ElAnt v1n7 - Athenian Popular Ideology
ATHENIAN POPULAR IDEOLOGY
Douglas H. Kelly, Department of Classics, Australian National University, Canberra, A.C.T. 2601, Australia. e-mail: c/- ian.worthington@classics.utsas.edu.auTo begin in an out-of-the way, but not completely irrelevant place, in an extended and intricate argument upon the chronology of the years 410 to 405 B.C., N. Robertson sought to date the Arthmios decree late in 407 BC ('The Sequence of Events in the Aegean in 408 and 407 B.C.', Historia 29 [1980], pp. 282- 301, especially pp. 294, 296, 301). This is not the occasion to weigh up all the considerations that go against assigning to this year what purports to be a Athenian decree outlawing a man from Zeleia for the crime of bringing Persian money into Greece. What is relevant here is N. Robertson's particular argument drawn from what he takes to be the practice of Athenian orators. Observing that none of the three orators who invoke this decree say who moved it (Dem. xix.271-2; ix.41; Aesch. iii. 258-9; Dein. ii.24-5), Robertson argues that the Arthmios decree can be attributed to some nameless politician c.407 B.C., for one of the hurdles he has to get over is that the Arthmios decrees is attributed in secondary sources either to Themistokles or to Kimon (Themistokles: Plut. Them. 6.4 and Ael. Arist. pro quattuoruir ii.287 Dindorf; Kimon: Krateros [FGrH124, F14] apud Scholia M. in Ael Arist. loc. cit.). That Plutarch and Krateros (Aelius Aristeides may be left to one side) should have differed on such a banal point raises disturbing questions about either's perceptions of the past.( 1 ) Yet rather than speculate about the lost literature behind Plutarch and our citations of Krateros, let us look at how Robertson cleared the way for assigning the Arthmios decree to a context conducive to his own hypotheses. There at least we will be dealing with literature that survives:
'Could they (sc. Demosthenes, Aeschines, Deinarchos) have cited the magic name of Themistocles or Cimon, they would not have been content to speak (sc. in connection with the Arthmios decree) simply of 'your ancestors' or 'the Athenians of that time'.
Yet does Athenian oratory in fact show irresistible urges to cite the names of these great heroes of Athens' days of greatness? Robertson alludes to the fact that, in debates in and around 347 on how to confront the threat from Philip, Aeschines had regaled the assembly with recitals of 'Miltiades's' decree, Themistokles's decree and the oath of the ephebes at the shrine of Aglauros'.( 2 ) Yet it needs to be pointed out that this is only one case involving one orator in one set of circumstances, an orator, moreover, who prided himself on his ability to argue from documents in court. Inspection of the whole corpus of Athenian oratory will show seldom orators invoked the great figures of the past:
Table: Reference to Worthies in Athenian Orator
(Fragments and spuria included)SOLON: Antiphon: 0 Andokides: 6 Lysias: 5 Isaeus: 0 Isocrates: 5 Demosthenes: Assembly speeches: 0 Public suits: 18 Private suits: 11 Aeschines: 7 Hypereides: 1 Lycurgus: 0 Deinarchos: 0 TOTAL: 53 KLEISTHENES: Antiphon: 0 Andokides: 0 Lysias: 0 Isaeus: 0 Isocrates: 3 Demosthenes: Assembly speeches: 0 Public suits: 0 Private suits: 0 Aeschines: 0 Hypereides: 0 Lycurgus: 0 Deinarchos: 0 TOTAL: 3 ARISTEIDES: Antiphon: 0 Andokides: 2 Lysias: 0 Isaeus: 0 Isocrates: 1 Demosthenes: Assembly speeches: 3 Public suits: 2 Private suits: 0 Aeschines: 4 Hypereides: 0 Lycurgus: 0 Deinarchos: 1 TOTAL: 13 THEMISTOKLES: Antiphon: 0 Andokides: 1 Lysias: 3 Isaeus: 0 Isocrates: 5 Demosthenes: Assembly speeches: 1 Public suits: 8 Private suits: 0 Aeschines: 4 Hypereides: 0 Lycurgus: 0 Deinarchos: 1 TOTAL: 23 KIMON: Antiphon: 0 Andokides: 1 Lysias: 0 Isaeus: 0 Isocrates: 0 Demosthenes: Assembly speeches: 1 Public suits: 0 Private suits: 0 Aeschines: 1 Hypereides: 0 Lycurgus: 0 Deinarchos: 0 TOTAL: 3 PERIKLES: Antiphon: 0 Andokides: 0 Lysias: 3 Isaeus: 0 Isocrates: 8 Demosthenes: Assembly speeches: 1 Public suits: 1 Private suits: 0 Aeschines: 1 Hypereides: 0 Lycurgus: 1 Deinarchos: 0 TOTAL: 15The figures in the Table should contain no surprises, except perhaps those for Kimon to Mr Robertson. Solon is the great figure of the past most prone to get an airing in Athenian oratory; Kleisthenes is a forgotten man and Themistokles outscores Aristeides by about 2:1. Yet the overall impression to be gained from these figures is the extreme restraint in referring to these great figures in the past specifically by name: two of our orators do not do this at all and the examples in four others can in each case be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even the number of instances in the orators who went in for this name-dropping most (Demosthenes, Isocrates, Aeschines) need to be seen in proportion. If there are 53 instances in the whole of Demosthenes works, this is not at all heavy-handed in a corpus that occupies 1218 Teubner pages: i.e. an average of one to every 23 pages, in comparison with the average for the orators overall of one to every 27.8.
