Ten Things You Really Should Know About Ancient Greek Democracy - Professor Paul Cartledge

So you see the title of my talk, but that's actually a bit of a disinformation because of course there are way more than 10 things you should know about democracy in Ancient Greece. And notice by the way the title there, Democracy in Ancient Greece, not Ancient Greek Democracy. There was no such thing, i.e. there were lots of different democracies in Ancient Greece. I'll come back to all that later on. Just one final personal note, I was actually born within almost a spitting distance of a very long stone's throw up the grazing road towards King's Cross at the old, the original Royal Free, which was the first hospital in the country to employ women as doctors on an equal footing with men. And it was a woman doctor who did something to me early on in my life which has stayed with me for the rest of my life. So I'm marked by the Royal Free Hospital indelibly. So Democracy in Ancient Greece. Democracy Alive, Richard mentioned, this is actually my most recent book. The title wasn't my own, quite often these things are forced upon authors who then think what a good idea. And of course it's a thing, not a person, so it's us, we humans who give it life or indeed death. And as I point out in the book, for quite a long period, in fact 1,000 years at one point, it was on life support. And it's only fairly recently that it's come back to life and is in, well, some sort of rude health, some would say too rude health. And before I go any further, let me just make clear one important thing. I'm talking about democracy in ancient Greece, the original types of democracy and what the word meant and how it was cashed out. The word today, of course, is extremely widespread. And this goes back to the late 18th century and eventually, as it were, we are all Democrats now, aren't we? But there is a fundamental distinction to be drawn, which I shan't dwell on, but it will become apparent as I talk about the ancients, namely that what we do in the name of democracy is indirect, representative democracy. We don't rule on a day-to-day basis. We the people, we who are empowered insofar as we are. We choose and we elect persons to rule for us and for has two senses, instead of us, as well as on our behalf and to our advantage, we hope. Now, what we've gone through recently, June the 23rd, what the Scots went through a couple of years ago, the Greeks last year, the Icelanders much more frequently is a plebiscitary referendum. And it's not accidental that both those words are from Latin. I'm gonna come back to the derivations of our political language later on. And they are not an add-on so much to our form of parliamentary, representative, indirect democracy. They're a direct contradiction of the essence, the spirit and the modalities of post-18th century, post-French Revolution, post-American Revolution, what we are pleased to call democracy. And therefore, it's not surprising, not to some of us at any rate, that things don't always work out brilliantly if we the people are suddenly, unexpectedly, without educational preparation, entrusted with an exercise for which we're not well prepared. Anyhow, I gave a talk in Buxton not long ago. And after it, a lady came up to me, a German by origin, who'd become British, British citizen. She was deeply distressed. This was after June the 23rd. And she gave me a sticker, which I proudly carry on my bag, my Smithson bag. And it says, I am European. And so, go figure. Right. The book published by the Oxford Press, New York, secondarily by the Oxford Press in Oxford, where I, in fact, did my undergraduate and graduate research, is in three main parts. It has three main aims, i.e. the life of democracy is a life in three acts. Act one, ancient. How, why, where, what, emerged as what the Greeks called demokratia in ancient Greece in the fifth, fourth centuries BC. What happened to that secondarily? There was a long period when the word was current, demokratia, but it meant more republic, rather than, i.e., monarchy, or being ruled by an outside power, independent polity, not what I'm going to explain to you the word originally meant, which is a very highly charged, politically charged term, not an anodyne, neutral sort of term. And then for, as I've said already, about a millennium, demokratia existed as a Latin transliteration of the Greek. A horrific thing. Thank goodness we don't have it, as it were. Until in the 17th century. I come from Putney. There's a church still there, St. Mary's Putney, where the levelers, presided over by one Oliver Cromwell, held their debates. They're known as the Putney debates, October 1647. And there, for the first time, the issue of people power, egalitarian empowerment, came to the fore in British politics for the first time in the West for about 1,000 plus years. So, those are the three acts. I'm not, as I say, going to be concentrating on the modern. If you wish to ask me about that, by all means, afterwards, do. I shall be focusing quite specifically on the ancient. So, I begin with a text on the left here. It's very beautifully written on pentelic, that's the local Athenian marble