 271, 307 Apatouria 6, 19, 271 allotment, see sortition Aphrodisias 105 n.12

see also Delian League Aphaia 342

altar(s) 276, 283, 313n.10, 317, 357 Aphrodite Pythochrestos 326n. 8 of the Twelve Gods 12, 280-3, 287 Apodektai 229

Althisius, Johannes 193 Apographe 257, 262-3 ambassadors 147, 364 Apollo 295, 316n.13, 326n.8, 342

see also embassies Delios 11, 95, 207

America, see United States Hekatombaios 316n. 13

American Revolution 29 Karneios 326n.8

Amorgos 326 Ptoieus 14, ch. 17 passim

Amos v. Gunn 215 Pythios 292-3, 298, 341 Amphiaraon of Oropos 178, 179n.5, 180 Apollodorus (mythographer) 278

Amphictyon 284-5 Apollodorus (orator) 359n. 35 Amphiktyones 207 Apology, of Plato 358 amphoras 211, 258 apophasis 153, 203 Amphipolis 56, 340 Aquinas, St Thomas 192 Anagyrous (deme) 187 Arabs, Arabic 192 ancestral constitution (patrios politeia), arbitrators, arbitration 205, 303 ancestral democracy 32, 122n.II, Arcadia, Arcadian League 142, 144

124 archaeology v, 65, 213, 299n. 36

Andocides 60, 87-91, 120, 126, 133n.44, archai 204

211, 260, 262, 264 see also magistrates Androtion 209 Archidamus II of Sparta 35, 56, 63, 128,

Andrewes, A. 96 archers 114 animals 354, 377 and n. 21 243

sacrifice of 307, 313, 315-17 Archidamian War 70

Anios 327n.13 Archippe 182

Antalkidas, Peace of, see King’s Peace architecture 308 and n. 2, 352-3

Anthesteria 274, 363 architraves 206n.19

Anthippasia 187n. 27 archives 3, 140-2, 157N. 2, 173, 212 and anti-democratic opinions, tendencies 126-8, n. 43, 214, 216, 219-20

132, 165-6 archons 5, 48, 76, I14, 183, 204, 208, 255,

see also oligarchs; tyranny 261, 270, 272, 279-80, 292n.6, 333-

Antigone, of Sophocles 167, 289 4

antigrapheus 219 see also basileus; thesmothetai Antikrates 344 Areopagus, Council of 16, 28, 30, 119 and

antilogy 60 n.1I, 126, 153, 204, 259, and n. 16,

Antimachos 44-5 261 and n.25 Antinous I12 arete 62-3, 125

Antipater 102, 154, 155, 189 Arginoussai 19, II5 Antiphanes, (author of Sappho) 378, 383 Argos 91Nn. 36, 94-5, 273, 305n. 58, 381

Antiphanes (father of Hyperbolus) 86 Ariadne 285

Antipharis 300 Aristarchos 40

Antiphemos, founder of Gela 323 Aristeides 33

386 Index aristocracy, aristocrats 28, 30, 72, 105, Athamantine plain 295 129N. 34, 139, 189, 206, 208, 220, Athena/Athene 13, 15, 39, 42. 46-7, I12,

228 201, 204, 206, 211, 214, 219-20, 223-

358-9 324-5, 345-6

Aristogeiton (fourth-century Athenian) 219, 4, 229, 230N.15, 309, 311, 317-18,

Aristogeiton (tyrannicide) 28, 304n. 52 Hygeia 175

see also tyrannicides Itonia 297Nn. 31

Aristomenes 316n. 13 Latmia (at Herakleia) 326n.8

Ariston 107 Lemnian Athena 341 Aristophanes (comic poet) 10, ch. 4 passim, Nike 13, ch. 18 passim

9In. 35, 92, 95-6 and n. 58, I25n. 21, Parthenos 13 n. 36 227 and n.1I, 237, 246-7, 262, 348-9, Polias 10, 211, 277, 325, 330, 332-3,

354, 364-7, 381 336-7

see also titles of plays Pronaia 302

Aristophanes of Byzantium 382 Skiras 47, 50, 328n.14

Aristophon 138 Athenagoras 63, 373

Aristotle 25, 31-2, 37, 73, 109, 116n. 32, Athenaion Politeia attributed to Aristotle, see

119N. 2, 127n. 27, 129-30, 133, 192- Constitution of Athens 3, 217, 234, 244, 315, 353, 373, 376f. | Athenaion Politeia attributed to Xenophon, see

see also Constitution of Athens Old Oligarch

arms, armour, arms-bearing chs. 2 and 6 Athenian Empire, see Allies; Delian League

passim, 149-50, 243, 305N. 59, 353, Athens:

see also panoply Allies of 6, 13, 90, 235, 239, 241, 245, Arrhephoroi 325-6 250-I, 271, 307, see also Delian League;

artisans 329 empire art 34, 99n. 36, 318, 349 characteristics of (as opp. Sparta, Persia,

see also sculptors; vases etc.) 26-7, 35, 61, 63, 108, 119, 128,

Artabanus 64, 68 129 and n. 34, 238, 242-3, 314, 355 Artemis 327n.13, 345, 379-80 citizenship at 6, 8f., 48, 189-90, 214,

Brauronia 180n.9, 209 216, 218, 228-30, 241, 271, 307,

Tauropolos 274 326f., 351 ff, 355, 362-3, 365. 367,

Arthmius Decree 141 n. 42, 211 369, ch. 22 passim

Asia Minor 189 colonies of 13, ch. 20 passim, 271 n. 10,

Asklepieion 181, 207 272

Asklepios 181, 202, 275, 326n. 8, 327, 333 comedy at ch. 4, see also comedy

and n. 42, 342, 344 demes of I, 5-7, 8-9, 182-3, 202 and

ASOpos 303 n.5, 272, 326n.6, 351

Aspasia 70, 80-I democracy at passim, esp. I-21, ch. I, 119, Aspis, Hesiodic 295, 298 143, 144, 189 ff., 214, 227, 264 Assembly 9, 15, 17, 19-20, 49, 75, 82, empire of 35, 57, 60-1, 91, 137, 227, and 86n. 11, 89, 93, 97, 115, 120f., 123, n.n.1I, 228, 233, 271, ch.14 passim, I4I, 148, 150, 189-90, 205, 228-9, 351, cf. 143, 307, ch. 20 passim 232, 237, 250, 343, 352, 354-5, 360, foreign policy of 49-50, 94-5, 143, I51,

368-9, 377 190, 293f., 302-4, 313n. 10, 321-2, see also Pnyx 339-40 of the initiated 344 history of ch. I passim, 66, 137, 189, 339-

assessment/reassessment of tribute 229, 232 40

Assyrians 214 inscriptions at see esp. chs. 9 and Io

Astyanax 382 physical layout/civic topography of 270-— Astyphilus 107 88, 351-3 Atarneus 144 religion at Ioff., see also cult; festivals;

ateleia 187 ritual

Index 387 Athens—cont Bauman, R. A. 142 self-presentation of 3, 82, 314, 351-3, Bdelycleon 246

368; see also ideology beans 40, 48

tyrannical image of 58 beasts

violence/non-violence at chs. 5, 18 see animals see also individual entries e.g. agora; beauty 355 Assembly; Attica; Cleisthenes; Council; Bedouin III finance; general; law-courts; leaders: bema 356, 377 oligarchs; Pericles; Thucydides; women Bendis 279, 327 athletes, athletics 3, 51, 138-9, 223, 272 Berkeley, Governor 225

Atreus 380 Berlin, Isaiah 144

Atrometus 139, 143 Bessarion, Cardinal 36 Attica vii, 81, IOI, 163n.18, 202-3, 232, Bias of Priene 59

254, 278, 341, 351 Bill of Rights, American 133

see also chora, general with responsibility biology 374

for Birds of Aristophanes I25n.19, 150n. 96,

‘Attic Stelai’, the 15, 210-II, 258 354, 365

Aubrey, John 104-5 Blass, Friedrich 135

auctioneers 262-3 Bleicken, J. 203

auctions, auctioning 15, 209, ch. 15 passim blood 317.

audiences chs. 4 and 21 passim blood-feuds 108—9, 112-13, I17

audit 203, 216 Blundell, M. W. 108 Augustine, St 192 Bodin, J. 193 Augustus 312n.6 bodyguards I14

auletes 183 Boeckh, August 31

see also flute players Boegehold, Alan 216

authority 193 Boeotia, Boeotians 14, 60, 238n. 43, ch.17

autochthony 50 passim, 343N.20

autonomy 340 see also Plataea; Thebes

Auxesia 342 boards 205-6, 214, 216 axes 318 bones of Theseus 313n.10, 340n.4 axones, of Solon 150 Bonner, R. J. 358 f.

book-keeping 221, 224

Babylon(ians) 214, 217, 221 see also accounts; records

Bacchae of Euripides 289 books 192 Baden 195 see also reading balloting, ballot boxes 41, 48, 51, 152 booths 350, 367

bankers 208 booty 254 andn.5 barbarians 36, 99-100, 344, 346, 353 bothros 313n.10

barley 348-9 boule, bouleutai

Basile 254 see also Council of Five Hundred; Council Basileus 211, 254, 326 of Four Hundred

Basilica Ulpia in Rome 323 bouleutikon (section of theatre) 364

basilinna 360 boundaries I-2

basket-carriers boundary-stones 342 see also kKanephoroi see also horoi Basle (‘Basil’) 29 Bourdieu, P. 250

bastion of Acropolis 307, 309 bous 313 see also ox, oxen

Bate (deme) 325, 332 bows I14, 301

battery 104 boys II, 123, 187, 271

battle(s) 313n.8, 317, 324, 376 see also children; homosexuality

see also names of battles; war Brasidas 63

388 Index

Brauron 180n.9, 207, 209, 273 see also cavalry; hoplites; thetes

Brea 271 n. 10, 340Nn. 7 Cerameicus 4n.2, 85n. 3, 285 and n. 49,

brephe/brephos 382 286, 315 brigands 103 Chaironeia 295 bribes, bribery 72, 93, 155, 227n.1 ceramic 157

