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Title: Athenian Democracy
Author: Martin Small
Date: November 1964
Language: en
Topics: Ancient Greece, democracy, direct democracy, participatory democracy
Source: Retrieved on 22nd September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/athenian-democracy
Notes: Originally published in Anarchy #045: Ancient Greece

Martin Small

Athenian Democracy

1. The anarchist case: the relevance of history.

THE ANARCHIST MAINTAINS THAT ALL MEN HAVE THE POWER to organise their

own lives: he maintains that this power does exist and should be used—or

at least, using a purely aesthetic and personal rather than ethical form

of judgment, that he would find it more pleasing if they did use it. And

a situation which would demonstrate conclusively the truth of what he

maintains, is conceivable. But since he maintains only that the use of

the power which he describes is possible, his case cannot be disproved

by any demonstration of how rarely this power has been used, or of how

difficult it is to learn to use it. Since what the anarchist desires,

either as an absolute good or merely for his own private satisfaction,

can be brought about only if people believe what he says, he wishes to

be believed. But though the incredulity of others may shake his own

conviction, no amount of disbelief, no matter how far and wide the words

and deeds in which it is expressed, can refute his case: that there is a

power, and that it should be used.

Those who doubt the anarchist case may say that there is little evidence

in history that this power exists, none that it exists in all men; the

anarchist will reply that there is much evidence of the failure to use

the power of which he speaks, none that it does not exist in all men. He

will say, do we not, in effect (however many different ways of

expressing it there may be), describe and assess ourselves and each

other as having been more or less able to use this power of which I

speak, as having learnt more or less well how to use it? And when the

anarchist appeals to history, he will appeal, not so much to what has

happened, as to how men naturally think of what has happened: not in

this way to escape from an objective fact to a subjective impression,

but rather in this way to emphasise that the deeds of men through time

are the different manifestations of an endeavour which is one and the

same in all men and that all men in their different ways have been aware

of this. And, the anarchist will say, in the societies and civilisations

which they have built to contain their common life men have expressed

their feelings about this endeavour: it has been glorious, perilous,

hopeless, absurd, and every man has found himself encouraged or

discouraged in his own individual interpretation of the common endeavour

by the expectations of the society in which he lives.

Of every society it must be asked, What encouragement has it given to

that power whereby men are able to build and create their own lives, and

what provision does it make for men to learn the use of this power—or

does it merely make provision for the failure to use this power, does it

merely ensure that the failure to use it will cause the least possible

damage to the social framework, forgetting that the social framework is

not the object of man’s common endeavour but merely an interpretation of

that object, an interpretation which may be wrong? Does this society

believe in freedom, or not? From the study of any past or present

society the anarchist cannot exactly learn anything new about the ideal

society which he has already conceived in accordance with his theory of

man. But he may be reminded of what it is that he believes, he may be

enabled to clarify his understanding and his knowledge: he will be

brought, not to any new conviction, but to a better understanding of

what has always been his conviction.

This sketch of the democracy of ancient Athens will be an attempt to

understand the theory of man upon which it was built and how it

developed: it will also attempt some examination of the theory of man in

terms of which that democracy was criticised by contemporaries. How well

did the Athenians learn the truth of the remark of their great lawgiver

Solon, that the best-policed city is “the city where all citizens,

whether they have suffered injury or not, equally pursue and punish

injustice”?[1] How justified are the claims that Pericles made in a

famous speech at the height of Athens’ pride and splendour, at the end

of the first year of the war (the Peloponnesian War, 432–404) which put

an end to the Athenian empire? “Our constitution is called a democracy

because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.

When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal

before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before

another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not

membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man

possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the

state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as

our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our

relations with each other … Taking everything together, 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

to do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional

versatility.”[2]

2. The foundations of Athenian democracy.

“About 1200 B.C. the secure prosperity of Mycenaean Greece was abruptly

terminated.”[3] The Mycenaeans had partially replaced and partially

taken over the Minoan civilisation of the Aegean: they now in their turn

succumbed to invasions from the mountains in the north: the invaders

were semi-nomadic tribesmen, among whom the most important were the

Dorians. The Dorians were ill-suited to the tedious business of the

Mycenaeans’ agriculture and industrious palace bureaucracy. They

preferred tribal assemblies over which the king was supreme, though

ruling by the consent of his soldiery. But in Greece during the age of

reconstruction from the twelfth to the eighth centuries the monarchical

organisation of society survived only in the north, in Macedonia. In the

rest of Greece the city-state (perhaps first brought over from Asia

Minor) came into being, a “synoecism” or “bringing together of

households” not so much into a single conurbation as under a single

judicial and military authority, a form of political organisation which

represented the triumph of the interests of the lowland farmers and

traders over the highlanders. Most Hellenic city-states—Athens was a

signal exception to the rule—started life handicapped by a division of

the people into a body of first-class citizens, living in the city and

on the arable land adjoining it, and an outer circle of second-class

citizens descended from the subjugated highlanders; and this schism in

the community was a fruitful cause of subsequent social conflict.”[4]

“ ‘Demos’, the people, can mean the whole community, including everyone

within it whether the community is large or small. It can also mean, not

everyone, but the mass of the people in contrast to the privileged

class—it can have, that is, a party and not a national sense, an

ambiguity that has attacked the word for ‘people’ in many languages.

This party sense appears in Solon’s poems side by side with the more

comprehensive sense, and it was probably in Solon’s lifetime, in the

early sixth century, that it began to have a party meaning.”[5] The

political situation with which Solon had to deal was one in which the

people (in the party sense of the word) were becoming politically

conscious and articulate, at least partly as a result of military and

economic developments of the seventh century.