text, with a documentary relief above showing a male figure seated with a cloak, but heroically nude as to his torso. He's quite elderly, he's bearded. And on his right, as you're looking, is a demure female figure, full clothes. If you show a woman naked or even disheveled in ancient Greek art, that is a woman of less stature or status than a good Greek citizen woman. And this is, in fact, an abstract personification of precisely what I have put on the screen there, Democratia. This is the goddess, Democratia. So, the ancient Athenians, and my talk will be mainly about Athens, but as I'll explain, there were many other cities which had democracies of various sorts at different times. In Athens, democracy was sacralized. I can't quite imagine us today feeling so warm, and cozy, and respectful of democracy as an abstraction that we would wish to pay cult to it, to worship it. I mean, typically the word is more abused than it is used, I think, probably. Well, as I pointed out here, it's a portmanteau word. It's a combination of two other words. Demos and kratos. And demos is the problematic word here in an etymological sense. Kratos, and I'm gonna come back to kratos, is unambiguous. That's to say it can be used for ill or for good, but it means power. Strength, might, force, grip. So, what is exercising strength, might, force, grip, power? The demos. Now, demos is ambiguous, and therefore ambivalent. Depending on which way you interpret it will determine how you interpret it practically, what you think about it, what you want it to be. Demos has a generic broad sense, people. And actually it comes from a very old Greek word which turns up in the Mycenaean Linear B tablets of the second millennium BC. It means a village. So, a grouping of people, a population, demos. And in a political sense it means therefore all the people. And because the Greeks were not wildly egalitarian as to gender, indeed which society was before the late 19th century, in other words women were disempowered, it means the male adult free citizen population, the people in that sense. So, the Athenians never referred to Athens or the Spartans never to Sparta in a political sense. Athens and Sparta were geographical terms. It was the Athenians or the Spartans. So, we talk today of Washington does this or Lisbon does that. They couldn't have done that because they saw politics concretely. They were citizen people that made the political entity. I'll come back to the vocabulary later on. So, that's fairly anodyne, the people. You might say, okay, which people exactly do you have in mind? But nevertheless, the other sense of the word is wholly other. It's extremely threatening. It's very potent. And it's indeed revolutionary. And it's the masses. It's the majority of the ordinary poor people who make up the citizen body. Now, imagine you're not one of the masses, the poor. You're one of the elite, one of the minority. Well, you might not have the same view of democratia as if you are a member of the masses who are quite happy because in both senses, the people and the masses, you have the kratos. Suppose you're one of the elite few. Well, gosh, what if the demos is the masses which has you in its grip, has power over you? That explains, in very brief, why the term itself in its origins was controversial. We don't know who invented it. But it's not impossible it was invented by its enemies. And why secondarily, throughout history, from the beginning down to the end of antiquity, democratia attracted more enemies in terms of written works of people commenting on it as a system of political rule than friends. And a work by a friend of mine, Jenny Roberts, is called Athens on Trial, the anti, or she would have said because she's American, anti-democratic tradition in Western thought. So if we think democracy, yeah, we all like that. We know that because the alternatives, fascism, extreme absolutist monarchism, are intolerable, unbearable. They happen elsewhere, not here. I know we have a funny kind of monarchy here. And one has to talk about this delicately in terms of mixed constitution. The queen is just a head of state and signs off on stuff rather than makes policy and is ruling in a strong sense that Louis XIV ruled. I know all that, but nevertheless, we are democrats by and large. Possibly the queen is. I don't know. Anyhow, moving on. Kratos is a character in a play, a tragedy, ascribed to this gentleman, or at least the person who made this bust imagined that that possibly was what Aeschylus once looked like or what he should have looked like. Those of you here, is there anybody here who will own up to being a gamer? And do you play the game of war? And Kratos is a character in that? No. Okay, well, Kratos is in God of War, which is a video game, a character. This one that I'm referring to, altogether more respectable, was a character, a speaking character, in a play ascribed to Aeschylus. I say ascribed because not everybody believes it was actually by him. And the play opens, it's the Prometheus Bound, with Kratos, who is a henchman, an enforcer, in a mafia sense, of Zeus, instructing Hephaestus, the smith god up on Olympus, how to make sure that Prometheus