‘bronze stelai’ 205-6 and n. 18 battle of 6

bronze statuettes 300 Chalcis 211, 342n.17, 343 tablets 214 Chalcidian helmet 320 Brygos Painter, the 45-7 Chania 274n. 20

buggery 72, 82 characterization 57

building accounts 207, 209, 231 charcoal 205, 211

buildings 240, 307 and n.I Charias 85

see also Thucydides son of Melesias chariot-racing, charioteers 95, 292, 294,

bulls 270, 288, 296, 311n.6, 313, 315 299

bullion 203, 207 Charondas of Catana 105n. 12 bureaucrats 222 Chersonese, Thracian 339 Burkert, Walter 288 Chersonnesos (in Crimea) 181n.14 buying 262 Children 8 and n. 25, 123, 125, 349-50. see also sales 358-9, 363, ch. 22 passim by-elections 75n.23 see also boys; girls Chion (archon) 183 Cadmeia 137 Choephoroi, of Aeschylus 354, 377. 379 Caesar 31 see also Agamemnon; Eumenides: 'Oresteic

Calchas 379 Choes 363

calendar(s), esp. sacred 2, 7, 202, 216, 307, — chora (territory, countryside) 189

316n.13, 340, 343, 351 see also Attica

Callimachus, Against (speech by general with responsibility for 178, 180

Isocrates) 358 choregia, choregoi 183, 272, 368

Calvin, Jean 193 choregic monuments 183-8 Camarina 61 choruses, choral lyric and utterances 57, 67, Canada 371-2, 374 183, 187-8, 272, 277, 280 Carcopino, Jér6me 89 and n. 25 Chremes 86

carnivals 72 Christ, Jesus 192

Carthage 96 Chryseis 45 Cassandra 379-80 chryselephantine statue 220

Castiglione, L. 111 church 192 castration 315 Chrysippus 377-8

catalogues 88, 238 and n. 43, 299 Cicero 31n. 35, 144, 147, 192

see also lists Cimon 33, 92, 140, 313n.10, 340n.4 Boiotian 238n.43, 299n. 36 cistellaria 362 Catana 105n.12 citation of laws 141, 147

Catherine the Great 30 citizens, citizenship 6, 8—9, 40, 48, 125, 137,

cattle 270, 288, 315 145, 158-60, 163, 174, 189-90, 214,

cavalry 5, 139, 150, 205, 206-7, 212, 216, 218, 228-30, 241, 271, 307, 326-—

355 N. 23 7, 351-3, 355, 362-3, 365, 367, 369 archives, tablets 212 ideal 353

see also horsemen city, see Athens; polis

cavea 276 civic ideals 351 Cecropis (tribe) 3n.9 see also ideology

censorship 162n. 13 clan 112, I15 of comedy 71n.8, 74n.17 class tension 143 census classes 31 clay 214, 217, 220-1

Index 389

Cleippides 86 IOI, 148-9, 202, 204, 258-60, 264, Cleisthenes v, 9-10, 12, 20, ch. I passim, 48, 325, 328-9

51, 102, 202, 272, 275-6, 281-2, 284, constitutions, constitutional arrangements 3,

288, 325, 329, 331 and n. 33, 346, 351, 19, 33, 120, 144, 151-3, 189-90

369 contests, see competitions

Cleitophon (character in Achilles contiones 89, 94

Tatius) 358n. 32 copies 219

Cleitophon, rider of 32 Corsica 102 n. 3

Clemenceau, Georges 345 Corcyra 19, I05, 208

Cleomenes I of Sparta 303-4 Corinth, Corinthians 68, 144, 297, 303 Cleon (demagogue) 56, 58, 63, 70, 74-5, Corinthian War 210 77-9, 80, 88, 128 and n. 32, 138, 146, | Coroneia, battle of 60

149Nn. 87, 237, 239, 250, 352 corruption 72

Cleon (son of Thudippus) 107 see also bribery Cleophon 70, 86, 98n.68, 138 Council of Areopagus, see Areopagus cleruchs, cleruchies 211, 327n.13, ch. 20 of Four Hundred (Solonian) 4, 28, 30, 48

passim of Five Hundred 4 ff., 9f., 15, 72, 87. 93,

Clinton, K. 330, 334 97, 137, 155, 190, 202, 204, 215, 218-

clubs (associations), see hetaireiai 19, 219, 228-30, 231-2, 237, 250,

clubs (weapons) IOI, 104 259-61, 262-3, 264, 343, 346n. 34,

Clytemnestra 378 364-5 Clouds of Aristophanes 96n. 58, 125Nn. 19, councillors 6, 10, 230 128 n. 32 see also Council

codification of law 120 courts, see law-courts coins, coinage 17-18, 181n.12, 203, cowards 124n.15, 149

304N.55, 321-3, 346 COWS 271N.I10, 307, 312

Decree 18n. 46 Crates 85

collusive activities 257n.13 Cratinus (character in Isocrates) 358 colonies, colonization 13, 271 n. 10, 272, Cratinus (comic poet) 75, 92n. 38, 95n. 58

ch. 20 passim Crete, Cretans 299n. 39, 314

comedy, comic poets 6, I1, ch. 4 passim, Critias 206 9In. 35, 92, 95 and n. 58, 150n. 96, Crito of Plato 172n.45

271, 348, 350, 381 Croesus 63, 68 competition: crowd 350 between individuals 355, 363 see also masses; mob

see also Olympia behaviour I10 between poets 71, 75-6, 80, 82n. 34 crowns 285 between tribes 2, 7, 183, 185, 271-2 CrOWS 377

concealment of property 210 Crowther, N. 355 confederacy/confederation, Boiotian 300, ‘crying woman’ topos 358

302 Ctesiphon 137, 144, 152

confiscation 14, 16, 180, 204n.12, 209f., cubs, lion 379-80

256, 258-9, 261-2 cult(s) IO-I2, 50, 203, 216, 273-5, 278-

Congress Decree 148-9 80, 325, 339-40, 342n.17

Connor, W. R. 273, 275-6 see also religion

conquest 318n.19 cups ch. 2 passim

see also victory curses 2—4 and n. 12, 19n.47, 211 consensus 227, 247-50 Cylon 19n.47 conservatism 128-9 Cyrus the Great 68, 378

Constantinople 30 dadouchs (torch-bearers) 6, 328 n.16, 330, Constitution of Athens/the Athenians attrib. to 333 Aristotle 20, 26, 30, 33, 36, 48, 78, daggers IOI, 103, 105, 114

390 Index

daidouchia, see dadouchs creation of by Cleisthenes v, 9-10, 12, 20,

Damon 92n. 38 ch. I passim, 48, 51, 102, 202, 272,

Danae 382 275-6, 281-2, 284, 288, 325, 329, dances, dancing 277, 280, 308 331, 351 Danes 193 empire and 246-8 Dante III ideology of, see Ideology

Darius I 28, 68 institutions of 13, 21, 31, 34, 109, 227, daughters 327, 358, 361-3 see also Areopagus; assembly; council;

dead, death 3, 19, 315 generals; law-courts, magistrates:

see also funerals military matters; navy

death penalty 129, 150 leadership in II, 20, 54, 61-3, 64-5, 70, see also executions; Locris 8ONn. 30, 92, 227, 249-50 debts 125n.19, 202, 206n. 25, 211, 219, see also demagogues, leaders

232, 256-8, 261 opposition to, see anti-democratic opinions

decision-making 48, 158, 190-1 priesthoods and 326

decrees (as opp. laws) 18-19, 120, I4I, ritual and I-21, ch. 16 passim

172n. 44, 202, 211 sovereignty and 135, 145-7, 168, 172,

see also Arthmius; coinage; congress; 189

Kallias; Pythodorus stability of 143, 227

dedications 14-15, 175-7, 180, 188n. 29, demokratia (as slogan) 27-8, 33, 36 202, 208, 220, ch. 17 passim, 337 n.c., Tyche Demokratia 344 n. 22

340-1; 353 demos 60-1, 69, 71, 74 andn.17, 75, 78,

Deinarchus I41n. 42, 153, 180n.7 80, 11 4Nn. 30, 120, 127, 143, 146, 155,

Dekeleia 187 180, 189, 213, 235-7, 250, 349 Delian League 6, 13, 91, ch. 14 passim, 230 of the initiated 344-5 and n. 26, 346 and and n.15, 245, see 369 n. 34 see also tribute lists demosios/a 14n.39, 244nN.55, 247Nn. 62

deliberation 376 Demosthenes (fifth-century general) 56, 65,

see also Assembly, Council 97n. 66

Delos II, 95, 153, 160n.8, 207, 215, Demosthenes (fourth-century orator),

253n.4, 263n. 30, 299, 305, and Demosthenic corpus 3-4, 12, 20, 25,

n.58, 327n. 13, 369 30-2, 34-6, 37, 59n. 26, 60, IOI, 103,

Delphi 160 8, 293n. 13, 294, 298-300, 107, I12, chs. 7 and 8 passim, 171-3,

305-6, 341 n. 11 174, 328, 358 Delphinion 357 Denmark 193

oracle at 278, 285, 339-4 Demosthenes (son of Demaenetus) 187 n. 27

demagogues, demagoguery 70-I and n.5, Depression, Great 194

77, 80, 88, 93N. 39, 95, 249, 349 deserters I124n.15

demarchs 6, 207, 263, 272 deterrence 239

demes, demotics I, 5—7, 8-9, 182-3, 202 dialect, Attic 292, 342

368 dialectic 169

and n.5, 272, 333, 326n.6, 346, 365, Boiotian 303

Demes of Eupolis 70 diaitetai 7 and n. 22 Demeter 277-8, 298, 344 Dicaeopolis 356

