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Title: Every Cook Can Govern Author: C.L.R. James Date: June 1956 Language: en Topics: direct democracy, Ancient Greece, democracy Source: Correspondence, Vol. 2, No. 12
The Greek form of government was the city-state. Every Greek city was an
independent state. At its best, in the city state of Athens, the public
assembly of all the citizens made all important decisions on such
questions as peace or war. They listened to the envoys of foreign powers
and decided what their attitude should be to what these foreign powers
had sent to say. They dealt with all serious questions of taxation, they
appointed the generals who should lead them in time of war. They
organized the administration of the state, appointed officials and kept
check on them. The public assembly of all the citizens was the
government.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Greek Democracy was that the
administration (and there were immense administrative problems) was
organized upon the basis of what is known as sortition, or, more easily,
selection by lot. The vast majority of Greek officials were chosen by a
method which amounted to putting names into a hat and appointing the
ones whose names came out.
Now the average CIO bureaucrat or Labor Member of Parliament in Britain
would fall in a fit if it was suggested to him that any worker selected
at random could do the work that he is doing, but that was precisely the
guiding principle of Greek Democracy. And this form of government is the
government under which flourished the greatest civilization the world
has ever known.
Modern parliamentary democracy elects representatives and these
representatives constitute the government. Before the democracy came
into power, the Greeks had been governed by various forms of government,
including government by representatives. The democracy knew
representative government and rejected it. It refused to believe that
the ordinary citizen was not able to perform practically all the
business of government. Not only did the public assembly of all the
citizens keep all the important decisions in its own hands. For the
Greek, the word isonomia, which meant equality, was used interchangeably
for democracy. For the Greek, the two meant the same thing. For the
Greek, a man who did not take part in politics was an idiotes, an idiot,
from which we get our modern word idiot, whose meaning, however, we have
limited. Not only did the Greeks choose all officials by lot, they
limited their time of service. When a man had served once, as a general
rule, he was excluded from serving again because the Greeks believed in
rotation, everybody taking his turn to administer the state.
Intellectuals like Plato and Aristotle detested the system. And Socrates
thought that government should be by experts and not by the common
people. For centuries, philosophers and political writers, bewildered by
these Greeks who when they said equality meant it, have either abused
this democracy or tried to explain that this direct democracy was
suitable only for the city-state. Large modern communities, they say,
are unsuitable for such a form of government.
We of Correspondence believe that the larger the modern community, the
more imperative it is for it to govern itself by the principle of direct
democracy (it need not be a mere copy of the Greek). Otherwise we face a
vast and ever-growing bureaucracy. That is why a study, however brief of
the constitution and governmental procedures of Greek Democracy is so
important for us today. Let us see how Greek Democracy administered
justice. The Greek cities for a time had special magistrates and judges
of a special type, like those that we have today. When the democracy
came into power, about the middle of the 5th Century B.C., there began
and rapidly developed a total reorganization of the system of justice.
The quorum for important sessions of the assembly was supposed to be
6,000. The Greek Democracy therefore at the beginning of each year,
chose by lot 12 groups of 500 each. These 500 tried the cases and their
decisions were final. The Greek Democracy made the magistrate or the
judge into a mere clerk of the court. He took the preliminary
information and he presided as an official during the case. But his
position as presiding officer was merely formal. The jury did not, as in
our courts today, decide only on the facts and look to him for
information on the law. They decided on the law as well as on the facts.
Litigants pleaded their own case, though a litigant could go to a man
learned in the law, get him to write a speech and read it himself. The
Greeks were great believers in law, both written and unwritten. But the
democrats believed not only in the theory of law, but in the principles
of equity and we can define equity as what would seem right in a given
case in the minds of 500 citizens chosen by lot from among the Athenian
population.
He would be a very bold man who would say that that system of justice
was in any way inferior to the modern monstrosities by which lawyers
mulct the public, cases last interminably, going from court to court,
and matters of grave importance are decided by the position of full
stops and commas (or the absence of them) in long and complicated laws
and regulations which sometimes have to be traced through hundreds of
years and hundreds of law books. When the Russian Revolution took place
and was in its heroic period, the Bolsheviks experimented with People’s
Courts. But they were timid and in any case, none of these experiments
lasted for very long. The essence of the Greek method, here as
elsewhere, was the refusal to hand over these things to experts, but to
trust to the intelligence and sense of justice of the population at
large, which meant of course a majority of the common people.