is nailed to the rock such that he can never escape, remembering he's an immortal. So it's gonna take some quite extraordinary thing to release him, because he could, in principle, be there forever. Well, Prometheus belongs to an older generation of gods than Zeus. Zeus is a younger god, he's an upstart. And there is a Greek word, borrowed probably from Lydian in Asia Minor, which is tyrannos, our word tyrant comes from it. And this is used very freely throughout. In other words, one god, Zeus, is represented as a tyrant over another god, Prometheus. What has Prometheus done wrong? Well, he's made a categoriera, as philosophers say. He has supported humans, that's us, against Zeus, who is the all-powerful father of the gods, leading god and dictator of Olympus, if you like. Why did Prometheus suddenly have this kind of fit of philanthropism? The word is used, philanthropos, he loves humans. Well, that's a matter for dispute, because, of course, we're talking about myth. It's all made up, isn't it? But what Prometheus did that so angered Zeus was he stole fire, he hid it. Zeus wanted humans to die out by not having fire. They couldn't cook, they couldn't keep warm, they couldn't scare off wild beasts, so fire was absolutely crucial. Zeus wants to take it away from mortals, and Prometheus stands up for us, and so it's thanks to Prometheus that we're here, crudely. Anyhow, he's punished for ever and ever, and among his punishments are an eagle, which is Zeus's kingly bird, the king of the birds for the king of the gods, which every day descends upon Prometheus, pecks its way, gouges its way into his liver, devours his liver, copious blood everywhere, but Prometheus is immortal, so overnight the liver grows back, and he's restored to his previous whole self only for him to be attacked, devoured ad infinitum, until Heracles, half man, half god, by birth his dad was Zeus, rescues Prometheus. We don't know that in the play that survives, we know from later references it turns up in a later play in the trilogy. Now, why am I dwelling on this? Because Kratos, you see, is unambiguous, force, mind, power, strength, but what if it's used by a tyrant against mortals? Not so good. So imagine you're a member of the audience in the Theater of Dionysus, 17,000 in the open air. It's end of March, beginning of April. You've rolled up, and you can see all the rest of the audience. This is so unlike our theatrical experience, and suddenly you're presented with half the word of your political system, the Kratos bit, as wholly negative. So my point is, I hope, clear, that democratia is not a comfortable word in origin, that it's contested, that it's revolutionary, that Greek politics, which is face-to-face, can be extremely unpleasant. It's a battle, some say a zero-sum game, but at any rate, it's not, if you like, comfortable. So I mentioned earlier that the language of politics that we use typically is a compound of largely either Greek or Latin in origin. So from the Greek politics, which comes originally from the word polis, if I can get it, well, you can probably see it all anyway, polis is a city or citizen state, an entity, the Athenians, the Spartans, and so on. Anarchy, not, and then the archy bit is rule. So without rule, anarchy, chaos, no political stability. Aristocracy, the crassy is the same bit as in democracy, except the aristoi claim to be the best in some way. Wealth, birth, intelligence, of course, a self-description. Monarchy is a more descriptive term, not evaluative, just archy rule of monos, sole, one, monarchy. Certainly, I've mentioned oligarchy, I've mentioned archy rule of a few, and Aristotle, for example, identified the few as, by definition, the rich, such that he would not use the word oligarchy unless the people running the city were the rich. It's a complicated notion, we can come back to it, but there is another Greek word explicitly meaning rich, and that's plutos, wealth. So a plutocracy is the rule of wealth. And finally, democracy. From Latin, we get citizens, from kiwis, kiwitas, constitution, something that stands together, empire, power, very powerful word, imperium, liberal, from liber, free, republic, the thing of the people, reis populi, reis populica, publica, and, of course, state, and power from potestas, people from poperus. You've probably heard the word populist quite frequently being uttered recently in connection with a certain, the Donald. Some of you may even have stayed up at two in the morning to watch him and Hillary go head to head. I move on. The Greek world. Why do we call the Greeks Greeks? I mean, you may think that's a very strange thing to say. The word graikoi in ancient Greece, that's correct. They lived somewhere up in North Greece here. They didn't live all over the Greek world. The Greeks called themselves then Hellenes, they call themselves today Hellenes, and the geographical unit, cultural unit, is a hellas. It's not Greece. Graikia is a Latin word. And when I'm talking in America, I say it's as if the United States were to be called Delaware, which happens to be, I think, the smallest or one of the smallest of the 50 states. So it's an insult. Greeks are Hellenes, they're