Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ grumbles of a small minority have tended to colour views of Athenian democracy ever since, creating a myth of Athens in decline which has been very hard to shift.

      Aristocratic disaffection did have more serious consequences, which left a deep mark on the democracy. There were two oligarchic revolutions: a brief episode in 411 but more particularly the coup in 404 which, with the help of Sparta, established the bloody rule of the Thirty (the Thirty Tyrants). With the support of a 700–man Spartan garrison on the Acropolis, the Thirty murdered and expelled large numbers of Athenians. Thousands fled the city, and only 3,000 Athenians – perhaps 10 per cent of the citizenry – retained full rights of citizenship. Yet, when the democracy was restored in the following year, it displayed remarkable restraint in dealing with the oligarchic opposition, instituting, at Sparta’s behest, an amnesty which ruled out the political persecution of the oligarchs and their supporters; and despite the catastrophes that brought the golden age to a close, the fourth century was to be the most stable period of the democracy, which enjoyed widespread support among the poor and even the rich. This was also a period in which the culture of Athens flourished and when it truly became what Pericles had earlier called ‘an education to Greece’. There was no further serious internal threat to the democratic regime, and it came to an end only when Athens effectively lost its independence altogether to the Macedonians in the last quarter of the century.

      The notion that the late democracy was a period of moral decay is largely a product of class prejudice. To be sure, there were serious problems, especially economic ones; and the Athenians had paid a heavy price in the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of the plague. But the myth of democratic decadence has more to do with the social changes that marked the decline of the old aristocracy, which were accompanied by political changes in both leadership and style, a new kind of popular politics that brought to maturity the strategy adopted by Cleisthenes at the beginning of the democracy, when he made the people his hetairoi. Critics described these changes as the triumph of vulgarity, materialism, amoral egoism, and ‘demagogic’ trickery designed to lead the ignorant demos astray. What is most striking about the attacks on a leader like Cleon – by figures as diverse as Thucydides, Aristophanes and Aristotle – is that they invariably suggest objections of style more than substance. Aristotle, for instance, can think of nothing worse to complain about than Cleon’s vulgar manner, the way he shouted in the Assembly and spoke with his cloak not girt about him, when others conducted themselves with proper decorum.

      For critics like Aristophanes and Plato, the sophists became the intellectual expression of this alleged moral decadence and were made to stand for the decline of traditional values. They were portrayed as representing a polis where even young aristocrats had given up the high moral standards of their ancestors, a polis in which all standards of right and wrong had been abandoned, and even those who knew the difference were likely to prefer wrong to right. The rhetorical strategies perfected by the sophists, and the lawyer’s adversarial principle that there are two sides to every question, were interpreted by critics as simply a way of ‘making the worse cause seem the better’. But, while some sophists may indeed have been unprincipled opportunists, among them were thinkers who made substantial and innovative contributions to Greek culture and the traditions emanating from it. Even while their ideas have come down to us only in fragments or in second-hand accounts, especially in the dialogues of a generally hostile Plato, enough remains to justify the claim that the sophists, and Protagoras in particular, effectively invented political theory and set the agenda of Western philosophy in general.

      The sophists varied in their philosophical ideas no less than in their politics. What they generally had in common was a preoccupation with the distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (law, custom or convention). In a climate in which laws, customs, ethical principles, and social and political arrangements were no longer taken for granted as part of some unchangeable natural order, and the relation between written and unwritten law was a very live practical issue, the antithesis between nomos and physis became the central intellectual problem. The very immediate political force of this issue is dramatically illustrated by the fact that, with the restoration of the democracy, magistrates were prohibited from invoking ‘unwritten law’, an idea that now had powerfully antidemocratic associations.

      The sophists in general agreed that there is an essential difference between things that exist by nature and things that exist by custom, convention or law. But there were disagreements among them about which is better, the way of nature or the way of nomos, and, indeed, about what the way of nature is. In either case, their arguments could be mobilized in defence of democracy or against it. Some, in support of oligarchy, might argue that there is a natural division between rulers and ruled and that natural hierarchy should be reflected in political arrangements. Others, in defence of democracy, might argue that no such clear division exists by nature, that men are naturally equal, and that it is wrong to create an artificial hierarchy, a hierarchy by nomos as against physis. But other permutations were possible too: a democrat could argue that a political equality created by nomos has the advantage of moderating natural inequalities and permitting men to live in harmony. Or it could be argued that, however similar men may be by nature, life in society requires differentiation, a division of labour, and hence some kind of inequality by nomos.

      If sophists could be either oligarchs or democrats, it was democracy itself that had brought such issues into sharp relief. In the context of civic equality, the seemingly self-evident observation that, as Thucydides put it in the Melian Dialogue, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ could no longer simply be taken for granted and was up for discussion in unprecedented ways. There were now indeed two sides (at least) to the question. The juxtaposition in practice of civic equality and ‘natural’ inequality, the inequality of strength and weakness, produced particularly fruitful tensions in theory, which found expression both in Thucydides’s history and in philosophy.

      It is not as easy as Plato would have us believe to distinguish between the intellectual activities of the sophists and true ‘philosophy’, or love of wisdom, as practised by Plato himself and the man more commonly credited with its invention, Socrates. To be sure, Socrates was not a paid teacher, though he could always rely on the largesse of his almost uniformly wealthy and well-born friends and acolytes – such as his greatest pupil, the aristocratic Plato. But both Socrates and Plato conducted their philosophic enterprise on the same terrain as the sophists. Not only were the ‘philosphers’ also concerned primarily with human nature, society, knowledge and morality, but they also proceeded in their own ways from the distinction between nomos and physis, between things that exist by law or convention and those that exist by nature. They certainly transformed this distinction, in a way that no sophist did, into a philosophical exploration of true knowledge. Unlike the sophists, who tended towards moral relativism or pluralism and never strayed far outside the sphere of empirical reality, Socrates and Plato were concerned with a different kind of ‘nature’, a deeper or higher reality which was the object of true knowledge. The empirical world was for them, and more particularly for Plato, a world of mere appearances, the object of imperfect conventional wisdom, at best (more or less) right opinion but not real knowledge. The philosophers drew a distinction between learning and persuasion, suggesting that the sophists, like lawyers, were not really interested in learning the truth but only in making a case and persuading others of it. Yet even if, for instance, Plato’s conception of the division between rulers and ruled is grounded in this hierarchy of knowledge and not on a simple test of brute strength or noble birth, we can still see the connections between the philosopher and those sophists who opposed the democracy on the grounds that it created an artificial equality in defiance of natural hierarchy. More particularly, we can see that the sophists, especially the democratic ones and Protagoras in particular, set the questions the philosophers felt obliged to answer.

      Socrates and Protagoras

      Socrates, probably the ancient Athenian most revered in later centuries, is also in many ways the most mysterious. He left none of his ideas in writing, and we have to rely on his pupils, especially Plato but also Xenophon, for accounts of his views. Although the differences СКАЧАТЬ