We must get rid of the idea that there was anything primitive in the
organization of the government of Athens. On the contrary, it was a
miracle of democratic procedure which would be beyond the capacity of
any modern body of politicians and lawyers, simply because these believe
that when every man has a vote, equality is thereby established. The
assembly appointed a council of 500 to be responsible for the
administration of the city and the carrying out of decisions.
But the council was governed by the same principle of equality. The city
was divided into 10 divisions and the year was divided into 10 periods.
Each section of the city selected by lot 50 men to serve on the council.
All the councillors of each section held office for one tenth of the
year. So that 50 people were always in charge of the administration. The
order in which the group of 50 councillors from each section of the city
should serve was determined by lot. Every day, the 50 who were serving
chose someone to preside over them and he also was chosen by lot. If on
the day that he was presiding, the full assembly met, he presided at the
assembly.
The council had a secretary and he was elected. But he was elected only
for the duration of one tenth of the year. And (no doubt to prevent
bureaucracy) he was elected not from among the 50, but from among the
450 members of the council who were not serving at the time.
When members had served on the council, they were forbidden to serve a
second time. Thus every person had a chance to serve. And here we come
to one of the great benefits of the system. After a number of years,
practically every citizen had had an opportunity to be a member of the
administration. So that the body of citizens who formed the public
assembly consisted of men who were familiar with the business of
government.
No business could be brought before the assembly except it had been
previously prepared and organized by the council.
When decisions had been taken, the carrying out of them was entrusted to
the council. The council supervised all the magistrates and any work
that had been given to a private citizen to do.
The Greeks had very few permanent functionaries. They preferred to
appoint special boards of private citizens. Each of these boards had its
own very carefully defined sphere of work. The coordination of all these
various spheres of work was carried out by the council. A great number
of special commissions helped to carry out the executive work. For
example, there were 10 members of a commission to see after naval
affairs, and 10 members of a commission to hear complaints against
magistrates at the end of their term. One very interesting commission
was the commission for the conduct of religious ceremonies. The Greeks
were a very religious people. But most of the priests and officials of
the temples were elected and were for the most part private citizens.
The Greeks would not have any bunch of Bishops, Archbishops, Popes and
other religious bureaucrats who lived by organizing religion. Some of
these commissions were elected from the council. But others again were
appointed by lot.
At every turn we see the extraordinary confidence that these people had
in the ability of the ordinary person, the grocer, the candlestick
maker, the carpenter, the sailor, the tailor. Whatever the trade of the
individual, whatever his education, he was chosen by lot to do the work
the state required.
And yet they stood no nonsense. If a private individual made
propositions in the assembly which the assembly considered frivolous or
stupid, the punishment was severe.
Here is some idea of the extent to which the Greeks believed in
democracy and equality. One of the greatest festivals in Greece, or
rather in Athens, was the festival of Dionysus, the climax of which was
the performance of plays for four days, from sunrise to evening. The
whole population came out to listen. Officials chose the different
playwrights who were to compete. On the day of the performance, the
plays were performed and, as far as we can gather, the prizes were at
first given by popular applause and the popular vote. You must remember
that the dramatic companies used to rehearse for one year and the
successful tragedians were looked upon as some of the greatest men in
the state, receiving immense honor and homage from their fellow
citizens. Yet it was the public, the general public, of 15 or 20
thousand people that came and decided who was the winner.
Later, a committee was appointed to decide. Today such a committee would
consist of professors, successful writers and critics. Not among the
Greeks. The committee consisted first of a certain number of men chosen
by lot from each section of the city. These men got together and chose
by lot from among themselves 10 men. These 10 men attended as the
judges. At the end of the performances, they made their decision. The 10
decisions were placed in the hat. Five were drawn out. And the one who
had the highest vote from among these five received the prize. But even
that does not give a true picture of the attitude of the Greeks towards
democracy.
