Chapter Four: The Ideal of Citizenship

If the city makes it possible for us to single out politics as a unique sphere of self-governance that is neither social nor statist, the citizen as the viable substance of this unique sphere makes it possible’to undo the confusion that blends these very distinct spheres into a collage of overlapping terms and blurred meanings, For it is in the citizen—in his or her activity as a self-governing being—that! the political sphere becomes a living reality with the flesh and blood of a palpable body politic.

The Greeks may have been the first people to give us a clear image of the citizen in any politically intelligible sense of the term. Tribal peoples form social groups—families, clans, personal and community alliances, sororal and fraternal clubs, vocational and totemic societies, and the like; They may assemble regularly to examine and decide communal affairs—certainly a nascent form of politics—but the issues that confront them rarely deal with ways and means of governing themselves. Custom plays a paramount role in establishing their norms for community management; discourse, beyond, direct argumentation, occupies a place secondary to the enormous authority of precedence and long-established administrative procedures. Nor is this approach to be disdained as trivial or “primitive/’ Group safety and stability require that the community preserve the old, well-tested ways of life, of expeditiously applying and modifying time-honored and secure structures of group management. The kin relationship forms the social tissue of this governing body, whether the blood tie be real or fictitious. Religious belief, too, may play a very important role, as Fustel de Coulanges has argued.

But politics as a creative and rational arena of discourse with its vastly innovative possibilities for shaping and bonding widely disparate individuals is only latent in tribal assemblies. It still has a domestic character with powerful familial biases that exclude the stranger. Tribal assemblies of preliterate peoples invoke the past political assemblies of free citizens create a future. The former tends to be highly conservative; the latter, highly innovative. If the two were juxtaposed with each other, we would be obliged to contrast custom to reason, precedent to a sense of futurity, kinship ties to civic ties, mythopoeia to ethics. In waxing enthusiastically over the popular assemblies that existed very early in Mesopotamian cities, Henri Frankfort declared that the assembly form “is a man-made institution overriding the natural and primordial division of society into families and clans. It asserts that habitat, not kinship, determines one’s affinities. The city, moreover, does not recognize outside authority. It may be subjected by a neighbor or a ruler, but its loyalty cannot be won by force, for its sovereignty rests with the assembly of its citizens.”{15}

Which is not to say that these contrasts are so absolute that they polarize the tribal assembly against its civic counterpart. Athenian citizenship, based on a civic myth that all citizens shared a common ancestry, became highly parochial by Perikles’s time. For a well-established resident alien or metoikos (metics) to become a citizen of the polis was virtually impossible. Doubtless, Athenians knew that Solon, a century earlier, offered the lure of Athenian citizenship to all skilled craftsmen who were willing to migrate from various parts of the Mediterranean to Athens. And Kleisthenes, a generation removed from Perikles, permitted many metics to become citizens in his day. Athenian citizenship, conceived as a form of status based on blood ties, was a shaky affair at best. But under Perikles, the body politic behaved like an oversize medieval guild. For patently self-serving reasons, it simply closed its doors to outsiders who might stake a reasonable claim to the privileges afforded by the corporate community. In principle, the impediments Athenians raised to citizenship in the middle of the fifth century B.C. were not different from those that modern nation states place in the way of immigrants and alien residents.

The Greek citizen ideal, however, differed very profoundly from the modern. It was not simply some specious myth of shared heredity that united citizens of the polis with each other but a profoundly cultural conception of personal development—the Greek notion of paideia. Paideia is normally translated into English as education, a term that is notable for its sparseness and limitations. To the Greeks, particularly the Athenians, the word meant considerably more. The education of a young man involved a deeply formative and life-long process whose end result made him an asset to the polis, to his friends and family, and induced him to five up to the community’s highest ethical ideals. The German word, bildung, with its combined meanings of character development, growth, enculturation, and an well-rounded education in knowledge and skills, more appropriately denotes what the Greeks meant by paideia than any word we have in English. It expresses a creative integration of the individual into his environment, a balance that demands a critical mind with a wide-ranging sense of duty. The Greek word, areté, which in Homeric times denoted the warrior attributes of prowess and valor, was extended by the classical era to mean goodness, virtue, and excellence in all aspects of life. Paideia and areté are indissolubly linked—not as means and ends but as a unified process of civic- and self-development. Excellence in public life was as crucial to an Athenian’s character development as excellence in his personal life. The polis was not only a treasured end in itself; it was the “school” in which the citizen’s highest virtues were formed and found expression. Politics, in turn, was not only concerned with administering the affairs of the polis but also with educating the citizen as a public boing who developed the competence to act in the public interest. paideia, in effect, was a form of civic schooling as well as personal training. It rooted civic commitment in independence of mind, philia, and a deep sense of individual responsibility.

