Democracy Paul Cartledge

S
Democracy



Democracy
A Life

S
Paul Cartledge

1


1
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© Paul Cartledge 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Cartledge, Paul, author.
Title: Democracy : a life / Paul Cartledge.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015034058 | ISBN 978–0–19–983745–8 (hardback) |
ISBN 978–0–19–049432–2 | ISBN 978–0–19–983746–5
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy—Greece—History—To 1500. | Greece—Politics and
government—To 146 b.c. | Democracy—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / Ancient / Greece.
Classification: LCC JC75.D36 C38 2016 | DDC 321.80938—dc23 LC record available at
/>1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan, USA


To Josh Ober in friendship and with admiration
And to the memory of ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne (b. c. 1615, d. 1657)



S
Contents


List of Illustrations



List of Maps

xi
xiii

Preface
xv
Acknowledgements
xxi
Timeline
xxiii
Prologue

Lost in Translation? Modern and
Contemporary Appropriations
of Democracy I

1

ACT I9
Chapter 1

Sources, Ancient and Modern

Chapter 2

The Emergence of the Polis, Politics, and

13

the Political: Modern and Contemporary
Appropriations of Democracy II

35

ACT II
47
Chapter 3

The Emergence of Greek Democracy

Chapter 4

The Emergence of Greek Democracy

I: Archaic Greece
II: Athens 508/​7

49
61

Chapter 5

The Emergence of Greek Democracy
III: Athens 507–​451/​0

77

Chapter 6

Greek Democratic Theory?

91

Chapter 7

Athenian Democracy in Practice c. 450–​335

105

vii


Contents

Chapter 8

Athenian Democracy: Culture and Society
c. 450–​335

Chapter 9

Greek Democracy in Credit and Crisis
I: The Fifth Century

Chapter 10

123
145

Athenian Democracy in Court: The Trials
of Demos, Socrates, and Ctesiphon

169

ACT III

183

Chapter 11

Greek Democracy in Credit and Crisis
II: The Golden Age of Greek Democracy
(c. 375–​350) and Its Critics

Chapter 12

Athenian Democracy at Work in
the ‘Age of Lycurgus’

Chapter 13

185
203

The Strange Death of Classical Greek
Democracy: A Retrospect
219

ACT IV
229
Chapter 14

Hellenistic Democracy? Democracy in
Deficit c. 323–​86 bce
231

Chapter 15

The Roman Republic: A Sort of

Chapter 16

Democracy Denied: The Roman and Early

Democracy?
247
Byzantine Empires
Chapter 17

265

Democracy Eclipsed: Late Antiquity,
the European Middle Ages,
and the Renaissance

275

ACT V
281
Chapter 18

Democracy Revived: England
in the Seventeenth Century and France
in the Late Eighteenth and Early
Nineteenth Centuries

Chapter 19

283

Democracy Reinvented: The United States
in the Late Eighteenth and
Early Nineteenth Centuries and
Tocqueville’s America

viii

293


Contents

Chapter 20

Democracy Tamed: Nineteenth-​Century
Great Britain

299

Epilogue

Democracy Now: Retrospect and Prospects

305



Notes and References

315



Bibliography and Further Reading 333

Index
363

ix



S
List of Illustrations

1.1

1.2a and 1.2b
4.1

5.1

5.2

Law of Eucrates, 336 bce18
Athenian silver tetradrachm
23
Ostraca
67
Persepolis tribute relief
80
Athenian Tyrannicides: Roman copies
in marble of bronze originals
83
5.3 Pericles
84

5.4
Erechtheis tribe casualty list, 459 bce88

8.1
Marriage Athenian-​style, Lebes gamikos
128

8.2
Trireme reconstruction
133

10.1
Kleroterion fragment
170

10.2
Water clock fragment
171
10.3 Demosthenes
175

11.1
Model of Athenian Acropolis c. 400
186

13.1
Alexander the Great as Pharaoh
220

14.1
Tyche, Roman bronze
235

18.1
Oliver Cromwell
284

18.2
Maximilien Robespierre
288

19.1
Thomas Jefferson
294

20.1
Thomas Paine
300

xi



S
List of Maps
1.1  Greece and the Aegean
10
3.1  Greek Colonization
48
4.1 Attica
60
9.1  Athenian Empire
144
10.1  The Athenian Agora c. 400 bce168
13.1  Hellenistic World
218

