Robinson, 'Athens on Trial. The Anti-democratic Tradition in Western Thought', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9502
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9502-robinson-athens
@@@@Roberts, Athens on Trial
Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial. The Anti-democratic
Tradition in Western Thought. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994. Pp. 391. $29.95. ISBN 0-691-05697-8.
Reviewed by Eric W. Robinson -- University of Pennsylvania
The story of the Athenian democracy's reception in later
ages may surprise many people, particularly those living in
Western countries. Brought up to accept the values of a free
society and taught to respect the accomplishments of the ancient
Athenians (to the extent that one is taught about the Greeks at
all), a modern citizen might expect that the famous democracy at
Athens has always been highly esteemed. As specialists have long
known, the truth is far different. For the past two millennia the
Athenian democracy has been reviled by the vast majority of those
who wrote about it. From fifth century BC Greece to Ciceronean
Rome to Renaissance Europe to the time of the American and French
Revolutions, the word "democracy" has carried a distinctly foul
odor to most political observers. In particular, critics have
targeted the democracy at Athens for regular abuse, vilifying it
as wildly unjust, intemperate, and fatally unstable. Even the
architects of the American democracy could not resist attacking
the perceived failings of the Athenian constitution, the example
of which they claimed they were strenuously avoiding.
Jennifer Tolbert Roberts has given us an excellent study of
this legacy in Athens on Trial. Ten year's in the making,
R.'s book explores the history of the anti-democratic tradition,
beginning with the indictments made by the Athenians themselves
and proceeding through the centuries up to about 1850, when the
tide of sentiment finally begins to turn in Athens' favor. R.
also offers insights into more recent scholarly trends, though
she does not claim the same degree of depth in covering late
nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship as she can for that
of earlier eras.
The pattern which R. elucidates is not one of unmitigated
antagonism, but rather one in which the occasional strands of
praise for the Athenian order became lost amid the louder and
more frequent shouts of censure. As she puts it, "...the dominant
Western tradition about Athens became what it did through an
ever-growing accretion of literature that systematically ignored
dissonant texts challenging the received wisdom." (15) The few
positive voices preserved in the tradition could have been picked
up by later critics, but were not. Most often a commentator
brought up Athens' history as a cautionary tale, an
exemplum to bear upon some issue of contemporary politics
("We do not want to do x; the Athenians under their irresponsible
democracy did that and came to a sad end"). The government was
chaotic; it mistreated its noble leaders; the mob ruled in a
heartlessly fickle manner. These sorts of indictments popped up
repeatedly in widely separated centuries, to the point where they
become almost axiomatic. Not until the appearance of Grote's
influential History of Greece and the eloquent liberalism
of John Stuart Mill does the stock of the Athenian democracy rise
precipitously and enduringly. Yet even in the democratic age of
the late twentieth century, Athens is not free from criticism.
Now many chastise the Athenians for not being radical enough:
their strict exclusion of women and slaves from political
participation would be utterly unacceptable in today's
democracies.
Chapter One (Introduction) provides a quick historical
outline of the hostile tradition and discusses some of the
sources upon which it rested. R. contends that much of the
criticism is based on weak evidence and misreadings of the
ancient authors. She is surely correct here; in any case, as she
notes, "if it were clear that the Athenian democrats were guilty
as charged, the vigor and longevity of the anti-Athenian
tradition would occasion little interest." (13) R. does voice
some understandable sympathy with the most recent strand of
criticism, that which faults Athens for its (by modern standards)
exceedingly narrow citizenship. To her credit she is honest about
her sympathies and proceeds to place these attacks (from the
"left," as it were) within the larger continuum of anti-Athenian
views, nicely expanding the breadth of the book's vision.
The next three chapters explore the beginnings of the
hostile tradition, concentrating on ancient Athens itself.
Chapter Two contains a brief narration of the evolution of the
Athenian democracy, and then attempts to recover its "theory" or
"ideology." While one may doubt whether there was a single,
abstracted doctrine for us to recover, R.'s exercise serves the
valuable purpose of establishing in what the Athenian
constitution consisted, according to our best sources. Relevant
portions of Herodotus, Euripides' Suppliants, Plato's
Protagoras, and Thucydides (particularly his reporting of
the words of Pericles) are profitably discussed with a view to
revealing the aims and characteristics of the democracy at
Athens. This chapter establishes a relatively positive,
historically responsible description of what the constitution was
about, at least according to some of its proponents. It is
against this picture that the avalanche of criticism from
contemporary and later ages should be compared. Chapters Three
and Four examine the aristocratic biases of most (surviving)
Greek authors, beginning with the elitism expressed in the
Homeric and Theognidean texts, and proceeding to the more
specifically anti-democratic criticisms found in the Old
Oligarch, Thucydides, Isocrates, and the philosophic tradition of
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. From these figures we hear for
the first time that poor people make bad citizens; that the
masses cannot rule competently, and are to be blamed for Athenian
military failures; that the popular constitution contributed
mightily to a fatal moral decline in the state. Democracies are
also said to be unfair, for they treat all citizens equally
despite the fact that some men are clearly better than others. In
addition, democracy is inherently chaotic and unstable. As R.
proceeds to demonstrate, the speciousness of most of these
contentions proved to be no impediment to their tiresome
repetition in later literature.