Demetrius Poliorcetes 202, 215, 277 dicing 49f.

demioprata 262 didacticism, didaxis 61, 64 and ch. 3 passim Demochares 211 didaskalos (in dramatic context) 183 democracy passim esp. I-21, ch. I, 119, 143, Diderot, Denis 30

144, 189-9, 214, 227, 307, 351-3, Dikaiogenes (adopted son of 372-3 Dikaiogenes) 188 n. 30 accountability in 2, [4—15, ch. 12 passim, Dikaiogenes (son of Menexenos) 180

216, 220, 342 dikasteria, see law-courts

Index 391 dikasts (jurors, juries) 5, 7, 17, 93, 103, 106, dress 48, 271, 320, 359Nn. 35

I21I, 123 and n. 14, 127, 132, 138, drunkenness 363

I51, 172, 246-7, 358 see also wine dining, ritual 285-6 duels, duelling 109, I1I, 117 Diocles of Alopeke 182 dynasts 140 Dike (Justice personified) 314 Ducat, J. 292, 300—I

Diocles of Syracuse 105n. I2

Diodorus of Sicily 54n.5, 65, 303n. 49 Ecclesia, see Assembly

Diodotus 58, 60, 239, 250 Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes 93, 354, 367 Diogenes (hero) 316n. 13 economy 163-5 _ see also finance; money:

Diogenes of Babylon 378 taxes; tribute Diogenes Laertius 373 Edmunds, Lowell 63 Diomedes 43, 67 Edonoi of Aeschylus 289

Dionysalexandros of Cratinus 75 education I19 and n. 2, 123, 125 and n. 21, Dionysia, City or Great 2, 6, 11-2, 71, 183, I 32-3, 158-9, 164, 169, 194, 349-50 185, 187, ch. 16 passim, 316n. 13, 342, see also didacticism; schools; sophists; ch. 21 passim teachers Rural 187, 275, 356 egalitarianism 167, 307

in cleruchies 34 3-4 see also equality

Dionysus (Dionysos) 12, 188, ch. 16 passim, Egesta 95, 204n. II

316n.13, 344N. 22, 363 Egypt, Egyptians 160, 162n.12, 214, 217, Fleuthereus 270n.6, 274, 280, 283, 287 222, 253n.4, 264, 318n.17

Lysios 275 Ehrenberg, Victor 26

Diopeithes, decree of 77 Eirene (Peace personified) 181 n. 12, 314

Diophanthus 153, 205 eisagoge apo tes eschares 288

Diphilos 175, 177, 182 eisangelia 204

diplomacy 140 eisphorai 143 discipline (Spartan) 119 Elam 21

disclosure, democratic 161 Elateia 148

disease 270 Eleatic Stranger (in Plato) 377 dispute settlement 132n.42 elections 2, ch. 19 passim ‘distancing devices’ 290, 354 Electra of Sophocles 354 dithyrambs 183, 185, 187, 271, 275-7, elegy 67

289 Eleusis 175n., I8I, 204, 207, 254, 258, diviners 340 273, 342, 346n. 34 dockyards 153, 180n.7 see also dadouch; Demeter; hierophant:

doctors 62 and n. 38 Mysteries

see also medical writings Eleutherai 12, 270, 273-5, 283, 285

documents 140-1, 157 and n. 2, 201-2, Eleuthereus, ee Dionysus

205-6, 214, 216-17, 231 eleutheria, see freedom

Dodona 305 ‘Eleven’, the 100, I14-15

dogs 377 Elias, Norbert 99 Dokimasia 149-51, 203-4, 229n.9 élite(s) I14-15, 165-6, 168, 218, 228, rhetoron 149, I51 230 Dolon 39, 41 Elizabeth I of England 36 Douris (vase-painter) 41, 44-5, 47-8 Ellis, W. M. 96

Dover, K. J. 108, 359 embassies 19, 88n. 21, 137, 140, 142, 148,

Dracon 125n.18, 133 155, 227

Drakontides of Bate 325, 332, 336 embezzlement 201

drama 140, 166n. 31, 349 emmisthos polis 227 see also comedy; tragedy Emmius, Ubbo 193

Drerup, Engelbert 35 Empedocles 377

392 Index empire, imperialism, Athenian 35, 57, 60-1, Eubulus (politician) 138, 144, 153

QI, 137, 143, 227 andn.1I, 228, 233, Eubulus (priest) 326n. 7

271, ch. 14 passim Eucheir 337n.h

see also Allies; Delian League Eucleides 151 Encyclopaedia Britannica 29 Eukosmia 147 f.

Engels, Friedrich 36-7 Eumenides of Aeschylus 40, 354, 381-2

entrenchment clauses 16 see also Agamemnon; Choephoroi; Oresteia ephebes 6 and n. 19, 16, 133n.43, 179-80, Eumolpidai 328-30, 333

205-6, 270, 316n. 13, 364 Eunomia 314

Ephesus 160n. 8, 373 Euphemus 58-9

ephetae 148 Euphiletos 103, 107, 109, 116 Ephialtes v, 27f., 31, 33, 51, IOI, 202 Euphrates 221

Ephorus 303, 304Nn. 53 Eupolis 70, 96n. 58 epi tei dioikesei 204 Euripides 58n. 21, 65, 274, 289, 314, 366,

epic 51, 65, 68 382 see also Homer Europe 145, 163nn.15 and 18, ch. 11 passim

Epichares 300 Eurykleides of Kephisia 332n. 33 Epidauros 275, 305 Eurysakes 328n.14 Epigonos 183 euthuna/euthunesthai 201, 215-17, 218 epicheirotonia ton archon 203 Eurynome 314

epigraphy, epigraphic evidence, habit vf., 9, Euthycrates 107

15, 157 and nn. I-2, 201, 204, 209, evidence, legal 131, 357

21I-I2, 216, 254, 262 examples, use of by Thucydides 53, 59-60, see also inscriptions 68

epimeletai 18 execution(s), executioners I00, 107, I14 epinikia 313n.8 excellence, see arete epistatai 207, 209, 254 exegetes 342

epistulia 206 exemptions 187

Epitaphia 315 exetasmos 217-18

epitedeumata 133 exile(s) 259, 264Nn. 34

} eponymous heroes, eponyms 48, 50, expansionism I43

279N. 34 see also empire Eraton 261 experience 62 Eratosthenes IOI, 103, 107f., 116 experts, expertise 130, 233, 236, 237N. 39, equality 27, 167, 189, 193 expenses, expenditure 157, 231, 249

Erechtheis (Athenian tribe) 1f., 3n.9, 249 331N. 32, 332

Erechtheum 219, 318 family IOI, III, 115, 139, ch.19 passim,

Erechtheus 331 358-60 Eretria 304 and n. 52 farmers 329

Ergines 297 Nn. 31 see also agrarian economies Eroiadai (deme) 179 farming of taxes 210, 261n.25

Erythrai 326n. 8 fawning, flattery 349

Eschara 270, 282-4, 286—7 feasts, feasting 313, 317 Eteoboutadai 138, 142, 328-30, 332-3 see also dining

ethnika, ethnics 291, 300-I, 304-6 fees, court 247

Etruscans 340 Fehrle, E. 361

Euadne 382 Female Power, see Gunaikokratia Euandria 355, 357 Ferguson, W. S. 154

Euboia 137, 304n.55, 343 festivals 2, 6-7, 10, 12, 71, 76, 185, 218,

see also Chalcis, Eretria 272-3, 275, 278, 280, 313, 341, 343,

Euboulides 337n.h 351, 361, 369

Index 393 festivals—cont furniture 258 see also Anthesteria; Apatouria; Choes;

Dionysia; Epitaphia; Lenaia: games 355 Oschophoria; Panathenaia; Pandia; see also agones; athletes’ competitions;

Thargelia; Theseia; Tonaia (at Samos) Olympia

feuds 116 Gargettos (deme) 331n. 32 see also blood-feuds garments 209

finance I2, 204-5, 208, ch14 and part II see also dress

passim, garrison duty 6, 103

see also accounts; revenues; taxes Gaul I91

financial officials 17 Gela 323

see also kolakretai; poletai; taktai gendering 354-5

Finley, M. I. 51, 112-13, 163, 248-9, 256 see also women

fire, festival of new 345 gene 6, 325, 327n.14, 328f., 331, 333, 334

First Sacred War 298-9 and n.47

fiscality 227, 231 genealogies, genealogical lists 238 n. 43, 331

fists 101, 103-4 and n. 29 fleet, see navy generalizations, in historians orators and Florence 29 poets 57-9, 63, 67, 147

flute-players 183, 272 see also auletai generals (strategoi) 5 and n.17, 17, 76, I15,

focalization 56n. 16 138-9, 141-2, 148n. 83, 178, 179Nn. 5,

food 223 180, 182, 207-8 see also dining; feasts; grain; meat Geneva painter 320

369 gennetai 328-9

foreigners 189f., 272, 281, 350, 361, 364f., genitals 313

resident at Athens (metics) 12, 124 and genos, see gene

369 geography 55 see also orators Germany, Germans 35 and n. 52, 145, I9I, Forty, the 205 196 founders 340 Gernet, Louis 150 n.15, 270-1, 356, 360n. 40, 364-5, gentilician priesthoods 326-9, 334

forensic speeches ch. 6, passim Gephyraioi 304

see also oikists gerontocracy 148n. 84

Fraenkel, Eduard 347 gestures 78 and n. 27

France 35, 196 gifts 223 see also French Revolution girls 270n.6, 271 n.9

189, 193 Gla 295

freedom 19-20, 27, 30, 35, 119, 144, 154, Gjolbaschi-Trysa, heroon at 318n.18, 320 of information, speech, the press 71, 158— Glaukon 234f., 377

