People :
Author : Murray Bookchin
Text :
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:
The land magnates were not deprived of their holdings, nor were the Hectemorioi permitted to reclaim the sixth of their produce that was taken by their landlords. Usury still plagued the Attic peasantry, although the lender and borrower were more evenly squared off by the controls that the ekklesia exercised over legal disputes. Solon also created a Council of Four Hundred—the famous Athenian boule—to which only propertied men could be elected annually. However, the boule served to check not only the popular ekklesia by rigorously determining its agenda and supervising its deliberations; it also checked the behavior of the aristocratic Council of the Areopagus (formerly the powerful Council of the Eupatridai), whose functions over the years were to, become more ceremonial than political. A number of reforms, unique for their time, were made to expand individual rights and alter popular etiquette. An heiress, burdened by an impotent husband, was free to marry his next of kin, and relatively poor women were spared the need to collect dowries. Individuals could will their property as they ‘chose, not according to familial dictates—a law that struck an important blow at the collective solidity of the aristocratic genos and its concentration of sizable wealth. A number of lesser laws restricted displays of excessive luxury and riches. But perhaps the most strikingly Hellenic law imputed to Solon was one that disenfranchized any citizen who, to use Plutarch’s words, “in the event of revolution, does not take one side or the other.” It was Solon’s intention, Plutarch emphasized, not to reward citizens who seek the safety of neutrality, apathy, or indifference at the expense of the public interest. Athenians were expected to be politically involved, irrespective of the causes to which they adhered, or else they were not worthy of citizenship. It was an affront to the Hellenic concept of citizenship for a man to prudently and selfishly “sit back in safety waiting to see which side would win.”
Characteristically, Solon refused to linger on as a tyrant by no means a pejorative term or a despised status in those days despite pleas that he become one, and went into voluntary exile for ten years. His work did not resolve all the political and economic problems that brought him to the archonship, nor did it prevent a tyrant from ultimately replacing him. But it provided Athens with the opportunity to absorb his reforms and the time needed for its citizenry to mature politically—to use and accustom itself to the ekklesia, to learn the arts of compromise, and to develop a political etiquette that fostered a sense of civic commonality rather than social conflict. The rather mild tyranny of Peisistratus and his son Hippias, which followed Solon s departure, greatly reduced the power of the Attic nobility and initiated the economic and political changes that were to lead to the democracy. Recalcitrant nobles were forced into exile and their estates divided among the poor. The needy were given livestock and seed, exports were promoted, and a vigorous foreign policy opened new markets to Athenian commerce. Peisistratus, despite the personal control he exercised over Attica’s affairs and his blatant nepotism, adhered to the Solonic constitution so meticulously that even Solon was induced to support him after his return to Athens. The political level of the Athenian citizen was raised enormously by the tyranny, and the commoners—farmers, shepherds, artisans, and merchants—benefited so considerably from the archonships of Peisistratus and Hippias that the tyranny became self-vitiating. Three generations had passed since Solon had been given the archonship, and Athens was now ready for a democracy. In terms of the mere flow of events, the efforts to initiate authentic popular rule seemed to come almost as a reaction to attempts by the aristocracy to restore their old clannish oligarchy, and many of the democracy’s features must be seen as institutionalized efforts to prevent the emergence of entrenched power by elites of any kind. But the Athenian people, too, seem to have become more certain of themselves and their capacity to govern their own affairs. The aristocracy, in turn, appears to have suffered a genuine lack of nerve. After a feeble attempt to eliminate the reforms of Solon and the Peisistradae, the nobles broke ranks. One of their own kind, Kleisthenes, the head of the aristocratic Alcmaenodae, became archon in 506 B.C., and the democraticization of Athens was launched in earnest.
Kleisthenes struck decisively at the societal basis of aristocratic power—the traditional kinship network that gave the Attic nobility its very sense of identity. The ancient Greek phratries and clans were simply divested of any political power and gradually declined in importance for want of any significant functions. The old Ionian system of four ancestral tribes was converted into ten Strictly territorial “tribes” based exclusively on residence. The villages and towns of Attica, in turn, became outlying sections of Athens and were designated as “demes” instead of genoi. Politics now became inseparable from territorialism: the demes, with their own popular assemblies, were grouped together in varying numbers into thirds or trittyes, and three trittyes, in turn, constituted a tribe, hence Attica was composed of thirty trittyes. Ten of the thirty demoi were composed of residents in or around Athens; another ten, from the maritime districts; and the remainder from the interior.