xiii



S
Preface

T

his is not my first crack at democracy, mainly ancient Greek. In 2008
I published, in German translation, the book of a series of lectures I was
invited to deliver at the University of Heidelberg (Cartledge 2008). This came
about through the good offices chiefly of Professor Joseph Maran, aided and
abetted by Professor Tonio Hölscher, to both of whom I owe a great deal, and
not only for their immensely friendly hospitality. In 2009 I published a book on
ancient Greek political thought (as opposed to theory) from Homer to Plutarch
(roughly c. 700 bce to ce 100), in which democracy served as the guiding red
thread (Cartledge 2009b). And I have published a number of articles on aspects
of democracy ancient and modern (e.g., Cartledge 1996a, 2000). But these were
all early runs at the subject. The real work begins here.
The present book has been several years in the making. Most immediately,
it is based squarely upon a set of advanced, final-​year undergraduate lectures
that I delivered in Cambridge over four successive academic years (from 2009
to 2013), both to undergraduate students taking the Classical Tripos and to
those studying for the Historical Tripos. The lecture course was titled ‘Ancient
Greek Democracy—​and its Legacies’, although for reasons that will become
apparent I would have preferred ‘Ancient Greek Democracies’. Since all or most
of the Historians who opted to take the course and the attached examination
paper (about ten in each of the four years) knew little or no ancient Greek, the
programme was firmly billed as a course in translation, a fact of which I tried
to make a virtue. In this, as in many other respects, I had the shining example
of the late Sir Moses Finley (Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge from
1970 to 1979) to guide me. It was to him (and also to the late Professor Pierre

xv

Preface

Vidal-​Naquet) that in profound homage I dedicated my Ancient Greek Political
Thought in Practice (Cartledge 2009).
In advertising and executing the course of lectures I  announced six
principal aims:
1. To explore the meanings of ‘democracy’ both ancient (in
Greek: demokratia) and modern (including current);
2. To enhance understanding of the special circumstances required to
make possible both the emergence and the continuation of ‘People
Power’ (demokratia) at Athens;
3. To compare and contrast the democracy (democracies) that were created
in Athens with those to be found elsewhere in the Greek world, a world
of—​at most periods from about 600 bce on—​1,000 or so citizen-​states
(poleis);
4. To appreciate the development of ancient political thinking and
theory about democracy, and not least comprehend their typically
anti-​democratic bent;
5. To track the devolution or degradation of the original Greek conceptions
and practices of democracy through the Hellenistic Greek world,
late Republican and early Imperial Rome, and down as far as early
Byzantium (6th c. ce); and
6. To follow some of the trajectory of post-​Ancient democracy, in the
European Middle Ages and Renaissance, in Revolutionary England,
America and France, and in its reconstituted or re​invented forms of the
nineteenth century and beyond.
I further issued a prospectus, to the following effect:
All historiography may be contemporary history, but the historiography of
democracy could hardly be more so. The current global preoccupation with
democracy and (for some) its global extension makes constant re-​examination

of the original ancient Greek versions imperative. This course will thus be
explicitly and determinedly comparativist from the outset, and one early pedagogical aim will be to problematize and defamiliarize Modern democracy and
thus to sever any easy assimilation of it to (any) Ancient (prologue).

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Preface

We shall not only be comparing and contrasting Ancient with Modern, I
continued, but also—​and at first equally or even more—​comparing and contrasting Ancient with Ancient, and indeed Ancient Democracy with Ancient
Greek Oligarchy (which could sometimes be represented as really quite
‘democratic’). Aristotle (384–​322 bce), I advised, will be our guide in this as
in so much else where ancient politics are concerned (here Chapters 1, 2, and
6). In his Politics he claimed to be able to distinguish four species of the genus
demokratia. We shall follow along in the same line of thought, by comparing
Athenian democracy, a version of Aristotle’s ‘last’ or ‘ultimate’ species (itself
a moving target, with quite distinct evolutionary stages and revolutionary
moments) with other, of course far less well documented democracies, such as
those of Mantineia and Elis in the fifth century bce, or Thebes and Argos in the
fourth (Chapters 4, 5, 9, and 11).
Ancient Greek, especially ancient Athenian, democracy (to 322/​1 bce) was
to be the main topic of the course (Chapters 3–​13). But the last third or so
was advertised as addressing also its varied legacies. To begin with, therefore,
we would continue the story beyond the Classical into the Hellenistic period,
where at least the island-​city of Rhodes kept some sort of democratic flag flying in the face of first Hellenistic Greek (Chapter 14) and then Roman assaults.
Republican Rome, I would argue against strong contrary opinion, has no true
place in a history of Ancient democracy properly so called, at least as that was
anciently understood by the pre-​Hellenistic Greeks (Chapter 15). This negative conclusion would be reinforced and confirmed by considering the devolution and devaluation of the term demokratia in the works of Cicero, Aelius
Aristeides, and others in the central Roman era (c. 200 bce–​ce 200), and (well)