The replacement of expensive bronze by cheap iron “brought within the

means of the yeoman farmer an equipment that had previously been the

monopoly of a small aristocracy, and the consequent large increase in

the number of a city-state’s heavy-armed fighting-men made it possible,

for the first time in the Hellenic World, to make the weight of metal

tell by substituting, for the chariot-borne champion, a phalanx of

peasant infantry, whose virtue lay not in individual physical prowess

but in drill and discipline and ‘esprit de corps’.”[6] The military

revolution brought into existence a vast new class of “hoplites”, that

is, “shield-bearers”, whose effectiveness in battle depended upon their

formation, since the shield, borne on the soldier’s left arm, protected

only his left side and he depended for the protection of his right side

on the shield of the soldier at his right just as the soldier on his

left depended upon his shield for the protection of his right side. And

if class solidarity was encouraged, so was self-confidence: “When they

see each other in moments of danger, the rich man will no longer be able

to despise the poor man; the poor man will be lean and sunburnt, and

find himself fighting next to some rich man whose sheltered life and

superfluous flesh make him puff and blow and quite unable to cope. Won’t

he conclude that people like this are rich because their subjects are

cowards, and won’t he say to his fellows, when he meets them in private,

‘This lot are no good; they’ve had it’?”[7]

The eighth century rise in population had made necessary, first ventures

in colonisation, and then commercial expansion. There emerged a class of

moderately prosperous merchants, who resented the hereditary privileges

of the aristocratic magistrates who in the previous centuries had

quietly usurped the functions of the kings. The nine annually elected

magistrates of Athens were called “archons”: the council of retired

magistrates was the “Areopagus”: it is not certain that election was

ever officially confined to the “Eupatridae” aristocracy, but in

practice they controlled the machinery of government: and Solon, who was

elected archon in 594, broke their monopoly.

Solon’s “Shaking off of Burdens” cancelled all the debts of the entire

population: for the future, he prohibited the use of one’s own body as

security for debt or the sale of oneself or one’s children into slavery

(except that a father might sell a daughter detected in illegal sexual

relations). Having “set free the land from slavery” Solon sought a

political arrangement which would combine the virtues of aristocracy

with those of democracy. He divided the citizenry into four classes, a

citizen’s class depending upon the number of bushels of com or measures

of oil his land produced, i.e. upon his income. The wealthy commoners

were the most obvious beneficiaries of Solon’s reform: they (it is not

clear whether it was the top two classes which received this right, or

only the top one) became eligible for election to the archonship, though

this was not conceded by the old aristocracy without a struggle: in the

fifteen years which followed Solon’s archonship there were two years

which appeared in the records as “anarchiai”—that is, no archon was

elected, or no election was recognised as valid. The third class (the

“zeugitai”, roughly the hoplite class) gained access to minor political

office; the fourth class (the “thetes”, literally the labourers) were

confirmed in their right to attend and vote at the assembly. But the

character of this right was much changed by Solon’s reforms.

It seems that before 594 the assembly had met but seldom, which rather

restricted the practical effectiveness of the ordinary citizen’s right

to attend and vote. After 594 all legislation and all major questions of

policy had to be brought before the assembly, and it was freed from the

control of the Areopagus by Solon’s institution of a new lower council

of 400 members, for election to which the second and third classes, but

not the fourth, seem to have been eligible. But Solon’s “greatest

achievement”, says Sir Alfred Zimmern, “was to ‘make the people master

of the verdict” … (The Magistrates remained.) But in exceptional cases,

where the law was not clear or the decision hotly disputed. Solon

granted an appeal to a large popular court of several thousand

citizens—a sort of Grand Assize of the nation sitting under open heaven

by the market-place. The exact powers and composition of this body, the

Heliaea as it was called, are not known; we only become familiar with

popular justice when the Heliaea had been split up into the numerous

courts, consisting of several hundreds, instead of thousands, of judges

(the people acted as both judge and jury and there were no lawyers),

which we find in the time of Pericles. We do not know who decided what

cases should be submitted to it. But Solon enacted one provision which

made it quite certain that, in the case of friction, the people had the

whip-hand of their magistrates. He ordained that every magistrate when

he went out of office should give an account before the assembly of the

people of his conduct during its tenure.”[8]

3. The development of Athenian democracy.

Tyranny, when it came to Athens in the middle of the sixth century, came

in a far milder form than that experienced by other cities where the

violence of class conflict had not been assigned by the wisdom of a

Solon. “Peisistratus’ two failures to establish a tyranny and his

eventual triumph organised from abroad do not look like the career of a

social revolutionary leader.”[9] His government, writes the author of

the treatise on the Constitution of Athens (probably a pupil of

Aristotle rather than Aristotle himself), “was moderate, and more

consonant with the character of a constitutional statesman than with

that of a tyrant. He was generally humane and mild, and ready to pardon

offenders; and, more especially, he pursued a policy of advancing money

to the poor to give them employment and to enable them to make a living

by farming. There were two reasons for this policy. The first was to

stop the poor from spending their time in the central city, and to

spread them out over the country-side; the second was to ensure (by

giving them a moderate competence and some business to engage their

attention) that they should have neither the desire nor the leisure to

concern themselves with public affairs.”[10] But the effect, according

to Professor Andrews, was rather different: the tyranny destroyed what

remained of “feudalism” (using the word in its conventional pejorative

sense), it made the mass of the people more independent of the upper

class and accustomed them to greater stability: “the strife of

upper-class parties was a form of disturbance unfamiliar to most

Athenians when it broke out afresh, after the fall of the tyranny,

between Isagoras and Cleisthenes.”[11] “And Cleisthenes”, writes

Herodotus, “finding himself the weaker, called to his aid the common

people.”[12]