Kleisthenes shrewdly placed one urban trittys in each of the ten tribes, so that the Attic agrarians from whom the nobles garnered whatever popular support they had were politically buffered by City citizens—the men who were to form the backbone of the democracy. This switch in the governance system of the polis was Strategic: it fostered the power of a citizenry that was distinctly urbane, cosmopolitan, and forward looking, vitiating the strongly hierarchical structure of a once-entrenched, highly parochial, feudal class system. At the same time, tradition was kept alive by using the language of the tribal world (even the word gene had a special clannish origin), retaining a number of local religious associations, chieftainlike figures such as demarchs (the deme’s version of the Athenian archons), and by making membership in a dome hereditary even though a citizen might choose to reside at some later time in another part of Attica. Kleisthenes, in effect, “revolutionized” Athenian political life in the literal sense of the term: he replaced a once-egalitarian tribal system that had been perverted into a harsh feudal hierarchy by a tribalistic structure that actually restored the old freedoms of the people on an entirely new political and societal level. Athens had revolved in a full circle—more precisely, a spiral—to the isonomia of its tribal past, but without the innocence that made the early Greeks vulnerable to hierarchy and domination.
The boule was increased from a council of four hundred to five hundred and restructured so that fifty men from each of the ten tribes rotated every tenth of the year as an administrative “executive committee” between sessions of the ekklesia. Each tribe selected its fifty bouleutes by lot, a practice that became so widespread that even archons were so chosen from members of the boule, as were members of Athenian juries (dikastoi) and lesser functionaries. Apart from the polis’s magistrates, no property qualifications debarred Athenian citizens from participating in the governance system, and under Perikles the last restrictions that lingered on from Kleisthenes’s reforms disappeared completely. In time, members of the boule, the ekklesia, and the heliaea or courts were compensated for participating in these institutions, generally on a per diem basis and in the case of the boule, annually. No public office could be held for more than a year, and with certain exceptions (jurymen and generals) none could be held more than twice in a lifetime.
This extraordinary opening of public life to the Athenian citizenry was completed during the sixty years that saw Kleisthenes assume the archonship in: 492 B.C. and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431. An analytic account of the democracy, its possibilities and its limitations, properly belongs to the discussion of civic freedom that follows in the next chapter. For the present, what counts is the way the democracy formed the citizenry and, in turn, was formed by it. Democratic leaders such as Kleisthenes and Perikles did not foist a remarkably open system of participatory governance on a passive people; the institutional structure and the body politic interacted closely with each other against a haunting background of quasitribal social forms and relationships. This is politics at its best—in a lived sense, not a formal one. The Athenian notion of areté, the daily practice of paideia, and the institutional structure of the polis were synthesized into an ideal of citizenship that the individual tried to realize as a form of self-expression, not an obligatory burden of self-denial. Citizenship became an ethos, a creative art, indeed, a civic cult rather than a demanding body of duties and a palliative body of rights. At his best, the Athenian citizen tried not only to participate as fully as possible in a far-reaching network of institutions that elicited his presence as an active being; the democracy turned his participation into a drama that found visible and emotional expression in rituals, games, artwork, a civic religion—in short, a collective sense of feeling and solidarity that underpinned a collective sense of responsibility and. duty. This drama extended beyond life itself. The Athenian citizen had little hope of any certain immortality other than the memory he left behind in the polis. Afterlife became a form of political life and eternahty existed only insofar as noble political actions were memorable enough to become part of the polis’s history and destiny.
The polis shrewdly availed itself of aristocratic attributes to bring the individual Athenian into the full light of citizenship, with its high standards of civic responsibility. We have seen how the agora prepared the way for the ekklesia. By the same token, the gymnasium, presided over by a paidotribes, extended the all-consuming fascination of the Greeks for athletics into martial arts, thereby preparing the young for military training. Troubling as this may be in modern eyes, war was a fact of life in antiquity. Apart from certain cults and religions, pacifism found no following among the ancients. One either fought unquestioningly for one’s city or faced clientage and slavery in the event of defeat. The citizen-soldier was much more than: a pillar of Athenian military strategy. He was a guardian not only of the polis but also of the democracy, as we shall see later, just as the citizen-farmer became the embodiment of its ideal of autarkeia.