9, ch. 13 passim Glaukos 343n.20 Freud, Clement 142 goats 318, 377 friends 112-13, 15 see also Tragos

French Revolution 29, 193-4 gnomic utterances 57-9, 67

friezes 307-8 gods, goddesses 12-14, 206, 208, 210, 216, see also Parthenon 232, 279, 289, 308, 314, 316n. 13, Frogs of Aristophanes 81-2, 95n. 58 335, 354

first discoverers, originators 124, 133 see also individual gods; religion; ritual

first-fruits 6 Gold 208, 321-2

Funeral Speech (in Thucydides) 3, 9, 18-19, Gomme, A. W. 179-80

30, 63, 119 and n. 3, 125, 132, I7I1 Gorgias 60

funerals 3, 125 Gorgias of Plato 188, 237, 349-50

Furley, W. D. 90 Gould, John 347-9

394 Index Graiai 363 Hephaestus 346

grain 18, 190, 258 Heptaphylai 327n.14 see also barley; loaves; oats; wheat Heraclitus 373

grammateia 201 Heraion, at Argos 273, 305n.58

grapes 313 at Samos 285

graphe, graphai 131, 149 Herakleia on Latmos (in Caria) 326n.8

hetaireseos 151 Herakles 297n. 31, 298, 318, 343

nomon me epitedeion theinai 131 priest of 326n.6 paranomon 97 and n.67, 123 heralds 5, 147, 191, 262n. 29, 262

‘Great Gods’, the 344, 346 Hermocrates 58, 61-2, 64

‘Great Goddess’ 345 Hermeias of Alexandria 378

Greek 192, 344 Hermes 298, 345

Greenstein, Fred 374 Chthonios 316n.13 Grote, George 26, 37 Hermias 144 Gunaikokratia, by Alexis 364, 367 Hermione 305n. 58

Gymnasia 51, 138, 355, 369 Hermippus 70, 80-1

Gythion 326n.8 Hermodorus 373

Herms, mutilation of 3n.8, 14, 66, 71n.8,

Habron 328, 331 90, 210, 258

Hagne Aphrodite 327n. 13 Heroon, at Gjdlbaschi-Trysa 318n.18, 320

Hagnon 340 for Theseus, see Theseion Hagnous (deme) 330 Herodes I0o1

Haliartos, Haliartia 295 Herodes Atticus 285

campaign 206 Herodotus 25, 27, 30, 32-3, 56, 60n. 29,

Halicarnassus 333n.42 61, 64, 67-8, I7I, 204Nn. 12, 244,

Halimous 326n. 6 245n. 56, 300, 302, 339, 343, 353

Hallof, Klaus ch. 15 passim heroes 4, ch. 2 passim, 313, 316n. 13,

Hamilton, Alexander 30 318Nn.17, 324, 333N. 42, 340, 343, 352 hams, collectors of, see kolakretai see also Aristomenes; Diogenes; Herakles;

hands, show of 40, 152, 325 Ptoios; Theseus

see also election; votes heroines 324 Hanover 194f., 197 Hesiod 67, 295, 298, 316 Harmodius 28, 304n. 52 hestia 282f., 287 see also tyrannicides Hesychius 263 n. 30

Harpalus 179-80 hetaireiai 89n.25

Harpocration 149, 329 hetairoi 93 Harriott, Rosemary 379 hides, animal 316n.13 Harris, E. M. 137 hierarchy 9, 365, 367 Harris, W. V. 165 Hieron of Syracuse 305 Harrison, A. R. W. 357 hierophants 6, 328n.16, 330, 333 Hattersley, Roy 142 hieropoioi 202, 204

Hattusa 222 hipparch 206 hearth, see Hestia Hipparchus 65-6, 292-3, 296, 302, 304-6 Hebe Philokleous 180 hippeis 206 Hector 319n. 20, 320 see also cavalry

Hegemon, law of 154, 205 Hippias 280, 293 hekatostai see ‘rationes centesimarum’ Hippobotos 211

Hellanicus 346 Hippocles 85n. 3

Hellenotamiai 204, 246 Hippocratic writings 53, 353 Henderson, J. 347f., 356, 360-1, 363, 365-— Hippodamus 353n.16

7, 368 Hippokleides 292n.6

Hephaestia 344n.25, 345 Hipponax 48

Index 395

Hippothoon 331 n. 33 Iliad 39, 66, 351, 376

Hippothoontis (tribe) 344 f. illegibility 165 historians, historiography 31-2, 37,67, 101 _ illiteracy 158

see also Herodotus; Plutarch; Polybius; see also orality

Thucydides; Xenophon Imbros 344-346

history, exploitation of, see Past Immerwahr, H. R. 293

Hitler, Adolf 35n. 52 imperial Athens, see Delian League; empire Hittites 214, 221-3, 217, 221-2 impiety 81, 256

Holleaux, Maurice 292 see also Diopeithes; sacrilege

Holscher, Tonio 315 income 231

Homer 39f., 48, 51, 67, 112, 295, 298, Ionian tribes (at Athens) 7 319N. 20, 346, 351-3, 376, 377 information (incl. access to, freedom of) 161, see also names of heroes; Iliad; Odyssey; 165, 220, 249

Hymns see also knowledge homicide 100-1, 104 inheritance 328, 330-1, 332-3

361 innovations 54-5

homosexuality 72, 136, 138-9, 149, 260, initiated, demos of the 344

honour 102, 106-7, 109 inscriptions 31, 95, 154, 157 and nn. I-2, hoplites 105, I14, 165, 244 chs.9, 10, 12 and 15 passim, 213, 228,

Hopper, R. J. 259 231, 254-6, 263 n. 30, ch. 17 passim, Horaia of Aristophanes 262 331, 343-5 Horoi 6, 206n.25, 342 see also epigraphy

horsemen 8, I4I instalments 210

see also cavalry institutions of democracy 13, 21, 31, 34,

horses 114Nn. 30, 150, 238, 391 109, 227, 351, 368 housekeeping 218, 221 instruction, instructors 234 and n. 30, 236,

houses, private 155 243, 245, 249

hubris, see hybris see also education; teachers

Hunter, Virginia 53n.2, 56 interest on loans 208 hunting 116n. 32 inventories 14, 207-9, ch. 13 passim, 231,

husbands, see wives 342

hybris 57, 105n.9, 123 Ion 382

Hyettos 297n. 31 Ionian War 90

n. 36 Iphigeneia 380

Hymn to Apollo, Homeric 295, 298—9 and Ionians 58

Hymn to Demeter, Homeric 298 Iphigeneia in Aulis, of Euripides 65 Hymn to Hermes, Homeric 298 Iphigeneia among the Taurians, of Hyperbolus 70, 74, and n.15, ch. 5 passim, Euripides 274

95, 138 Ireland 193

Hypereides 151, 359 iron 105n. 11

Hypsipyle 346 ironyirrationality 354 4, 63n.42

iambos 82n. 34 Isaeus IOI, 107, 149, 210 iconography 40, 47, 49, 307 Isagoras 26

ideographs 241 isegoria 27

ideology 9, 27, 34, 51. 58, 71, I13, 135, isotes 71

146, 155, 159, 161, 166, 227n. 3, 238, Ismenion 298 241, 248-9 and n. 68, 351, 352, 358 Isocrates 25, 36, 60, 89, 126, 128,

Ikarion (deme) 202n. 5, 276 140N. 35, 358

Ikarios 274, 278 isonomia 27-8

Ikidmas 300 Isthmia 276-7, 305

ikria 277, 281, 287 Italy 88n.21, 110, I12, 196

396 Index

Ithaca 112 klerosis ek prokriton 326, 333-5

ithyphallic god 345 Knights, of Aristophanes 72, 77, 79, 81N. 3,

Itys 380 g2n. 38, 95n. 58, 237 Iulis 305n.58 knives IOI, 103-4, 105n. II

ivory 208 Knopia 292 ivy 285 Knopiadas 291 Jacobins 196 Knopias 299Nn. 39 Jason 346 Knopos 292 Jaucourt, Louis, Chevalier de 30 Knossos 221

Jefferson, Thomas 31 knowledge 169, 228-30, 233-5, 249

Jerome, St 192 see also information

Joint proedroi, see Symproedroi Kodros 254

Jones, A. H. M. 51, 135, 154 kolakretai II, 204, 229, 246-7 and n. 62 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor 30 Kolonos 9

Joseph 31 Kome 343 journalism 65n. 46 komos 271, 275, 361-2 judges (dramatic) 272, 364 Kopais, lake 292, 294

jurors, see dikasts Korea 371

justice 193, 314 Kore (daughter of Demeter) 342, 344 kore/korai (statues of young women) 295

Kabeiroi 323, 344, 346 Koroneia 297Nn. 31

Kabirion in Boiotia 297 Korres, Manolis 175, 178, 183, 188

on Lemnos 344 Kos 282

kakegoria 71n.8 kosmetes 179

Kallias of Euboea 137 kouroi 295

Kallias I (sixth-century Athenian) 204n. 12 Kourotrophos 328n.14 Kallias II, son of Hipponicus, dadouch 330 Krisa 298 Kallias HI, son of Hipponicus, dadouch 330 kurios (male representative of woman in

Kallias, financial Decrees of 202, 208-9 court) 357

Kallistratos (archon) 183 see sovereignty kanephoroi 270n.6, 356, 360 Kyknos 298

katalogos 206 kylix, kylikes, see cups

katastasis 206 Kyzikos 323 kathairesis 217-18, 224

Keos 305n.58 Lacedaemonians 61 Kephale (deme) 178, 180 see also Sparta Kephisia (deme) 332 Nn. 33 Lachares 215 Kephisodotos 175n., 181-2 Lactantius 192

Keramos 285n.49 Lamachus 95 Kerkides 364 Lamian War 178f., 189 Kerykes 329, 333 Lampon 340 Khorsabad 221 Lampsakos 322f.