not Greeks. And there were about 1,000 separate Greek political entities of which, well, we haven't got precise figures, perhaps a quarter had some version of democracy. And I stress that there are more or less radical, more or less extreme versions of democracy where more power is entrusted to the poor, the ordinary, the masses, than it is in more moderate, moderated forms of democracy. So that functions as a kind of rough guide. It's the backdrop to any talk about politics in the ancient Greek world, including democracy in the ancient world. Athens is, of course, up here. Sparta is here. They're about 150 miles apart geographically, but they are light years apart, politically, culturally, socially, militarily, and all sorts of other ways. And the war still goes on, by the way. I'm an honorary citizen of Sparta. And I like to remind my Athenian friends, we beat you in the Peloponnesian War. They then come back and say, hi, yes, but you only did that because you went over to the Persians and kowtowed to them and got foreign barbarian money. Well, that's true. Anyway, we'll come back to the Spartans because they were no friends of Athenian-style democracy. And that's absolutely crucial. They're the other pole, if you like. And there is a very long tradition, a Spartan tradition, opposed to an Athenian tradition in intellectual and other respects. So I'm giving you a couple here of exemplars of ancient Greeks, specifically Athenian politics. On the, well, he really should be on the right, but he's on the left, Plato, who was so extreme an opponent of the Athenian democracy that he lived and he thought suffered under, that actually they didn't do that much to him. They did something to his mentor, Socrates, for which he never forgave the Athenian demons. But nevertheless, he personally lived out into his 80s and he had a school, he was left alone, his wealth and all that. But he was a radical anti-democrat because he held the view in an extreme intellectual way that the majority, as it were, is always wrong. The masses are stupid, ignorant, ill-educated, fickle, and therefore not to be trusted with political power. And in the famous, what we mistranslated, the republic, the Greek is actually politia, meaning just a polity, or the alternative title, on justice. In his republic, he, that is Socrates and his interlocutors, fashion in their imagination an ideal polity that is the exact opposite of a democracy, where the rulers are called kings. Well, most democrats then, as today, are not very keen on monarchs, kings. And he called them philosopher kings because in order to qualify, to be a king in Plato's ideal republic, they had to be platonic philosophers. So you have to buy into platonic metaphysics, mathematics, ethics, and the lot. So there weren't many candidates for that position and that's exactly how Plato liked it. Because the Athenians took the exact opposite view that anybody, in principle, should be entitled to have some access to some actual political power, so long as they're adult, male, free, and a citizen, of course. On the right of the screen is an idealized representation of, and his name is down the bottom there, Pericles, who's possibly most famous in the pages of Thucydides, those of you who read Thucydides, and I'm gonna show you a jade-formed bust of Thucydides shortly. We don't know for sure what Pericles thought about anything because he didn't write an autobiography or a diary or anything like that. That was true of all Athenians. But we have a speech put in his mouth by Thucydides and it is one of the most famous. It's a kind of hymn to a version of democratia. And so, if you wish to read an idealized version of what might be thought to count as democratia in Athens in the 430s, 420s, I recommend Thucydides' book two, chapters 37 to 46. But I move on to the sources because without sources, we historians might as well go home or become historical novelists. Now, there's a threat. And on the right is, oh, sorry, I pressed the wrong one, is my friend Herodotus. He's on the right and Thucydides is on the left. This is in Naples, in the Naples Museum. It's a jade-formed Roman period, 2nd, 3rd century AD. And Herodotus' work has come down to us as called histories. Now, in original ancient Greek, historia did not mean history. That's to say, it didn't mean the result of inquiry, but inquiry. So the equivalent today would be research. And he starts out by saying, this is the exposition of the research of Herodotus, Halicarnassus, modern Bodrum in Turkey, which he has done, and then he explains why he did what he did. And he has one major aim, which is explanation. And that's a hallmark of what it is to be a historian. And what he wants to explain above all is why the Greeks and the Persians fought each other in our terms, 490, Battle of Marathon, 484, 79 BC, and why the Greeks astonishingly, unpredictably won. And the key part, it's not the whole, of his answer is politics. The Greeks did politics. So the Persians, in a way, did not do politics at all. And Greek politics were premised on freedom and equality, two qualities which were not in great abundance in the Persian empire, let alone at the Persian