But the polis, particularly the democracy, gave the family’s aristocratic attributes a uniquely public character. And it is in this non-elitist sense that the democracy elevated its citizens into an “aristocracy”—not only as a result of the participatory nature of Its courts, assemblies, and councils, but also the familial mood of koinonia that its civic festivals engendered. Without losing their essentially religious character, rituals and festivals became a form of politics. The ekklesia opened with prayers, and its agenda was composed of sacred as well as secular topics. Problems of constructing temples or planning festivals occupied the assembly as earnestly as matters such as ostracism or the ratification of treaties. In famous funeral oration, which so vividly captures the spirit of the democracy, Perikles cites among its attributes “the contests and sacrifices throughout the year, which provide us with more relaxation from work than exists in any other city.”{21} Webster’s observation that the Athenians tended to turn their holy days into holidays suffers from a certain degree of misunderstanding.{22} Athenian life struck a remarkable balance between religiosity and secularity: the camaraderie of participating in a spectacle or sharing fully in the excitement of the games imparted a quasireligious sense of communion to civic life. This sense of communion more accurately conveys the intense meaning of koinonia than do such commonplace words as “community.” At the risk of repitition, we could say that such shared experiences unravel the Athenian notion of “community” as an on-going activity of communizing, not simply an institutionalized form of participation. Like the agora, the “contests and games” of Athens often created a shared sense of preternatural civic enchantment.
The democrats knew this very well and these “contests and games” occurred with considerable frequency. To discuss them in detail would require a volume in itself. Let it suffice to say that every year, many days were devoted to the Lesser Mysteries in February and the Greater Mysteries in September, rituals that centered around Persephone’s descent into Hades and Demeter’s mourning, the mythical explanation for the occurrence of winter and its lean months. Every July, Athenians participated in the Lesser Panathenaia, which culminated quadrennially in the Greater Panathenaia, an extraordinary parade of Athenians and Athenian life in full array, if we are to judge from the bas relief that girdles the Parthenon. Almost every month, Athenians witnessed or participated in a variety of rituals, contests (athletic, musical, poetic, and choral), or celebrations to honor deities, historic events, great personages, victors in Panhellenic festivals such as the Olympics or the fallen of past and recent battles. Religion and civic loyalty blended the great variety of personal and social interests within the body politic into an underlying commonality of outlook that, if it did not remove serious conflicts, rarely reached such desperate levels that they could efface the democracy from within. Ultimately, it was to be Macedonian rule that brought the democracy to its definitive end, not the Athenians. For all its shortcomings, the democracy in various forms persisted through nearly two of the most stormy centuries of the ancient world and, at its height, exhibited a degree of cultural and intellectual creativity that has no peer in western history.
Perhaps the most important of the Athenian festivals was a comparatively new one: the City Dionysia. Even more than the Greater Panathenaia, when all of Athens went on display with a large tapestry (the pelops) that depicted the triumph of Olympian “reason” over the chthonic rule of “force,” the City Dionysia was strongly democratic in its focus. It was then, for three out of a span of six days that overlapped March and April, that Athenians could witness the great dramatic tragedies that gave the democracy its ideological meaning. By the thousands, Athenians flocked to the Theater of Dionysos on the southeast slope of the Acropolis to see the plays of Aeskylos, Sophokles, Euripides, and others who literally created serious drama in western culture. Under the clear skies of a high Mediterranean spring, they watched with absorption the Aeskylean drama of their own polis and its human antecedents unfold with a majesty that may have verged on reverence—certainly a thrilling sense of exaltation that compels a modern historian of the democracy, W. G. Forrest, to cite Aeskylos “as the greatest of the three Athenian tragedians,” and for many, including myself, the greatest of the world’s dramatists.{23} Aeskylos’s trilogy, the Oresteia, advanced a powerful validation of the democracy that, in its emotional and declaratory power, may even exceed the funeral oration of Perikles—a trilogy that was constantly replayed and kept winning prizes at the City Dionysos long after the author’s death.