Chapters Five through Ten trace the course of the Athenian
democracy's reception from Roman times through the eighteenth
century. In "Roman Adaptations" we learn how Greek topoi of
democratic excess were pressed into rhetorical service by Roman
authors. Cicero contrasts the sensible Roman fore-fathers with
the politically foolish Greeks, who went so far as to conduct
state business in contiones (public meetings); Plutarch,
destined to become the most influential classical author from the
Renaissance up through the eighteenth century, hammers home the
message that the indisputable past greatness of Athens did not
extend to its system of government. The abuse of leaders by an
ungrateful demos, moral depravity, and the superiority of the
Spartan constitution were all themes voiced repeatedly by
Plutarch and other authors of the Roman era. Aelius Aristides
(first-second c. A.D.) bucks the trend with his paean to Athens
and her democracy in his Panathenaic oration, but his words were
rarely remarked upon by posterity. Chapter Six makes passing
reference to Orosius and other Christian authors before moving on
to the rediscovery of Greek history in Renaissance Italy, where
Bruni, Machiavelli, Guiccardini, and Giannotti trumpeted
parallels between Florence or Venice and the glory of ancient
Athens. These comparisons, however, were generally shallow and
ill-informed, and when more serious political investigations were
conducted Athens was inevitably found wanting: the supposedly
stable, mixed polities of Sparta or Rome provided the more
salutary political exempla. In chapters Seven and Eight R.
explores early opinions in England and France, where the volatile
mob-rule of the Athenian democracy contrasted unfavorably with
monarchy, at least initially. Interest in Greek history was
rising during the eighteenth century, as indicated by the
appearance of the first narrative histories of Greece after 1729.
A diversity of opinion began to grow as well. English liberals
such as Trenchard and Gordon used Athenian examples in an
approving way to highlight the need for the accountability of
state ministers; Frenchmen such as Goguet, Jaucourt, and Voltaire
also had positive things to say about the Athenian democracy.
Nevertheless, the dominant opinion remained the superiority of
Sparta over Athens and Lycurgus over Solon (and certainly
Pericles), tiresomely repeated. The focus on classical
constitutions and their relevance intensified in the age of the
American and French revolutions, examined in Chapter Nine. The
American revolutionaries, intent on achieving stability as well
as freedom, shunned the example of Athens and the word democracy:
they feared its reputation for chaotic government and took refuge
in the concepts of representation (as opposed to direct
democracy) and separation of powers. Neither did French radicals
propose a restoration of democratic Athens. For them Athens
provided examples of virtuous "martyrs" such as Aristides,
Socrates, and Phocion--but the fate of such figures hardly
reflected favorably on the Athenian demos. Monarchists in Britain
and France, of course, took the opportunity afforded by the
fearsome revolutions to lambaste republicanism and democracy in
all its forms, ancient and modern. Chapter Ten chronicles the
appearance of a new, aesthetic Hellenism in Germany in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The works of
Winckelmann, Herder, Schiller, and Hegel share a romantic
reverence for Athenian achievements in the arts and lifestyle,
and credit democratic government for contributing to these
successes. Such thinking foreshadowed the sea-change to come.
Chapters Eleven through Thirteen describe the dramatically
different directions taken by scholars of the mid-nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Reaction against Mitford's important yet
predictably anti-democratic History of Greece began to
appear in British review journals in the 1820s and earlier. But
the decisive blow did not come until 1846 to 1856 when George
Grote, a man steeped in German classical scholarship, published
his own immense History of Greece. In it he set out to
redeem the reputation of the Athenian system of government by
conducting a spirited defense of the demos. Grote's vigorous
argumentation and sound scholarship lent his work a powerful
influence in his own country, across the Channel, and across the
Atlantic as well. No longer did the glory of Rome or Sparta
eclipse that of Athens in the modern mind. Along with the growing
philhellenism already at work in the nineteenth century, Grote's
history spurred a broad new appreciation for the Athenian
democracy which still echoes to this day. Faultfinding has not
ceased altogether, of course. Chapter Twelve investigates the
most recent varieties of scholarly criticism: the city's
imperialism and its exclusions of women, slaves, and others in a
starkly patriarchal society provide critics with ample grounds
for reproach. The final chapter, the Epilogue, discusses the use
to which Athenian history has been put in the twentieth century,
offers thumbnail sketches of some of the most recent popular and
scholarly treatments, and draws cautious and sensible conclusions
from the whole.