The democracy established by Cleisthenes’ reforms in 507 was “a regime

based on a property-qualification that had been reduced almost to

zero.”[13] The membership of the council was increased from 400 to 500,

to be chosen annually by lot, 50 from each of the ten tribes (“demes”)

with which Cleisthenes had replaced the older and more decentralised

tribal organisation of Athens: no citizen was to sit on the council for

two successive years or more than twice altogether. These provisions,

“this simple device”, as A. W. Gomme calls it, “prevented the growth of

anything like that corporate feeling which comes when men work side by

side for many years together, and which is so powerful a factor in the

creation of privilege.[14] It prevented also the concentration of

political experience in a small body of men, and at the same time spread

political experience among as large a number of citizens as possible;

and in this way worked both positively and negatively towards the

predominance of the assembly.” Like the archons councillors had to be

over thirty years of age, to take an oath and to submit individually to

preliminary scrutiny and final examination:

“It may be conjectured that technically they had, like magistrates, to

be of at least zeugite (i.e. third class, vid. p. 332) status.”[15]

The council sat every day except on festivals, and it had a standing

sub-committee which dined every day in the city hall and whose task it

was to prepare the order paper (“programma”) for the council, which in

its turn prepared one for the assembly if it was to meet—as it did on

four days in every sub-committee’s period of office: no decision might

be taken by the assembly except on a motion voted by the council, and

placed by the council on the agenda. The fifty members of each tribe on

the council served in turn for a tenth of the year as the council’s

sub-committee, the sub-committee for each period being selected by lot

at the end of the preceding period: every day a new president of the

committee was chosen by lot from their number, and he also presided over

the assembly if it met. (In the fourth century another president of the

assembly was chosen by lot from among those councillors who were not on

the sub-committee.) It cannot be said that the Athenians did not take

their democracy seriously.

It may be that Cleisthenes’ intention was that the council should be the

effective governing body, only referring major and contentious issues to

the people. If that was his intention, it was not his achievement. The

people had come into their own, or so it would appear from Herodotus’

description of the Athenians’ successful repulse of an attempt by

Cleomenes king of Sparta to restore Isagoras: “And it is plain enough,

not from this instance only, but from many everywhere, that freedom is

an excellent thing; since even the Athenians, who, while they continued

under the rule of tyrants, were not a whit more valiant than any of

their neighbours, no sooner shook off the yoke than they became

decidedly the first of all. These things show that, while undergoing

oppression, they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a

master; but so soon as they got their freedom, each man was eager to do

the best he could for himself.”[16]

Ephialtes (who was murdered in 461) and Pericles carried the democracy a

few stages further. In 462 or 461, at their instance, the Assembly

passed a bill which deprived the Areopagus (which had already lost much

of its importance, its members now being chosen by lot from the archons)

of all its powers except those of a supreme court for charges of murder:

its customary jurisdiction in moral and constitutional questions went,

respectively, to the popular jury-courts (vid. p. 332) and to the

council. A few years later the chief archonships were thrown open to the

“zeugitai”, and before long even the poorest class (the “thetes”) were

accepted as candidates if they wished to stand—which in fact they

usually didn’t, since the office demanded by tradition expenditure in

excess of its meagre pay, and had some rather exacting duties, like the

choice of dramatists to compete at the Dionysia. Far more significant

was the introduction of the system of payment for the members of the

juries. For this too Pericles seems to have been responsible.

4. Democracy and empire.

Pericles was born not long before the battle of Marathon (490) at which

the Athenians defeated the Persian invading force before the arrival of

their (the Athenians’) Spartan allies—ten years later the Athenian naval

contribution and the cunning of her general Themistocles were the

decisive factors in the destruction of Xerxes’ great invading fleet at

Salamis, though a Spartan commanded the allies on land and a Corinthian

commanded their sea forces. If this was an opportunity to achieve that

political unity they needed, the ancient Greeks missed it. But the

Athenian navy (on which, rather than upon any private—or

public—frivolities, Themistocles had persuaded the assembly in 483 to

spend the large profit made by the state silver mines) became the

instrument of empire. When the Delian League—from which Sparta and the

Peloponnesian League were always quite distinct—was formed in 477

against the threat of any future Persian invasion, the allies of Athens

contributed men and ships to a common navy. But more and more did it

become the system that Athens built the ships[17] and provided the men

for their crews while her allies made monetary contributions; and as the

Persian threat receded the navy seemed to become the instrument of

purely Athenian interests and policies: the great city’s allies began to

resent what had ceased to protect and reassure, what was now the sign,

not of their safety, but of their subjection.

After the reduction of the archons to election by lot in 487, the ten

annually elected generals remained the only chief officers of state

elected directly by majority vote. (In general direct election was

distrusted as an instrument of aristocratic rule: candidates would be

elected for their personality or private influence; but occasionally the

need for a certain technical skill reduced or at least modified this

danger and at the same time made election by lot impractical.)

“Anything like a continuous government”, writes Professor Jones, “was

only achieved when one man (or a coherent group of men) succeeded in

holding the confidence of the people over a long period, in which case

he (or they) was usually in the fifth century regularly re-elected

general.” But, he warns, “the idea that the board of generals acted as

such as a government is manifestly false … The generals were primarily

executive officers in the military and naval spheres, and their duties

were to mobilise armies and fleets on the instructions of the assembly,

and to command such armies and fleets with a view to achieving

objectives laid down, in more or less detail, by the people.”[18]

Pericles was elected general for the first time in 463 or thereabouts.