Its story has been told and interpreted repeatedly, and to explore it at length would be a tiresome redundancy. Let it suffice to say that the murder of Agamemnon, the returning chief of the besiegers of Troy, by his wife, Klytemnestra, followed by her own death at the hands of her vengeful son, Orestes, opens the whole drama of Athens’s transformation from a quasitribal society, rooted in kinship rules, custom, and chthonic deities, into a political community—a polis—based on residence, reason, and the anthropomorphic Olympians. It is Athene who, in a challenging statement against the Erinyes (the three female guardians of “matriarchal” blood ties and tribal retribution for the murder of one’s kin), solemnly declares:
After being pursued by the Erinyes for committing a blood crime more damning than a marital one—and particularly against his mother from whom early tribal descent may have been traced—Orestes is absolved and the Erinyes reconciled by acquiring a civic status as Eumenides, the kindly ones who look after the well-being of the Athenian polis.
The trilogy has many levels of meaning, probably all of which had a gripping effect on the audience that knew Aeskylos personally or, in later years, by reputation. The Eumenides, the last drama of the trilogy, celebrates the victory of civic law and rationality over tribal custom and unthinking mimesis. Athene, born of Zeus’s head, embodies logos and justice. In a strongly patriarchal society that saw male rationality as the sole bulwark to dark chaos and an uncertain, untamed world, it was not difficult to identify “fickle” woman with nature and the polis as the sole realm of freedom and law. Orestes’ trial, which marks the culmination of the trilogy, is presented as a new dispensation in the affairs of men. The Erinyes unrelentingly pursue any homicidal perpetrator of the blood tie. All that counts with them is the act of murder of one’s kin, not the circumstances or motive that produced it. To the Athenians, this behavior was evidence of unreasoning tribalism, of an irrationality that precluded any civic union based on discourse, logic, and orderly compromise. Recourse to trial rather than ordeal, to the weighing of circumstantial evidence, motive, and logical judgment rather than mere action and contests of fortitude, marked the first step toward a political koinonia—the city as a polis.
To the Athenian audience, which believed Athens was the first city to establish a system of laws, the trial of Orestes was a founding act. Athens’s decision to try homicide by a judicial process literally created the polis as an ethical union based on justice. “If it please you, men of Attica,” intoned Athene, the patroness of the polis, “hear my decree now, on this first case of bloodletting I have judged. For Aegeus’ population, this forevermore shall be the ground [the Hill of Ares] where justices deliberate-No anarchy, no rule of a single master.... I establish this tribunal. It shall be untouched by moneymaking, grave but quick to wrath, watchful to protect those who sleep, a sentry on the land.”{25} Henceforth, justice, not tradition; reason, not custom; fact, not ordeal; motive, not myth are to guide the men of Attica, for without this new dispensation, the polis has no ethical meaning, nor does the democracy have an ethical rationale.
It is easy to see in Aeskylos not only the clearest voice of the polis, of a body politic free of arbitary rule, but also of the democracy—whether as a “radical,” as Forrest declares, or as a “revolutionary poet,” as George Thomson seems to believe.{26} To the Athenians, who apparently revered Aeskylos, the Oresteia unfolds the emergence of justice from a hazy “dark” world of tribal antiquity and its fortunes in the arbitrary domain of warriors, nobles, and the genoi, into the clear light of the polis and its orderly citizenry. The identification of the audience with the drama must have been intensely personal; it was the authentic protagonist of the play. Of Aeskylos’s remaining dramas, Prometheus Bound arrests us to this very day with its message of heroic defiance against unfeeling authority and its expansive belief in humanity’s sense of promise, indeed its capacity to advance toward an ever-wider horizen of intellect and wisdom.