Despite the appointment of this commission, there is evidence that the
spectators had a preponderant influence on the judges. The Greek
populace behaved at these dramatic competitions as a modern crowd
behaves at some football or baseball game. They were violent partisans.
They stamped and shouted and showed their likes and dislikes in those
and similar ways. We are told that the judges took good care to notice
the way in which popular opinion went. Because, and this is typical of
the whole working of the democracy on the day after the decision, the
law allowed dissatisfied citizens to impeach the members of the
commission for unsatisfactory decisions. So that the members of the
commission (we can say at least) were very much aware of the
consequences of 15 disregarding the popular feeling about the plays.
Yet it was the Greeks who invented playwriting. In Aeschylus, Sophocles
and Euripides, they produced three tragedians who, to this day, have no
equals as practitioners of the art which they invented. Aristophanes has
never been surpassed as a writer of comic plays. These men obviously
knew that to win the prize, they had to please the populace. Plato, the
great philosopher, was, as can easily be imagined, extremely hostile to
this method of decision. But the Greek populace gave the prize to
Aeschylus 13 times. They were the ones who repeatedly crowned Aeschylus
and Sophocles, and later Euripides, as prize winners. It is impossible
to see how a jury consisting of Plato and his philosopher friends could
have done any better. There you have a perfect example of the Greek
attitude to the capacities, judgment and ability to represent the whole
body of citizens, which they thought existed in every single citizen.
There are many people today and some of them radicals and
revolutionaries who sneer at the fact that this democracy was based on
slavery .So it was, though we have found that those who are prone to
attack Greek Democracy on behalf of slavery are not so much interested
in defending the slaves as they are in attacking the democracy.
Frederick Engels in his book on the family makes an analysis of slavery
in relation to Greek Democracy and modern scholars on the whole agree
with him. In the early days, Greek slavery did not occupy a very
prominent place in the social life and economy of Greece. The slave was
for the most part a household slave. Later, the slaves grew in number
until they were at least as many as the number of citizens.
In later years, slavery developed to such a degree, with the development
of commerce, industry, etc., that it degraded free labor. And it is to
this extraordinary growth of slavery and the consequent degradation of
free labor that Engels attributes the decline of the great Greek
Democracy.(
However, it is necessary to say this. In the best days of the democracy,
there were many slaves who, although denied the rights of citizenship,
lived the life of the ordinary Greek citizen. There is much evidence of
that. One of the most important pieces of evidence is the complaint of
Plato that it was impossible to tell a slave to go off the pavement to
make way for a free citizen (especially so distinguished a citizen as
Plato) for the simple reason that they dressed so much like the ordinary
citizen that it was impossible to tell who was a citizen and who was a
slave. In fact, Plato so hated Greek Democracy that he complained that
even the horses and the asses in the streets walked about as if they
also had been granted liberty and freedom. Near the end of the period of
radical democracy, Demosthenes, the greatest of Athenian , orators, said
that the Athenians insisted on a certain code of behavior towards the
slaves, not because of the slaves, but because a man who behaved in an
unseemly manner to another human being was not fit to be a citizen.
There were horrible conditions among the slaves who worked in the mines.
But on the whole, the slave code in Athens has been described by
competent authorities as the most enlightened the world has known.
It was also stated by many that the position of women in Athens during
the democracy was very bad. Naturally in these days, they did not have
the vote. But for many centuries we were taught that the women of the
Greek Democracy were little better than bearers of children and
housekeepers for their husbands. Yet some modern writers, on closer
examination of the evidence, have challenged the old view, and we
believe that before very long, the world will have a more balanced view
of how women lived in the Greek Democracy.
Now if the ancient Greeks had done little beside invent and practice
this unique form of human equality in government, they would have done
enough to be remembered. The astonishing thing is that they laid the
intellectual foundation of Western Europe. Today when we speak about
philosophy, logic, dialect; when we speak of politics, democracy,
oligarchy, constitution, law; when we speak of oratory, rhetoric,
ethics; when we speak of drama, of tragedy and comedy; when we speak of
history; when we speak of sculpture and architecture; in all these
things we use the terms and build on the foundations that were
discovered and developed by the Greeks.