The period of his continual re-election began in 443, after 443 in all

the years until and including that of his death (429) only once did the

people of Athens fail to elect him general; and that once was in the

year of the plague which devastated Athens during the second year of the

Peloponnesian War (430: the plague lasted into the summer of 429 and

after a pause in 428 flared up for the last time in 427). But even

before 443 his influence upon Athenian policy is discernible: the

reforms which he and Ephialtes initiated have already been mentioned, so

has his introduction of payment for jury-service. In 453 Athens.

began to plant strategic settlements of her citizens (“cleruchies”) in

the territories of her allies, allowing a remission of their naval

contributions (or tribute) to those whose territories she used: in 447

the Athenian assembly decided that this money could legitimately be used

to rebuild those temples and other public buildings which had been

destroyed by the Persians in 480–79. For, says Plutarch, Pericles wanted

those who stayed at home to enjoy the benefits of empire as much as

those who were paid to serve in the navy: but not for doing nothing: and

so he instituted the greatest social welfare scheme of public works that

there has ever been, and among other things the Parthenon was built. And

all the while it was claimed that it was for the Delian League that this

was being done: for after all the Parthenon was Athena’s temple, and

Athena was the patron-goddess of the League. But at the same time the

League’s treasury was moved from Delos to Athens, and the periodical

League conferences lapsed.

In 451 Pericles had proposed to the assembly that Athenian citizenship

should be restricted to persons of citizen parentage on both sides: his

proposal was accepted: perhaps he made it only because if he did not

someone else would—and he would lose influence in the assembly. Six

years later an Egyptian prince sent Athens a gift of 30,000 bushels of

wheat. There were still people on the registers of the various wards who

were no longer citizens by the terms of the act of 451. The assembly

ordered a public scrutiny, there followed 19,000 cases of disputed

citizenship (a number, it has been estimated, equal to the total number

of adult “thetes” claiming citizenship in the urban wards), and 5,000

names, it is said, were struck off the registers. “The Athenian people

had become—even the poorest of them—a privileged minority in the Empire.

The antithesis of Empire and democracy has never been more brutally and

clearly posed.”[19]

How far was Pericles responsible for Athenian policy during the years of

his generalship? Could he have influenced his fellow-citizens in the

direction of a different policy even if he had wanted to? What did

Pericles think he was doing? What did his fellow-citizens think he was

doing? What was he doing? What did he achieve? Professor Jones

emphasises Pericles’ continuous accountability to the people or at least

to the assembly[20], his absolute dependence upon their approval. “He

had to persuade the people to vote for every measure that he wished to

have passed, and if they lost confidence in him they could, as they once

did, depose (sic) and fine him, and they could flout his advice, as

again they did in trying to parley with the Spartans in 430. Athenian

policy”, he concludes, “was really determined by mass meetings of the

citizens on the advice of anyone who could win the people’s ear. The

success of Athens is a testimony to the basic sense of the ordinary

Athenian citizen.”[21] Thucydides, who had the advantages of being a

contemporary, argues somewhat differently. “Pericles, because of his

position, his intelligence, and his known integrity, could respect the

liberty of the people and at the same time hold them in check. It was he

who led them, rather than they who led him, and, since he never sought

power from any wrong motive, he was under no necessity of flattering

them; in fact he was so highly respected that he was able to speak

angrily to them and to contradict them. Certainly when he saw that they

were going too far in a mood of over-confidence, he would bring back to

them a sense of their dangers; and when they were discouraged for no

good reason he would restore their confidence. So, in what was nominally

a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen. But his

successors, who were more on a level with each other and each of whom

aimed at occupying the first place, adopted methods of demagogy which

resulted in their losing control over the actual conduct of affairs.

Such a policy, in a great city with an empire to govern, naturally led

to a number of mistakes.”[22]

But another contemporary or near-contemporary judgment was that the

mistakes of Pericles’ successors were but the natural and inevitable

consequence of a completely wrong course taken by Pericles and the other

great Athenian statesmen of the fifth century. “They have glutted the

state with harbours and dockyards and walls and tribute and rubbish of

that sort, regardless of the requirements of moderation and

righteousness, and when the inevitable fit of weakness supervenes the

citizens will hold their current advisers responsible, and go on

extolling Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, the real authors of their

woes.”[23]

5. The meaning of democracy.

The counterfeit of the real art of government is pandering: “pandering”,

Socrates explains to Gorgias, “pays no regard to the welfare of its

object, but catches fools with the bait of ephemeral pleasure and tricks

them into holding it in the highest esteem.” All the great Athenian

statesmen have failed, they have not even tried to succeed, in the real

art of government, the only object of which is to make men better, that

is, to purify their desires and appetites by detaching them from all

merely corporeal and transient images and fixing them upon the ultimate

and unchanging reality of which these images are but the shadows.

Callicles protests that “one of the men of today” (the dramatic date of

the dialogue seems to be, accepting some large anachronisms, about 405;

the year before the end of the Peloponnesian War) can compare with

Themistocles, Miltiades (the general who commanded the Athenians at

Marathon), Cimon, or Pericles; and Socrates agrees that “they seem to

have been better servants of the state than the present people, and more

able to provide the state with what it desired. But when it is a matter

of diverting men’s desires into a new channel instead of allowing them

free course, or of driving one’s fellows by persuasion or constraint to

the adoption of measures designed for their improvement, which is the

sole duty of a good citizen, there is practically nothing to choose

between your men and their successors.”[24]

The “Gorgias” is the earliest of Plato’s political dialogues; and, in

its contrasting of the true art of government with what merely imitates

it, it outlined what was to be the theme of all the later political

dialogues. “Born in 427, nearly two years after Pericles died, Plato

knew only the growing disillusionment with the glories of Periclean

democracy.”[25] At first he hoped for a regeneration of public life

after the coup d’etat of the Thirty Tyrants in 404, but the violence of

their government showed him that this was not to be. The democracy was

restored in 403 and Plato was impressed by the moderation and clemency

of the returning party; but in 399 Socrates was executed, for what at

another time and in another place would have been called crimes against

the state. “The result was that I, who had at first been full of

eagerness for a public career, as I gazed upon the whirlpool of public

life and saw the incessant movement of shifting currents, at last felt

dizzy … and finally saw clearly in regard to all states now existing

that without exception their system of government is bad.”[26] Plato

decided that what was needed was a re-examination of first principles:

an inquiry into the function and purpose of government which would show

in what way contemporary constitutions were defective instruments of

government and how they might be remedied. He founded the Academy

(c.388) to promote this inquiry in the minds of others, and as the

inquiry proceeded he saw more and more clearly and convincingly the

nature of man’s common end and the necessity for educating him in order

that he may achieve it.