It would be easy enough to end our discussion of the Athenian drama with Aeskylos, but Sophokles beckons us with other facets of meaning that must have deeply affected the Athenian spirit. His Antigone raises the ambiguities of justice in the form of conflicting Individuals, indeed personalities. Antigone herself becomes the ombodiment of tribal kinship rules in her frenzied zeal to bury the body of her brother, Polyneikes, whom Kreon, the King of Thebes, wishes to leave to vultures and dogs as an example for future rebels. Kreon thus appears as the embodiment of secular authority, the civil counterpart to Antigone. The drama emerges as a fugue, in which deeply emotive ethical themes are played against each other and intermesh. If Aeskylos’s characters tend to appear as forces rather than individuals, despite Klytemnestra’s awesome personality and Athene’s majesty, Antigone wins us as a persecuted heroine who seeks the burial of her brother s body and Kreon as the willful embodiment of civil rule, prior even to the rise of the polis. For we are still in the time of the royal oikos or household. In writing the drama, Sophokles may have tried to show that after the decline of this prepolitical world of blood clans and regal palaces the Athenian citizen no longer had to confront the pangs of tragedy in Hegel’s sense of the term—a drama in which both sides are right. The polis spares us the need to pit divine law in the form of tribal commandment against human law in the form of civil retribution for rebellion. We can read our romantic sympathies for Antigone into the drama, but a Greek audience might have viewed her differently. It would have been obliged to place Kreon’s civil obligation on a par with Antigone s tribal obligation, and its sympathies would have been allotted according to political as well as personal sensibilities. Relief emerges from the sense of delivery that a concealed theme in the drama affords: the free air of the polis in which the citizen can breathe without the presence of such exotic conflicts.
Such is also the case in one of Sophokles’s most celebrated—and possibly one of his most misunderstood—plays, Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus. Here man, potentially the citizen, rises to a clear and level gaze at his fate and his ability to learn from suffering. If there is anything that impresses us about the play, it is the fact that Oedipus emerges with greater nobility toward the end of his life, all his misfortunes notwithstanding, than in its portentous beginnings. No broken King Lear confronts us but rather a hero whose passion for truth ultimately transcends the disastrous impact of patricide and incest. The cathartic core of the drama is unmistakable: it is the nobility of the individual, purged of archaic curses and trammels, of man’s high promise and destiny to achieve insight and wisdom when he acquires the status of a free citizen.
Yet, the Greek ideal of the citizen, in contrast to ours, is not monadic. However individuated the Greek drama became with Sophokles and even more decidedly so with Euripides, the Athenian citizen would have mocked the entrenched bourgeois myth that the free man is an atomized buyer and seller whose choices are constrained by his own psychological and physical infirmities. He would have seen beyond the arrogance of this self-deception into the pathos of the bourgeois citizen’s clientage to the powerful, his aimless pursuit of wealth, his reduction of life to the acquisition of things—in short, a moira or destiny governed more by ananke or necessity than by the understanding that even such a nascent personality as Oedipus brings to his own insight into reality. Such a despised bourgeois being, he would have concluded, is no less archaic than the Erinyes, who must be freed from their primality as mere forces and reconstructed by reason and justice into the “kindly ones.” Only then, in synchronicity and ethical union with the polis, is citizenship more than a formality and its practice more than a ritual.
By the same token, the Athenian citizen was not a corporate being in our usual meaning of the term. Most present-day discussions of the Athenian’s lack of individuality and the polis’s tendency to subserve his personality to an overbearing collectivity are weighed down by Eurocentrically neurotic images of the individual as such. The modern identification of individuality with egotism and personality with neurosis has been overindulged under the rubric of “modernity” with an arrogance that bears comparison only with the conceited claims of psychoanalysis and psychohistory to explain the human drama in all its aspects. That human beings can be individuated in different ways—some as highly social and political beings, others as private and self-indulgent beings, still others as combinations and permutations of both—is as alien to the imperialistic claims of “modernity” as it is to the admirers of gemeinschaft, the stagnant folk community based on kinship and organismic relationships. To the Hellenic citizen of a polis, leaving all its mythic origins aside, the monad would have seemed as prehuman as the folk community seemed prepolitical. Individuality meant citizenship. And, ideally, citizenship meant the personal wholeness that came from deep roots in tradition, a complexity of social bonds, richly articulated civic relationships, shared festivals, philia, freedom from clientage and freedom for collective self-determination through institutions that fostered the full participation and everyday practice of a creative body politic. To he such a citizen, one had to live in a polis—a city that possessed an agora, a space to convene general assemblies of the people, a theater to dramatize the reality and ideology of freedom, and the ceremonial squares, avenues, and temples that gave it reverential meaning. To remove any of these elements that made up this whole was to instantly destroy it. Without every one of them, cultivated on a daily basis by the paideia of citizenship and guided by an unerring concept of areté, the Athenian ideal of citizenship fell apart and its institutions became hollow forms.