There is profit in surveys of the surviving texts of Athenian orators to enrich and deepen our perceptions of Athenian popular ideology, something that may be given a working definition of that conglomerate of beliefs, assumptions, prejudices and values which most Athenians would most commonly expect to see upheld in public behaviour and public debate and which, conversely, most Athenians would be offended to see traduced. This popular ideology will predictably be unsystematic, even contradictory at times, compounded of both sentimentality and cynicism, common decency and Athenocentric arrogance. Ideology is always untidy at the edges: what can be enforced or what is worth enforcing in particular circumstances is not always the same as what most people think ought to be done, and there can be shifts in attitudes: phases of relaxed tolerance can be interrupted by fits of alarmed morality. ( 3 ). Yet there should emerge in the end from analysis a broad enough picture of the values and the attitudes that the community is comfortable with in the public domain. (Perhaps a useful motto for enquirers into popular ideology is Samuel Butler's characterisation in The Way of All Flesh of how the congregation of the Reverend Theobald Pontifex felt about the principles of the Christian religion: they would have been equally outraged by having them attacked as they would have been by having them taken seriously.)
That Athenian oratory provides, along with comedy, the most useful body of data for investigating Athenian popular ideology has already been recognised as a cardinal point of methodology, though no doubt more remains to be done, rather in the way of refining or nuancing detail than fundamental reshaping. That oratory can be used and has been used to document Athenian popular ideology is a truism. Here the procedures are plain: simply collect from the orators whatever comes up in the orators that is relevant to the categories that interest the enquirer. But now the problems begin to crowd in. Will the categories that the enquirer selects be the best to apply to the society in question or will they say more about the interests active in the mind of the enquirer or, even more worryingly, the assumptions latent in that same place? The common-sense notion of letting the material speak for itself is an abuse of the term 'common sense', which in this context is something closer to unreflective or boneheaded obscurantism. The material is simply too bulky and too chaotic to preclude selecting, organising and classifying, all activities that of necessity comprise mental shaping and patterning of the data, the more insidious the more these processes are unconscious.
Typically, the Ph.D. student in anthropology is sent off to a society that is exotic and remote from the student's own experience. You cannot do anthropological research (at least not at this stage of your career) by means of fieldwork in the supermarkets and clubs of your suburb. The familiar is too cloying for the anthropologist to learn how to understand it. So anthropology students may be sent off to villages in the New Guinea Highlands. On the contrary, the Ph.D. student in Classics/Ancient History typically begins work on material that is already in itself familiar to a substantial extent and in any case set within a culture and time frame that have preoccupied the enquirer for some time. Perhaps the absence of culture shock on confronting the material is the greatest obstacle for the researcher in Classics/Ancient History. The anthropologists in a strange new environment has been put there for the deliberate purpose of avoiding comfortable assumptions about the obvious. The classicist/ancient historian in contrast is amongst the all too familiar. The anthropologist at least has an explicit methodology and a set agenda about what ought to be investigated in the host community (kinship, rituals, work, access to goods and status); the classicist/ancient historian may have only a thesis title acceptable to a committee.