Plato’s objection to democracy was much more directly to an attitude of

mind than to a form of political organisation which he assumed to be so

bound up with it as to be almost identical: the form of political

organisation being either the effect of the attitude of mind or the

social evidence of its individual existence. This attitude of mind was

one of not understanding and of not caring to understand the nature of

government: above all, one of not knowing the need for education and the

need for a teacher. In “The Republic” democracy appears as the natural

consequence of the breakdown of an aristocratic society in which the

rulers have turned aside from the common good and pursue merely their

own private interest. “Oligarchy changes into democracy because of its

lack of restraint in the pursuit of its objective of getting as rich as

possible … This failure to curb extravagance in an oligarchy often

reduces to poverty men born for better things. Some of them are in debt,

some disfranchised, some both, and they settle down, armed with their

stings, and with hatred in their hearts, to plot against those who have

deprived them of their property and against the rest of society, and to

long for revolution … Democracy originates when the poor win, kill or

exile their opponents, and give the rest equal rights and opportunities

of office, appointment to office being as a rule by lot … In democracy

there’s no compulsion either to exercise authority if you are capable of

it, or to submit to authority if you don’t want to … We said that no one

who had not exceptional gifts could grow into a good man unless he were

brought up from childhood in a good environment and given a good

training; democracy with a grandiose gesture sweeps all this away and

doesn’t mind what the habits and background of its politicians are,

provided they profess themselves the people’s friends. It’s an

agreeable, anarchic form of society, with plenty of variety, which

treats all men as equal, whether they are equal or not.”[27] All this

adumbrates the famous comparison of the democratic society with the ship

whose captain has been locked up in his cabin: the wine-casks have been

broached, everything is going merrily and joyfully, but those who can

see, see only disaster ahead.

“Politicus” (The Statesman), written between “The Republic” and “The

Laws”, clarifies the distinction between true government and its

imitation. Rule of the one may be in accordance with the laws

(monarchy), or in defiance of them (tyranny): and similarly the rule of

the few (aristocracy or oligarchy), and the rule of the many (called

democracy in both cases). But true government is characterised, not by

any constitutional form, but by the knowledge and understanding of those

who rule: the constitutional form of the rule of those who possess “the

art of government is unimportant.” It makes no difference whether their

subjects be willing or unwilling; they may rule with or without a code

of laws, they may be poor or wealthy. It is the same with doctors. We do

not assess the medical qualifications of a doctor by the degree of

willingness on our part to submit to his knife or cautery or other

painful treatment. Doctors are still doctors whether they work to fixed

prescriptions or without them and whether they be poor or wealthy … The

one essential condition is that they act for the good of our bodies to

make them better instead of worse, and treat men’s ailments in every

case as healers acting to preserve life. We must insist that in this

disinterested scientific ability we see the distinguishing mark of true

authority in medicine—and of true authority everywhere else as well.”

Such authority will be productive of a juster social order than will a

system of written law, for “law can never issue an injunction binding on

all which really embodies what is best for each: it cannot prescribe

with perfect accuracy what is good and right for each member of the

community at any one time.” But where true authority is lacking, the

authority of written law is necessary to ensure the very survival of the

state: above all there is then one rule to which there must be strict

adherence. What rule is that? “The rule that none of the citizens may

venture to do any act contrary to the laws, and that if any of them

ventures to do such act, the penalty is to be death or the utmost rigour

of punishment.”[28]

Professor G. H. Sabine claims that “The Laws” (Plato’s last political

dialogue, on which he was still working when he died) “was written in an

attempt to restore law to the place which it occupied in the moral

estimation of the Greeks and from which Plato had tried to remove

it.“But, if this is so, then the dialogue “closes”, in Sabine’s words,

“on a note which is entirely out of keeping with the purpose which Plato

has been following and with the state which he has sketched in

accordance with that purpose.”[29] What happens is that Plato’s attempt

to describe “the second-best state” in which the authority of written

law rather than of the ruler is supreme, breaks down before his own

realisation that it is useless to devise laws and institutions for a

society unless there are persons in it capable of understanding the

principle behind these laws and thus above the law in the sense that

they are its guardians rather than it their guardian. It is for this

reason that “The Laws” concludes with a description of the “Nocturnal

Council”, a council of elders who will see that the laws are properly

obeyed. “In order that the map of the state may be complete, it must

provide for the presence of some body which understands, in the first

place, the true nature of the mark a statesman must keep before his

eyes, and next, the methods by which it may be attained, and the

counsels—emanating principally from the laws themselves, secondarily

from individual men—which make for or against it.”[30]