But such notions, valuable as they may be, lack a processual content that sees this whole from the standpoint of an ever-fuller development. We can see this by looking closely at the quixotic nature of the Greek dramatic tragedy itself—the staged experience of the polis and citizen. For it was through the tragedy that the Athenian underwent self-examination, much as though he could withdraw from his own skin and observe himself thoughtfully for what he really was. It is notable that all the tragedies we have at our disposal are made up of mythic and epic material. As civic experiences, they seem to function dissonantly with stuff that is drawn from a prepolitical world, from eras that precede the polis in its most advanced stage of development. Their heroes and heroines are Bronze Age characters who still live under the commandments of a tribal or warrior society, by canons of right and wrong that are archaic at best and chthonic at worst. In the transformations that the dramas recount from one world to another, we rarely seem to rise from new foundations embedded in still older ones to the edifice that the audience knew at hand—the polis of the, fifth century B.C. and its democracy.
Yet the antiquity of the characters, material, and themes with which all the great tragedians seem to have worked is belied by a startling sense of innovation, by tensions from which new ideals, institutions, and credos are born. The, Oresteia seems to not only justify radically new communal dispensations, indeed most of which already existed when the trilogy was presented; its radicalism consists in the fact that Athene’s decrees are fraught with the promise of change, with motives that are likely to yield ever-wider ethical and political horizons. One senses that a community guided by justice has just begun to emerge, that the civic ideal of freedom is still nascent, that citizenship and the polis are still experiencing birth pangs and their future still lies before them. Few Athenians, I suspect, could have left such dramas without feeling an intense sense of futurity and a serene commitment to growth. Prometheus Bound is even more challenging in its thirst for heroic innovation and its passion for a fuller arid richer experiential life, as are the Oedipus dramas for truth at all costs.
Hence, seemingly conservative material is played, replayed, and ultimately transmuted into searingly progressive hopes and possibilities. When we bear witness to these dramas by viewing them in all their starkness as idealized “archetypes” of an immutable human nature, we do violence to the tensions they probably produced in the Athenian audiences of their day. These plays were no mere spectacles or cathartic outlets for pent-up civic anxieties. Quite to the contrary: they were sources of motivation and tension, designed to move their audiences forward to noble deeds and great enterprises, to contrast past with present so that meaning, continuity, and tendency could be imparted to the future. They voiced a hope in the human spirit that belies the conventional interpretation of the Athenian drama as fatalistic in its view of life and resigned in its image of destiny. Indeed, it is with Euripides, that most “modern,” “realistic,” and “individualistic” of the Greek tragedians, that hopelessness, alienation, and the insufferable burden of circumstances seem to devour the characters of the drama and exhaust the hopes of the audience. Here, the deus ex machina snaps up the immanent dialectic of the older drama with its promise of futurity and hope.
The polis was no less a theater for the practice of virtue than the orchestra at the foot of the Acropolis was a home for the performance of the plays it watched. And the citizen was no less an actor in a great civic drama than the men who performed for him with masks in the City Dionysos. In both cases, the plot we call the history of Athens incorporated the layered traditions that formed its cultural biography and ideology. So central was the citizen to this plot with his “freedom for” as well as his “freedom from,” that the histories of the time, when they refer to Attica, speak more commonly of “the Athenians” than they do of “Athens.” Unerringly, they reveal that Athens was no mere collection of structures, no simple geographic locale, that any aggregate of people could occupy without the polis losing its authenticity. Admittedly, the city outlived the polis, and the democracy in a formal sense outlived the citizens. Democratic institutions persisted in a truncated form long after Athens s final defeat by the Macedonians at Krannon in 322 B.C. No city was a polis, in Aristotle’s view, unless it had an agora; but, needless, to say, no agora could have produced a democracy unless it had the kind of citizen the historians of that day called “the Athenians.”