Kimon 175, 183-8 land sales 15, ch. 15, passim King’s Peace, the 137, 303 see also poletai; sales kings 67, 125, 140, 155, 189, 194-5, 217 Larymna 295, 322-3 see also monarchs; princes; rulers; tyranny Latin 192

kin, kinship 58-9, 112 Laureion 190, 209, 244-5

Kirchner, Johannes 332 law(s) 9, 17, 26, 30, 73, 105, 114, ch.7

Kish 221 passim, 144-5, 167-8, 172, 202,

Kithairon 303 353n.16, 381 Kleandros 305 see also dikasts; lawcourts; rule of law Kleonai 305n. 58 law-code 120

Index 397 lawcourts 5, 18, 69, 77, 82, 89n. 23, 93, Lezzi-Hafter, A. 356 97, 107 and n.16, 109, III, 115-17, liberty, liberation 27, 34, 36, 210, 214, 275,

127, 149, 152, 189--91, 205, 228, 247, 363, 363

250, 352, 357, 360, 369 see also freedom

lawgiver 18, ch. 7 passim libraries 221 lawlessness 99, 119 Linders, Tullia 213-14, 219, 223 Laws of Plato 68, 125, 349-50 Lindos 160n. 8 lawsuits 71, 98, 247n. 63 Linear B 274 laziness, Solon’s law against 125 lions, lion-cubs 379-80

leaders, leadership, political 11, 20, 54, 61- lists 15-16, 88, 205-6, 211, 221-2, 236 3, 64-5, 70, 80N. 30, 92, 227, 234-5, see also inventories; tribute, (quota) lists

249f. literacy ch.9 passim, 350n. 5

see also demagogues; generals; orators; see also writing

ostracism litigation 71

leases I, 6, 15, 205, 209-II, 212, 253-5, see also lawcourts

259, 263 liturgies 187, 368

Lebanon 102n. 3 see also choregia legal language/matters, see law Livy 31 leges sacrae 202 Lloyd, Geoffrey 353

Lelanton, Lelantine plain 211, 342n.17 Lloyd George, David 35

leleukomena grammateia 205 loans 206N. 22, 208, 231

Lemnos 13, 341, 343-6 loaves 270

Lenaia 71, 187, 246, 363 Locris, Locrians 108n.17, 128-9, 131

Lenin, V. I. 36-7 logistai 203f., , 207, 208, 218, 229

Leocrates 142 logographic narrative 53

Leonardos, B. 178 logan didonai 201

Leontios 330 Loraux, Nicole 354-5 Leontis (Athenian tribe) 178-9, 183, 185 lot 335

Leosthenes 177-81 see also sortition Levéque, Pierre 27 Lucullus 55

Leptines 18, I130~I Luther, Martin 193 Lesser Panathenaia, see Panathenaia Lycurgus (Athenian orator) 4, 142, 149f.,,

Leto 291-2 331-4 letter-forms 193 Lycurgus (mythical character) 67, 274, 289 lessons of history, ch. 3 passim 173, 205, 209, 328, 330 and n. 27,

Letters 155 Lycurgus (Spartan lawgiver) 26, 33

Leukaspis 323 lygos 285

Leukippe 358n. 32 Lykomedes (great-grandfather of

leukomata 205 Lycurgus) 330n.27

Leucon 96n. 58 Lykophron (son of orator Lycurgus) 328 Lewis, D. M. v—vii, 2-21 passim, 25, 34. 53, Lysias 4, 88, IOI, 103, 107, 120, 150, 185,

56n.13, 57n. 18, 66n. 48, 85, 119, 206, 210, 261-3, 264, 357 137f., 140n. 36, 154, 160, 175, 180, Lysimache 10f., 325, 336 201, 204n. 12, 208, 210 and n. 37, Lysios (title of Dionysus) 275 212n.42, 213, 227 andn.I, 242n.49, Lysistrata 1of., 325 244n.55, 253Nn., 254, 269n. 1, 293, Lysitheus (Lysias X) 150 294n.18, 304nn. 54 and 57, 307Nn., Lysitheus of Trikorynthos 181 325 andn.I, 336n.c, 339n., 347 and

n., 348 f., 369 Maastricht treaty 145

lex talionis 108n.17 MacDowell, D. M. III, 357

lexicographers 328f., 362 Macedon(ia) 35, 55, 95n. 54, 140, see also Harpocration: Hesychius; Pollux I8In. 10, 344

398 Index

Macedon(ia)cont Megacles 26, 292 see also Alexander the Great; Perdiccas; Megara 48 Philip II; Philip V Meidias 107

McGee, Michael 241 Meier, Christian 51 Machiavelli, Niccolo 29, 193, 196 Meiggs, Russell 293 Macleod, Colin 54, 64 Meixidemos 256-7

Madison, James 220 Meleager 67 madness 274, 289 Melite (deme) 345 maenads 363 Melos, Melians 14, 59, 90 mafia, mafiosi 102 n. 3, III memory 169-71 magistrates 5, 17-18, 119, 157, 203, 204, men, see man

214, 229, 232, 250 Menander 271n.9, 362

see also apodektai; archons; council; Menelaus 50 generals; kolakretai; poletai; priests Meno of Plato 63

maidens, see parthenoi mentalité 146 make-up 359n. 35 mercenaries I14, 242n.49 Makron 43, 45, 47, 51 merismos 205

maladministration 201, 218 Meritt, Benjamin 159-61, 165

mallets 318 Mesopotamia 221

Malthake 180n.9 metal 157, 218, 296

man, manhood 355 see also bronze; gold; iron; silver

see also boys, women metics, see foreigners, resident at Athens

Mandela, Nelson 371 metroon 140, 173, 214-16, 219-20 mania, see madness Mikion of Kephisia 332n. 33

Manitoba 371f. Miletos 326n.8

mannerism 319 military arrangements, matters, service 6,

Manninni 222 55, 141, 149, 313

Mantinea, battle of 91n. 36, 94 see also arms; cavalry; cowards; garrison

Mantitheos 206 duty; generals; hoplites; navy: war

manumission 15, 20I, 207 Mill, John Stuart 26

Marathon, battle of 97, 244, 317, 353 Miltiades (oikist of Chersonese in 6th

marble 165, 213, 301 cent.) 340

Marcadé, J. 181 Miltiades (victor at Marathon) I41n. 42, mares 291 343 Mari 221 Miltiades (oikist sent to Adriatic in 4th

Maroneia 245n. 56 cent.) 340

marriage 139 mines 6, 190-1, 209-10, 245, 253,

sacred363 363Minoa 259-60 marshes 326 Martha, Jules 325-6, 328 Misgolas 136-7, 361 Marx, Karl, Marxism 36—7 Mithraism 312n.6

‘Mary Ellen affair’ 372 Mixellenes 346 mass, masses 168, 228, 234 Mnia 342

see also crowd behaviour; demos; mob mob 68, 189, 194

Mathieu, G. 179-80 see also crowd matricide 381 mockery ch. 4 passim

Maya 160, 162, 165n.27 see also comedy meat 272, 307, 317 Momigliano, Arnaldo 51

see also sacrifice monarchs, monarchy 35, 68, 189, 192, 214,

Medeios 331 217, 224 Medes, see Persia; Persian Wars see also kings

medical writings 53 and n. 3 monasteries, monks 192

Index 399 money, moneys I5, 71-2, 201, 204, 209, Near East 160, ch. 13 passim, 217

ch. 14 passim Neleus 254

see also coinage; finance; taxes Nemea 305

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron Nemesis 207, 344Nn. 22

de 30, 196 Nestor 67

monuments 352-3 new men (novi homines) 136, 139 see also victory: names of monuments ‘new politicians’ 70-1, 74, 76 moral improvement, moralizing 54, 57, 66, newspapers 65n.46, 162, 164

125 and n. 21, 132-3 Nicaragua 371

Moerbeke, William of 192 Nicias (son of Nikeratos, famous general) 57,

More, Sir Thomas 193, 196 62-3, 65, 79, ch. 5 passim, 148, 188

Mosychlos, Mt. 345 and n.29

mother (goddess) 326 Nicomachus (Lysias XXX) 4, 120

mothers 138, 358 Niebuhr, B. G. 36

see also matricide Nikeratos, son of Nicomachus 345

Mounychia 180 niketeria 313

murder 107, 358Nn. 32 Nikomachos (sculptor) 337n.d see also homicide Nikias (son of Epigenes) 187n. 24 Murrhinous (deme) 256 Nikias (son of Nikodemos) 188n. 29 music, musical games 272, 349 Nikodemos 256-7

Mycenae 305 Nikai, Nike 308-11, 317-18, 322-3 Myrine 341n.II, 343n.18, 345 Niobe 67 Myronides 60 nomothetai, nomothesia 12, 17, 120,

Myrrhine 327 128 n. 31, 133, 147 Myrrhinicus 86 nomos 121n.9 Mysteries, Eleusinian 330 see also law

profanation of 14, 71n.8, 90, 210, 258, nostalgia, political 128, 132-3

284, 330 novels 358n. 32

mystery cult at Lemnos 344-5 Nuzi 222 myth(s) 17, 67-8, 73, 270, 274-5, 278,

289, 339, 342, 345 oaths 4, 7, 216, 358

Mytilene Debate, in Thucydides 58, 78-9, oats 348

146, 149n. 87, 239, 250, 352 Ober, Josiah 143, 228, 249 Mytilene, Mytilenians 58, 60, 342n.17 ochlocracy 189 Odeion 286

names 299N. 39 Odysseus 40-2, 45, 47, 112, 323

see also prosopography Odyssey 112, 351 naming of women 138, 360 Oenophyta 60

Napoleon 36 offerings 270f., 342, 346, 356 narrative, narration 63, 135, 318, 354 see also dedications national character 63 oikists 339f. see also Athens, characteristics of see also Antiphemos; Miltiades naukleroi 11 oikos 351, 353-4, 358, 368