But if all government requires that there should be some knowledge of

its purpose possessed by those who govern, it is also necessary that

those who obey should have some sort of knowledge. The need for

education, and the kind of education necessary, is made clear by what

Socrates says in the “Gorgias”: “We can win happiness only by bending

all our own efforts and those of the state to the realisation of

uprightness and self-discipline, not by allowing our appetites to go

unchecked, and, in an attempt to satisfy their endless importunity,

living the life of a brigand.”[31] “Of all the great offices of state

this is the greatest”, says Plato in “The Laws”: he is speaking of the

director of education. “… Education is the drawing and leading of

children to the rule which has been pronounced right by the voice of the

law, and approved as truly right by the concordant experience of the

best and oldest men. That the child’s soul, then, may not learn the

habit of feeling pleasure and pain in ways contrary to the law and those

who have listened to its bidding, but keep them company, taking pleasure

and pain in the very same things as the aged—that, I hold, proves to be

the real purpose of what we call our ‘songs’.”[32]

Aristotle (born in 385 or 384) agreed with his master Plato that the aim

of government is the control of the emotions in order that happiness

might be sought, not in transient and inconstant pleasures, but in those

which endure and are not subject to fortune. But while both believed in

the education of the individual so that his emotions might be controlled

by his reason, at the same time the political theory of the one no less

than that of the other seems to assume that there are and always will be

some people who will need to have their emotions controlled by others. A

basis of this assumption is the theory of the “natural slave” as worked

out by Aristotle: “A man is by nature a slave if he is capable of

becoming the property of another, and if he participates in reason to

the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it

himself.”[33]

Are there any “natural slaves”? asks Professor Charles O’Neil, and

answers his own question: “it is simply dishonest not to answer: yes,

there are. There simply are some men who are unable ‘on their own’ to

contribute to the common good life, the common life of common political

virtue.” The principle of the political life, of the life of men living

in common, is justice, the idea that each man should have his share of

what society produces and possesses. And thus the knowledge which is

necessary to the government of a society—the knowledge of which

government should be merely the application—is the knowledge of what is

due to a man: as Professor O’Neil says, “in its innermost and most

exquisite expression, in its being, an Aristotelian ‘polis’ is a knowing

of the right human thing to be done.”[34] But there are some men (this

seems to be the Platonic as well as the Aristotelian argument) who will

know what is good for a man, what is his due, better than he will know

that himself. And this is the explanation of the inadequacy, so

Aristotle says, of the democratic principle of equality. “Democracy

arose in the strength of an opinion that those who were equal in any one

respect were equal absolutely, and in all respects … Democrats seek to

widen the principle of equality until it is made to include all the

masses. What is certainly just—and expedient as well as just—is that the

principle should extend to all who are really ‘peers’.”[35] The

principle of equality which underlies the concept of justice, explains

Aristotle in the fifth book of “The Nicomachean Ethics”, does not

require that every man should get an equal share in everything, but that

all should receive equally what they need of each thing[36]; similarly,

one might add, cosmic justice requires, not that everyone should possess

an equal amount of knowledge, but that each man equally should possess

that knowledge which is required by his social position: “The soul has

naturally two elements, a ruling and a ruled; and each has its different

goodness, one belonging to the rational and ruling element, and the

other to the irrational and ruled … (Similarly, the different elements

of society must share in the possession of moral goodness, possessing it

not in the same way, but each in the way appropriate to the discharge of

its separate function.) The ruler must possess moral goodness in its

full and perfect form, because his function demands a master-artificer,

and reason is such a master-artificer; but all other persons need only

possess moral goodness to the extent required of them … (Slaves) need

but little goodness; only so much, in fact, as will prevent them from

falling short of their duties through intemperance or cowardice.”[37]

The nature of political knowledge is also debated in the “Protagoras”.

Socrates asks why it is that the Athenian Assembly will listen only to

the advice of experts when the debate concerns for instance

shipbuilding, but when the debate is about questions of public policy

will listen to anyone. Protagoras replies by means of a myth. All

animals have been given some particular ability—strength, speed, or some

other means of self-preservation; but man has been given a general

ability to use all things and, since this alone was not enough to ensure

his survival, he was also given the ability to live together with his

fellows in cities for their mutual protection. “Zeus sent Hermes to

impart to men the qualities of respect for others and a sense of

justice, so as to bring order into our cities and create a bond of

friendship and union. Hermes asked Zeus in what manner he was to bestow

these gifts on men. ‘Shall I distribute them as the arts were

distributed—that is, on the principle that one trained doctor suffices

for many laymen, and so with the other experts? Shall I distribute

justice and respect for their fellows in this way, or to all alike?’ ‘To

all’ said Zeus. ‘Let all have their share. There could never be cities

if only a few shared in these virtues, as in the arts. Moreover, you

must lay it down as my law that if anyone is incapable of acquiring his

share of these two virtues he shall be put to death as a plague to the

city.’ ” And so the Athenians listen to experts when the question before

the Assembly concerns building or some other craft. “But when the

subject of their counsel involves political wisdom, which must always

follow the path of justice and moderation, they listen to every man’s

opinion, for they think that everyone must share in this kind of virtue;

otherwise the state could not exist.”[38]

6. Some suggestions.

Perhaps neither the criticisms of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle nor its

vindication by Protagoras fully appreciate the principle of democracy.

All of them understand that the guiding idea of democracy is the idea of

equality, but none of them examines the full implications of the idea,

though Aristotle’s analysis of justice provides a clue and a

starting-point. Justice is the arranging in society that every man shall

have his share of what that society has: justice provides that every man

shall have, not an equal amount of everything, but equally whatever he

needs. In order that the work of justice—distribution and

redistribution—may be done, above all else knowledge is necessary:

knowledge of what justice requires. Aristotle and Plato think that this

knowledge will be possessed by a small class: Aristotle seems to think

that it would be better if the circle of knowledge could be extended as

far as possible, though he is somewhat vague and self-contradictory on

this point[39]; but Plato is certain that this knowledge is attainable

only by a few[40]. Protagoras claims that all citizens must possess

political skill if the city is to survive; but he speaks only of what is

socially convenient and not of what is absolutely desirable and possible

for all men—indeed the political skill of which he speaks seems to be

something accidental rather than essential to man—and Plato is

unconvinced.