court. In Herodotus' work, which is a feast, it's got many, many, it's like a great plum pudding, in book three, as we follow the ancient editors, we call it book three, there is a debate. And it's very odd debate because it's supposedly between Persians, three noble Persians, and it's set way back before probably anybody in Herodotus' audience would have been alive, or at least sentient, in the 520s BC. The issue is this. Persian empire's been taken over by a usurper. What regime, once the usurper's been overthrown and legitimate government's been restored, what regime, what form of governance will Persia have? So you have three speakers, and they speak up respectively for rule by all, version of popular democracy, rule by some, kind of aristocracy, the best, and then the third speaker, and here is the third speaker in real life, that's him, with his foot upon a defeated enemy, facing, much, much bigger, a whole string of defeated enslaved kings who are bound at the neck and at the hands, all under the guiding spirit of Ahura Mazda, the Persian Achaemenid god of light, but nevertheless, this is for a Greek, especially for a democrat, an exercise in tyranny, autocracy, non-responsible sole rule. The pro-democracy speaker in the debate, which actually is a Greek debate, it's not a Persian debate, identifies three features of democracy which are superior to anything that any other political system can offer. One, all official positions are chosen by the use of the lot, not by election, and so some of you may have read recently, there's a lot of literature, there is even a sortition society, which advocates the extensive use, I've written a little blog on sortition if you want to follow this up. Secondly, however people are selected to hold an office, let's say general, they must be held to account, and by whom, the people, and so the third quality is the people decides everything, i.e. by majority vote in public over serious issues as well as merely operational ones. So there is the alternative, some of you will know that Aeschylus, the same Aeschylus, his earliest surviving tragedy, for which Pericles, aged 20, acted as the impresario. Aeschylus' first surviving play is The Persians, in which Xerxes, who is of course the villain of the piece, also in Herodotus, acts as the sort of central casting, demiurgic, non-responsible, autocratic tyrant. I mean, he throws fetters into the Havisbond, and the Havisbond is a god, the garden elf, who treats it as if it's a slave. He has it whipped, he's a terrible man, he's sacrilegious, he deserves to be defeated, and he was defeated, and that's great. Now I mentioned the use of the lot. The Athenians were particularly hot on the use of the lot, in other words, they extended it more widely than most other Greek political systems. And we tend to think, well, it must be the assembly that was the key institution, wasn't it? Because that's where the will of the people, at any one time, would be expressed by majority vote. However, unlike us, with our referendum, which is a kind of equivalent to what the Athenians did every nine days or so, and they had a kind of referendum on various things, they had a fallback position, they had a fail-safe system. So I suppose the decision proved to be a disaster. What do you do? Well, there are two things. One, you can take on the proposer of it, and you can say, you misled us, and I'm gonna prosecute you. Well, who's going to hear the case? Who's going to try you? Somebody with a token like that, and tokens like that. This is the equivalent of an ID card. It's made of bronze, and this is a guy from, if you've been to the Olympics, or near the Olympic Stadium, North Athens, Kifisia, he came from Kifisia. And he's got a very democratic name, because it's Deimos Athens, Deimos, the people there. And every year, 6,000 Athenian citizens, about a fifth of the total, were enrolled as a permanent panel, by lot, to serve, potentially, as jurors, possibly one day in two. I mean, on average, every other day, conceivably. On the days on which trials were held, let's say it's the trial of Socrates, the jurors roll up the potential impaneled ones, they hand in their token at the bottom there, and they hope that it will be, as it were, pulled out of a hat. It wasn't a hat, it was a rather complicated machine. But at any rate, that's the point, that this is random, maximizes the entitlement, the distribution of actual implementation of power, and in particular, encourages mass participation on an egalitarian basis. One juror, one vote. One citizen, one vote in the assembly. And this is a radically democratic way of doing things. However, before you run away with the notion that all Greeks were Democrats, or Athens was a typical Greek polis, I move to the antithesis, the opposite pole, if you like, my fellow citizens, no, the Spartans of antiquity. And they, oddly enough, preserved monarchy, or not diarchy, to be literally accurate. You can see here in the English translation, this is a text from a base of a statue erected at Olympia. It's an Olympic victory dedication from the early fourth century BC, BCE, specifically 396 BCE. And the lady who's speaking is called