There is a myth that the classical Athenian polis was the spontaneous product of custom and tradition. Hence, its integrity rested largely on hidden presuppositions of which it was largely unconscious, indeed, to which it was sublimely oblivious. This notion of an unreflective Athenian morality, imputed to Hegel and held by many romantics in the last century, is belied by almost everything we know about the democracy. The Aeskylean tragedies and Perikles’s funeral oration, to cite two highly important and widely separated examples, completely refute the image of the democracy as a phenomenon based on mere habit and convention. One must totally ignore Kleisthenes’s reforms and the subtle melding of religious tradition with clearly formulated political goals not to recognize that the democracy was a consciously crafted structure, the product of purposeful, insightful, and thoughtful efforts to achieve clearly perceived goals—and, let me add, guided by a philosophy and practice of its own. The introduction of the lot, the rotation and limitation of tenure in public office, the development of the assembly and the boule—all reveal a degree of intentionality and clarity of purpose that has few equals in any later constitutional developments. That Sokrates was executed for questioning this order on charges that were archaic even by conservative standards of fifth-century Athens has more to do with the politics of the trial, particularly Sokrates’ arrogance and his desire for martyrdom, than the challenge his philosophy posed to the polis’s “ethical order.” No political community was more aware of its uniqueness and wondrous of its achievement than the Athenian democracy. And no one was more consciously committed to this humanly wrought body of institutions than the Athenian citizen.
By contrast, later ideals of citizenship, even insofar as they were modeled on the Athenian, seem more unfinished and immature than the original—hence, the very considerable discussion I have given to the Athenian citizen and his context. As we shall see shortly, there were impressive attempts to create patterns of civic freedom that approximated the democratic polis in medieval city-states and in the American and French revolutions. These attempts were usually intuitive. The Americans who attended town meetings in New England after 1760 and the French sans-culottes who filled the radical sections of Paris in 1793–94 were hardly aware of the political drama that unfolded in Athens some two millennia earlier, although their more knowledgeable spokesmen fingered Plutarch throughout their lives and occasionally adopted heroic names during fervent moments of the two revolutions. What was lacking in their attempts to achieve a living approximation of civic democracy was not merely ideology. Greece, commonly Athens (although Sparta’s garrison-state was a close runner-up for some utopian writers and for Rousseau), was held up as a fascinating experiment in popular self-governance and, as usual, compromised with the republican ideals generated by the emerging nation-state,
For this reason, the Athenian ideal of citizenship, like its parallel creation, politics, demands careful exploration today even more than at any time in the past. If moderns find democratic politics and citizenship a desideratum, they will never achieve them without a supreme act of consciousness. They must not only want it but know it. Athenian civic goals, for all their shortcomings (notably Athens’s treatment of women, alien residents, and its widespread use of slave labor), must be rooted in an everyday notion of what we mean by politics. Is it statecraft? Or does it center around social entities such as cooperative, vocational societies or tribes in the countercultural sense of this much-abused term? Or some broad concept of grass-roots organization that passes under words such as “localism,” “decentralism,” and “bioregionalism”? Is it an educational activity—a civic paideia—that fosters the citizen’s empowerment, both spiritually as well as institutionally? Or is it primarily a form of “management” whose goal is administrative efficiency and fiscal shrewdness?
No modern body of ideas, to my knowledge, has wrestled with the answers to these questions adequately enough to draw clear distinctions among the social, the political, and the statist so that a meaningful outlook can be formulated—one that will seek the delicate balance of ingredients (traditional, familial, ethical, and institutional) and the paideia that articulates an authentically democratic politics with a concept of citizenship that gives this outlook reality. Nor do we have a clear idea of the extent to which the city, properly conceived as a humanly scaled ethical community, differs from urbanization and the inhuman scale produced by the nation-state. We rarely understand’how integrally an ethical politics is wedded to a comprehensible civic scale, to the city itself, conceived as a thoroughly manageable and participatory union of citizens, richly articulated by tradition and by social, cultural, and political forms. We live so contemporaneously within the given state of affairs, the overbearing “now” that eternalizes the status quo, that no society is more prey to the workings of mindless forces than bur own. Bereft of a serious regard for history, indeed for the experiences of our own century, we find ourselves in the airless vacuum of an immutable “present/ a time warp that precludes any sense of futurity and ability to reason innovatively.
Accordingly, where thinking of a crude kind does exist, lines of thought fecklessly crisscross each other like the scrawlings of an infant that can barely grasp a pencil. Oligarchies are accepted as democracies; virtual monarchies as republics; state institutions as social forms; social forms as political ones. One, can hardly speak, here, of a kind of shallow eclecticism that afflicts every age; rather one encounters a potpourri of unfinished notions, barely worthy of being called “ideas,” that are mingled together in the viscera rather than the head. To think out ideas to their logical conclusion, to be consistent and complete in thought, is viewed as a form of intellectual aggression that stimulates reticence or withdrawal rather than dialogue or response. The modern “ego” is now so fragile that the mere presence of passion, particularly in the form of argumentation, is a stimulus to flight or, worse, cause for a yielding quietism. The emphasis that the Athenians placed on speaking, which was identified with democracy, spells out the extent to which a qualitative breach separates our pitiful image of public activity from the classical one of two millennia ago.