beyond that into the sixth-​century Byzantine world of Justinian (r. 527–​565)
(Chapter 16).
More briefly, I  concluded, we would look finally at some foreshadowings or inklings of modern democracy as vaguely sketched in the European
Middle Ages and Renaissance (Chapter  17), much more sharply focused in
seventeenth-​century England (the English ‘Revolution’ as witnessed to in the
Putney-​Leveller Debates, Chapter  18), and yet more explicitly announced in
the claims to antique Greek democratic legitimacy put forward by some of the
French Revolutionaries of the later eighteenth century (Chapter 18).

xvii


Preface

Modern democracy as such would not be our subject, but the resumption,
really re​invention, of democracy (so called) in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States (Chapter 19) and the United Kingdom (Chapter 20),
certainly would be; so that we would end on a paradox, one that I still find quite
baffling, actually. Until the first half of the nineteenth century the dominant
tradition of Western political thought both in and since Antiquity had been
anti-​democratic, opposed, specifically, to the more radical species of democracy theorized by Aristotle in the Politics. That long tradition has been and is
still today being actively undermined, although it is as yet far from being overthrown, by various shapes and forms of direct democracy advocates, including
those who point to the—​technical—​capacity of new information technology to
realise the global democratic village. Against them, however, looms the spectre
of a globalized political world order dominated by a country and state-​form,
the People’s Republic of China, entirely lacking in any sort of Western-​style
democratic tradition whatsoever. Back to the future? It might well turn out to
be just a pious wish (epilogue).
That prospectus was quite closely adhered to in the lectures, although they
differed in detail and sometimes more than just in detail year on year, as they
were always given ex tempore from—​extensive—​notes (supplied to students as

handouts) rather than delivered as pre-​conceived scripts. It has been likewise
adopted as the guiding scheme for this book, as the chapter citations above are
meant to indicate.
If I may end this preface on a rather personal note, I will relate how at a dinner
with colleagues in Cambridge in about 1981, early in the Thatcher years, I was
shocked to be told by a now deceased, extremely eminent professor of ancient
and modern philosophy that for him democracy was, as it were, bunk. To be
fair, I had no illusions myself about what I dismissed as ‘bourgeois’ democracy,
but I did think there was still a good deal of life yet in the old dog of democracy
that the Greeks had (as I still believe) invented: democracy as the rule of the
masses, the political empowerment of the poor, on the basis of some workable definitions of freedom and equality. That at any rate in principle seemed
much better than what it had replaced—​rule either of the unelected and non-​
responsible one (whether a hereditary monarch as at Cyrene in north Africa
or a usurping tyrant as on the eastern Aegean island–​state of Samos), or of the
possibly elected but certainly not responsible (to the people) few (whether a
xviii


Preface

more or less hereditary aristocracy or, as on the island of Aegina, a plutocracy;
Sparta being, as often, a special case, both in practice and in ideological fiction).
The other personal factor that fuelled my quest for ancient democracy or
democracies was the chance that I  was raised in Putney on the south bank
of the Thames in southwest London—​not only the place of origin of King
Henry VIII’s consigliere Thomas Cromwell but also that Putney in which,
when it was still just a village cut off from London, there occurred in October
and November 1647, in the church of St Mary’s, the eponymous Putney (or
Levellers’) Debates (Chapter 18). Here for the first time in English history and in
a consciously non-​traditional political forum, the prospect of a republic in the

sense of a non-​monarchical and in some sense ‘popular’ political regime was
seriously debated—​and of course it was shortly to be implemented, if hardly in
a democratic form, under another Cromwell, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.
St Mary’s stands today; but so too—​still unfinished—​does the Levellers’ great
project of genuine republicanism.