Kyniska, which means little dog. And so female dog is a bitch, so little bitch, or puppy. And it's her real name, it's not a nickname. Kyniska says, kings of Sparta are my father and brother. She had father and a full brother who were kings and a half brother who'd been a king. Sparta had two royal families, two kings ruling at any one time. She goes on, victorious with a chariot of swift-footed horses. So women were not permitted to participate in the Olympic Games in person. They were not even allowed to watch, with one exception, a priestess. There's a famous story of a woman who was the trainer of a brilliant Olympic victor, her son. She was the sister and daughter of Olympic victor. She came from the island of Rhodes, put on a man's cloak, tried to get into the arena, slipped over, and oh dear, they didn't wear M&S or any other underpants. And so her sex was revealed. And thereafter, trainers, as well as competitors, were obliged by law to enter the arena stark naked. Our word gym comes from gymnasium, where you exercise stark naked. Gym bunnies, they didn't have, because it was a men-only thing. Well, Kainiska erected this statue, and then she goes on, this is the bit I like. I declare myself the only woman in all Hellas, in the entire Greek world, to have won this, in fact, olive-roof crown. Now there's a backstory here. She's the first woman Olympic victor. She wins with a chariot, which she owned. She didn't ride it herself. According to a literary source, it was her brother, King Agesilaus, who put her up to competing, on the grounds that if a woman can win an Olympic victory in the four-horse chariot race, that doesn't say much, does it, for the four-horse chariot race and winning an Olympic victory. It's the equivalent of a Formula One race. But if a woman can win it, well, Agesilaus was, of course, a sexist. And his Sparta was radically anti-democratic. They had no use for the lottery. There was no public jury system, no popular judicial system, and they never used the lot. They elected everybody, rather than used the lot, and they elected by shouting, not by voting with a hand or a secret banner. All radically anti-democratic, and there's a story. It turns up in Plutarch, and the scenario is a Spartan and Athenian run into each other, perhaps at Olympia. And the Athenian says to the Spartan, you Spartans, why don't you have democracy like we have in Athens? It's a great system. And he replies, we will introduce democracy into the public political sphere when you Athenians introduce democracy into your own home. In other words, Athenians were radical chauvinist sexists, and indeed, the position of women politically, legally, was slightly superior in Sparta than it was in Athens. So I move on to my last slide, and you may wonder why I'm showing an emperor. This is from Ravenna, of course, Justinian, ruling based in Constantinople, now Istanbul, formerly Byzantium, which is why we speak of the Byzantine emperor, married to an extremely notorious ex-dancer, and goodness knows what else, called Theodora. And he is a raving, theocratic autocrat. So in other words, even further removed from Athenian democracy than was my friend Kyniska, because in the interim, the Roman world, they call themselves Romans, Gibbon said that they disgraced the name both of the Romans and of the Greeks. They had gone Christian, Orthodox, Catholic, monotheist, and so utterly different from thought world and real world. Well, I've put it on the screen because in his reign, 527-565, we have a source which is relating an event going on in the Hippodrome, the horse race course, which you can still see in ancient Constantinople. And they were passionate. It's sort of like Arsenal and Chelsea or Tottenham or Manchester City and Manchester United. They had the blues and the greens, absolutely. And so when, in one case, the wrong side won, the losing fans rioted. The source, period of Justinian says, there you are, that's democratia. It's one of the very last uses of the word democratia, and it's come to mean riot, which is one version, lawless version, of oclocracy, rule of the oclos. And that was what Plato, what right-thinking, shall we say, intellectuals believed about democracy, that it was the worst, or worst, ruling their betters, ignorantly and for nefarious sectarian purposes to no good end. And I'm sorry to end on such a negative note, but that's actually where democracy was in the sixth century and it's what you had to climb back from to recover any sort of positive sense. And it did so, and these are my final two points. When you go, there's a handout, and I've got a couple of, as it were, lessons at the end. One of them is the past of foreign countries. They do things differently, they're healthy, hearty. But the other one is, how odd isn't it that this very negative term, democracy, has risen up the social scale to become, as it were, the norm, the normative. And the answer to that is quite simply what I started by saying at the beginning. Our democracy is not that. Ours is indirect, parliamentary, representative, tamed democracy, not the masses having their hands on the tiller of power. If you have been, thank you very much for listening.