The real question confronting any enquiry into Athenian popular ideology is what question to ask. Targets of opportunity may present themselves, as for example the opening gambit provided by N. Robertson's assumptions that Athenian orators loved to conjure with great names in Athens past and, specifically, to attribute their decrees to them by name. This hardly happens, as we have seen, with the great men in Athens' past, Solon always excepted. Yet it also turns out to be relatively uncommon for Athenian orators to cite by proposer's name decrees ( psephismata ) of the assembly or boule, except, of course, in speeches delivered in cases of graphe paranomon , when a proposal is being indicted for its incompatibility with existing laws (M. H. Hansen, The Sovereignty of the People's Court in Athens in the Fourth Century B.C. and the Public Action Against Unconstitutional Proposals [Odense: 1974], collects the material). In such cases the proposer's name was not going to escape mention, so these cases may be put aside. Also to be put aside is the kind of speech exemplified by Deinarchos i, Against Demosthenes , an energetic denunciation of Demosthenes by a prosecutor who was bound in the nature of things to refer to Demosthenes's political activities. In the rest of Athenian oratory, there are 56+ cases ( 4 ) where a decree is referred to and the mover is named. This is not a very large number of times at all, when the amount of surviving oratory is considered. In fact this number is well and truly put into the shade when it is set against the overwhelming number of cases in which orators will refer to psephismata without naming the proposer but with such terms of phrase as 'You voted' or 'the demos voted' or 'the boule responded in my case with a decree that will now be read out to you' (Dem. xlvii.33), and any number of variations and circumlocations. The practice of individual orators is revealing: in Lysias there are 14 contexts where there is mention of decrees but no mover is named (Lysias xiii.22-3; 28-9; 33; 35-6, 50, 55-6, 59, 71-2, 95; xxiv.1,vi.29; xvi.6; xviii.15; xix 21; xxviii.5; xxx.17); Lycurgus in his Against Leocrates refers to 10 decrees, each the subject of suitably heavy comment about their salubrious consequences but the mover of only one is given, in technical language: the decree for a posthumous trial of Phrynichus. Otherwise Lycurgus says 'the demos voted' ( Leocr. 112-13 [Kritias's decree]; 15-16, 441, 53, 117, 120-1 (bis), 122-3, 125-6, 146. In two fragments [31 & 57 Conomis] Lycurgus also refers simply to 'the decree'). In contrast, Andokides names the proposers of five of the seven decrees that enter into his highly circumstantial account in his On the Mysteries of events in 415 BC; he also identifies by their proposers' names the two important decrees of 405/4 and 404/3 relevant to his case. Andokides also in another speech (ii. On His Return 23) names the mover of the decree, later revoked, that granted him immunity. Personal preference plays some part here: Andokides likes to make a flourish when citing documents and in recounting events of 415 BC anything that helped spell out a complicated tale was useful (Andok. i. 15, 28 [anonymous]; 17 & 22, 27 [bis] 43, 71 [named];73 & 77-80 [Patrokleides's decree], 82-4 [Teisamenos's decree]). Aeschines shows a comparable preference for arguing from a steady stream of state documents and prides himself on his capacity to rebut malicious accusations with chronology and other specific evidence from official documents (ii. On the Embassy 89, cf. 66). Accordingly in his Embassy speech Aeschines speaks in considerable detail about five decrees moved by Demosthenes and three by Philokrates, whom he represents as Demosthenes's partner in crime; he also gives the name (including the demotic) of two other persons moving decrees relevant to the events in question. ( 5 ). It may be noted that when Aeschines refers to a decree by its proposer's name to begin with he can be content to refer to it later simply as a decree of the demos.( 6 ) Otherwise Aeschines refers to five other decrees without giving the mover's name (Aesch. ii. 12, 37, 91-2, 94, 133). Who moved these is not germane, or if it was, it is suppressed, and their bearing on Aeschines' defence was clear enough without his going into detail. This pattern in Aeschines's Embassy speech suggests that an orator will give detail about the mover and context of a decree only if there is some special point to make, such as the villainy of his opponent or the blamelessness of his own part in what is under discussion. Otherwise it is enough to refer to the decrees of the sovereign demos simply as such.