The modern notion of “politics” as a form of managerial “efficiency” or of education as the mere acquisition of knowledge and skills would have seemed pitiful to an Athenian citizen of classical times. Athenians assembled as an ekklesia not only to formulate policies and make judgments; they came together to mutually educate each other in the ability to act justly and expand their civic ideals of right and wrong. The “political process,” to use a modern cliche, was not strictly institutional and administrative; it was intensely processual in the sense that politics was an inexhaustible, everyday “curriculum” for intellectual, ethical, and personal, growth—paideia that fostered thjs ability of citizens to creatively participate in public affairs, to bring their best abilities to the service of the polis and its needs, to intelligently manage their private affairs in Accordance with the highest ethical standards of the community.

This “calling” to civic and personal excellence was more than a family responsibility’or an institutionalized form of personal training. By classical times, Athenians who could afford them had tutors aplenty—rhetoricians to teach them the arts of persuasion; philosophers and logicians to instruct them in wisdom and consistency of thought; elders to provide them with the inherited lore of their families, civic traditions, and models of behavior; gymnasia in which to train and control their bodies or learn martial arts; courts to shape their faculties for judgment; and, in time, the ekklesia in which to formulate crucial policies through discourse and debate. But every polis, be it a garrison-state such as Sparta or a democracy such as Athens, provided a variety of public spaces in which citizens could gather on more intimate terms, often daily, to discuss public and practical affairs. Perhaps the most important of these spaces, the agora, which M. I. Finley calls the “town square,” was an informal meeting ground in the people could be assembled when needed.{16} By Perikles’ time, the Athenians were to shift the formal assembly of the people—the ekklesia—to a hillside (the Pnyx), but, as Finley notes, the agora originally meant a “gathering place,” long before it was invaded by shops, stalls, and temples.

The agora provided the indispensible physical space for turn¬ing citizens hip from a periodic institutional ritual into a living, everyday practice. Home was the place in which one ate, slept, and tended to the details of private life. But the Greeks generally held this private world in small esteem. Life was authentically lived in the open public space of the agora, where the citizens discussed business affairs, gossiped, met friends—new and old—occasionally philosophized, and almost certainly engaged in vigorous political discussion. Perikles could be waylaid there by badgering critics as surely as Sokrates could be drawn into lengthy discussions by the intellectually earnest young nobles of the polis. Jugglers, acrobats, poets, and play-actors mixed with tradesmen, yeomen, philosophers, and public officials, a crowd spiced by strangely costumed visiting foreigners who gawked at the looming acropolis above and the superbly adorned public buildings nearby.

During inclement weather, this colorful and eminently vocal crowd could take refuge in the colonnaded arcades or stoa that lined part of the twenty-six-acre square. There, they encountered artisans working at their trade and merchants who displayed their wares, often women who sold much of the farm produce that fed the community. In its emphasis on-direct, almost protoplasmic contact, full participatory involvement and its delight in variety and diversity, there is a sense in which the agora formed the space for a genuine ecological community within the polis itself. Thus politics, which found its most ordered and institutionalized expression in the ekklesia, originated in the daily ferment of ordinary life In the agora. Its informal genesis reveals the organic way in which Important policies slowly developed into popular ideas before they were formulated as verdicts and laws in the courts and official assemblages of the polis. The democratic institutions of Athens, for all the ritualistic panoply that surrounded them, were merely the structural forms in which everyday debate and gossip were hardened into the legislated expression of an easy-going, unstructured, and popular politics—one that was embodied by an earnest, Spontaneous, and an extraordinarily active citizenry. The “tyranny of structurelessness” that so many contemporary liberals and socialists fling so reprovingly at their libertarian critics as an “ultrademocratic” vice would have been incomprehensible to the Athenian citizen. The teeming “anarchy” of the agora was, in fact, an indispensible and fecund grounding for “libertarian” structures (to use Jaeger’s term) that, given time and neglect, would have Otherwise turned into oligarchic institutions with a democratic veneer.