Athens on Trial deserves praise both for its
conception and its execution. For most of us the virtues of
democracy appear so self-evident as to be hardly worth debating;
all the more fascinating, then, to understand how and why leading
intellectuals for centuries just as cavalierly dismissed
democracy in favor of monarchy or aristocracy. R.'s book is as
much about the rhetorical uses to which history may be put as it
is about the Athenian government's reception. The thorough,
chronological approach allows the reader to observe fundamental
shifts in the political and intellectual climate in different
periods of European history as reflected by the opinions which
surface abut Athens and Greek history. R.'s (mostly)
non-judgmental approach to the material lends a sense of
historical objectivity to the project, crucial lest one get
sucked into the very partisanship one hopes to elucidate.
Moreover, the book reads remarkably easily. Dashes of humor here
and there demonstrate an active, appealing wit. (R.'s wry talents
are put to the test in one or two of the middle chapters, when
the reader confronts seemingly endless regurgitations of clich_s
about the virtue of Sparta and the decadence of Athens.) While
her study is of sufficient substance and detail to occupy
profitably most classicists, R. keeps it accessible to interested
non-specialists with sparing use of the ancient languages (with
Greek words always transliterated), and by including pithy
historical summaries of key Athenian events in the early
chapters. Footnotes are full and informative, and show a more
than satisfactory command of the bibliography of a great many
scholarly issues, both classical and post-classical. The
index--particularly important in a work which parades such a
bewildering collection of luminous and not-so-luminous literary
figures before one's eyes--lists references to proper names,
important Greek and Latin terms, and key concepts (liberalism,
representation, slavery, etc.). The bibliography is brief;
readers are encouraged to use the index to locate the more
obscure authors and titles.
One can always imagine ways that even successful studies
might be improved. In some places Athens on Trial could
have benefited from a bit more background. For example, the two
paragraphs devoted to the fourth century Athenian democracy is
clearly inadequate coming after the seven-page historical sketch
of the sixth and fifth centuries. This reviewer is probably not
alone in being hazy on fourteenth to fifteenth-century Florentine
and Venetian political history: without a somewhat fuller
narrative here it is hard to evaluate R.'s contention that the
instability frequently assigned to the Athenian democracy in fact
better suited the historical circumstances of the Italian states.
Moreover, the book would have profited by more attempts at
precise identification of the ancient sources used by some of the
Renaissance and Enlightenment commentators. Reading about their
(sometimes off-the-wall) opinions is certainly interesting, but
it would add still more to know specifically what ancient
(or modern) authorities they relied upon for their statements.
What classical authors did they cite, if any? Was Plutarch always
the source, or did the tracts of Cicero or Aristotle or the Old
Oligarch fuel some of their treatises?
On a more nit-picking level, a few dubious statements and
minor errors and omissions should be pointed out. R. ignores the
battle of Plataia in her account of Greece's defeat of the
Persian threat, p. 28. Her repeated, questionable claim (pp. 14,
32, 47) that aristocrats betrayed the Athenian fleet at
Aegospotami requires at least a footnote (cf. D. Kagan, The
Fall of the Athenian Empire ([Ithaca, 1987], 388-93). Pages
51-2 contain the statement that "The theory of Athenian democracy
sought to negate the concept of class." This surely overstates
the case: the Athenian democracy, unlike the modern ones we are
used to, continued to organize the expected contributions of its
citizens according to class and wealth. The direct involvement of
all free males in governing the state seems not to have
removed, in theory or in practice, the distinctions made between
rich and poor Athenians, aristocrats and commoners, in terms of
numerous public responsibilities (liturgies, manner of military
service, etc.). Footnote 21 on page 320, which lists bibliography
on the first appearance and meaning of the word
demokratia, omits the extremely important contribution of
M. H. Hansen on the subject, "The origin of the term
demokratia, " LCM 11.3 (1986), 35-6. Pages 246 and
285 have typographical errors ("two to contributors" and
"imortant" respectively).
These matters should not detract unduly from what is an
impressive achievement by R. Her unique study succeeds admirably
in providing a readable and informative account of the
development of the anti-Athenian and anti-democratic traditions
in Western literature. Anyone interested in Greek democracy and
its reputation through the ages will profit immensely by reading
it.