A similar pattern emerges from Demosthenes's practice in specifying the proposers of decrees. Apart from the proposals that were the subject of graphe paranomon proceedings for which he wrote speeches, in the Demosthenic corpus there are cited 26 decrees with their authors' names: 14 in public suits, 11 in private suits and one in a speech to the assembly.( 7 ) Again the number is quite small in relation to the size of this corpus. It is also worth noting that in nine of these instances (Hansen, Sovereignty , nos. 11, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27) the decree in question happened to have itself been indicted under the provisions of the graphe paranomon , so that there was reason to speak of it with more than a bare reference to the fact of its existence. In general, it stands out that orators were not often called upon to refer to the movers by name unless there was some special reason to do so. Particularly in speeches before the assembly it was the regular practice to speak of acts of state simply with such phrases as 'you voted' or 'the demos voted' or even to 'the demos's psephisma' (e.g. Dem. iii.4; xiii.120; l.13 (this last a decree in his own honour cited by Apollodoros). Remarkably, despite its being mentioned in four speeches by two orators, the decree proposing honours for Chabrias that became the subject of a celebrated graphe paranomon case is of unknown authorship (Dem. xx. 75, 79, 84, 86, 146; xxiii.198; xxxiv.180, Aesch. iii.243; Hansen, Sovereignty , no.7.). Obviously a politician in Athens had to do more to get himself talked about than just moving decrees. More to the point speakers and juries were not interested in who moved decrees unless there was some point at issue. In the assembly a strictly observed convention required speakers to refrain from mentioning living fellow citizens by name when addressing issues of policy. Presumably a speech proposing honours for an Athenian would make free with his name. Otherwise in symbouleutic speeches there is a remarkable dearth of references to living Athenians. In extant symbouleutic speeches politicians had no occasion to scatter bouquets. So references for good to living citizens by name are not be expected and neither will the living be named by name. There is in fact only one case of this in Athenian public oratory (Aristomedes, Dem. x.70-4; cf. note 8). The convention appears to be that policy speeches should avoid personalities, in remarkable contrast with the wild freedom in this regard of lawcourt speeches. Opponents, of whom any Athenian politician worth his salt had a good number, had to be referred to allusively and even cryptically in speeches delivered before the assembly (Dem. iii.3, 21, 28-29, 33; v.7, 10, 22; vi. 29-30; viii.1, 29, 32, 52, 57, 61, 64, 66; ix.2, 53-6; 63-4: Andok. ii.4, iii.13, 33, 36. Non-citizens could be mentioned more freely: e.g. Dem. ii. 19; v.6; viii.40; ix.57; 58; 59-61; 72 - not always to their credit.)
Demosthenes viii On the Chersonnese shows this convention at work when Diopeithes's conduct as strategos in the Chersonnese was the subject of continuing debate in this and other speeches: Diopeithes's actions had to be discussed and so he had to be named but prosecution or judicial review were a matter for the courts (Dem. viii.1-2). Ancient readers remarked upon the absence of personal abuse in Demosthenes's speeches to the assembly. No one seems to have remarked upon, or thought it worth remarking on, the hard and fast convention in Athenian assembly practice that has been pointed out here.( 8 )
The examination so far of the ways that speakers in the assembly refer to decrees, to great figures of their past and to one another is meant to illustrate the methods that it seems necessary to follow in enquiring into oratory as historical evidence: the material must be examined in extenso , without prejudice, without the enquiry being blinkered by assumptions as to what ought to have been the case and with little time spent on current fads.( 9 ) What emerges from the material studied above provides some insight into patterns of behaviour on the part of speakers in the assembly. From these patterns something may be concluded about the ethos of the assembly and of the ideology that, pervades and orders all this: individuals in the present matter little, certain great individuals in the past are significant only for special reason; in the present as in the past it is the collective exercise by the Athenian demos of its power that matters most.
The enquiry may be taken a little further into the prevailing ideology of Athenian public life. Again the emphasis will be upon the commonplace and the repetitious, in the sphere of Athenian epideictic and symbouleutic oratory. These two types of oratory are to be usefully distinguished, in this preliminary analysis, from the third type kind recognised as separate in ancient practice and theory alike, forensic oratory,( 10 ) primarily because these first two kinds deal unselfconsciously with the public interest in the widest sense and aim at articulating beliefs and values to which the community as a whole will subscribe. (Forensic oratory does this too but in a different way, usually arguing that a decision in a particular case also serves the demands of public policy. This deserves a separate enquiry, as too does the evidence of forensic oratory for behaviour and values in the private sphere.) Epideictic oratory in this context means the extant epitaphioi logoi delivered at the annual state funeral of war-dead. Here assertion of common values is to be expected. In symbouleutic oratory, as well as arguments for and against particular lines of policy, the same set of common values is also present. Politics in Athens, as in any other ancient society of which we can speak is instrumental, being concerned with choices amongst competing ways of reaching desired goals, not with fundamental debate over principles.( 11 ). Occasionally, assertions are made about what is presented as universally acknowledged truths but these turn out to be jejune and banal: the commonest notions are that democracies everywhere have a natural affinity for common action and a natural enmity with tyrannical power (Dem. xv.8, 20-21; vi. 6, 21, 24; viii.40, 41; cf. xvi.3, 25-6, ii.9, 10.vii.18). Funeral speeches are the last place to look for argument of any kind but in such speeches, where praise of the dead and praise of the city that produced them are intertwined, speakers have the occasion to elaborate on sentiments that are declared to be the common convictions of all Athenians.
From these funeral speeches a number of themes emerge. They are that Athens has always stood for justice, for the protection of the weak and the oppressed, for hostility to barbarians and for the championing of the freedom of all Greeks. In pursuit of these noble aims Athens has always provided itself valorous and steadfast and so has won what matters most in human life, a splendid reputation (on the centrality of reputation and esteem in Athenian values, cf. K.J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality [Oxford: 1974], pp. 227-8; H. Montgomery, The Way to Chaeronea [Oslo: 1983], p. 62). While outstanding for their piety, Athenians have won their brilliant successes by their own efforts: the gods give no special protection or favour to the Athenians. Above all, the achievements of the Athenians' ancestors in the past have left the Athenians of the present with a unique civic heritage and in their obedience to this and in their emulation of it the Athenians of the present constitute a community that is special: the natural leader of Greece and the bulwark of its traditions and freedom. Conversely, the reverses that Athens has experienced are due not to any lack of courage or intelligence amongst the Athenians themselves but are due to either divine disfavour or to the failings of individuals.( 12 )
Such a mixture of self esteem and unreflecting arrogance is not surprising in ceremonial orations at state funerals where the articulation of the commonplace and new variations on old themes were the appropriate ways of expressing grief and reinforcing the demands that the community makes upon its citizens. What is remarkable is that these same values that pervade funeral speeches also recur in symbouleutic oratory. In this they cannot be elaborated at such length as they are in epideictic but they provide the background and setting for the particular arguments that are advanced on the business in hand.