xix



S
Acknowledgements

I

owe huge thanks, once again, to the Oxford University Press and
especially its New York editor, Stefan Vranka, and his able assistant Sarah
Pirovitz; to former colleague Gareth Stedman Jones and current colleague
David Runciman, for delivering lectures early on in the course on early modern, modern, and contemporary understandings of democracy, roughly from
Robespierre to Noam Chomsky; to all those colleagues who have supervised
(taught) the course in whole or in part to either Classics or History undergraduates or both, especially Robin Osborne, Paul Millett, Tom Hooper, and
Carol Atack; to friends and colleagues who most generously read drafts and
offered comments, including above all Carol Atack, Richard Cohen, Edith Hall,
and Tom Hooper; to Lex Paulson for revivifying democratic enthusiasms; and
last but not least to the one hundred or so students (several of them auditing)
who attended them and provided me with invaluable feedback and a constant
reality check.
I dedicate the book to two persons: one long dead but not forgotten—​at least
not by me—​John Lilburne, guiding spirit of the English Levellers; the other
my longstanding friend and colleague Josh Ober, now Constantine Mitsotakis

Professor at Stanford University, formerly Magie Professor of Ancient History
at Princeton, who—​as we learn from an unusually revealing, indeed revelatory
online interview—​has been working on a general theory of democracy, from a
political-​scientific standpoint informed by a political-​historical approach (see
www.artoftheory.com/​josiah-​ober-​the-​art-​of-​theory-​interview/​).

xxi



S
Timeline
(All dates down to 508/​7 are approximate or traditional.)
bce = Before Common Era
ce = Common Era
Archaic Age
c. 700
c. 650–​600
621/​0
594/​3
550
546
545 (to 510)
508/​7
505

Poems of Homer and Hesiod; introduction of hoplite fighting
Law on office-​holding inscribed at Dreros, Crete
Dracon’s laws inscribed at Athens
Solon’s laws at Athens

Achaemenid Persian empire founded by Cyrus (II ‘the Great’)
Cyrus defeats Croesus of Lydia
Tyranny at Athens of Peisistratus and son Hippias
Cleisthenes introduces Democratic reforms at Athens
Sparta’s Peloponnesian League formed

Classical Age
499 (to 494) Ionian Revolt: rebellion against Persia of Ionian Greeks
and other Greek and non-​Greek subjects
490
Battle of Marathon: Athens and Plataea defeat Persian invaders
480 (to 479) Second Persian invasion, under Xerxes, defeated: Salamis 480,
Plataea 479
480
Battle of Himera: Sicilian Greeks under Gelon
defeat Carthaginians
478 (to 404) Athens founds anti-​Persian Delian League

xxiii


Timeline

466
462
460 (to 446)
449
447
446
431

421 (to 414)
415 (to 413)
405 (to 367)
404
404 (to 371)
401 (to 400)
395 (to 386)
386
385
378 (to 338)
371
366
362
359 (to 336)
356 (to 346)
346
338
336

End of tyranny, beginning of democracy at Syracuse
Further Democratic reforms at Athens: Ephialtes and Pericles
First Peloponnesian War: Sparta and allies versus Athens and allies
Peace of Callias (between Athens and Persia; existence and
precise date disputed)
Thebes defeats Athens at Coroneia, establishes Oligarchic
federal state; Parthenon begun (completed 432)
Thirty Years’ Truce between Sparta and Athens (broken 431)
(to 404, with interruptions) Atheno-​Peloponnesian War
Peace of Nicias
Athenian expedition to Sicily: Syracusan victory

Dionysius I becomes tyrant at Syracuse
Sparta, with Persian aid, wins Atheno-​Peloponnesian War
Spartan hegemony
Expedition of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries to Asia: written up
by Xenophon of Athens
Corinthian War: Sparta defeats Quadruple Alliance (Athens,
Boeotia, Argos, Corinth)
King’s Peace (first Common Peace): sponsored by Artaxerxes II
of Persia and Agesilaus II of Sparta
Plato founds Academy at Athens
Athens founds anti-​Spartan Second Sea-​League, Thebes a
founder-​member
Battle of Leuctra: Thebans defeat Spartans; Theban ascendancy
in mainland Greece (to 362)
End of Sparta’s Peloponnesian League
Second Battle of Mantinea: Theban victory, death of
Epaminondas; Common Peace renewed
Accession of Philip II of Macedon
Third Sacred War: Phocians versus Philip
Peace of Philocrates between Macedon and Athens: Philip
rules Greece
Battle of Chaeronea: Philip and Alexander defeat Athens and
Thebes; foundation of League of Corinth
Murder of Philip II, accession of Alexander III (‘the Great’)
xxiv