What should be stressed, for the present, is that the Athenian ideal of citizenship did not die in the formal sense, even after Macedonia had eviscerated the democracy. The ekklesia and boule functioned for generations after Athens lost her independence; the institutions were kept alive as a political sop to the Mediterranean-wide belief in Athens’s uniqueness, all the more to cloak a growing despotism that finally caused the last institutional vestiges of the democracy to wither completely. And here lies a lesson that later institutionally oriented democrats were to learn at great cost. An agora does not in itself produce a polis, nor does an ekklesia in itself produce citizens. All of them must exist, to be sure, if a democracy is to be established; but they remain mere formalities if they fail to interact in the proper way to form a unified whole. It was this largely formal sense of democracy and citizenship that served, in part at least, to abort the only attempt to rescue the Roman republic in the guise of the Athenian polis. It would be difficult to tell from Plutarch’s biographies of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus that the brothers were no mere agrarian reformers; indeed that their laws to supplant the Senate’s powers by the authority of the comitia tributa came as close to a fundamental political revolution as Rome ever experienced. The brothers, in M. I. Rostovtzeff’s view, were clearly out to “set up at Rome a democracy of the Greek type,” a “dream or farce,” as he calls It, that was designed “to transfer from the Senate to the popular assembly the decision of all important business, or, in other words, to set up at Rome a democracy after the Athenian model.”{27} Nor Was this goal entirely impractical, at least institutionally. “To secure this point no special law was required: according to the constitution all important business was, in theory, settled by the popular assembly; the innovation was this, that business which by custom had hitherto been decided by the Senate was now laid by [Gaius] Gracchus, as tribune, before the popular assembly, for their consideration and decision.”{28}
The effort ultimately foundered not for want of institutional mechanisms but for lack of a genuine citizenry. Despite Rostovtzeff’s aristocratic biases, he is on solid ground when he emphasizes that “to allow land even to every member of the proletariat could never bring back a time when the state rested NOCurely upon a strong peasant population.”{29} The culture that produced men such as Cincinnatus or the elder Cato was waning and had to be recovered or a new one developed in its place if mere institutional changes were to be viable and lasting. The Gracchi would have had to deal with still another change that would ultimately undermine the entire republican edifice. Rome was no longer a city in any Hellenic sense of the term. It was the center of an emerging empire, an urbs, to use the conventional Latin word for “city,” that had ceased to be a civitas, the word Romans commonly used to denote a “union of citizens.” The terminological distinction is apt: the Roman urbs was growing uncontrollably by the second century B.C., at the expense of the Roman civitas; it was sprawling outwardly in size as well as worldwide in scope, especially after the spoils of the Punic Wars began to fill its coffers. Conceivably, the yeoman-citizens who founded the republic could have turned it into a democracy. But once they “came down from the Seven Hills” on which Rome was founded, they became “small,” to use Heine’s words. The “idea of Rome” as a spiritual heritage diminished in direct proportion to the growth of the city. “The greater Rome grew,” Heine wrote, “the more this idea dilated; the individual lost himself in it: the great men who remain eminent are borne up by this idea, and it makes the littleness of the little men even more pronounced.”{30}
The decline of the ancient world did not efface the ideals that Athens and Rome inspired. Later eras were to blur them so that we now speak of two kinds of “democracy,” “direct” and “representative,” as though they derive from a common heritage. During inspired moments, medieval and modern cities were to fluctuate between the two and, at times, come closer to a Hellenic democracy and citizenry than the Gracchi could have achieved in Rome. What these cities achieved in fact, however, they rarely achieved in ideology; hence their patterns of civic freedom were basically intuitive creations. They did not last long. But in an era of chilling discontinuities, when our knowledge of western culture is in grave peril of disappearing, we can no more ignore the legacy of their example than we can ignore the sprawling urbanization that threatens our civic identity and political freedom.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 02, 2021 : Chapter 4 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 4 -- Updated.
HTML file generated from :
http://revoltlib.com/