Thus in symbouleutic oratory praise of Athenian ancestors is acknowledged to be a potent argument but it is not rehearsed at length. Rather, the ancestors are invoked to impress upon the Athenians of the present their duty to uphold their ancestral reputation by emulating their ancestors' determination, a legacy of honour that is at once a special privilege, and a source of danger and hardship. It is the unescapable role of Athenians in the present to accept the burdens and challenges of leadership and of the responsibilities of protecting the freedom of all Greeks from their natural barbarian enemies. This glorious heritage should motivate Athenian actions in the present and Athenian motives are declared to be consistent with traditional Athenian upholding of justice and protection of the weak. Athens is never motivated by selfishness and occupies a special and unique role as the protector of the rest of Greeks. Other Greeks may opt for expediency or surrender but Athens alone must be true to itself. Athenian failures must be blamed on deviant individuals: the gods are not to blame but corrupt and vicious leaders, who are responsible for the loss of integrity in Athenian public life. In contrast Athens has only to be true to itself in order to prevail in the struggle against injustice.( 13 )
Political persuasion deals more with appeal to the emotions than with rational argument and in Athenian symbouleutic oratory it can be observed how arguments about the conduct of policy in the present are enmeshed in the conglomerate of values drawn from a powerful vision of the past. Oratory, then, provides insight into the Athenian mentality: specifically, into those values that are articulated and exploited in the context of debates on public policy. Much more remains to be done, especially in the rich fields of Athenian forensic oratory in public cases. This examination of 'mentalities' or 'ideology' should not be cut off from what has been a longstanding preoccupation in historical research on the orators the problems of weighing up what basis in fact, if any, may be assigned to particular assertions in oratory about specific events. Thus to end with one example, Deinarchos i. Against Demesthenes 9 says that, on the proposal of Kephalos, the Athenians marched out to Thebes and helped the returning Theban exiles to force the evacuation of the Spartan garrison on the Kadmea in a few days. Whatever be thought of this version of events in Thebes in early 378 BC, which happens to agree with Diodorus Siculus xv.25-6 and to be contradictory with Xenophon, Hellenika v.4.2,( 14 ) one important consideration must not be overlooked. The whole context in Deinarchos (i.37-40) is redolent with the clichés of Athenian political discourse: Athens's repeated heroism in the past in upholding freedom, justice and ancestral honour. Here the action ascribed to Kephalos's decree is singled out as a glowing instance of traditional valour that is a useful stick with which to beat Demosthenes, because of the supine inactivity he is being blamed for in connection with the disaster that befell Thebes in 335 BC. In invoking this glorious heritage orators were at their most ebullient and audiences at their most uncritical. This Deinarchos passage does not confirm anything, except the readiness of Athenian orators to exploit the popular ideology.
FOOT NOTES
Private suits:
Dem. lix.27; l.4-6; xlvii.20-1; xlvii.21; xxvi.ii; lviii.36-8; 43; 35; 30-1; 53; xx.10.Assembly speech:
vii.42-3.Aid to weak, hostility to barbarians, Greek freedom:
Lys. ii.6, 7-8; 10-12, 45-6, 61, 71; Gorgias; Pl. Menex. 239ab; 240 de, 241e-c, 244b-c,e; 245c-e; Dem. lx. 1, 8, 10, 11, 18-19, 23-4, 33; Hyper. vi.5, 9-11, 14, 16-17; 24, 26, 33, 39-40.
Courage: Lys. ii.6, 14, 23, 24, 30, 37, 50-3, 69-70; Gorgias Dem. lx.6
Heritage: Lys. ii 17-18; Pl. Menex. 237a-c; lx.6-7; Hyper.vi.36-7
Piety: Lys.ii.39-40; Pl. Menex. 237c, 245e; Dem. lx 34,36; Hyper. vi.
Reverses: Lys.ii.58; Pl. Menex. 243a, d.
Aid to weak, hostility to barbarians, Greek freedom: Lysias xxxiv, 11; Andok: iii.4-5, 28; 37-9; Dem. ii.24 vii. 7; viii.42-46; ix.71; xiv.3, 5, 6; 29; 40. xvi. 12. Courage: Dem. ix 36-9.
Heritage: Lys. xxiv.10-11; Andok.iii.37-9; Dem. ii.24; iii.36, vi.8-12; ix.20, 74, xiv. 6, 15; xv.22; xvi.15.
Piety: Dem.ii.1; iii. 23-7; iv. 12, 42, 45; xv.2; xvi.36; Lys. xxxiv.10.
Reverses: Dem. v.7, 10, 22; vi. 29-30, viii. 32, 52, 57, 61, 64, 66; ix.2, 53-6 etc.
Douglas H. Kelly
e-mail: c/- ian.worthington@classics.utsas.edu.au
COPYRIGHT NOTE: Copyright remains with authors, but due reference should be made to this journal if any part of the above is later published elsewhere.
Electronic Antiquity Vol. 1 Issue 7 - February 1994 edited by Peter Toohey and Ian Worthington antiquity-editor@classics.utas.edu.au ISSN 1320-3606