But is the Platonic-Aristotelian idea of a ruling class ruling by virtue

of its superior insight in fact compatible with that justice in which

they themselves believe? The fact that justice deals in the material

world with the distribution of things should not mislead the observer

into thinking that it is concerned with nothing more: the real object of

justice—the end to which the distribution of material things is but a

means—is the creation of a psychological state, is to give the

individual a feeling of true contentment, to show him that he is well

treated and accepted by the other individuals who make up the society in

which he lives. This is why justice must not only be done, but be seen

to be done: if it is not seen, it has not achieved the object of

justice. And that is why the sort of knowledge Plato and Aristotle

describe is not enough, if justice is to be effectively realised in the

world of human relationships and not to remain but an ideal with the

awareness of which a few may be happy: it is not enough that one or a

few men should know and do justice—there is not an extent appropriate to

his social function, but know and do justice equally. If justice is a

realisable social ideal, then every individual equally must have

somewhere, somehow the power of knowing and doing justice to his

fellows, and of recognising it when he himself receives it: the

realisation of this power will be the realisation of justice.

If this is what justice is, then that slavery which Athens no less than

the rest of Greece accepted and which Aristotle sought to justify cannot

be just. Indeed, Aristotle’s rationalising interpretation will be turned

on its head: while he sought to justify and explain a social and

economic situation (i.e. the use of one man by another as a tool) in

terms of a psychological condition (i.e. the inability of an individual

to do good except by allowing himself to be the instrument of another

man’s reason), the democrat will follow Marx and will denounce this same

socio-economic situation (now described as one of “alienated labour”)

as, if not the sole cause of this psychological condition (in which the

individual does not make political and moral decisions for himself, but

allows his relations with his fellows to be determined by others), at

least dependent upon it for its existence and thus encouraging its

continuance. Slavery is, then, not a condition which is potentially

just—Aristotle admits that not all legal slaves are natural slaves; and

vice versa—but rather one which proclaims the non-realisation of

justice: both in those who are slaves, and in those who use them.

The importance of slavery in ancient Greece has been much debated: it

has been pointed out that to discuss whether Greek civilisation was

“based on” slavery is usually to become bogged down in unprofitable

arguments concerning just what “to be basic” means.[41] Professor Jones

write: “It is unlikely that any slaves were owned by two-thirds to

three-quarters of the citizen population (of Athens). The great majority

of the citizens earned their living by the work of their hands, as

peasant farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, seamen and labourers.”[42] But

it cannot be denied that the Athenian democracy used slavery; and it was

silver-mines worked by slaves—“speaking generally, mining was the

gravest blot on Hellenism”[43]—that provided the capital which brought

the Athenian imperial navy into being.

The Athenian democracy of the fifth century B.C. certainly brought to a

high pitch of development the participation of the individual citizen in

the political activity of his city: on this all contemporary witnesses,

whether hostile or favourable, agree with Pericles: the contrast between

the city’s splendid public buildings and the miserable private dwellings

shows, says Sir Alfred Zimmem, that the fifth-century Athenian “knew

very well that a man who practises politics and ignores housekeeping,

though he may possibly starve, at least remains sane and

companionable.”[44] Slavery is one sign that Athens did not fully

understand the democracy it professed. Its acceptance of war is another.

Wars arise, says Socrates, from the desire for material things: “All

wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we

have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its

service.”[45] And even if we seek merely to defend ourselves against the

unjust demands of an aggressor, it may be possible to do this only at

the expense of ceasing to be able to defend ourselves against, what is

far worse and more harmful than suffering injustice, doing

injustice.[46] The first requirement of justice is not that a man should

receive his share of those material things which are as it were the

instruments of justice (of pp.23–4), but that there should be a

willingness on the part of his fellows to give him that which is his

due. Thus, the most and indeed the only effective way in which a man can

defend himself against suffering injustice is not, as even Socrates

thought, by the use of power, but by the building up of the spirit of

justice in his fellows.

Neither the policy of the Athenian democracy nor the

Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian criticism of it fully realised the

universal nature of the democratic principle of equality. But an

understanding of the Athenian experience—of the slow, groping,

incoherent and never altogether complete evolution of an idea of

citizenship, together with an appreciation of the criticisms of the

great Athenian philosophers[47] (and it is important to remember that

these criticisms were in terms of an idea of citizenship fostered to a

great extent by the political development of Athens): may nonetheless

help us to understand the nature of this equality. We may accept the

philosophers’ contention that the art of government depends upon

education, that in a sense government is education, and even (some of us

at least) that education is the training of the individual’s libidinal

capacity so that he seeks after the true happiness and not after

ephemeral pleasures. But the anarchist will want to modify—perhaps he

will claim, to clarify—the original picture of the ideal.

It is strange that Plato with his strong sense of the common nature and

destiny of man—“there is none so worthless whom love cannot impel, as it

were by a divine inspiration, towards virtue”[48]—should nonetheless

have made so sharp a distinction between those who govern and those who

obey: the explanation lies perhaps in a misconceived psychological

analogy—Plato compared the rule which rational men ought to exert over

irrational men to the rule which the rational part of the soul ought to

exert over the irrational part.[49] But the anarchist ideal of the

universal rule of reason and justice is of a rule whose instruments are

not—cannot be—the understanding of a few or even of a majority: the idea

of justice is that all shall be saved. And the object of education is

the awakening or the bringing back to life of the power of understanding

in every man: education is education in the use of freedom, in the use

of the power of every individual man to rise above the fleeting and

insatiable pleasures of material things to the contemplation of the

divine harmony of which the spirit of justice is the earthly sign or

symbol. Justice is the achievement of freedom: where there is

understanding of freedom, there is justice, and where freedom is

obscure, unrealised, there can be no justice. And even while the

universal power of freedom remains slighted and unfulfilled, every just

man and every just act is a testimony that it is universal.

[1] Quoted by A. E. Zimmern. The Greek Commonwealth (O.U.P. 1911, 5^(th)

ed. 1931, paperback 1961), p. 133. (All my references are to the 2^(nd)

edition.)

[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin Classics

translation by Rex Warner, 1954), pp. 117 119.

[3]

G. L. Huxley, Early Sparta (Faber & Faber 1962), p. 14.

[4] Arnold J. Toynbee, Hellenism. The history of a civilisation (Home

University Library: O.U.P. 1959), p. 37.

[5]

A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (Hutchinson’s University Library, 1956),

pp. 35–6.

[6] Toynbee, op. cit., p. 64.

[7] Plato, The Republic, 556 (Penguin Classics translation by H. D. P.

Lee, 1955, pp. 328–9).

[8] Zirmmern, op. cit., pp. 134–5.

[9] Andrewes, op. cit., p. 104.

[10] Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle, translated and with an

introduction (0.U.P. 1946); appendix: On the Constitution of Athens, p.

377.

[11] Andrewes, p. 114.

[12] The History of Herodotus, Book 5 chapter 66 (translated by Georg

Rawlinson, Everyman’s Library 1910, volume, p. 29).

[13] Toynbee, p. 72.

[14]

A. W. Gomme, More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford:

Blackwell 1962), pp. 184–5.

[15]

A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell 1957). p. 105.

(The indispensable modern work on the subject.)

[16] op. cit., Book 5 chapter 78 (op. cit. volume 2, p. 35).

[17] These ships were galleys and they were rowed by Athenian citizens—a

task which was the occupation of slaves and criminals in other

civilisations.

[18] Jones, op. cit., pp. 126, 125, 124.

[19]

A. R. Burn, Pericles and Athens (London: English Universities Press

1948), p. 91.

[20] On a good day 6,000 might attend out of a citizen population—i.e.

excluding women, slaves, children and foreigners—which has been

estimated to have been about 30,000 in the last quarter of the fifth

century.[50]

[21] Jones. pp. 127, 132.

[22] op. cit. (Penguin Classics tr., pp. 13 5).

[23] Plato. Gorgias, 519a (Penguin Classics translation by W. Hamilton

1960, p. 135).

[24] ibid., 464, 517 (pp. 46, 133).

[25]

J. B. Skemp, introduction to translation of Plato: The Statesman

(Politicus) (Routledge 1952, Routledge paperback 1961), p. 26.

[26] Letter 7, 325d, quoted by G. H. Sabine, A History of Political

Theory (Harrap 1937, 3^(rd) ed. 1951), p. 45.

[27] 555, 557, 558 (pp. 327, 328, 329–30).

[28] tr. Skemp, op. cit., pp. 194–5, 196, 203 (293a-b, 294b, 297e).

[29] Sabine, op. cit., pp. 71, 84.

[30] The Laws (translated by A. E. Taylor, Dent 1934), p. 357.

[31] 507 (p. 117).

[32] The Laws, Book 2: 659 (op. cit., p. 37).

[33] The Politics, Book 1 chapter 5: ¶9 (tr. Barker, p. 13).

[34]

C. J. O’Neil, Aristotle’s Natural Slave Reconsidered (The New

Scholasticism, July 1953, pp. 259, 278).

[35] The Politics, Book 5 chapter 1: ¶3; Book 5, chapter 8: ¶6 (pp. 204,

225).

[36] vid. in particular chapters 3 and 5 (Penguin Classics translation

by J. A. K. Thompson 1955, pp. 146–7, 151–4).

[37] The Politics, Book 1 chapter 13: ¶¶6 8, 12 (pp. 35–6).

[38] Protagoras, 322c-d (Penguin Classics translation by W. K. C.

Guthrie 1956, p. 54).

[39] The Politics, 6.2 ¶l, 7.14 ¶¶2–3 19, 2.11 ¶14, 3.1 ¶12 (pp. 258,

315, 319, 86, 95); of 5.8 ¶¶17–18, 6.4 ¶¶l-4. (pp. 228, 263).

[40] The Statesman 293a (tr. Skemp, p. 194).

[41]

M. I. Finley, Was Greek Civilisation Based on Slavery? (Historia 8,

1959, p. 161): reprinted in M. I. Finley (ed.), Slavery in

Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Heffer 1960). (This collection

of essays contains a very interesting on by R. O. Schlaifer on

“Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle”.)

[42] Jones, p. 17.

[43] Sir William Tarn, Hellenistic Civilisation (Edward Arnold 1927,

3^(rd) ed. 1952), p. 254: he gives some details.

[44] op. cit., p. 212 (cf. pp. 213–4, 293–4, 296).

[45] Phaedo, 66 (The Last Days of Socrates: Penguin Classics translation

by Hugh Tredennick 1954, p. 111).

[46] vid. Gorgias, 509–513, 522 (pp. 119- 25, 141–2).

[47] Both Socrates and Plato were Athenian citizens who lived and died

in Athens Socrates’ service in the Athenian army and Plato’s expeditions

to Sicily were the only time they spent away from their native city);

Aristotle neither was born or died in Athens, but spent there twenty

years in Plato’s Academy 367–347) and another thermo (335–323) in his

own.

[48] Symposium 179a 7–8 (also in Penguin Classics translation).

[49] vid. The Laws, Book 3: 689 (p. 70).