Citizenship, in effect, involved an on-going process of educational, ethical, and political gestation for which such words as “constituent” and “voter” are modern parodies of a politics that was more existential than formal. This gestative process occurred in the agora days before it found expression in the ekklesia. It is a cliche to say that Americans are a “practical people,” Italians an “emotional people,” Germans a “methodical people.” In any case, there can be no doubt that the Athenians were a “political people” and citizenship was their destiny, not merely the avocation it has become in the modern world. Behind their ideal of citizenship, nonperishable as long as there is a meaningful literature on democracy, is the way that citizenship was formed. It was a citizenship formed by the moral fortitude of a mountain people—in Athens’s case, tempered by the wide cultural contacts afforded by a major seaport—and a delicate balancing of social conflicts that pitted opposing classes against each other without obliterating the virtues each possessed in its own right. Greece was to inherit not only the aristocratic epics of Homer and their high standard of courage but the mundane litanies of Hesiod with their workaday sense of practicality. Her long journey from a tribal to a political world, from a society of peasants to one of citizens, is a fascinating narrative in its own right. But it is also an exemplary biography of the citizen as such, at least insofar as this remarkable individual was to approximate an ideal that Athens more closely attained than any community that followed her—and one that the modern world may well lose at the peril of its freedom.

The first phase of this journey into a political world begins with the way the Athenians managed to shed the narrow features of the kinship bond based on blood ties, religion, and familial loyalties, while simultaneously developing an almost ecological sensibility based on a Active kinship, territorial commonality, rationality, and a healthy secular humanism.

Greek society was not immune to a general historical trend that raised humanity out of a dismal archaic era, one which reworked an egalitarian tribal world into a hierarchical feudal one. By Homeric times, commanding patriarchal clans had already imposed their will on loosely structured and highly vulnerable peasant communities. Ironically, the very tribal features of kin and blood that once had produced egalitarian norms of mutual aid and material reciprocity were used to achieve their very opposite: a hierarchical system of rule focused on domination and acquisition. This new reordering of traditional clans or phratries from tribal into aristocratic families fostered exclusivity and privilege rather than sharing and communal responsibility. The “bribe-devouring judges” whom Hesiod, the Boeotian peasant, had denounced in the eighth century B.c. had become land-devouring nobles by the seventh. Gross inequalities in the ownership of land that mark the Greek world in that period of transition seem like forerunners of the Roman agrarian crisis that followed the Punic Wars. That Greece, especially Athens, did not become a mere historical preface to Rome, indeed that the polis developed a political life so markedly different from any republican system of governance, can be explained only in terms of a remarkable constellation of factors from which the modern world can learn much.

What aristocratic Greece and democratic Greece were to share as a common legacy is a vigorous ideal of independence—an ideal oven stronger than its widely touted ideal of justice. To the Greek mind, clientage in any form verged on slavery, indeed a denial of the individual’s humanness and personality. This notion, which many Greek scholars were to regard as an aristocratic disdain for Work as such, actually expressed a concern for the citizen’s capacity to form independent judgments insulated from external or personal interests. “To build one’s own house, one’s own ship, or to spin and weave the material which is used to clothe the members of one’s own household is in no way shameful,” observes Claude Mosse in her insightful study on work in the ancient world. “But to work for another man, in return for a wage of any kind, is degrading. It is this which distinguishes the ancient mentality from a modern which would have no hesitation in placing the independent artisan above the wage-earner. But, for the ancients, there is really no difference between the artisan who sells his own products and the workman who hires out his services. Both work to satisfy the needs of others, not their own. They depend on Others for their livelihood. For that reason they are no longer free. This perhaps above all is what distinguishes the artisan from the poasant. The peasant is so much closer to the ideal of self-sufficiency (autarkeia) which was the essential basis for man’s freedom in the ancient world. Needless to say,fin the classical age, in both Greece and Rome, this ideal of self-sufficiency had long since given way to a system of organized trade. However, the archaic mentality endured, and this explains not only the scorn felt for the artisan, laboring in his smithy, or beneath the scorching sun on building sites, but also the scarcely veiled disdain felt for merchants or for rich entrepreneurs who live off the labor of their slaves.”{17}