Nausicles 141-2 Oineis 331 n. 32

Navaho 333 Oinoe (deme) 256

navy, naval matters, list 55, 90-I, 201, 207, old people 147 and n. 78

211, 238, 243-4, 250, 254 Old Comedy 69f., 80, 82 see also ships: thetes; trierarchs; triremes Old Oligarch 74n.17, 116N. 32, 192-3, 241,

Naxos 341 246, 248, 349 nea 12 and n. 34 oligarchs, oligarchy, oligarchic revolutions 9,

Neaichmos (archon) 187 28, 68, 77, 102n.4, I13, 114Nn. 30,

Neaira 359 126, 143f., 147, 152f., 189

400 Index

olive oil, leaves 47, 223 Pandion 278 Olympia, Olympic Games 58, 95, 297N. 31, Pandionis (tribe) 188, 343n.19

299, 305, 355 Pandrosos 328n.14

Olynthiacs of Demosthenes 36 Panhellenism, Panhellenic sanctuaries 272,

Onasimos 300-1 305, 340 Opisthodomos 220 see also Delphi; Olympia; Nemea; Isthmia opposition to democracy, see anti-democratic panoply 271In. 10

opinions; oligarchs paper I61

optimates 147 see also printing

Oracle(s) 50, 63n. 42, 294, 299-300, 380 papyrus 157, 168, 173, 206, 214-16, 219,

at Delphi 278, 339-40 253n.4

at the Ptoion 296 Paphlagon, the ‘Paphlagonian’ 92 n. 38, 237 oral culture, society, orality 167-8 andn.36, paradeigmata 59-60

169, 213, 224, 238NnN. 43 paradosis 202, 207-8, 217

orations, funeral 3, 352 Parasopia 304 see also Funeral Oration Parents

orators, oratory 15, 32, chs. 6-8 passim, 128, obligation to maintain 149, see also

130, 135, 211, ch. 14 passim unwritten laws see also rhetoric Paris 382

orchestra 276-7, 281 n.4I1 Paros, Parians 271n.10, 301 and n.45

Orchomenos 295, 297N. 31 Parliament 154, 195

order, disorder 274, 289 parricide IOI Oresteia of Aeschylus 51, 108, III, 354, parrhesia 71

378-83 parthenoi 270, 271n.9, 356, 360-1

Orestes 382 Parthenon 208, 254, ch. 13 passim Orestes of Euripides 65 frieze 8, 48, 308-9, 3II, 352

organization, political 93 Parthenos, Athena 13n. 36

orgeones 343 and n.18, 344 past, use of by Thucydides and other Oropos, Oropia 178, 179Nn.5, 304 writers 59-60, 67, 135, 141 Nn. 42, 152

orphans 272, 364, 369 Patrios politeia, see ancestral constitution

Orthanes 345-6 Patroclus 319n. 20, 320

Orthoboulos 206 Patrokleides, decree of 211, 216 Oschophoria 313-15 patronage 72 andn. 10

Ostia 312n.6 Paul, St 192 ostraca, ostracism 16-18, 73-4, IOI, ch.5 Pausanias (writer) 278, 284, 286, 352 passim pay, dikastic 246-7, 357 Otanes 28 political 17, 191, 246~-7

Ostwald, Martin 27 military 227n.1

ox, oxen 309, 31In.5, 313n.8, 318n.17 Peace (Eirene), peaceability 75, 99, 102, 18iIn.12

Pagondas 60 Peace of Aristophanes 72, 95n.58, 348-9 palace 214, 220f. Peasants 164Nn. 21, 193

economy 221 pebbles, see psephoi

Pallas 291 Pegasus 270, 274, 285 see also Athena Peiraieus 6, 18, 103-4, I14N. 30, 179N.5, Pan Painter 318n.17 257, 353n.16

Panathenaia 6, I13n. 36, 204, 214-15, 218, _Pelasgians 343-5

271-3, 277, 292, 307, 312, 342, 351, Peleus 376

355-7, 360, 362, 368-9 Pelike 318n.17

Lesser 2n. 3, I2 Peloponnese, the 95

Panathenaic way 278, 317 Peloponnesian War 61, 70, 75, 81, 91, 147,

Pandia 2, 278 208, 233, 242, 308

Index 4OI penis 348 Philoumene 14, 175-82 see also genitals; phalloi Philtera 332, 337n.h

Pentheus 274, 289 Phintias (Lecata) 323

people, popular government passim Phleius 137

Peparethos 180 Phocion 31, 142 Peplos of Athena 13n. 36, 277 Phoenicians 221

Perdiccas 95n. 54, 148 Phoenix 376

Pergamum 221, 333 Phoibos 291

Pericles 3, 9, 18-19, 25, 30—-I, 33-5, 36-7, see also Apollo 57-8, 62-4, 65, 70, 74, 78, 81, 96, Phormio son of Philokles 179 119, 121, 125, 129n. 36,132 andn.31, phoros 246n.59 139-40, 171-3, 209, 227, 233-9, 250, see also tribute

376 phratries 6-7, 138, 142, 255, 271, 273, Persepolis 223 325, 329 Perseus 382 phthonos 73-4, 82 Persia, Persian Empire 28, 61, 68, 137,189, Phryne 359n. 36 214, 223, 217, 223, 244Nn. 52, 309-9, Phrynondas 85n.5

353 phylai 331

Persian Wars 35n.52, 47, 60-2, 126f., see also tribes LION. 21, 244-5, 295, 308-9, 354 phylarchs 206

persuasion 376 Phylarchus 344n. 22

see also rhetoric Pickard-Cambridge, A. W. 347 Phaeax 85-6, 88, 92 Piérart, M. 203 Phaedrus, of Plato 169 pinakes/pinakia 201

Phaedrus of Sphettus 361 Pindar 50, 67, 297N. 33, 382 Phaenippos 188 n. 30 Pisistratus, Pisistratids 26, 36, 49, 65f., 68,

phalloi 270, 271 n.10 114, 204n. 12, 264N. 34, 275, 292-4, see also ithyphallic god 299, 340 phallophorein 270n.6 Pisistratus (younger) 280

Pheidias 341 plague 53 Pheidippides 125n.19, 128n. 32 Plangon 358n. 30 Pherae 181 Plataea (incl. battle of), Plataeans 59, 301I-— phialai 15, 47 4, 316n.13 Philadelphia (American city) 29 Plataean Debate 59, 61, 303 Phileriphus 85 n. 3, 86 plate 203

Philinus 98 n. 68 Plato (comic poet) 72, 96n.58

Philistides of Hagnous 330 Plato (philosopher) 31, 63, 68, 73, 75, 103, Philip II of Macedon 20, 35-6, 142, 153-5 125-6, 128, 133, 144, 166, 169-70,

see also Chaironeia 172n.45, 188, 225, 235, 237, 341,

Philip V of Macedon 344 348-50, 377 Philippics of Demosthenes 36, 152, 154-6 Plautus 362

Phillips, D. J. 94 Pliny the Elder 181

Philochares 142 Plotheia (deme) 202n.5, 207

Philochorus 187, 285 Ploutos (wealth personified) 181n.12

Philocleon 246 Plutarch v, 20, 25, 29, 31-3, 85-6, 92-3,

Philokles son of Phormio 179-80 97, 188n. 29, 240, 244, 248, 260, 264,

Philoserapis 177-9, 182 277

Philosophers, philosophy 26, 32, 34, 63, Pnyx, the 2, 9, 70, 80, 364n. 46

IOI, 170, 349 Podlecki, A. 347-8, 351, 363

see also Aristotle; Plato poets, poetry 68, 71, 82, 108, 147, 349-50

Philostratus 285-6 see also comedy; epic; tragedy

Philotera 337n.h poison(ing) IOI, 360

402 Index

poletai 6, II, 15, 201, 204, 207, 209-II, prizes 7, 40, 75, 355

229, ch. 15 passim pro Archia, of Cicero 47 poleterion 262n. 28 probability, arguments from 54 Polignac, F. de 351 probouleumata 232 policy-making 190 procession(s) 272, 316n.13, 345, 352, 356 see also decision-making see also pompe polis, poleis 35, 50, 189-90, 272-3, 283, procurers 123, 132 287, 290, 303, 306, 341, 364, 368 proedroi 17, 152, 344

see also Athens see also symproedroi

politicians, statesmen 26, 54, 65, 72-3, 76, pro(h)edriai 364, 367

81, 98 professionalism 235

see also demagogues; leaders see also experts politics, part I passim, esp. 12-13, 55, 59, 62, proletariat 37

69, 140, 293-5 propaganda 32, 146, 169, 209

Politics of Aristotle 25, 32, 36, 193, 353, property 125, 139, 180, 189, 210

373 public/private 14 and n. 39, 203, 254 polity 189 prosecutions, political 72n.10 Politicus of Plato 125, 377 Propylaea 175-6, 216, 254

pollution 342 prosopography 178-80, 183

Pollux, Julius 262-3, 364 prostatai tou demou 74 Polybius 29, 54-6, 129n. 34 see also demagogues

pompe 271, 279-81, 287-8, 357, 360-2, prostitutes, prostitution 123, 138, 149,

363, 367 261 n. 24, 359 and n. 35, 360-1, 365, see also procession(s) 369 poor 189, 193 Proteus of Aeschylus 379 Populares 147 procession, Panathenaic 218 population IOI, 196, 230, 245n. 56 in City Dionysia 270-2 Porthmos 328n. 14 Protagoras 353n.16

Poseidippos 359n. 36 proxenoi 155 Poseidon 316n. 13, 342 Prussia 195

Erechtheus 328, 330-1 and n. 29 prytaneion 12, 278-83, 287-8

at Halicarnassus 333n.42 prytaneia (court fees) 247 and n. 62

positive vetting 147, 149 prytanikon 281

pots, pottery ch. 2 passim, 344, 356 prytany, prytaneis 5, 17, 62, 86n.11, 87,

see also amphoras; phialai; vases 202, 210

potsherds IOI, 103-4 psephismata, see decrees

see also ostraca psephoi 40-2, 46-8

Poulytion 284 see also votes

power 238-45, 250, 319 Ptoiodoros 297 and n. 33

praeco publicus 262 Ptoion 291

Praolles 301 see also 14 Prasiai (deme) 344 Ptoios (hero) 296, 302

Praxiteles 181 Ptolemaic Egypt 264 prayers 2, 5, 103 see also Egypt

prices, pricing 258-60 Ptolemais (tribe) 332n. 33 priests, priestesses 10, 181, 202, 299, 308, public, see demosia

ch. 19 passim, 345, 356, 363 property 14 and n. 39

princes 193 publication 210, 214-15, 218

see also kings punishment 107f., 113, 115-16, 239, 257

printing 158 and n.4 purchase of priesthoods, see sale

prison I1I4 and n. 30, 130 purification, purity 2f., 47, 273 private property 14 and n. 39 Pyanopsion 314

Index 403

Pylades 379 109, 121, 128-30, 136, 140, 227N. 3, Pylos 55-6, 78, 92, 221 247-8, 308 n. 3, 349, 358-9. 376

pyrrhichistai 185 see also oratory

Pytharatos 188 Rhetoric of Aristotle 234 Pythian Games 299 rhetorike graphe 149

Pythodorus 32 Rhetra, the Great 33 Rhitsona 297Nn. 30

quarries 254 Rhodes 142 Quintilian 78n.27, 359n. 36 see also Lindos

Raaflaub, Kurt 51 ridicule 11, ch. 4 passim

racial arguments, factors 58, 62 rights of children ch. 22 passim

rams 316n.13, 317, 320-4 ritual(s) I-21 passim, 71, 82n. 34, 147, 201,

see also sheep chs. 16 and 18 passim, 363

rations 223 robbery 99, 103n.6

‘rationes centesimarum’ I5, 254 Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert 203

Raubitschek, A. E. 87-8, 293 Robertson, Martin 49

ravens 377 romanticism 194

reactionary opinions, statements 127f., Rome, Romans, Roman Empire 29, 31, 89,

131 136, 140, 147, 154, 160, I90-I, 193,

reading 159, I61I, 231, 350 262,.264, 312n.6, 323, 366 see also literacy: writing Romilly, Jacqueline de 54

real estate 258, 263 Rose, Peter 383

see also land sales rotation of priesthoods 327 and n. 13

records 14, 202, 207, 210, 212, 215, 218 Rousseau, J. J. 30, 126, 194 see also accounts; archives; catalogues; rowers 227n.1

inventories; lists Royal Stoa, see Stoa Basileios

Reform Act, English (of 1832) 194 rule of law 127, 135, 145. 150, 168

registry of citizens 216 ruler-cult 344n. 22 religion I-21 passim, 63 andn.42, 90,147, rulers 193

190, 192, 216, part III passim see also kings rent 205

representative government 194f. sacred land, matters, moneys 147, 201, 205,

representation/self-representation of 209, 211, 247N. 62, 345 democracy ch. 21 passim, esp. 368 see also religion see also Athens, self-presentation of marriage 363

Republic of Plato 68, 103 officials 325

republics 29, 35, 145, 147, 196 see also priests

reserves, financial 231, 233-4 War, First 298-9 resident foreigners (metics), see foreigners sacrifice(s) 1f., 5, 202, 272, 288, ch. 18

retaliation 108~9 passim, 340, 343, 345

retribution I11 sacrilege 216

revenge 106-8, I12-13 see also herms; Mysteries; sacrilege

revenues 4, 205, 231, 233-5, 239, 246, Salaminioi 327n.14

342n.17 Salamis 49, 211, 341, 343n.18 revolts 239 sale(s) 204, 210, ch. 15 passim revision of law-code 120, 133 battle of 245

Rhamnous (deme) vii, 179n.5, 202n. 5, see also poletai

207, 276 of priesthoods 326

rhapsodic games 272 Sallust 31 Rhesus 340 Samos, Samians 31, 71n.8, 88, 285,

Rhetores 128 341Nn. 11, 342-3, 344n. 26

rhetoric 34, 53, 59 and n. 26, 60, 90-1, Samothrace 344, 346

404 Index

San Marino 29n.25 siegecraft 55

sanctuaries 5, 188, 202, 273, 283-4, 286, Siena I12, I14

288, ch. 17 passim, 363 silver 18n. 46, I90-I, 203, 208-9, 244-5,

sanides (leleukomenai), sanidia 201, 205-6 301

Sappho, of Antiphanes 378, 383 Simon 107

Sarapis 327n.13 Simonides 382

satire, satirists 69, 74, 82 Sinclair, R. K. 203

satyric drama 271 Singer, Itamar 223

Sausage-seller 72, 92n. 38 Siphnos 244Nn. 53 Schiller, Friedrich 26, 30 Sirens 140 and n. 35

Schutte, Danie 371 sisters 333, 358 schools 164, 194 sitophulakes 18

scribes 221-2 size 355 scrutiny 149 Skenas katalambanousai, of Aristophanes 367 sculptors, sculptures 13, 175-7, 181-2, skolion 28 ch. 18 passim, 330n. 25, 337n.d Skyros 313n.10, 340Nn. 4, 343n. 21

Scythia, Scythians 68, 114 slaves, slavery 8, 15-16, IOI, 103, 138,

Sealey, Raphael 132, 145 163n. 18, 189-90, 213, 258,

Second Athenian Confederacy 137 262n. 28, 348, 350. 355, 357-8. 360-

secrecy, secret ballots 50, 165 I, 365, 369, 376

secretaries I40-I, 208 snakes 297N. 31 seers 340 snobbery 79 selection 10, ch. 19 passim, 356 socialism 37

see also elections; sortition Socles 68 self-help 114-15 Socrates 81, 103, 125n. 21, 169, 349, 358,

self-restraint 107 377 see also sophrosyne Soldiers 6, 9, 317

Selinus 95 see also hoplites, warriors

sellers 204 Solon v, 14n. 39, 18, 25 ff., 31f., 36, 63 semi-Greeks 346 ch. 7 passim, 148-51, 153, 204 and

Semnai 354 n.12, 353 Senate, Roman 136, 154 soothsayers 138

Servius Tullius v sophists 54, 63, 77, 90, 125n.19, 126, 128

settlers 341 of Second Sophistic 142

sex differences (cows/bulls) 313, 315-17 Sophocles 50, 59, 148n. 83, 167Nn. 34, 289,

sexual licence 73, 80, I51, 361, 365-6 354 see also buggery; homosexuality sophrosyne 79, 124n.15

Shapiro, H. 356 Sopwith, Robert 31

sheep 377 sortition 17, 152, 204, ch. 19 passim, 330, shields I14n. 30 see also elections; votes

see also rams 330

ships 238, 242n.49 Sounion 327n.14

see also navy South Africa 371

short-list, allotment/sortition from, see klerosis sovereignty 135, 145ff., 168, 172, 189

ek prokriton space, civic 157, 351-4, 360

show of hands, see hands Sparta, Spartans 19, 26, 30, 33, 35, 61, 63,

shrines, see sanctuaries 68, 90, 94-5, I14Nn. 30, 119, 126n. 23, Sicilian Expedition 90-1, 148, 187n. 23, 128, 132-3, 143, 238n. 43, 242-3,

318 302-4, 318, 322, 340, 353

Sicily 14, 56, 58, 63, 88n.21, 90, I02n.3, — spectators 352, 357, 368f.

III, 140 speech (as opp. writing, action) 168-9, 352,

see also Syracuse 376, 378

Index 405

233-4 swings 363

speeches in historians 57-9, 64, 91 Nn. 35, suspicion 144

Sphettus (deme) 361 Switzerland 192 sphagia/sphazein 317, 318n.18, 324 swords 103, 105N.1I, 317, 320, 324 Spoudippos 183, 185 sycophants 358 sports I116n. 32 syllogeis 18 see also athletics Syleus Painter 47-8 Sprague, C. E. 224f. symbolic motives for inscriptions 202

stability of democracy 143, 227 symbolism, ‘marked’ 315

Stage 142, 354 symmories 152

see also theatre symposia, symposium 3, IO5

Stahl, H.-P. 54 symproedroi 344 and n. 26 stasis 19, 102n.4, 105 syndikoi 3

state 113, 158 syndicates 14I

cult 325 and n.2 see also clubs

debtors 219, ch. 15 passim synegoroi 3, 203, 218

see also debts synomotai 93

statesmen, see politicians syntaxis 137

statistics, statistical data IOI Sypalettos 202n. 5 statues 175, 183, 216, 220, 270, 273-4, Syracuse, Syracusans 55, 62, I1o5n. 12,

279N. 34, 281, 283-5, 288, 353 305, 322N.5, 323, 373

statuettes 300, 302 Syrakosios 71n.8 ‘Statute of Limitations’ 5n.15

Ste Croix, G. E. M. de 54 tablets 212, 214, 219, 221 stelai I, 202, 205-6, 210-12, 215-17, 219, taboos 360

222, 231 Tactica literature 55

see also ‘Attic Stelai’ Tacitus 31, 126n. 23 stewards 217f. Tahiti 163n.19 Sthenelaidas 61, 238, 242 taktai 91, 229

Sthenelus 67 tamiai 204, 207-9, 218

sticks 104, 114 stratiotikon 204 Poikile 352 Taplin, Oliver 354

Stoa(s), Stoa Basileios 120, 126, 211, 284 Tanagra 304

Stoic school 378 targets, comic 69-70, 74 stone(s), used for inscriptions 157, 160, 168, Tarnapolsky, Walter 375

I71, 201, 203, 205, 209-10, 216 Taurid 274 stones, stoning IOI, 103-4, 110n. 21 tauroSs 313, 315

Strabo 292 taxes 6, 194, 205Nn.15, 210, 216, 220, 256,

strategeion 324 259-61 Strategoi, see generals teachers 123, 136, 235, 249 stratiotic fund 259n. 16, 264 see also education

strength 355 teaching (by poets) 82 Stroud, Ron vi, 282 see also didacticism ‘structural demagogues’ 249 Tegyra 295

structuralism 354 Tekmessa 45-7

suffering, learning through 56 Telemachos of Acharnai 257

Sulla 312n.6 temenos, temene 211, 254-5, 284, 342n.17

Sultan of Turkey 36 temples 188n.29, 213, 214-15, 217, 219,

Sumerians 221 221, 280, 307-8, 317 Suppliants of Aeschylus 40, 379 see also sanctuaries

suppliants, supplication 47, 281, 304 ten, boards of 340

Susa 28, 223 see also tribes

406 Index Teos 3n.II Thrace 95n. 54, 339

Teucer 45, 50 Thracian Women of Cratinus 92 n. 38 ‘terra sigillata’ 345 Thrasyllos 187 territory, see chora Thrasymachus of Chalcedon 376 Tertullian 192 Thucydides (historian) 3, 9, 18-20, 28, 30Thargelia 185, 271-3 2, ch. 3 passim, 78, 91 and n. 35, 95, Thasos 211, 244n. 53 97n.66, 99-100, 105n. II, 132, 136, Thatcher, Margaret 79, 142 146, 149n.87, 154n. 119, 171-2, theates, see spectator 233-5, 247-8, 302-3, 341 Nn. 10, 342theatre(s) 140, 248, 276-7, 286, ch. 21 - 3, 352, 373, 376

passim see also Funeral Speech; Mytilene Debate;

of Dionysus 2, 188, 270-1, 276-7, 283, Plataean Debate: Melos; Sicilian Expedition

287 Thucydides son of Melesias 93, 237. 240,

Thebes, Thebans 28, 47, 55, 67, 137, 275, 247, 250

29 3-304 Thudippus 107

theft 100, 103n.6, 218, 227n. 1 Thurii 340, 353n. 16 Themistocles 63, 92-3, 141n.42, 244 and Thyestes 380—I

n.54, 245 tickets for theatre 364-5 Decree 148 Tigris 221 Theokydes 300 Tilphossa 294-5

Theomenes 211 Timarchus (brother of Praxiteles) 181-2 Theomnestus 150 Timarchus (target of Aeschines I) 79 and

Theophemos 211 n. 28, 131, 136, 143, 145, 149-50 Theophrastus 92, 97, 153, 155 Timasiphilus 301

Theopompus (archon) 185 Timoleon 144 Theopompus (historian) 86-8 tithes 16, 210

Theoria (Aristophanic character) 72 tokens, for voting 47-8 theoric fund 259n. 16, 261n.25, 264, 365, for theatre 364

368 Tonaia (Samian festival) 285

commissioners of 153 Todd, Stephen 357

Theosebes of Xupete 256 Toepffer, Johannes. 332

Thera 326n.8 topography 55 andn.1I

Theramenes I14Nn. 30, 206 of democracy 360, 369 Theseia (festival) 313 and n.10, 314, see also space, civic

316n. 13, 355Nn. 23 torture I0O

Theseion (temple) 262 n. 28 trade 71

Theseus 32, 313 and n.I0, 324, 340n.4 tragedy 12, 34, 50, 57-8, 64-5, 67-8, 108, Thesmophoriazusae of Aristophanes 81 n. 3, 185, ch. 16 passim, 343, 349

95n. 58, 366 see also Aeschylus; Euripides; Sophocles

thesmothetai 122 tragos (he-goat) 288 Thespiai 301 see also goats Thespis 275, 280 traitors, treason I51I, 180

Thessaly, Thessalians 297 n. 31 treasure/treasury records 14-15, 190, 201,

thetes, thetic status 229n.9, 230 224, 232, 247n. 62, 369

Thetis 40, 320 see also Parthenon

thiasotai 182 treasurers 6, 201, 216-17, 220, 223, 229,

Thirty Tyrants 9, 48, 105, I14n. 30, 124 247n.62, 342 and n.15, 127, 205, 206n. 21, 210 treaties 216

Thompson, H. A. 282 Tréheux, Jacques 219

Thorikos (deme) 276-7 trials 358n. 32 thorubos 152 see also lawcourts; lawsuits Thourion 294 tribal societies, tribes 100, LI1n.23, 115-16

Index 407

tribes (subdivisions of citizen body), 330n.25f.

Athenian I-2, 5-7, 9-10, 183, 185, see also amphoras; kylikes; phialai; pelike;

272, 280-I, 329, 331, 343 andn.19g, pots 344nN.26, 345, 351, 364 and n. 46, vendetta 109, 116f.

365, 367, 369 vengeance 102, 106, 108, III

Ionian (i.e. pre-Cleisthenic) 9 victims, sacrificial 307, 313, 317-18, 320

post-Cleisthenic 331 and n. 33 Victoria 317

tribute ch. 14, passim, 271, 369 victory/ies, victors, victory monuments 7,

229, 231 318, 353 f.

(quota) lists 15, 91, 201-2, 207, 212, 227, 13, 187, 275, 278-9, 291, 309, 313, trierarchs 148, 178-9, 182, 187n. 23, 211 see also choregic monuments

Trikorynthos 181 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 27 tripods 183, 185, 187-8, 278-9 vines 313, 315

Triptolemos Painter 39, 41, 320, 324 violence 3, 13, ch. 6 passim

triremes 180, 245 of oratorical manner 77-8 trittyes 6, 9-10, 329 virtue, see Arete

Troades of Euripides 65 votes, voting 5, ch. 2 passim, 216, 352, ch. 22 Troezen I181n.14 passim trophies 309, 313, 315, 318 and n.19

Trophonion 294-5 walls 286

Trophonios 297 n. 31 war, warfare 56-7, 75, 105, 297N. 31, Troy, Trojans, Troad 40, 340 and n. 3, 346, 318n.19, 364

351, 353 see also cavalry; generals; hoplites; military Trygaios 72, 348 arrangements; Peloponnesian War:

Tullius, Servius v Persian War; Sacred Wars;

Twelve Gods 344 Warriors 320, 323

see also altar Wasps, of Aristophanes 77, 79, 81 n. 3,

Tyche Demokratia 344n. 22 95n.58, 246, 248, 381

Tydeus 44 water-clock 5 tyrannicides 51 wealth 241, 249, 251

see also Aristogeiton: Harmodius see also money; Ploutos

tyranny, tyrants 16, 26, 30, 32, 36, 58,67. | weapons ch. 6 passim

140, 144, 168, 189, 215, 215, 225 see also arms see also Pisistratus; Thirty Tyrants weights and measures 18, 208, 223

‘Tyrrhenians’ 343 wheat 258

whips 114 and n. 30

Ugarit 222 whitewashed boards 205-6, 207, 211, 215unconstitutional proposals, law against, see 16, 259n. 16 graphe paranomon wife, see wives United States of America 29n.25, 149, 158, Wilhelm II, Kaiser 35

164-5, 194, 215, 216-17, 225, 372 wills 80 see also Adams; Bill of Rights; Hamilton: Winckelmann, J. J. 51

Jefferson; Madison Winkler, J. 364

unwritten laws 18, 120 and n.5, 125-6, wine(s) 223, 274, 363

13I, 132n.41, 167, 172 wineskins 270

Urartu 221 witnesses 357, 382

usefulness of history ch. 3 passim wives 327, 358, 360-2, 365 Utopia of Thomas More 193, 196 women I, 3, 8, II, 80, 90, 93, I02n.5,

utopias 354-5 103, 105n. 10, 110Nn. 21, 123, 125, 132n.40, 138 and n.1I5, 162n.13,

vases, vase-painters 17, ch. 2 passim, 163n.18, 189f., 271, 299Nn. 36, 308, 181n.12, 211, 297N. 31, 302, 320, 327, 333, ch. 21 passim, 375-6, 382

408 Index

women—cont Xenophon (Pindaric victor) 297Nn. 31 see also girls; Philoumene; priests, Xerxes 63, I110n. 21

priestesses Xupete (deme) 256

wood 157, 173, 206n. 18, 214, 219

Woodhead, A. G. 86-7 young, the ch. 22 passim

World Wars 194 see also boys; children; girls; orphans

writing (incl. written laws 15, 18, 123n. 14,

231 Zeno 378

125-6, 131. 141, chs.9 and 13 passim, Zaleucus 129N. 34 Zenobius 280

xenismoi 277-8, 280-1, 287-8 Zeus 274Nn. 20, 316n.13 Xenophon (writer) 30, 68, 93n.44, 169, Karaios/Laphystios 297 n. 31

377 Soter 316n. 13

218, 234, 280, 353, 355 and n. 21, Sosipolis 316n. 13

see also Old Oligarch ‘zooming devices’ 290