Correspondence is not sure about science. but in every other sphere of
human endeavor, whatever the methods, routines, procedures, etc. that
are used by people in intellectual and political association with each
other, these were discovered, invented, classified and analyzed by the
people of ancient Greece.
They not only invented or discovered these things. The men who invented
and discovered and developed them — sculpture, politics, philosophy, art
and literature, medicine, mathematics, etc. — these men are still to
this day unsurpassed as practitioners of the things that they invented
or discovered. If you were writing a history of modern civilization, you
might find it necessary to bring in perhaps half a dozen Americans. Let
us be liberal. A dozen. You will be equally in difficulty to find a
dozen Englishmen. But in any such history of Western Civilization, you
would have to mention some 60 or 80 Greeks.
Here are some of the names. Epic poetry — Homer. Dramatic poetry —
Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripedes. Comedy — Aristophanes. Lyric poetry
— Pindar and Sappho. Statesmen — Solon, Themistocles and Pericles.
Sculpture The Master of Olympia and Phidias. Oratory — Dernosthenes.
History — Thucydides and Herodotus. Philosophy — Socrates, Aristotle and
Plato. Science and mathematics — Pythagoras and Archimedes. Medicine —
Hippocrates.
These are only some of the best known names. And the fact which should
never be forgotten and which indeed we should make the foundation of all
our thinking on Greece is that by far the greatest number of them lived,
and their finest work was done, in the days when the Greek Democracy
flourished.
This is the greatest lesson of the Athenian democracy for us today. It
was in the days when every citizen could and did govern equally with any
other citizen, when in other words, equality was carried to its extreme,
that the city produced the most varied, comprehensive and brilliant body
of geniuses that the world has ever known. The United States today has a
population of 155 million people. In other words, 1500 times the
population of Athens. In economic wealth, any two-by-four modern city of
20,000 people probably contains a hundred times or more of the economic
resources of a city like Athens in its greatest days. Furthermore, for a
great part of its existence, the total citizen population of Athens
could be contained in Ebbets Field or at any of a dozen football grounds
in England. This will give you some faint idea of the incredible
achievements not of ancient Greece in general, but of Greek Democracy.
For it was the democracy of Greece that created these world-historical
achievements and they could not have been created without the democracy.
Greece did not only produce great artists, philosophers and statesmen at
a time when their work laid the foundation of what we know as
civilization. The Greeks fought and won some of the greatest battles
that were ever fought in defense of Western Civilization. At the battles
of Marathon, Plataea and Salamis, a few thousand Greeks, with the
Athenian democrats at their head, defended the beginnings of democracy,
freedom of association, etc., against the hundreds of thousands of
soldiers of the Oriental despotic monarchy of Persia. In those battles
in the 5th Century, Oriental barbarism, which aimed at the destruction
of the Greeks, was defeated and hurled back by the Greeks fighting
against odds at times of over 20 to 1. The Oriental despots knew very
well what they were doing. They came determined to crush the free and
independent states of Greece. Never before and never since was so much
owed by so many to so few, and as the years go by the consciousness of
that debt can only increase.
This has always been an important question but at the stage of society
that we have reached, it is the fundamental question: What kind of a man
was this Greek democrat? Karl Marx has stated that the future type of
man, the man of a socialist society, will be a “fully developed
individual, fit for a variety 20 of labors, ready to face any change of
production, and to whom the different social functions he performs are
but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired
powers.” Here is how Pericles, one of the greatest statesmen of the
Greek Democracy, described the ordinary Greek citizen:
Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education
to Greece, and I declare that in my opinion each single one of our
citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life is able to show himself
the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover,
with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.
Marx and all the men who have written of a society of democracy and
equality had to place it in the future. For our Greek, this conception
of the citizen was not an aspiration. It was a fact. The statement
occurs in perhaps the greatest of all the Greek statements on democracy,
the speech of Pericles on the occasion of a funeral of Athenians who had
died in war.
The Greek democrat achieved this extraordinary force and versatility
because he had two great advantages over the modern democrat. The first
was that in the best days of the democracy, he did not understand
individualism as we know it. For him an individual was unthinkable
except in the city-state. The city-state of democracy was unthinkable
except as a collection of free individuals. He could not see himself or
other people as individuals in opposition to the city-state. That came
later when the democracy declined. It was this perfect balance,
instinctive and unconscious, between the individual and the city-state
which gave him the enormous force and the enormous freedom of his
personality.
Pericles shows us that freedom, the freedom to do and think as you
please, not only in politics but in private life, was the very
life-blood of the Greeks. In that same speech, he says:
And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-today
life in our relations with each other; We do not get into a state with
our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we
give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm,
still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our private
lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it
commands our deep respect.
We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority,
and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the
protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws which it is an
acknowledged shame to break.
Those simple words need hard thinking for us to begin to understand them
today. The United States is notorious among modern nations for the
brutality with which majorities, in large things as in small, terrorize
and bully minorities which do not conform; in Great Britain, the
conception of “good form” and “what is not done” exercises a less
blatant but equally pervasive influence. The Greek democrat would have
considered such attitudes as suitable only for barbarians. One reason
why the Greeks so hated the Persians was that a Persian had to bow down
and humble himself before the Persian King — the Greek called this “a
prostration” and this too he thought was only fit for barbarians.
Instead, in the midst of a terrible war, he went to the theatre (which
was a state-theatre) and applauded a bitterly anti-war play by
Aristophanes, and on another occasion, when the ruler of Athens,
accompanied by foreign dignitaries, attended the theatre in his official
capacity, Aristophanes ridiculed him so mercilessly in the play that he
sued the dramatist — and lost the case.
Another great advantage of the Greek democrat was that he had a
religion. The Greek religion may seem absurd to us today, but any
serious study of it will show that it was as great an example of their
genius as their other achievements. Religion is that total conception of
the universe and man’s place in it without which a man or a body of men
are like people wandering in the wilderness. And the religious ideas of
a people are usually a reflection and development of their responses to
the society in which they live. Modern man does not know what to think
of the chaotic world in which he lives and that is why he has no
religion.
So simple and easy to grasp in all its relations was the city-state that
the total conception with which the Greeks conceived of the universe as
a whole and man’s relation to it was extremely simple and, despite the
fact that it was crammed with absurdities, was extremely rational. The
Greek gods were essentially human beings of a superior kind. The Greeks
placed them on top of a mountain (Olympus) and allowed them their
superiority up there. But if any citizen looked as if he was becoming
too powerful and might establish himself like a god in Athens, the
Athenian Democracy handled him very easily. They held a form of
referendum on him and if citizens voted against him, he was forthwith
banished for ten years, though when he returned, he could get back his
property. Gods were strictly for Olympus.
Around all religions there is great mystery and psychological and
traditional associations which are extremely difficult to unravel. But,
although the Greek no doubt recognized these mysteries, his relation to
them was never such as to overwhelm him.
Thus in his relation to the state, and in his relation to matters beyond
those which he could himself handle, he understood what his position was
and the position of his fellow men in a manner far beyond that of all
other peoples who have succeeded him.
In strict politics the great strength of the system was that the masses
of the people were paid for the political work that they did. Politics,
therefore, was not the activity of your spare time, nor the activity of
experts paid specially to do it. And there is no question that in the
socialist society the politics, for example, of the workers’
organizations and the politics of the state will be looked upon as the
Greeks looked upon it, a necessary and important part of work, a part of
the working day. A simple change like that would revolutionize
contemporary politics overnight.
The great weakness of the system was that, as time went on, the
proletariat did little except politics. The modern community lives at
the expense of the proletariat. The proletariat in Greece and still more
in Rome lived at the expense of the community. In the end, this was a
contributory part of the decline of the system. But the system lasted
nearly 200 years. The Empires of France and Britain have not lasted very
much longer. And America’s role as a leader of world civilization is
mortally challenged even before it has well begun.
It is obvious that we can give here no more than a general account of
Greek Democracy. There are great gaps in our knowledge of many aspects
of Greek life; and even the facts that scholars have patiently and
carefully verified during centuries can be, and are, very variously
interpreted. There is room for differences of opinion, and Greek
Democracy has always had and still has many enemies. But the position we
take here is based not only on the soundest authorities, but on
something far more important, our own belief in the creative power of
freedom and the capacity of the ordinary man to govern. Unless you share
that belief of the ancient Greeks, you cannot understand the
civilization they built.
History is a living thing. It is not a body of facts. We today who are
faced with the inability of representative government and parliamentary
democracy to handle effectively the urgent problems of the day, we can
study and understand Greek Democracy in a way that was impossible for a
man who lived in 1900, when representative government and parliamentary
democracy seemed securely established for all time.
Take this question of election by lot and rotation so that all could
take their turn to govern. The Greeks, or to be more strict, the
Athenians (although many other cities followed Athens), knew very well
that it was necessary to elect specially qualified men for certain
posts. The commanders of the army and of the fleet were specially
selected, and they were selected for their military knowledge and
capacity. And yet that by itself can be easily misunderstood. The
essence of the matter is that the generals were so surrounded by the
general democratic practices of the Greeks, the ordinary Greek was so
vigilant against what he called “tyranny”, that it was impossible for
generals to use their positions as they might have been able to do in an
ordinary bureaucratic or representative form of government.
So it was that the Greeks, highly sophisticated in the practice of
democracy, did not, for example, constantly change the men who were
appointed as generals. Pericles ruled Athens as general in command for
some 30 years. But although he ruled, he was no dictator. He was
constantly reelected. On one occasion, he was tried before the courts
but won a victory .On another occasion, Aspasia, the woman with whom he
lived, was brought before the court by his enemies. Pericles defended
her himself. He was a man famous for his gravity of deportment, but on
this occasion, Aspasia was so hard pressed that he broke down and cried.
The jury was so astonished at seeing this, that it played an important
role in the acquittal of Aspasia. Can you imagine this happening to a
modern ruler? Whether democratic or otherwise?
The Greek populace elected Pericles year after year because they knew
that he was honest and capable. But he knew and they knew that if they
were not satisfied with him, they were going to throw him out. That was
the temper of the Greek Democracy in its best days.
This democracy was not established overnight. The early Greek cities
were not governed in this way. The landed aristocracy dominated the
economy and held all the important positions of government. For example,
rich and powerful noblemen, for centuries, controlled a body known as
the Areopagus and the Areopagus held all the powers which later were
transferred to the council. The magistrates in the courts were a similar
body of aristocrats who functioned from above with enormous powers such
as modern magistrates and modern judges have. The Greek Democracy had
had experience of expert and bureaucratic government.
It was not that the Greeks had such simple problems that they could work
out simple solutions or types of solutions which are impossible in our
more complicated civilizations. That is the great argument which comes
very glibly to the lips 26 of modern enemies of direct democracy and
even of some learned Greek scholars. It is false to the core. And the
proof is that the greatest intellectuals of the day, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle and others (men of genius such as the world has rarely seen),
were all bitterly opposed to the democracy. To them, this government by
the common people was wrong in principle and they criticized it
constantly. More than that, Plato spent the greater part of his long
life discussing and devising and publishing ways and means of creating
forms of society, government and lay which would be superior to the
Greek Democracy. And yet, Plato owed everything to the democracy.
He could think and discuss and publish freely solely because he lived in
a democracy. We should remember too that the very ideas of what could
constitute the perfect society he was always seeking, came to him and
could come to him only because the democracy in Greece was itself
constantly seeking to develop practically the best possible society. It
is true that Plato and his circle developed theories and ideas about
government and society which have been of permanent value to all who
have worked theoretically at the problems of society ever since. Their
work has become part of the common heritage of Western Civilization.
But we make a colossal mistake if we believe that all this is past
history. For Plato’s best known book, The Republic, is his description
of an ideal society to replace the democracy, and it is a perfect
example of a totalitarian state, governed by an elite. And what is
worse. Plato started and brilliantly expounded a practice which has
lasted to this day among intellectuals — a constant speculation about
different and possible methods of government, all based on a refusal to
accept the fact that the common man can actually govern. It must be said
for Plato that, in the end, he came to the conclusion that the radical
democracy was the best type of government for Athens. Many intellectuals
today do not do as well. They not only support but they join
bureaucratic and even sometimes totalitarian forms of government.
The intellectuals who through the centuries preoccupied themselves with
Plato and his speculations undoubtedly had a certain justification for
so doing. Today there is none. What all should study first is the way in
which the Greeks translated into active concrete life their conception
of human equality. The Greeks did not arrive at their democracy by
reading the books of philosophers. The common people won it only after
generations of struggle.
It would seem that somewhere between 650 and 600 B.C., the first great
stage in the development of Greek Democracy was reached when the laws
were written down. The people fought very hard that the law should be
written so that everyone should know what it was by which he was
governed.
But this was not accidental. As always, what changed the political
situation in Greece were changes in the social structure. Commerce and
(to a degree more than most people at one time believed) industry; the
use of money, played great roles in breaking down aristocratic
distinctions, and over the years, there was a great social levelling,
social equality, due to the growth of merchant and trading classes, to
the increase of the artisan class, of workmen in small factories and
sailors on the ships. With these changes in Greek society, the merchants
made a bid for power in the manner that we have seen so often in recent
centuries in European history and also in the history of Oriental
countries. Solon was the statesman who first 28 established a more or
less democratic constitution and, for that reason, his name is to this
day famous as a man of political wisdom. We see his name in the
headlines of newspapers, written by men who we can be pretty sure have
little sympathy with what Solon did. But the fact that his name has
lasted all these centuries as a symbol of political wisdom is
significant of the immense change in human society which he inaugurated.
A few years before the end of the 6th Century B.C., we have the real
beginning of democracy in the constitution of Solon.
The citizens of the city-state were not only those who lived in the
city, but the peasants who lived around. Solon was supported by the
merchants and the urban classes, and also by the peasants. The growth of
a money economy and of trade and industry, as usual, had loaded the
peasants with debt and Solon cancelled the burden of debt on them. So
that in a manner that we can well understand, the growth of industry and
trade, and the dislocation of the old peasant economy provided the
forces for the establishment of Solon’s great constitution. It was the
result of a great social upheaval.
To give you some idea of the state of the surrounding world when Solon
was introducing his constitution, we may note that 30 years after
Solon’s constitution, we have the death of Nebuchadnezzar, the king in
the Bible who was concerned in that peculiar business of Shadrack,
Meshak and Abednego. And this is the answer to all who sneer about the
greatness of Greek Democracy. You only have to look at what the rest of
the world around them was doing and thinking.
But although Solon’s constitution was a great and historic beginning,
the democracy that he inaugurated was far removed from the radical
democracy, the direct democracy of later years. For at least a century
after Solon, the highest positions of the state could only be filled by
men who had a qualification of property and this property qualification
was usually associated with men of noble birth. The constitution in
other words, was somewhat similar to the British constitution in the
18th Century. The real relation of forces can be seen best perhaps in
the army. In cities like Athens, the whole able-bodied population was
called upon to fight its wars. Political power, when it passed from the
aristocracy, remained for some decades in the hands of those who were
able to supply themselves with armor and horses.
About 90 years after Solon, there was another great revolution in
Athens. It was led by a radical noble, Cleisthenes by name. Cleisthenes
instituted a genuinely middle class democracy. As in Western European
history .the first stage in democracy is often the constitution. Then
later comes the extension of the constitution to the middle classes and
the lower middle classes. That was what took place in Greece.
The great masses of the people, however, the rank and file, were
excluded from the full enjoyment of democratic rights. The ordinary
citizen, the ordinary working man, the ordinary artisan, did not have
any of the privileges that he was to have later. The way he gained them
is extremely instructive.
The development of commerce gradually transformed Athens first into a
commercial city, and then into a city which did a great trade in the
Mediterranean and the other lands around it. But a few years after the
establishment of this middle class democracy by Cleisthenes, we have the
period of the great Persian invasion. In 490 B.C., we have the battle of
Marathon, in 480, the battle of Salamis, and in 479, the battle of
Plataea, in which the whole population fought. Much of this war was
fought at sea. Thus, commercially and militarily, Athens became a naval
power. But the ships in those days were propelled by the men who rowed
them. Thus the rowers in the fleet became a great social force. The
Greeks always said that it was the growth of democracy which had
inspired the magnificent defense of Greece against Persia. But after
that victory was won, the rowers in the fleet became the spearhead of
the democracy and they were the ones who forced democracy to its
ultimate limits.
The port of Athens was, as it is to this day, the Piraeus. There, for
the most part, lived the sailors of the merchant fleet and the navy and
a number of foreigners, as takes place in every great naval port. The
leaders in the popular assembly were sometimes radical noblemen and
later were often ordinary artisans. But the proletarians of the Piraeus
were the driving force and they were the most radical of the democrats.
The struggle was continuous. The battle of Plataea took place in 479
B.C. A quarter of a century later, another revolution took place and
power was transferred definitely from the nobles who still retained some
of it, to the radical democracy. Pericles, an aristocrat by birth, was
one of the leaders of this revolution. Five years after, the lowest
classes in the city gained the power of being elected or chosen for the
Archonship, a very high post. It was Pericles who began to pay the
people for doing political work. From 458, the radical democracy
continued until it finally collapsed in 338 B.C.
The struggle was continuous. The old aristocratic class and some of the
wealthy people made attempts to destroy the democratic constitution and
institute the rule of the privileged. They had temporary success but
were ultimately defeated every time. In the end, the democracy was
defeated by a foreign enemy and not from inside. One notable feature of
Athenian democracy was that, despite the complete power of the popular
assembly, it never attempted to carry out any socialistic doctrines. The
democrats taxed the rich heavily and kept them in order, but they seemed
to have understood instinctively that their economy, chiefly of peasants
and artisans, was unsuitable as the economic basis for a socialized
society. They were not idealists or theorizers or experimenters, but
somber, responsible people who have never been surpassed at the
practical business of government.
How shall we end this modest attempt to bring before modern workers the
great democrats of Athens? Perhaps by reminding the modern world of the
fact that great as were their gifts, the greatest gift they had was
their passion for democracy. They fought the Persians, but they fought
the internal enemy at home with equal, if not greater determination.
Once, when they were engaged in a foreign war, the antidemocrats tried
to establish a government of the privileged. The Athenian democrats
defeated both enemies, the enemy abroad and the enemy at home. And after
the double victory, the popular assembly decreed as follows:
Athenian Oath
If any man subvert the democracy of Athens, or hold any magistracy after
the democracy has been subverted, he shall be an enemy of the Athenians.
Let him be put to death with impunity, and let his property be
confiscated to the public, with the reservation of a tithe to Athena.
Let the man who has killed him, and the accomplice privy to the act, be
accounted holy and of good religious odor. Let all Athenians swear an
oath under the sacrifice of full-grown victims in their respective
tribes and demes, to kill him. Let the oath be as follows: “I will kill
with my own hand, if I am able, any man who shall subvert the democracy
at Athens, or who shall hold any office in the future after the
democracy has been subverted, or shall rise in arms for the purpose of
making himself a despot, or shall help the despot to establish himself.
And if anyone else shall kill him, I will account the slayer to be holy
as respects both gods and demons, as having slain an enemy of the
Athenians. And I engage, by word, by deed, and by vote, to sell his
property and make over one-half of the proceeds to the slayer, without
withholding anything. If any man shall perish in slaying, or in trying
to slay the despot, I will be kind both to him and to his children, as
to Harmodius and Aristogeiton and their descendants. And I hereby
dissolve and release all oaths which have been sworn hostile to the
Athenian people, either at Athens, or at the camp (at Samos) or
elsewhere.” Let all Athenians swear this as the regular oath immediately
before the festival of the Dionysia, with sacrifice and full-grown
victims; invoking upon him who keeps it good things in abundance, but
upon him who breaks it destruction for himself as well as for his
family.
That was the spirit of the men who created and defended the great
democracy of Athens. Let all true believers in democracy and equality
today strengthen ourselves by studying what they did and how they did
it.