As befitted free men, farmers enjoyed the economic independence and material security that were needed to form decisions untainted by self or class interests. In fact many Greeks would have seen even wealthy tradesmen as clients of their buyers and highly skilled craftsmen, artists, and poets as dependents of a fickle market for their products. To be free in Athens meant very little if one’s basic needs were not satisfied within a mutualistic group of self-sufficient producers. The word autarkeia, strictly translated, has the double meaning of the rarely used definition of “selfirule,” as weil as. the. more familiar notion of “self-sufficiency.” In its latter meaning, autarkeia has long been replaced by autonomos, literally the conditipn of living by one’s own laws. This concept of independence is more juridical than political. The English translation of these words, notably the use of “autarchy” to mean economic self-sufficiency and autonomy to denote personal freedom or self-government, creates a disjunction between the material and political that would have been alien to the Greek ideal of independence. We would be hard put to understand Artistotie’s belief that all tradesmen, artisans, merchants, and servants should be denied the franchise if we failed to recognize that it is not simply labor and trade he despised but, more importantly, material clientage in any form that could affect the citizen s independence of judgment. Independence without the substance of material self-sufficiency and personal autonomy would have been formal at best and hollow at worst to the Greek mind. No client, however well-off, could render a judgment or reason freely without deferring to exogenous authorities and interests on whom his welfare depended.

It is worth noting that these Hellenic precepts have entered into modern ecological thinking with little knowledge of their remote origins and political orientation. But such a demanding notion of independence could not have emerged solely from ideological considerations. Here, the mountainous terrain of the Greek archipelago comes verymuch to our aid. “Nature gave to Greece, as to her neighbors, the tendency to equality together with abundant opportunities for the growth of public opinion, and then intensified these forces by strictly limiting the areas in which they could operate,” observes Alfred Zimmern. “Each little plain, rigidly sealed within its mountain-barriers and with its population concentrated upon its small portion of good soil, seems formed to be a complete world of its own. Make your way up the pasture-land, over the pass and down on to the fields and orchards on the other side, and you will find new traditions and customs, new laws and new gods, and most probably a new dialect.... The Greeks were not painfully taught to value local independence. They grew up unable to conceive of any other state of government. It was a legacy slowly deposited through the long period of isolation which intervened between the first settlement of the Hellenic invaders and their emergence centuries later as a civilized race. They never themselves realized, even their greatest writers did not realize, how unique and remarkable their political institutions were.”{18}

Colorful and truthful as these lines may be, Zimmern understates the extent to which Greek thinkers were conscious of their heritage and political uniqueness. Indeed, as we shall see, it was the extraordinary acuity of this consciousness that imbued Athens with a high sense of mission and clear sense of direction. No political sphere was more carefully, thoughtfully, and artistically crafted than the Athenian. Equality or isonomia followed from an even more basic; influence than Greece’s mountainous terrain exercised on its pocket-sized communities of free villagers. To five in such isolation and forced independence required that every family and family-sized community had to fend for itself. The Greek farmer had to be a well-rounded man in a more tangible sense than we use this cliche today. He was obliged to know how to fight for his land,as well as cultivate it, build his shelters as well as repair them, methodically tend to his wounds as well as cunningly avoid needless conflicts, plan his long-range needs as well as satisfy his immediate ones, function as a caring father, loyal spouse, dutiful son, supportive brother, a wary buyer of things that his co mm unity could not produce—in short, he needed to combine a working knowledge of all the techniques needed for his survival with soldiering and “politicking.” Together with his spouse, who presided over all the domestic affairs of the family, the Greek farmer gained in practical competence and personal fortitude what isolation denied him in acculturation. In the Latin sense of competere—to be fit, proper, or qualified—he had no equal in the ancient world. Hence, he could be “unequaled” by self-anointed superiors who tried to subordinate him and assert their authority over his destiny. A magnificent amateur, he embodied the nascent citizenship in which all his peers acknowledged the need for a self-possessed individual who could be entrusted as much with the affairs of his community as with the satisfaction of his private needs.

The flow of ideas from the independence of a mountain-dwelling villager to the egalitarianism of a polis-dwelling citizen must be seen as an unbroken continuum. The Greek language itself is magnificently processual and organic. A crucially important word such as arche, from which an entire political vocabulary has been constructed, denotes the originating principle as well as the ordering principle of any kosmos, the Greek word for “order” in the broadest sense of the term. To think of an “order” without deriving it from its origin and, hence, the latent possibilities that it could fulfill is linguistically built into the Greek mind—and also provides us with an important clue to the language’s ethical thrust. Origin, history, f ulfillm ent, and possibility—all form a unified whole in Greek, so that whether we choose to speak of the universe, humankind, the polis, or the citizen, these concepts, charged with ethical meaning, denote the unity of civic, natural, and social life or what we call “connectedness” today. Accordingly, autarchies or self-sufficient communities lead us organically—deductively, if you will—to independence, competence, and isonomia. The Greek polis has its arche in this germinal phasing of a highly competent farmer who, by an immanent process of sociopolitical development, found his fulfillment as a highly competent citizen.

