Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ noble clan seeking to enhance the position of his own aristocratic family, his appeal to the demos was direct and unambiguous. Herodotus writes that, when Cleisthenes found himself weaker than Isagoras, he made the demos his hetairoi – a word difficult to translate but suggesting comrades or partners. It also suggests the associations, friendship groups or clubs, the hetaireiai, which formed the power base of the aristocrat in Athens.⁶ The demos, in other words, had replaced friends and kin of aristocrats as the source of political power. When Cleisthenes’s enemy, Isagoras, drove him out, with the help of Sparta under its leader, Cleomenes, the demos rose in revolt, erupting into the political arena in an unprecedented way, as a conscious political force acting in its own right and in defence of its own interests.

      Whatever his intentions, the result of Cleisthenes’s reforms was the establishment of an institutional framework that was to govern Athenian democracy from then on, with only a few modifications. He changed the whole organization of the polis by removing the political functions of the four tribes, dominated by the aristocracy, which had been the traditional basis of political organization – for instance, in the conduct of elections – and replaced them with ten new tribes based on complex and artificial geographic criteria. More significantly, he subdivided the tribes into demes, generally (but perhaps not always) based on existing villages, and made them the foundation of the democracy, its fundamental constituent unit and the locale of citizenship. The new divisions cut across tribal and class ties and elevated locality over kinship, establishing and strengthening new bonds, new loyalties specific to the polis, the community of citizens.

      Cleisthenes also effected other major reforms, introducing measures designed to create some kind of counterbalance to institutions still dominated by the aristocracy, such as the Areopagus, which continued to have a monopoly of jurisdiction in crimes against the state and in controlling magistrates. In particular, he gave the Assembly a new legislative role. But it was the institution of the demes perhaps more than any other institutional reform that vested power in the demos. It was in the deme that the peasant-citizen was truly born. Democratic politics began in the deme, where ordinary citizens dealt with the immediate and local matters that most directly affected their daily lives, and the democratic polis at the centre was constructed on this foundation. It was here that the traditional barrier between producing peasant village and appropriating central state was most completely broken down; and the new relation between producing classes and the state extended to other labouring citizens too.

      Nothing symbolizes more neatly the effect of Cleisthenes’s reforms than the fact that Athenian citizens were thereafter to be identified not by their patronymic or clan name but by their demotikon, the name of the deme in which their citizenship was rooted – an identification not surprisingly resisted by the aristocracy, which clung to the old identity of blood and noble birth. To be sure, the aristocracy continued to hold positions of power and influence, and Cleisthenes may or may not have intended to establish true popular sovereignty. But his reforms did advance the power of the people. Cleisthenes himself seems to have described the new political order as isonomia, literally equality of law, which had to do not simply with equal rights of citizenship but with a more even balance among the various organs of government, giving the popular assembly a more active legislative role than ever before. Although the demos, who elected magistrates, would not achieve full sovereign control as long as the Areopagus retained its dominant role in enforcing state decisions and holding magistrates to account, the new legislative role that Cleisthenes gave to the Assembly was a major enhancement of popular power.

      There were also other more intangible effects of Cleisthenes’s reforms. We shall have more to say later about developments in the concepts of law, justice and equality; but it is worth mentioning here that Cleisthenes has been credited with a significant change in Greek political vocabulary, the application of the word nomos, instead of the traditional thesmos, to designate statutory law.⁷ What is significant about this change is that, while thesmos implies the imposition of law from above and has a distinctly religious flavour, nomos – a word that suggests something held in common, whether pasture or custom – implies a law to which there is common agreement, something that people who are subject to it themselves regard as a binding norm. The application of nomos to statute became common usage in Athens, which had thereby adopted ‘the most democratic word for “law” in any language.’⁸

      Was the Democracy Democratic?

      After Cleisthenes, popular power continued to evolve, with the Areopagus losing its exclusive jurisdiction in political cases, with popular juries playing an ever greater role (pay for attendance was introduced in the 450s under Pericles), and the Assembly gaining strength (though pay for attendance was introduced only in the late 390s). Since much of what we might regard as political business was dealt with in Athens by means of judicial proceedings, the power of popular juries was particularly important, and Aristotle – or whoever wrote the Constitution of Athens commonly attributed to him – would later describe it as one of the three most democratic features of the Athenian polis. Athens’s victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC or, more especially, the naval victory at Salamis in 480 ushered in the golden age of the democracy, a new age of democratic self-confidence. When the historian Thucydides a few decades later depicted the most famous democratic leader, Pericles, he was able to put into his mouth a glowing account of democracy in his famous Funeral Oration. For all its rose-tinted prose, this speech tells us much about the realities, and even more about the aspirations, of Athenian political life.

      Pericles, himself an aristocrat, tells us that Athens is called a democracy

      because its administration is in the hands, not of the few, but of the many; yet while as regards the law all men are on an equality for the settlement of their private disputes, yet . . . it is as each man is in any way distinguished that he is preferred to public honours, not because he belongs to a particular class, but because of personal merits; nor, again, on the ground of poverty is a man barred from a public career by obscurity of rank if he but has it in him to do the state a service . . . and we Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavour to arrive at a sound understanding of them, in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.⁹

      And indeed the Assembly, which all citizens were entitled to attend, deliberated and decided on every kind of public question, while legal cases were commonly tried in popular courts. The council which set the agenda for the Assembly was now chosen by lot annually from among all citizens. Although election was regarded as an oligarchic practice, it was used for some positions, typically military and financial, which required a specialized skill. But in general public offices, which tended to be ad hoc, were not treated as specialized professional employments; and many officials were chosen by lot. In principle, then, and to a great extent in practice, all citizens could be involved in all government functions – executive, legislative and judicial. To be sure, aristocrats like Pericles (who reached his influential position in the democracy as a military leader chosen by the people) still enjoyed great influence, while wealthy and well-born citizens probably still had disproportionate weight in the assembly. Yet (as anti-democrats like Plato make very clear) we should not underestimate the day-to-day role of popular power in juries and assemblies, nor the significance of democratic practices like sortition (selection by lot) for various public positions.

      Nevertheless, even taking into account the historically unprecedented, and in many ways still unequalled, power of the Athenian people, we must pause here to ask whether, or in what sense, it is appropriate to call the Athenian polis a democracy. After all, this was a society in which slavery played a major role, and in which women had no political rights. In fact, the evolution of democracy increased the role of slavery and in some ways diminished the status of women, especially in respect to the disposition of property. It can hardly be denied that the imperatives of preserving property had a great deal to do with restrictions on the freedom of women, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the position of smallholders, the peasant-citizens of Athens, generated particularly СКАЧАТЬ