The old Greek aristocracy was no mere anachronism in this process. The Athenian democracy did not shed it; rather, it tried, with qualified success, to absorb it. Its epic culture, gospel of valor, high sense of philia, and code of honor, marked by a disdain for material thin gs, were incorporated into the puritanical virtues of

the democracy, which abjured luxury, ornateness of dress, culinary delights, and self-indulgence. The democratic hero was not only valorous but sternly self-willed and emotionally controlled. Warrior manliness did not die; it was reworked into civic loyalty, personal dignity, and a high regard for virtuous behavior. The comradeship of the military camp became the isonomia of the ekklesia in which human worth was seen as virtually interchangeable. Citizens were expected not only to be competent but to be competent equals. Hence, all could participate in the governance of the polis on the same footing, a practice which, as we shall see, was translated into the widespread use of sortition and attempts to arrive at decisions by consensus as well as by voting.

It is worth emphasizing that nearly all the men who turned Athens from an aristocratic oligarchy into a democratic polity were of noble lineage, Solon, Kleisthenes, and Perikles, to cite the most well-known figures in forming the democracy, were members of the most elite clans, the genos, of Attica, the territorial domain of Athens. In contrast to their Roman counterparts, however, they did not become the leaders of an unruly partes populares, nor did they try to rise in an oppressive hierarchy by throwing away their fortunes in gifts to a debased urban mob. They were commonly men of exceptional distinction who could be as heroically selfless in political causes as their ancestors were heroically valorous in military ones. As Werner Jaeger was to point out, Athens did not destroy its aristocracy but rather tried to turn its entire citizen body into one.

This pithy formulation has several levels of meaning. Politically, it sums up the slow but sweeping way in which Attica’s “bribe-devouring” nobles were shorn of their power. By the seventh century B.C., Athens and its environs were on the brink of revolution. Plutarch tells us that the “common people were weighed down with debts they owed to a few rich men. They either cultivated their lands for them and paid them a sixth of the produce and were hence called Hectemorioi and Thetes, or else they pledged their own persons to raise money and could be seized by their creditors, some of them being enslaved at home, and others being sold to foreigners abroad. Many parents were even forced to sell their own children (for there was no law to prevent this) or to go into exile because of the harshness of their creditors. However, the majority, which included the men of most spirit, began to make common cause together and encourage one another not to resign themselves to these injustices, but to choose a man they co,uld trust to lead them. Having done this, they proposed to set all enslaved debtors free, redistribute the land and make a complete reform of the constitution.”{19}

At this point, Athens might have easily gone the way of Rome. Five centuries later; the Gracchi brothers, who faced a nearly identical crisis between bitterly polarized classes of landless peasants and bloated patricians, raised such sweeping demands for political change and agrarian reform that they opened irreparable wounds in the Roman body politic. It remains to the credit of the Athenians that the crisis was handled very gingerly. The moderation that Hellenic society turned into a deeply personal as well as civic ethos was to find its embodiment in Solon, a noble of considerable prestige who had earned the respect of the Athenians as a whole. No one could have contained the crisis that faced his people with greater prudence.

Elected archon of the polis—its chief magistrate—and invested with sweeping powers to resolve the, conflict, Solon followed the middle course that eluded the Gracchi and the more sincere populates in the closing years of the Republic. For the poorest of the demos—the Hectemorioi and Thetes—he removed their most pressing economic burden by canceling all outstanding debts and making debt slavery illegal. To strengthen their political status, he revived and expanded the functions of the ekklesia, which had virtually ceased to exist since tribal days. The assembly was authorized not only to enact the community’s laws and elect its magistrates; it convened as a court of justice to deal with all cases other than homicide, a crucial advance in empowering the demos, The upper crust of the nobility—the Eupatridai—were obliged to relinquish their hereditary claim to, furnish Athens with its archons, a powerful, annually elected magistracy whose number Solon increased to nine. The office, to be sure, could only be filled by landowners, but the door to executive power, which later generations were to open, was now unlocked for the demos.

Solon never pretended that he desired the political and economic supremacy of demos, nor did he try to divest the nobility of power. As his verses indicated, he shrewdly steered a middle course through a crisis that would have exploded in social chaos had any of the contending orders gained absolute supremacy over the others: