1

Tom Burns
Organisation and Social Order
Updated Sept. 1995; June 1997; Final Revision: 1.xii.00

Chapter I
ATHENS: THE INVENTION OF DEMOCRACY
I
We begin with the constitutional and administrative set-up which was developed in
Athens during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and lasted, apart from two brief intervals,
until towards the end of the fourth century. Its lifetime, therefore, falls within that
momentous period around 500 B.C., close to the very beginning of the history - the
recorded history - of Europe, that Karl Jaspers called the Achsenzeit, the axial age, the
turning point of history. In it were concentrated "an extraordinary number of
extraordinary personages and events" - not only the philosophers, the tragedians and the
historians of Greece, but Confucius and Lao-Tze in China, Buddha, Zoroaster, and the
Jewish prophets. "Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater
justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation of things. New models of
reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a
criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models."1
This was the time when Athens became a democracy - 'an association of persons, living in
a defined territory, legally organised for their own government.'
Democracy nowadays, as John Dunn says in his glum review of contemporary western
political theories ("some of the central anomalies of our political understanding today"),
has resolved itself into two quite distinct formulations: "one dismally ideological and the
other fairly blatantly Utopian. In the first, democracy is the name of a distinct and very
palpable form of modern state, at the most optimistic, simply the least bad mechanism for
securing some measure of responsibility of the governors to the governed In the
second, democracy (or as it is sometimes called participatory democracy) is close to
meaning simply the good society in operation, a society in which all social
arrangements authentically represent the interests of all persons, in which all live actively
in and for their society and yet all remain as free....(roughly) as they could urgently and
excusably desire."2
One of the more popular variants of the first of the two formulations Dunn puts forward is
Schumpeter's. Modern representative democracy amounts to a system in which political
leaders contend with each other for the citizen's vote in exactly the same manner that
1
2

A.Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, C.U.P., 1975, pp. 8-9.

J.Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future C.U.P., 1979, pp.26-7.

entrepreneurs compete with each other for the consumer's choice. This, we learn, makes
democracy much more understandable - at least to economists. For economic and
political activity resemble each other quite closely. The meaning and purpose of
economic activity is obvious: people want food, clothing, shelter and so on, and
production and commerce are there to satisfy those wants. But it would not get us very far
if we took that as the starting point for acquiring an understanding of economic activity in
present-day society. Far better to start out from ideas about profits, and how they are
realised though market competition. In the same way, the meaning and purpose of
political activity - in the western world at least - is to produce the legislation and the
administrative measures that people want. "But in order to understand how democratic
politics serve this social end, we must start from the competitive struggle for power and
office and realise that the social function is fulfilled, as it were, incidentally - in the same
way as production is incidental to profits."3
For political scientists, and for political commentators and writers too, Schumpeter's
observations had an obvious and immediate appeal. It offered them a detective role in
which they penetrated the disguise of overt political purposes and revealed the latent
functions and the structure of relationships behind them. So well established and familiar
did his interpretation become that, twenty years later, S.M.Lipset needed only to say, in
his preface to the 1962 edition of Michels' Political Parties: "In essence, democracy in
modern society may be viewed as involving the conflict of organised groups competing
for support."4
Whether or not this holds good for contemporary western democracies, it certainly does
not apply to Athenian democracy. Fifth century Athens, in fact, is the model of that idea
of democracy which Dunn dismissed as "blatantly Utopian .... simply the good life in
operation". This is in fact very much how Athenians would have described what their
constitution was aimed at, however far short it may, for some of them, and for some of the
time, have fallen in practice. For of course there were groups of citizens who supported
leading figures like Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, and other groups, with their
leading figures, who opposed them, or had other ideas about what should be done. And,
true, such leaders and their followers, did engage in "a competitive struggle for the
people's vote". The crucial difference from what obtains in modern representative
democracy was that the vote was itself the political decision, not about who should have
the power to decide. The people themselves decided.
It was, supremely, a 'participatory democracy' - the first recorded in history. And it was
invented - manufactured out of familiar bits and pieces of what remained of a halfforgotten past. Those 'bits and pieces' of collective action deliberately removed from
democratic control were for limited and quite clearly specified purposes only, mostly to
do with external threats, and then to elected military and naval leaders - ten of them, and
for one year only, although they might be reelected. During the fourth century, when
finding money for military and other commitments became dificult, a few men regarded
as expert in financial matters were also elected by the Assembly. Both cases, as
3
4

J.Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Allen & Unwin, 1962 edn., p.282.
S.M.Lipset, Introduction to R.Michels, Political Parties, Free Press, 1962, p.52.

A.H.M.Jones has observed, amounted to a surrender of democratic principles, "for the

Greeks considered popular election to be aristocratic rather than democratic, since the
ordinary voter will prefer a known to an unknown name."5
Political leadership was a different matter entirely. Political leaders in the Athens of the
fifth and the fourth centuries had to be men who could command the attention of their
fellow citizens in the Assembly rather than acceptance of their decisions and obedience to
their orders. They were people whose proposals were most likely to be in accordance
with the wishes of a majority of the four or five thousand who might be expected to turn
up to a meeting of the Assembly, and so win the support of their votes.
All citizens had the right to speak in the Assembly. Few of them actually exercised it,
largely those whose experience, special knowledge, or political wisdom was generally
recognised; the foolish and ignorant were shouted down. The Assembly did in fact look
to a few men to present different lines of policy, among which they could choose. But this
was utterly different from the way Schumpeter's definition of the democratic method as
that in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of 'a competitive struggle
for the people's vote'.
"Schumpeter meant power to decide quite literally: "The leaders of political parties
decide, not 'the people'. Not in Athens. Not even Pericles had such power. While his
influence was at its height, he could hope for continued approval of his policies, expressed
in the people's vote in the Assembly, but his proposals were submitted to the Assembly
week in and week out, and the Assembly always could, and on occasion did, abandon him
and his policies. The decision was theirs, not his or any other leader's; recognition of the
need for leadership was not accompanied by a surrender of the power of decision. And
he knew it."6
How could this have happened?
How can one possibly account for democracy democracy in its most 'blatantly Utopian' form - coming into existence in a society which
had previously been characteristically monarchic and aristocratic - a palace-ruled society
in which something of the formal inflexibility of the ancien regime shows itself?
It is as well to establish at the outset that the Athenian constitution bore little resemblance
to what we are accustomed to think of as a 'state'. Even the term 'city-state' usually
applied to it is misleading. Athens did indeed comprise a territory - Attica - of about a
thousand square miles, but its boundaries were unmarked, permanently open, and
undefended in time of peace. As in the case of all other political entities of the classical
world (including Rome), Athens, for Athenians, meant themselves. They were citizens of
Athens, moreover, by right of descent - not residence, or even birthplace.
In Solon's time, at the beginning of the sixth century, Athenians may well have seen
themselves as constituting (rather than 'belonging to') not much more than a loose
5

A.H.M.Jones, "The Economic Basis of the Athenian Democracy" Past and Present, 1, 1952, p.13.

6 M.I.Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, Chatto & Windus, 1973, pp.24-5.

confederation.
There were four large associations of 'phylai' (usually rendered in
translation as 'tribes', for want of a better word) to which the people of Attica were
traditionally attached; citizenship was secured on the basis of being a member of one or
other of the four phylai. The phylai were composed of 'fraternities' to which citizens
belonged, with the approval of the aristocratic families who assumed leadership in time of
war. The phylai seem to have lost most of what claims on loyalty they may once have had
well before the sixth century. The basic constitutional, juridical and administrative cells
of the Athenian polity were the multiplicity of small communities that made up the phylai,
each with its central village or township (although Athens itself had five of them). These
were later reshaped, or reconstituted, in Cleisthenes' reforms as 'demes'.
What sense of unity - outside wartime - there was among the whole population in preclassical times (i.e., before c.600 B.C.) came as much as anything from the celebration of
religious festivals and the representation of Athenians as a whole at pan-Hellenic
gatherings - which, again, were held for religious purposes. Unity in other respects was
largely a matter of combining for war, and for the oversight (rather than the direct
administration) of justice. Nine archons were elected annually, each with his designated
function: one to take the lead in war, another for religious ceremonies, and several to
adjudicate in important legal disputes. After their year's term of office, the archons took
their place in the Areopagus, a council whose function was, in formal terms at least,
advisory.
So far as the historical record goes, there is virtually complete agreement that the whole
revolutionary change from this older dynastic ('eupatrid') regime to full democracy was
the product of a series of specific reforms, constitutional and other, engineered by leading
political figures, Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes, over the period stretching from the
early 6th century BC to the middle of the 5th century.7
What occasioned the first set of wholesale reforms attributed to Solon is presumed to be
large-scale disturbances or unrest - although the evidence for this comes from his
denunciation of the way the existing system of justice worked, the rapacity and selfish
indifference of the powerful, and the discontents which this bred among the common
people, with its attendant danger of civil strife. The reforms themselves were designed to
remedy the major abuses and remove the discontents which they aroused.
The traditional system of exploitation which subjected peasant farmers to their aristocratic
overlords (debt-bondage played a large part) was abolished. All officials were made
accountable for any misdeeds during their term of office. Penalties imposed by
magistrates which exceeded a specific level had to be referred to an assembly open to all
citizens.
It was also Solon who is said to have laid down the rules which determined citizenship,
what its rights and obligations were, and, more strikingly, the qualifications required for
different grades of military, civic and juridical duties and offices. The criteria for
7

See D.Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, O.U.P., 1990, pp.20-21.

qualifying at each grade were uncompromisingly economic. Not that there was any
question of other differences in standing by inherited position, prestige, and so forth being
abolished. They were simply set aside when it came to constitutional and military rights
and duties.
Four classes of citizen were instituted, each defined in terms of the agricultural yields
from the property they held, coinage being in its infancy and monetary values
meaningless. The top class consisted of those who could reckon annually on getting at
least 500 medimnoi of grain from their land. A medimnos is the equivalent of about a
bushel and a half (11 gallons in liquid terms), so that citizens at this level owned enough
property to provide basic subsistence for about twenty families. Candidates for election
as archons had to be members of this wealthiest category. The next level (hippeis) had
land rated between 300 and 500 medimnoi, and the third grade (zeugites) between 200 and
300. Citizens whose property yielded less than this were classed as 'thetes', the word
used for bondsmen or hired labourers (not slaves).
Important as these distinct categories of citizen were for the political organization of
Athens (and they remained virtually unchanged for centuries) political considerations
were not primary - or rather, they were consequential to military requirements.
Citizenship was first and foremost a matter of military duty. Every adult male was, as
citizen, liable to be called on to fight in the all-too-frequent wars. The wealthiest were
looked to for major contributions to the armed forces: in later times, especially, they were
responsible for equipping and maintaining ships for the navy. The second rank, as their
name (hippeis) implies, had to equip themselves for duty as cavalry. Zeugites served in
the army as heavy infantry, and were required to supply their own armour, shield, and
spear. By the sixth century, infantry had come to play a much more significant part in
warfare; they fought as 'hoplites', in close formation. Thetes were not called upon to be
more than 'lightly armed' (whatever that amounted to) or to do more than serve as
auxiliaries in fighting on land. Later on, however, it was the thetes who manned the
galleys which won the all-important sea-victories of later years.
Solon's 'ancestral democracy', as Aristotle called it, did not last long. Around the middle
of the sixth century, Peisistratus, (at his third attempt) won personal and lasting supremacy
over Athens. However, one of the novel features of Solon's institutional arrangements
were that they were written down, and so publicly known. (Solon himself left a memoir,
composed in verse[!] recording all his reforms.) Perhaps for this reason, but also because
there was no good reason for him to repeal them, Peisistratus let the institutional
arrangements stand, merely seeing to it that his own followers were installed in positions
of authority - the archons, the Areopagus, and so on.
In fact the 'reign' of Peisistratus led on to notable increases in the prosperity of Athens and
the welfare of its people. Factional disputes were suppressed; loans backed by the public
treasury were made available to peasants for improving their land and crops. Overseas
trade grew.
Clear evidence of the expansion of Athenian power and influence lies in the multiplication

of its colonies. The Greeks had been long accustomed to setting up colonies; by the sixth
century settlements had been established by many of the larger cities not only around the
coast of the Aegean and the eastern shore of the Adriatic but along the southern stretches
of the coast of Italy, in Sicily, and, quite early on, even in the south of France. They were
not alone; Phoenicians had founded colonies even farther west in the Mediterranean.
Founding colonies was a useful way of providing for poorer citizens; agricultural land was
everywhere in short supply, and a bad harvest could bring famine. Once established, a
colony customarily gained at least technical recognition as an independent polis ; the
colonists ceased to become citizens of their city of origin. But religious ties remained,
fortified by kinship and the form of Greek language they had in common, and most
colonies were regarded by the original polis as overseas extensions. Moreover, there was
also a second-grade form of colony: the 'cleruchy'. People settled in cleruchies retained
their citizenship, and although they rarely had any opportunity to exercise any rights
attached to it, they were liable to taxation and military service. Although zeugites could
also be allowed in, the vast majority of first settlers in both types of colony were thetes,
naturally enough; the amount of land allotted to them, however, meant that they qualified
as zeugites. "By her colonies and cleruchies Athens raised more than 10,000 of her
citizens from poverty to modest affuence, and at the same time increased her hoplite force
by an even larger number, the cleruchs with their adult sons serving in the ranks of the
Athenian army and the colonists as allied contingents."88 In addition, of course, relieving
the pressure of population in the city of origin meant that fewer of the better-off citizens,
or their children, would be forced into poverty and the status of thetes.
The consequence of all this was a substantial growth in numbers of the more prosperous
class of zeugites, and this, in turn, had a great deal of bearing on the next stage of reform.
Peisistratus' son, Hippias, lost the standing and powers he had inherited, and was
overthrown in 510 by an aristocratic faction aiming to restore the pre-Solonian regime.
When internal disputes broke this group up, one set called on Sparta for help, and a small
expeditionary force of Spartans occupied the Acropolis . It was at this point that
Cleisthenes, himself a leader of one of the aristocratic factions, gained the support of the
zeugite class, who, as hoplites, constituted the main fighting force. At all events, they
proved numerous and strong enough to ensure victory for Cleisthenes over his chief rivals,
besiege the Spartans, and force them to leave.
Just what the arrangement was by which Cleisthenes gained the support of a large
following is not clear, but there is no doubt that the reforms which take their name from
him gave the zeugite class and, eventually, even the thetes, a substantial role in politics.
Previously, they had been looked on merely as mob support in conflicts between
contending aristocratic leaders. They now gained admission to full citizenship in political
and juridical terms.
The groundwork was laid down in the comprehensive redistribution of the affiliations to
which the right of citizenship attached. Once again, there was no resort to the abolition of
what had previously obtained; the old 'phylai' were left alone, but citizenship was now a
8

A.H.M.Jones, Athenian Democracy, Blackwell, 1957, p.7. (see also Appendix, pp. 168-77.

matter of membership of one of ten new phylai ('tribes'). Once again, citizenship had
military service as its primary feature. Each of the ten tribes supplied a force of hoplites
under its own elected general ('strategos'). Membership of the tribes was now based on
residence in one of the demes, the small communities which now numbered - officially 139. A list of demes was drawn up and made public, and all adult free men were required
to register at their local deme centre. The new system allowed of the admission to
citizenship of a sizeable number of men whose membership of the old fraternities, and
thus their affiliation to the former phylai, had been challenged by the aristocratic groups
who had first taken over from Hippias, and in this way had become liable to be deprived
of citizen rights.
This was not all. The distribution of the demes belonging to each of the ten new phylai
was systematically spread among three trytties (analogous to the three Ridings - 'thirdings'
- of Yorkshire). These were distinct regions of Attica: Athens and Piraeus, plus the area
around them; the coastal areas; and the inland region. Each of the ten phylai, therefore,
was made up of demes from the three separate sections of the whole territory of Attica.
Furthermore, after the first comprehensive registration, citizens were registered as
belonging to the deme in which his direct ancestor had been registered at the time (the
later years of the sixth century) when the new registration system was introduced.
It is as if the affiliations to the four traditional phylai on which citizenship had previously
been determined were shuffled, cut into three equal packs, and these then dealt out among
the ten new phylai. Differentiation by wealth into four distinct 'classes' of citizen
remained; so did distinctions of rank in terms of birth. The reforms of Cleisthenes were
aimed at an approximation to equality in political terms. And they achieved this, together
with equality before the law, with much success, and for a long time.
Shuffling the citizenship pack of cards was only the beginning. By Pericles' time, in the
latter part of the fifth century, practically all legislative, administrative, and judicial
powers had been devolved on to the citizenry at large; any process of selection for liability
for service was determined first by age and then by lot; those called for actual service
were paid a daily subsistence allowance.
After Cleisthenes' victory over his rivals, the Ecclesia became the supreme political
decision-making body, open to all citizens, voting (usually by show of hands) on business
and proposals presented for its approval by the Boule.
The Boule - the Council of Five Hundred - was responsible for preparing the business
coming before the Ecclesia, for conducting its diplomatic business and for seeing that its
decisions were implemented. These included arrangements for seeing that any financial
undertakings consequent upon decisions of the Ecclesia were met. Naturally, as Athenian
power grew and colonies multiplied in number and size, and more and more overseas
commitments were acquired, so the Council's functions expanded, especially those
connected with diplomatic and financial affairs. The Council acted as watchdog rather
than agent on the Ecclesia's behalf, instigating, inspecting and monitoring what was done
in its name, and reporting back to it when necessary. Collecting taxes and other revenues

(sales from the publicly-owned silver mines, tribute and customs duties exacted from its
overseas colonies, client cities, and allies), paying out public money, and buying supplies
was the job of individual officers and appointed boards.
All these things were done under the direct authority of the Ecclesia. Moreover, all those
selected for office were subjected to a preliminary scrutiny before they began their term and to examination of the way in which they had conducted themselves when they came
to the end of it. In David Stockton's words, "The widespread use of random selection of
public officers by means of the lot, and of boards rather than individuals, together with the
practice of annual and generally non-consecutive or even [non-]repeatable tenure of
executive responsibility, meant that the boule ... was the body to which all the multifarious
agents of the Athenian demos were, in the first instance at least, answerable and
accountable."9 The fragmentation of executive responsibilities and their dispersal among
a multiplicity of short-term officials meant that service in the Council of Five Hundred
was fairly exacting, the more so since there was no hierarchic bureaucratic structure nor
any possibility of meritocratic progress towards higher office. What it also points to is
that the distinction between the administrative and executive branches of government was
very much alive then.
The Council's five hundred members were made up of fifty (all of at least zeugite
standing) chosen by lot from each of the ten 'tribes' (and so from the three 'ridings', too).
Its members were therefore drawn in equal numbers from different parts of Attica and
randomly selected. They served for one year and - certainly later on - only twice in their
lifetime. The Council met every day throughout the year except on days set aside as
festivals or as ill-omened, with meetings open to a limited number of non-member
citizens. In session, it received envoys and messengers, but its primary purpose was to
prepare the business coming before the Ecclesia, which normally met on forty days in the
year. Any citizen could bring forward a proposal or an issue for discussion and decision
in the Ecclesia, but it had to go first to the Council. It then came before the Ecclesia either
as a specific recommendation formulated by the Council, which could be approved or not
at the next meeting of the Ecclesia 'on the nod', so to speak, or as an open question. Any
such open question had normally to be settled in terms of a proposal made by an
individual member of the Ecclesia and thereafter challenged, discussed, and voted on.
Each contingent of fifty from one of the ten 'tribes' represented in the Council also served
for one-tenth of the year (even the order of succession was decided by lot) as the standing
committee of the Council of Five Hundred. The standing committee was responsible for
supervising meetings of the Ecclesia and keeping order at them. There were several other
jobs devolved on the standing committee, all of which made it necessary for the fifty
members to be lodged and provided with meals in their quarters adjacent to the Council's
meeting place during their thirty-odd days of office.
The 139 demes were local administrative and jurisdictional units, as well as the
constituencies from which the thirty ridings and ten tribes were made up. They were of
9

D.Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp.90-91.

very different size - not that it mattered, since there was no question of their being used as
electoral constituencies; even to begin with, demes varied in area and population size, and
the discrepancies must have increased over time - although not so much as they would
have had the fact of citizenship been decided, on reaching the age of eighteen, by
birthplace or residence alone.
Citizenship for Athenians meant, in the first place, being citizens of their deme.
Residence in a deme or descent from someone registered there at the time of Cleisthenes
was the basis of citizenship; the name of the deme figured in the full formal name of a
citizen, following the first name and patronymic. Demes had their own civic organisation,
their own cults, temples and traditions. According to Thucydides, it was the deme which
counted as the accepted and traditional setting and provided the everyday framework for
their social, religious and political life. Not surprisingly, attachment to the deme and
solidarity with fellow demesmen show up as important elements in political and legal
disputes.
Each deme had its assembly and its own officials - almost certainly selected by lot from
men over thirty years old. Like everybody selected for public office, they were subject to
preliminary scrutiny beforehand and held accountable after. The most important office at
the level of deme was that of Demarch, who held office for - again - a year, and,
presumably, never more than once. The list of his responsibilities is of formidable length,
but since they were the same for all demes, they are not likely to have been all that
burdensome except in the more populous and central localities, where the Demarchs must
have been kept pretty busy.
The Demarch presided over meetings of the deme assembly, and along with his fellowofficials, saw to it that whatever it decided was done. Other duties, which he shared with
the few councillors appointed with him, were - exceptionally - of two kinds,
administrative and executive, since he was the main link with the centre of government
and also, in some respects, its agent. Many of his local duties were those of oversight:
arrangements for local cults and festivals (including the appointment of local priests and
priestesses) and for the community's participation in and contributions to major festivals,
the proper conduct of funerals, surveillance of the construction and maintenance of public
works and buildings (usually paid for by wealthy local citizens).
On behalf of the central government, there were taxes to be collected, forfeitures and
distraints on property to be registered and seen to. It may be assumed, too, that the
Demarch had to ensure that the deme's contingents for army and navy were complete and
properly equipped when they were called up.
It was the legal system - or rather, the administration of justice - which seems to have
been the principal object of the reform measures usually ascribed to Ephialtes (or Pericles)
after the middle of the fifth century. Just how they came about is, like so much else,
obscure, but they may well have been provoked by the resurgence of the old aristocracy
during the years following the Persian Wars, which had caused such disruption - including
the evacuation of Attica before the battle of Salamis. At all events, Ephialtes was

10

remembered as the man who had successfully harried members of the Areopagus and
deprived it of most of its judicial powers, which were dispersed among the Council of
Five Hundred and a multiplicity of citizen magistracies and juries.
Overall jurisdictional authority belonged to the Ecclesia. As well as making new laws, the
Ecclesia also 'handed down' law, and acted on occasion as a court of law. In general,
though, it was only major trials for accusations of treason or major cases of corruption that
came before it, and even these were voted to be dealt with by special courts after 360 BC.
Some judicial responsibilities also attached to the Council of Five Hundred, but the
Athenians, who were more than usually prone to litigation, handled law-suits and trials in
much the same way as they did the business of legislation and administration; i.e., they
were dealt with by formally constituted judges and juries drawn from the whole body of
citizens.
There were, roughly speaking, two sorts of cases at law. The first category consisted of
claims for damages or compensation brought by persons - or their guardians or relatives claiming personal injury or loss against one or more specific individuals. (This category
of case, it is worth remarking, was a great deal broader than anything comprehended by
present-day definitions of 'civil law'; as in early medieval times in Europe generally, it
included manslaughter, theft, and most other kinds of 'crime against the person'.) Minor
cases involving small sums of money went before 'deme-judges' - three (later four)
appointed to each of the ten 'tribes'; those for larger amounts or more serious injuries went
before a court composed of the deme-judges in the tribe headed by an arbitrator. (Every
citizen was obliged to act as an arbitrator, when called upon, during his sixtieth year.) But
there was also, importantly, provision for appeals to be made to a much larger body of
citizens (numbering 201 or, for sums over 1000 drachmai, 401) drawn by lot from the
6,000 citizens over thirty years old appointed as liable to serve as 'jurymen' for the coming
year.
The second and much broader category of trials (though smaller in number) was in
matters of public concern, and were brought by anyone who chose to do so. These might
be conducted before an assembly of anything from 201 to 1,000 or more 'jurymen' - all of
whom were paid a daily allowance of half a drachma. The prosecutor in such cases, if
successful, was entitled to a reward, which could be substantial; if however, he withdrew
the case or failed to get cast on his side at least a fifth of the votes, he was liable to a
heavy fine and loss of civic rights; defendants, if convicted, were liable to a penalties
ranging from a fine up to confiscation of property, loss of civil rights or - as in Socrates'
case - sentence of death.
II
The question posed at the beginning of this chapter was how was it that democracy - in its
most 'blatantly Utopian' form - came into existence in a society in which 'politics' had
previously been a matter of discussion, rivalry and dispute, occasionally descending into
gang-warfare among would-be tyrants or would-be oligarchs? The account so far, brief as
it is, contains what we have of the kind of factual evidence we look to narrative history to
provide. The record of events and constitutional reforms which has been so painstakingly

11

compiled by classical historians and epigraphists is not of course complete; it is by now

perhaps impossible to hope for one. But, incomplete as it is, the history of constitutional
reform from Solon to Pericles does make one thing abundantly clear.
It is that the recital of the series of constitutional reforms does not in itself contain any
explanation of how it was that so unique and absolute a form of participative democracy
came to form the accepted framework of Athenian political life. Naturally, persistent
efforts have been made by classicists to get closer to the truth of the matter. But until
recently those efforts do not seem to have gone beyond the simple reassertion of
'Aristotle's important truth', as W.I.Newman called it over a hundred years ago, that the
constitution of a state 'has its roots in what moderns term its social system' (as against,
Newman went on, 'the prevailing modern social contract theory of the state').10
Fortunately, there have been some notable attempts during this century to interpret and
understand the social order that prevails in a community at some special period of time:
the ethos, beliefs and scale of values, citizens' self-conception - all those elements which
are subsumed by French historians under the heading of mentalits and of either social or
cultural history by Anglophone historians.
There is, to start with, the conception Athenians had of the polis as a political unit. For us,
the comparable political unit is the state. Since Bodin, the state has been seen as distinct
from all other organizations by the sovereignty - the absolute sovereignty - which attaches
to the head of it. Sovereignty is taken to signify the combination of authority and power;
it includes not only monopoly of the right to make laws and issue commands which
everyone in the community must obey but also the right to use physical force to compel
obedience.
If sovereignty had any meaning at all in the context of Athenian democracy, it was
attached to the citizenry as a whole. "It is," says Ehrenberg, translating the phrase literally
from Thucydides, "the men that are the polis. There were no subjects."11 And again,
"only the full citizens possessed unrestricted rule in the state, roughly what we call
sovereignty."12
Yet even to put the matter like that is to falsify it. The sovereignty of Parliament over the
people of Britain is accepted as total. In Bryce's words, "Parliament can make and
unmake any law, change the form of government, interfere with the course of justice,
extinguish the most sacred rights of the citizen."13 This was not the case in Athens.
Every citizen was entitled to attend meetings of the Ecclesia as and when he pleased and,
for that matter, could speak in debate and propose amendments, as well as vote on
proposals, "on war and peace, taxation, army levies, war finance, public works, treaties

10

W.I.Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, O.U.P., 1887, Vol. I, p.223. (Quoted by M.I.Finley, Politics in
the Ancient World, C.U.P., 1983, p.1.)
11
V.Ehrenberg, The Greek State, (2nd. edn.) Methuen, 1969, p.88.
12
V.Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates, Methuen, 19 p.92 and p. 217.
13
J.Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1893), rev. edn., Macmillan, 1918, p. 36.

12

and diplomatic negotiations, and anything else, major or minor, which required
government decision."14
Democracy in classical Athens was not a matter of perpetual referenda, a la Suisse; nor
can we treat the polis of Athens as ruled by a sovereign parliament in which all citizens
had a seat. True, decisions were indeed arrived at by majority vote, and included such
things as declarations of war, and so could be matters of life and death for the whole
community, as well as for individuals. But enacted legislation has to be distinguished
from another body of laws: the fabric of norms and beliefs sanctioned by the gods and
sanctified by tradition which were general to the Greeks but also particular to each polis,
and which exercised power over the destiny of its citizens and moral and social control
over their conduct.15 The polis transcended its members.
Once again, the words one has to use tend to mislead. Just as the idea of sovereignty
makes little sense in the context of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., so the
notion of the civic community 'transcending' its members has a false ring about it. It
presumes that the difference lies in the Athenian overcoming the antithesis between
individual self-interest and social responsibility which is normal for us, and which it takes
the extremities of fear, or triumph, or hostility, or love - or a strong sense of loyalty or of
social or religious duty - to transcend. The implication is that the self is actually
disregarded. But, as Aristotle put it, 'the polis is prior to the individual', a conception not
far removed from Durkheim's view of the individual as the creature of society - except, of
course, that 'society', for Durkheim, was categorically distinct from the polity - 'the state'.
Part of the difficulty in comprehending Athenian democracy lies in the customary practice
of modern scholars of construing the polis in rather abstract, normative, terms: a legal and
moral entity rather than a community. "The use of the same word" (politeia) "for
participation in the state and for its general structure shows that the participation was in
the main not a purely legal act between individual and state; it reflected the vital
adherence of the individual to the citizen body, as also to the other communities within the
state, and therewith was bound to them, bound to religion and soil."16
Not that the Greeks themselves were averse to abstract terminology. The trouble is that
the terms they used do not quite correspond to those we use to translate them. While
politeia means citizenship, it also stands, we are told, for the whole body of citizens and
for the constitution. Again, the polis may best be thought of as the realisation of what the
Greeks meant by koinonia rather than the normative model of what we call the State rather as the early Church conceived of itself as a realisation of the Christian community
rather than the hierarchy of the Church in embryo. The word koinonia is meant to convey
a sense of the way of life pursued by a community conscious of its common destiny, and
conscious too that membership was neither optional nor anything else than lifelong. But it
also reaches out to comprehend a great deal more. Philia, something more than friendship
14

M.I.Finley, The Ancient Greeks, Penguin Books,1966, p.75.

15

See H.D.O.Kitto, The Greeks, Penguin Books, 1951, p.94.

V.Ehrenberg, The Greek State, pp.38-9.

16

13

(or even Adam Smith's 'sympathy'), and dike, something more than justice, were singled
out by Aristotle as the major element of koinonia.
It may well have been the memory of their undemocratic past, as much as anything, which
was responsible for the reiteration of words like isonomia ("the most beautiful word of
all," as Herodotus put it), which stood for equality - equality before the law and equal
participation in the affairs of the state, and parrhesia or isegoria (freedom of speech), in
the plays which celebrated, directly or indirectly, Athenian democracy as the perfection of
the Greek polis. It was something that Athenians had striven for and achieved, a positive
endeavour towards a more civilised form of society which the city itself, as it grew, made
both possible and - if life were to be lived without constant dissension and turbulence necessary.
Much of the increased prosperity which Athens undoubtedly enjoyed during the classical
age seems to have been put to use to bring to civilised perfection the kind of organised
collective action with which they had made themselves so familiar, and wanted to retain,
and to embellish its physical, cultural and religious setting. Civic pride is evident enough
in the buildings which remain. Athens was evidently a community much given to
idealising itself. The same self-congratulatory, almost self-adulatory, tone recurs in the
plays of Aeschylus and the speeches of Pericles (as rendered by Athenian historians), and
is implicit in the religious ceremonies which celebrated Athens and the gods and demigods who stood watch over its destiny. They reflect the all-consuming concern of each
and every citizen in the survival, the welfare and the prosperity of the community as a
single, integrated, organized, entity.
But more than civic pride was involved. The chief object of collective action was the
protection of the city from attack and the promotion of its wealth and prosperity,
regardless of or at the expense of others, if need be. In the last resort, recognition by all
citizens, rich and poor, of this as a civic responsibility acknowledged and demonstrated by
all citizens, rich and poor, was central to Athenian democracy.
For there was another side to all such utterances and displays. They found their most
fervent and high-principled articulation, significantly enough, in the immediate aftermath
of attack from outside or of dissension within. So the celebration of its idealised condition
also reflects the anxieties and fears about its preservation which had just been overcome
or encompassed. War was a perpetual condition of existence in classical Greece, either as
present reality or imminent threat. So too, more particularly, was stasis - open dissension
within the polis. In combination, what is more, war and stasis posed the further threat of
treason. The aristocratic opponents of Hippias, late in the sixth century, had sought and
obtained the help of Sparta; a hundred years later, in the mid-years of the Peloponnesian
War, Alcibiades tried to play the same game. These are the most notorious instances, not
the only ones.
The word stasis seems to have had an extraordinarily wide range of connotations. It was
applied to any conflict within the body of citizens, from conspiratorial or public hostility
between rival groups to open conflict. Such conflicts might be between tyrants and their

14

rivals, competing noble dynasties or oligarch groups, or, in democratic Athens, rich and
poor. And again, the same word might be applied to the adoption of a partisan position in
political debate as well as to murderous encounters between groups of citizens, or to civil
war.
One has, therefore, to juxtapose the idealisation of Athens as the embodiment of a wholly
integrated community and the source of "virtually transcendent authority" with constant
references to the threat to its survival posed by hostile forces within it as well as from
outside. It is a contrast which has been taken up and used by Nicole Loraux.17 The
suggestion which her argument embodies is that the oppositional struggle of stasis should
be seen as virtually the precondition for the enhanced sense of unity which comes from reunification when the crisis has passed. Feelings at such times were not dissimilar from the
sense of dangers and troubles overcome when outside enemies had been defeated, and
they were scarcely less intense. In both cases, the polis - the body of citizens as a whole had restored its integrity and safety. Triumphant rejoicing over adversity was the best
possible reinforcement of the sense of unity which called for such frequent celebration.
The tragedies, writings and speeches that have survived are, she says, "haunted by the fear
of division but perhaps also silently fascinated by duality." There is also the 'famous
transparency' of Greek politics apparent in the vote by show of hands, seen as symbolic of
democracy, but which could be turned by a handful of determined conspirators into a
weapon against democracy. But perhaps in the present context, the critically important
point of her essay is that made by the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, whom she quotes:
"For a political body to be able to allow itself ... the luxury of a decision-making
procedure as explosive as the vote, it must be quite certain of its unity."18
It was in 'belonging' rather than in 'equality' that the revolutionary change of the sixth
century reforms consisted. Freedom to speak in the Assembly, the 'one-man, one vote'
principle, equal access to, and equal treatment before, the law did not mean that either
high-born or low-born Athenians, or rich or poor, saw themselves as equal. Aristotle, in
the fourth century, is quite specific about the 'general and principle causes' which turned
the ever-present, though usually latent, contentiousness (stasis) into open conflict. It was
inequality.
For all Athenians, including the nobly-born, to accept others, including thetes, as fellowcitizens, as actually belonging to the same community, and to tolerate opposition from
them bespeaks a change in attitudes and values at least as revolutionary as the reforms in
the machinery of government carried through by Solon and Cleisthenes. Landless
labourers - thetes - had no place in the system of values which obtained under the 'old
regime', any more than they had in the palace household. "A thes, not a slave, was the
lowest creature on earth Achilles could think of. The terrible thing about a thes was his

17

N.Loraux, "Reflections on the Greek City in Unity and Division", in A.Molho, K.Raaflaub, J.Emlen, eds.,
City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, F.Steiner Verlag, 1991, pp.33-51.
18

N.Loraux, "Reflections on the Greek City in Unity and Division", p. 44 and pp.42-3.

15
lack of attachment, his not belonging."19
For the Athenian form of democracy to happen at all, let alone to last as long as it did,
there had to be one overriding presupposition. Every citizen had to have some regard for
consultation, discussion and persuasion as the everyday currency of politics. This is not to
say that classical Athens became permeated with the spirit of altruism and cooperation, or
of consideration for others. The people of Athens were, Pericles told them, self-interested
and pushy. Like the Romans, they believed very strongly in liberty - individual liberty and this very definitely meant doing, and getting, whatever one pleased. (see below,
Chap.3, pp.**). Dissension and political conflict persisted throughout the life of Athens
as a democracy, as it did when it was an oligarchy or ruled by tyrants.
The 'utopian' form of democracy which the Athenians arrived at is inconceivable outside
of a fundamental change in values from those of the primitive, 'heroic,' past. Virtue morality - right conduct - had to be thought of in terms other than those of the small
communities of earlier times, comprising no more than one's own and a few neighbouring
households. Athens - Attica - had been a society in which, like the rest of Greece, the rich
and powerful - kings, together with their household entourages, to begin with, then landed
aristocrats - had been the 'natural' rulers over an impecunious peasantry. Only they, in the
first place, could afford to equip themselves with the armour and the horses needed for
exemplary prowess in battle. It was they who were looked to for the courage, strength and
skill needed in battle - not just to fight well but to win. This, supremely, was 'arete' - in
Homeric times and for long after.
The Homeric system of values was the preserve of royalty and the aristocracy, and of
those who were members of their families (i.e., those of the extended family of which they
were the head who lived in his house or close by). It was "based on the competitive
standard of arete" (virtue, excellence), this being the term used to commend outstanding
skills, physical gifts and "inherited social advantage."20 The well-being, the freedom, and,
ultimately, the very lives not only of the palace household but also of all members of the
community and their dependents, rich and poor alike, depended on the courage, strength
and skill of their fighting men.
The same thing held good in later times. "[S]ince no Greek city-state ever was, or felt
itself, fully secure," A.W.H.Adkins notes, "arete tends to have this predominant flavour
even in fifth-century Athens."21 But by the fifth century, "The primary social group is no
longer the kinship group but the city-state.... To characterise a good man" [and thus a
well-regarded, an honoured, man] "is in crucial part to characterise the relationship in
which such a man stands to others and both poets and philosophers for the most part do
not distinguish in their accounts of these relationships what is universal and human from
what is local and Athenian. The claim is often explicit; Athens is praised because she par

19
20

M.I.Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd. edn. Penguin Books, 1979, p. 57.

A.W.H.Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, O.U.P., 1960, p.46.

A.W.H.Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, p.73.

21

16
excellence exhibits life as it ought to be."22
And this, in turn, rested on the presumption, which reached articulate expression as a
matter of high principle when it was most threatened by attack from outside (or dissension
within), that each individual citizen had an interest in the survival, the welfare and the
prosperity of the community of Athens as a social organisation - i.e., in its entirety.
As Adkins sees it, the decisive shift occurred when it became more important for the
safety and well-being of Athens to win battles at sea than on land: "To ensure survival, the
will and the ability to resist, coupled with good counsel, are the most evident necessities.
In a hoplite-oligarchy, or any society in which the individual must buy his own fighting
equipment, the most effective striking force is supplied by the rich; and, given the prestige
derived from this in a society with the traditional Greek values, it is the rich who, even in
a society which is a democracy in name, will give advice in the assembly and hold the
important offices. In the maritime democracy of Athens, however, all this is changed: the
poor man, not the rich, mans the navy, the most important striking force of the state, and,
his equipment being provided for him, can meet the rich on at least equal terms on that
score."23
For the democratic constitution of Athens to come about, the argument runs, one must
assume some acknowledgement among the rich and powerful, however grudging and
unwilling, of an obligation, or need, to share power not only with others of their kind but
with their fellow-citizens in general. There may well have been some validation for this
in the fact that the poorer citizens did display sufficient of the approved qualities of arete
to win sea battles for Athens. This, in turn, may well have led to a settled resolve among
the general run of poorer people to safeguard their rights by demanding the right to
participate in political and administrative decision-making.
Paying subsistence
allowances to allow of time to be spent in discharging such civic responsibilities was a
sensible and inevitable consequence; it was not a precondition.
The argument, which is at the centre of Adkins' thesis, is not altogether convincing. For
one thing, the reforms of Solon, which were, and are, presumed to mark the first major
episode in the development of Athenian democracy, occurred some time before its navy
gave Athens the mastery of the Aegean and its imperial role. For another, it was the
Athenian army which drove the Persian invasion back into the sea at Marathon, the
victory on which Athenian confidence in its martial prowess was first founded.
So, while the changed nature of warfare did afford some validation for the changes that
had taken place in the nature of the Athenian polity, this is more likely to have been a
'rationalisation' arrived at after the event; it could hardly have served to justify their taking
place as and when the changes occurred.

22
23

A.Macintyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, p. 124 and p.125.

Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, p.197.

17

III
One of the more striking aspects of the recent literature dealing with Athenian democracy
is the assiduous and constantly renewed search for more, or better, explanations of how
and why it came into being. Part of the reason for this may be the defensiveness of
scholars provoked by the tendency to sideline participative democracy as unique and
'utopian', and therefore irrelevant to the concerns of modern political scientists and
theorists. In addition, virtually all the contemporary evidence comes from philosophers,
playwrights and historians either native to Athens or with close attachments to the city and
its people. Self-praise tends to be suspect; and there are, after all, plenty of dissident
voices. Many of them in classical times are easily dismissed as those either of
contemporaries identified with oligarchic interests or of later writers obviously disposed to
elaborate on the superior virtues of Roman political principles and practice. On the other
hand, there was a tradition of principled disbelief in democracy, beginning with Socrates
and Plato, which found frequent - and contemptuous - expression in the time of the later
Roman Republic, and which, after an interval of almost 2000 years, was revived in the
eighteenth century. Hume, for one, considered that since the minds of common people
were 'debased by poverty and hard work', they were rendered unfit for politics, which was
a matter for trained experts.24 It is a sentiment echoed frequently throughout the
nineteenth century. If it is not openly expressed today, it is perhaps because representative
democracy, in its Schumpeterian guise as 'entrepreneurial politics', has calmed the fears
expressed by the ruling (or 'political') class over the generations following the French
Revolution.
It is outside my present purpose (and beyond my competence) to attempt anything like a
general review of the explanations which have been put forward, but a few are especially
relevant to the main concern of this chapter. Material changes - population growth,
increased wealth, urbanisation, changes in social structure and in warfare - are basic to all
of them, but the organising ideas come from the psychological, cultural or sociological
framework different writers have adopted.
Growth in population and wealth, and the consequent increase in size of the city itself,
was fundamental. Athens prospered during the sixth century, after the reforms of Solon,
and grew into a major Greek power during the period following on the reforms of
Cleisthenes. As Athens prospered, its population grew, despite the multiplication of its
colonies and cleruchies. Population growth, swollen by the influx of metics which the
new prosperity and political power brought with it, was concentrated in the city itself, and
the Piraeus. Even at the time of Solon, it seems, Athens itself "was made up of five
villages separated by the open areas in which the dead were buried."25 During the
following century or so, these merged together to form a composite whole. By Aristotle's
time, the citizen population alone is estimated to have been about 30,000, for the whole
territory of 2,600 square kilometers. It was possibly twice as much earlier, in the decades
before the Peloponnesian War and the Great Plague. The city itself, given the increase in
population and the concentration of commercial, political and social life within it, must
24
25

D.Hume, Essays and Treatises, Edinburgh, 1825, p.125.

D.Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, p.58

18

have contained a population of something like 50,000 men, women and children during
the period of its greatest prosperity.
So it apparently took no more than two or three generations for Athens to grow from a
small agglomeration of villages into a sizeable town. And it has been argued that there is
a special affinity between the freshly discovered liveliness of urban life and participative
democracy. At all events, there is enough of a parallel visible in the situation and
experience of the new Italian republics formed in the medieval renaissance of the twelfth
century to have inspired an international conference on the lessons to be learned from
comparing them.26
Two things have to be borne in mind. The first is that the size of classical Athens or
medieval Florence and Venice fell far short of that of modern cities, so that the social life
of their inhabitants had none of the anonymity which Louis Wirth picked on as the
characteristic feature of modern urban life. Secondly, the transformation of social life
was revolutionary, for aristocrats and ordinary people alike.
The society of the small communities of pre-classical Greece was a good deal removed
from the kind of society portrayed by Homer, but through tradition, carried within a
society whose structure remained largely unchanged up to the end of the seventh century,
there was an affinity with it in some important respects. One of these, much discussed by
classicists in recent years,27 is that distinction of any kind - moral, intellectual, athletic,
martial - was the preserve of the aristocratic leaders, their families and (possibly) the men
who belonged to their households and followed them in battle. Arete, - virtue - was
thought of in entirely competitive terms. It was simply excellence: "excellence of any
kind; a fast runner displays the arete of his feet, and a son excels his father in every kind
of arete - as athlete, as soldier, and in mind."28 To have virtue, therefore, was to be
outstanding. Ordinary people - peasants, labourers, and the like - who played no part in
the social, political or martial pursuits of the aristocracy and their households, naturally
had no part in any of this; it was certainly not for them to think in terms of acquiring
arete. Locked in the everyday world of farmwork and husbandry or servitude, there was
for them no particular differentiation between the part a person played in his family and
his position in any of the collective activities in which he and they participated. There
was no need; they remained the same people; their relationships were unchanged.
By contrast, the special quality of the new urban life - for aristocrats as well as ordinary
people - lay in the multiplicity of its activities. In all of them: buying, selling, talking
with friends, going to the Assembly, joining a religious procession, watching a play,
exercising with a section of the army, manning a ship: on all these occasions, a man's
presence would in all probability call for some quite specific kind of conduct and place
26

City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy (ed. A.Molho, K.Raaflaub, J.Emlen), Franz Steiner
Verlag, 1991.
27
The discussion, initiated by W.H.Adkins' Merit and Responsibilty, O.U.P., 1960, has continued up to the
present time. The most recent major contribution is by Bernard Williams. See Shame and Necessity,
Univ. of California Pr., 1993.
28
A.MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, p.115.

19

him in some quite different group. There were plenty of groups, formal and semi-formal,
to which he might be attached, each with its distinctive and often incompatible demands
and interests, and to each of which his involvement might vary according to his selfimage, aspirations, discontents, and his standing within it. M.I.Finley lists an impressive
variety of possibilities for quite different kinds of activity and of relationship which must
have been in existence by the time of Herodotus and Thucydides. Purely informal groups
aside, they extend from the family and neighbourhood to age-groups and tablefellowships. To these one can add the association with others - mostly strangers, to begin
with, since they were all chosen by lot - on juries, year-long membership of the Council of
Five Hundred, as well as military service in the army or navy.
The special feature of urban life is that it redesigns the self into roles. It calls for a new
kind of participation, one which allows for - demands - the self to be partitioned into
selves. Relationships become differentiated according to their location, purpose, and the
people involved. Both relationships and activities take on new forms, Perhaps a few of a
man's companions in any one group might know a man in other situations and in his other
capacities; most, probably, would not. In each part-self, therefore, an individual might
then be able to demonstrate qualities of the kind appropriate to one of the many activities.
Virtue - merit - might be obtained in each and any of the activities, in most or in none.
Any merit - or demerit - acquired in one capacity might or might not reflect on his
reputation in another, but would in any case attach to that one capacity.
The implications are rendered succinctly by MacIntyre: "the conception of a virtue has
now become strikingly detached from that of any particular social role."29 It is not so
much that virtue became measured by cooperative rather than competitive standards, as
Adkins suggests, but that it became immeasurable, or incommensurable between different
activities. It is conceivable that it was awareness of this aspect of contemporary morality
that drove Aristotle to define arete as moderation - striking a balance between excess and
vices in all sectors of individual existence.
To the multiplicity and variety of social interaction that surrounded the individual in the
new city one must add immediacy. Limitation in size made it possible for all the affairs
of the community, personal or public, economic, legal, administrative, religious, or
political, to be conducted face to face.
Greek political ideas, as Peter Laslett has
remarked, were "conditioned by the fact that the polis was a face to face society."30
Everything Aristotle says, he remarks later, "implies that all citizens know all other
citizens, and all citizens know their rulers, indeed, any citizen may be called upon at any
moment to be one of the rulers."
The special feature of face-to-face society in a small city like Athens is not that everyone
in it really knows everyone else but that he knows of, or can get to know, them, at least by
sight - everyone, at least, who 'is anybody' - as well as relatives, friends, acquaintances,
shopkeepers, fellow-workers. They have been born into the same community and will
29

A.MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, p.24.

P.Laslett, "The Face to Face Society", in P. Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society: First Series,
Blackwell, 1956, p.162.
30

20

live their lives out within it; in some important respects, they share a destiny common to
all. They are aware of how others have behaved on innumerable occasions in the past,
and behave with this awareness (which others may well have of them) in all transactions
and discussions about what to do. Further, Laslett observes, critical situations to which
there is no immediately obvious solution have to be met by people meeting together and
'talking it out.'
Laslett uses the family as the prototypical face to face society, although he acknowledges
that this is not an altogether satisfactory model, for a community such as the polis "has
an infinitely longer continuous history, with no break at the generations: its purposes are
ever so much wider; they are, in fact, the totality of purposes."31 More to the point,
perhaps, the family in classical Greece was, as in Rome, the last place one would find
decisions arrived at by 'talking things out'; the family was a legally sanctioned tyranny.
Nor does the 'artificial family' idea serve any explanatory purpose. This is a term which
has been used to account for the extraordinary proliferation of oath-bound associations confraternities, guilds, brotherhoods and sisterhoods, religious orders and so on - met with
in medieval Europe by representing the relationships people entered into as 'quasifamilial.' It does not make much sense to treat relationships which are essentially
voluntary as if they were involuntary, as kinship relationships are. Cities, even relatively
small ones like Athens - or Florence, Venice, Pisa and so on - are categorically different
from households or family and kinship systems, 'nuclear' or 'extended'.
Evidence of a pragmatic system of mutual help has also been advanced, as tying in with
democratic propensities. There was prevalent among the poorer sort in Athens - and the
not-so-poor, Socrates among them - a give-and-take (or rather, borrow-and-lend) system
of the kind represented in the eranos loan, by which "a person who was in financial
difficulties would go the rounds of his philoi" (relatives, neighbours, friends), collecting
from them small contributions, until he had raised the sum required."32 The argument is
that mutual aid practices of this sort became so well-established among Athenians as to
first to reduce and then remove the need for dependence on rich patrons and then to point
towards subsistence payments for service in the courts, in the army and navy, and even
attendance at the Assembly. It is not suggested that the practice predisposed the citizens
of Athens, rich and poor alike, to political democracy but merely that it eased the path
towards its all-round participant character.
Unfortunately, far from helping to explain, it actually deepens the mystery. The informal
'whip-round' among much the same set of friends and acquaintances is a familiar mutualaid device in today's (or at least, yesterday's) workplaces and working-class
neighbourhoods, just as the slightly more formal 'ales' were in the Middle Ages.33 Neither
seems to have much connection with democratic beliefs, let alone with founding political
31

P.Laslett, "The Face to Face Society", p.158.

P.Millett, "Patronage and its avoidance in classical Athens" in A.Wallace-Hadrill, ed., Patronage in
Ancient Society, Routledge, 1989, p.41.
33
J.M.Bennett, "Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England", Past and Present 134,
Feb. 1992, pp.19-41.
32

21

institutions on those beliefs.

One further consideration enters in which complements the implications Laslett has read
into the face-to-face society which obtained within it. It consists in an antithesis which is
hidden from us, just as the Greeks would have been blind to that between 'state' and
'society' which exists for us. It lies in the distinction between conduct and action - "the
essence of conduct," in John Jones' words, "being that it is mine or yours; of action that it
is out there - an object..." not "issuing from a solitary, secret, inward focus of
consciousness."34
The Greek polis was an arena of action - of political action - which could be fiercely
competitive as well as cooperative. The whole notion of a primary concern with action things done, and the way in which 'the Gods', moral obliquity, or, especially 'fortune'
affects the outcome - rather than with motive, intention, character, or any personal
attributes or relationships is, as John Jones claims, "desperately foreign" to us.
It was these characteristics on which the constitution of fifth-century Athens was founded,
and they were built out of the hard-won experience the citizens had accumulated, since
those first days of Solon's reforms, of the sheer gain - economic, cultural, and moral, as
well as political - to be had in their lives from balancing or reconciling their common, or
mutual, interests with individual gain, the public good with private ambition, autonomy
with safety.
If it is detached from the rather distracting family model Laslett uses (and he fairly
obviously had the Greek polis in mind throughout), the picture of democratic Athens he
presents resolves itself into one of a community set on creating for itself a sophisticated
and civilised political organisation contained within the social framework of a face-to-face
society.
That it was all accomplished consciously and deliberately is not in question. There is
plenty of evidence for this, much of it to be found in Thucydides, the best example being
his rendering of the speech made by Athenagoras before the young oligarchs of Syracuse:
"There are people who will say that democracy is neither an intelligent nor a fair system,
and that those who have money are the best rulers. But I say, first, that what is meant by
the demos, or people, is the whole polis, whereas an oligarchy is only a section of it; and I
say next that though the rich are the best people for looking after money, the best
counsellors are the intelligent, and that it is the many who are best at listening to the
different arguments and judging between them. And all alike, whether taken all together
or as separate classes, have equal rights in a democracy."35
Of course there were dissidents, radical critics, atheists even, just as there were those who,
in public as in private, were ready to point out how impossible it was for a democracy to
be other than inefficient and ineffective, as well as being at the mercy of the vulgar and
34

John (H.J.F.) Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Chatto & Windus 1962, p.33.

35

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. Rex Warner, Penguin Books, 1972, pp.435-6.

22

ignorant. Yet this did not diminish the sense of identity between the community of
citizens and the polis.
Of course, too, while the notion of sovereignty, even of the sovereignty of the people
which is written into the constitution of the United States, has no place in this system, any
more than does the idea we have of the State, there was still government. The business
coming before the Assembly had to be prepared and proposals shaped so as to be effective
legislative acts if approved - work which was carried out by the Council of Five Hundred.
Disputes had to be settled according to the due process of law. There was an
administrative system. Decisions of the Assembly had to be carried out and, if necessary,
enforced. Taxes - extraordinary taxes on wealth to meet wartime expenditure, which were
imposed by the Assembly - had to be assessed and collected. Payment had to be made for example, to the thetes, the poorer citizens who manned the fleet and were paid a fixed
wage, as against the better off, who served with the army as hoplites and had to provide
their own armour and equipment and maintain themselves in the field.
For all this administrative business, and much more, there were officials and magistrates,
chosen by lot; at the end of their year of office, their performance was subject to official
scrutiny, with prosecution to follow if they were shown to have been unsatisfactory. But
there was no hierarchy of appointments; whatever the importance of his office, every
officeholder was responsible directly to the people, either in the Assembly or in the courts.
"The pivotal mechanisms were election by lot, which translated equality of opportunity
from an ideal to a reality; and pay for office, which permitted the poor man to sit on the
Council and on jury courts, or to hold office when the lot fell to him..... Though the pay
was sufficient to compensate a man for the wages he might have lost as a craftsman, it
was no higher than that. Hence no man could count on officeholding as a regular
livelihood, or even as a better one for some periods of his life." Thus M.I.Finley, who
also, in the same passage, makes the point that "In a sense, amateurism was implicit in the
Athenian 'definition' of a direct democracy. Every citizen was held to be qualified to
share in government by the mere fact of citizenship."36
The charge of amateurism is more than a little odd. One would be hard put to it to find
anyone in ancient Athens who qualified as a 'professional' in any sense comparable to our
own. It might be thought just as remarkable that the selfsame principles of universal
obligation to serve and selection by lot have applied to jury service in Britain for
centuries, and in America also. More to the point, wartime service in the army and navy
was on precisely the same 'amateur' basis. Fighting in the wars was in fact the true
qualification for citizenship; indeed, according to A.W.H.Adkins, it was the decisive
element which validated Athenian democracy.
Still more to the point, there is another side to the picture of randomly selected, brief, nonconsecutive, non-repeatable appointment of 'amateur' judges and administrators to office.
With one year the typical term, a high proportion of citizens must have had personal
36

M.I.Finley, The Ancient Greeks, Penguin Books, 1966, pp.76-7.

23

experience of office-holding, and most of those over forty (thirty being the usual
minimum age) might well have had held several different posts. And, quite apart from
attendance at the Ecclesia, membership of the Council of Five Hundred, appointment to
one or more of the wide variety of offices, there were also the grass-roots democratic
institutions at the level of the demes.
All in all, it looks as if the participant democracy of classical Athens, however utopian it
may seem to us, had pretty solid foundations in the experiential knowledge of its operation
which its constitution - idiosyncratic as it undoubtedly was - obliged virtually all its
citizens perforce to acquire - time-consuming as its acquisition undoubtedly was. The
leisure which the Greeks (and Romans) of classical times regarded as the indispensable
component of the good life takes on a rather different complexion; citizens who could not
afford time to devote themselves to their responsibilities as citizens were paid to do so. In
Athens, a good deal of attention was paid to making the good life - the acquisition of merit
- politically possible for all citizens.
IV
Just as miniatures prettify, so abbreviation tends to idealise. Even so, some reservations
are inescapable, even in an account of this brevity. They spring, as much as anything,
from the uneasy feelings that grow as one reads the succession of secondary writings that I
have, perforce, relied on. Classicists are all too ready, even nowadays, to slip into the role
of apologist, advocate, even public relations officer, when they approach the topic of
Athenian democracy. Ancient Athens, it seems, has been too long the great pedagogue of
the western world for classical scholars to forego the gratification of illuminating our
present darkness.
Among all the reservations and qualifications that suggest themselves, there are four of
special relevance. The first is slavery.
The number of writings on slavery in ancient Greece and Rome has grown enormously
during this century, although it has added precious little new 'hard' information. Finley
begins his 1959 paper with two generalisations: "First, at all times and in all places the
Greeks world relied on some form (or forms) of dependent labour to meet its needs, both
public and private. By this I mean that dependent labour was essential, in a significant
measure, if the requirements of agriculture, trade, manufacture, public works and war
production were to be fulfilled. And by dependent labour I mean work performed under
compulsions other than those of kinship or communal obligations. Second: with the rarest
of exceptions, there were always substantial numbers of free men engaged in productive
labour. By this I mean primarily not free hired labour but free men working on their own
(or leased) land or in their own shops or homes as craftsmen and shopkeepers."37
Yet slavery varied enormously in sheer amount and the way in which it was regarded
changed too, although to a lesser extent. In Homeric times, it seems, slaves were thought

37

M.I.Finley, "Was Geek Civilisation Based on Slave Labour?", Historia 8, 1959, p.145.

24

of (though not necessarily treated) as ordinary human beings who had suffered the
misfortune of becoming subject to a master. In later centuries, growing prosperity, most
obviously in Athens, though not confined to it, capped by success in the Persian wars,
multiplied the number of slaves, who were for the most part, of foreign origin. The rich
bought slaves for household service and to work their home farms. The not-so-rich also
found they could afford to acquire slaves and use them as household servants and to
supplement their own labour as artisans or entrepreneurs. By the fifth century, there
seems to have been much the same number of slaves as citizens, engaged not so much as
farm labourers as domestic servants, mine workers, masons, and as skilled craftsmen or
unskilled labourers for those who could afford to employ them and so increase the output
of their enterprise. In this last case, they often would work alongside their masters; some
were foremen or managers. And there are accounts of slaves working as bankers for the
richer citizens who lent money.
So the social distance, in our eyes, between master and slave varied very considerably.
But, at bottom, what counted was working for a master. Essentially, it meant an utterly
repugnant curtailment of liberty - eleutheria. Working under a master in whatever
capacity came to have a stigma attached to it. Its seemingly inevitable accompaniment
was the stigmatizing of all the kinds of labour that was, or could be, performed by slaves.
Another accompaniment, not so inevitable, was the attempt to justify the subjection of
some men and women to others. There were indeed a few Greek thinkers who saw slaves
as the equals of their masters 'in nature'; they were slaves 'by convention'. Aristotle's
response to this was to argue that the difference was inherently natural: that there were
people for whom it was natural that they should be, or become, slaves. They were, he
argued, physically and mentally inferior - demonstrably so.
It is this that has made the passage in the first book of his Politics so notorious. "If there
is something worse than accepting slavery," Bernard Williams remarks, "it consists in
defending it."38
There is, then, something fundamentally anomalous about 'the glory that was Greece'. As
Finley puts it at the end of his article, "the cities in which individual freedom reached its
highest expression - most obviously Athens - were cities in which chattel slavery
flourished. The Greeks, it is well known, discovered both the idea of individual freedom
and the institutional framework in which it could be realized. The pre-Greek world.....
was, in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense in which the West
has come to understand that concept. It was equally a world in which chattel slavery
played no part of any consequence. This, too, was a Greek discovery. One aspect of
Greek history, in short, is the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery."39
What also has to be said is that while it is true that slavery does not now exist in Europe
and America, it is hardly for people of our times to take too high a stand. Much the same

38
39

B.Williams, Shame and Necessity, Univ. of California Pr., 1993, p.111.

M.I.Finley, "Was Greek Civilisation Based on Slave Labour?", p.164.

25

increase in (national) prosperity that Greece experienced in the sixth and fifth centuries
B.C. has come to us in the last hundred years or so, and it, too, has been accompanied by
an increasing disparity between rich and poor. The 'underclass' - a term coined in the U.S.
and now current in Britain and Europe, despite the detectable (and detestable) echo of the
German 'Untermensch - has become familiar during recent decades as the seemingly
inevitable corollary to what Kenneth Galbraith has called a 'culture of contentment'.40 We
haven't quite shed the connotations of social darwinism, with its own echo of Aristotle's
argument.
The next qualification is that of the sheer limitation in size of the ordinary Greek polis.
This is one which is rarely omitted from the literature, however devoted a philhellene the
writer may be. The Greeks themselves saw this numerical limitation as an essential
precondition of the existence of the polis itself, let alone democracy. It relates to the kind
of social order peculiar to a face-to-face society which this smallness made possible.
The third qualification is one which, like the reference of behaviour to a man's or woman's
actions rather than to their character, makes ancient Greece so 'desperately foreign' to us.
The whole conceptual array of koinonia, philia, dike, and the rest has a distinctly
Durkheimian ring about it, although the multiplicity of ways in which social solidarity
manifests itself far exceeds anything Durkheim unearthed from the ethnographic texts on
Australian bushmen which he made so much use of. The Durkheimian implications
become even stronger when it becomes apparent that the special relationship which bound
the citizens of the polis together, the sense of fellowship in the community which
transcended the individual, found everyday expression not in terms of the analytical ideas
one finds in Aristotle or in the equal participation of rich and poor, great and small, in the
debates of the Assembly and the administration of government and justice, in service in
the citizen army and the citizen navy, but in the round of religious ceremonies,
processions, and ritual. The dictates of the normative rules which prescribed right
conduct, and bound the citizen to the polis - and therefore to each other - had religious as
well as moral, or legal, force. The first charge against Socrates was that of impiety, an
offence against the gods, and therefore against the community.
And, in the fourth place, while sovereignty, in the modern sense, was non-existent, not
even something vested in the whole body of citizens, neither was there anything
recognisable to modern Europeans as natural rights. Citizenship meant membership of the
political community and a degree of participation in governmental and legal decisionmaking far beyond anything available to the ordinary people of modern states, but, on the
other hand, the authority of the political community was total. The Greeks of democratic
Athens "lacked, and would have been appalled by, inalienable rights."41 Duties owed to
others and to deities, certainly; obligations, possibly; rights, no. The very idea of rights,
as enumerated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, for instance, would have offended
the Greek conception of liberty. One can see the point, though it was not one which
would have made any more sense in classical times than the idea of natural rights. It
40

J.K.Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, Penguin Books, 1993.

41

M.I.Finley, The Ancient Economy, University of California Press, 1985 p.154.

26

implies selection, and therefore limitation. The omission of education from the rights
listed in the Declaration of 1789 is notorious - largely because it was inserted in the 1796
version without there being the slightest attempt to implement it; and there are those
which have been introduced since: subsistence, medical treatment, housing
accommodation.
This last set of considerations, abstruse as the anachronistic puzzle on which it rests may
be, does something to explain the precariousness not only of Athenian democracy but of
the political organisation of the Greek polis generally. Political voice mattered more than
rights. The particular configuration of the constitution as well as the balance of political
forces could have fateful consequences for the lives and well-being of all citizens.
Conscription and taxation have borne heavily on the lives and property of citizens in the
twentieth century too, but when the consequences of defeat, if he escaped death or injury
in battle, might well be not simply capture and imprisonment but being killed off himself
and the massacre or enslavement of his wife and children, commitment to his community
had to be unconditional. But his commitment "was indeed diminished or obliterated if he
considered that the organisation of his community was injurious to him. This was the
origin of the internal conflicts (stasis) so prevalent in Greek cities, and therefore of the
development of Greek political theory, which was not primarily concerned with the nature
and validity of the citizen's obligations to his state, the question which has tended to
dominate modern political theory, but rather with the form of state which would best
guarantee his welfare."42
Since Athens was 'the Athenians,' the lands and the income of the polis belonged to them.
The wealth accumulated by Athens was put more to public than to private use. The
vestiges of the palaces which rulers and great men built for themselves are still visible in
Rome - as they are at Knossos and Mycenae. They are absent in Athens. Nevertheless,
the prosperity which came to Athens and to other poleis from successful wars, increased
trade - and moneylending - did make for the inequality which had always been present to
become exacerbated. It led, as inequality has done in all times and places, to discontent,
unrest, conflicts. Aristotle is quite specific about the 'general and principle causes' which
turned chronic, though usually latent, contentiousness (stasis) into open conflict. It was
inequality.
Perpetual conflict, open or latent, could be interpreted as the price paid for the coexistence
of an unequal distribution of wealth and the full and equal participation of all citizens in
the political community - or for the coexistence of a subsistence economy and the social
and political order of a face-to-face society which were overlaid - 'framed' - by
commercial interests. Claims to inalienable natural rights may not have been dreamed of,
but men recognised differences of interest. And since the citizenry was the ultimate
repository of power, success in the conflicts between rich and poor, or between the
factions which bid for their support, meant being able to alter the distribution of authority.
Such an interpretation is hardly contestable, but it almost certainly does not represent the
whole truth of the matter. Conflict, of varying degrees of intensity, was part and parcel of
42

P.A.Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic, O.U.P., 1988, pp.300-301.

27

the life of Athenian democracy and of its citizens. For in fifth and fourth century Athens,
even though the high level of consensus about values usually assumed by most writers
may well have existed in fact, the right decision, fair judgment, the means of attaining the
good life, for the individual citizen no less than for the city, had to be arrived at by debate
- either within oneself or within the properly appointed council or committee. If we
follow Alasdair Macintyre, the conflict was as much ethical as it was political. "For each
virtue and timidity, justice between doing injustice and suffering injustice, liberality
between prodigality and meanness."43 The point is taken further in another passage:
"Of course all the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of the Greeks, whether
Athenian or not, took it for granted that the way of life of their own city was
unquestionably the best way of life for man, if it even occurred to them to raise the
question at all; and it was equally taken for granted that what the Greeks shared was
clearly superior to any barbarian way of life." However, "moral disagreement in the fifth
and fourth centuries does not only arise because one set of virtues is counterposed to
another. It is also and perhaps more importantly because rival conceptions of one and the
same virtue coexist that conflict is engendered."44
V
This may go some way towards explaining an apparent paradox. For while the economic
inequality which was built into Greek (and Roman) society was a frequent cause of civil
disorder and uprisings, egalitarianism in economic terms seems never to have figured as a
political objective. The equality and inequality Aristotle speaks of as political goals
concerned political power - 'voice' in political decision-making. True, there was at least
one polis, Sparta, in which citizenship meant equality in possessions (or, rather, equality
in lack of personal possessions), but Sparta was unique, an oddity even for the Greeks
themselves, admirable in many ways but a model not to be imitated, except theoretically,
as in Plato's Republic.
"The judgment of antiquity about wealth was fundamentally unequivocal and
uncomplicated. Wealth was necessary and it was good; it was an absolute requisite for the
good life; and on the whole that was all there was to it."45 The distribution of wealth
between ranks and social classes was, by and large, little affected by changes in the
distribution of political power backwards and forwards between tyranny, oligarchy and
democracy. The economic consequences of constitutional changes of that sort resembled
more what happened after the English revolution of the seventeenth century, or the
American War of Independence, rather than after the French, Russian or Chinese
revolutions.
True wealth was measured in land. Booty, including slaves, acquired in war and conquest

43
44
45

A.Macintyre, After Virtue, p.144.

ibid., p.125.
M.I.Finley, The Ancient Economy, pp35-6.

28

belonged to the polis, apart from what was 'disposed of' in the field at the commander's
discretion. Trade brought profits and loans brought interest, but one's standing in society
depended on the amount of land one owned ( so that profits and interest tended to be
translated into land ownership fairly quickly). The fact that, almost without exception,
land ownership was reserved for citizens was as much consequence of this as it was cause.
Which brings us to the bedrock of the Greek economy and of Greek economic
organisation. In essence, Greek society rested, as I have already remarked, on a
subsistence economy. In other words, it was a society of peasant landowners, in which
each household provided for itself. Clearly, in Athens and a great many other places this
system was supplemented by a second system founded on large estates (which were
commonly multiple small-holdings rather than single properties), and it was this, and the
fact that wealthy landowners could collect rents from farmers and interest from debtors,
that forced the upper and lower limits of wealth and poverty farther and farther apart.
Inequality, in turn, promoted demand for commodities and goods among the better-off far
beyond the range of subsistence needs. Trade, and the wealth it brought to those able to
profit from it, served as an effective economic multiplier of inequality. None of this
reached the extremes it did in Rome, but it entailed a degree of division of labour and a
volume of trade well in excess of that needed for an economy of single households.
There was division of labour, just as there was commerce, but it lacked the dynamic of
growth we associate with them (and which Adam Smith treated as intrinsic to the
development of modern industrial economies and Durkheim to the growth of modern
civilised society itself). The same is true of Greek (and Roman) technology, although it
was by no means altogether primitive, crude or devoid of intellectual or scientific
foundations, and it is true for much the same reasons.
There was plenty of activity in trade and in manufacture for sale in the classical world, but
most of it was small-scale, even by comparison with medieval commerce and industry.
Any large-scale trade in commodities was contained within what we would now call 'the
public sector', carried on either by officials of the polis (or, later, of the Roman Republic
or Empire), or by the contractors they engaged.
Domestic manufacture of the kind practised in the classical world has always featured in
industrial production; it persisted as the principal mode of organisation for industrial
production until a few hundred years ago and has survived, in modified form and over a
narrowing band of products, until the present day.
What is quite unfamiliar, however, is the absence of any organisation expressly for
controlling and supervising production. Even construction work - building houses,
fortifications, harbour works, temples and other public buildings, ships - was handled in
the same way, by individual craftsmen each under contract, sometimes in association with
two or three other citizens, metics (resident aliens) or slaves. Each craftsman, whether
citizen or 'foreigner' (Greek noncitizen), operated as an independent contractor. Even
slaves, who might well be at least as skilled as any other craftsmen, worked alongside the
free citizens. This applied even in the case of the construction of ships or large buildings,

29

such as the temples which crowned the Acropolis. The building of the Erechtheum in
409BC seems to have occupied 27 citizens, 40 metics and 15 slaves.46 Metics and slaves
worked not only in the same trades but on identically the same tasks as the workers who
were citizens. All workmen (including slaves, although their pay presumably went to
their masters) were paid at much the same rate.
It all seems extraordinarily casual and 'unorganised'. So it was, if one is thinking of
production in terms of profitable enterprise or even of what Weber called economic
rationality. Difficult as it may be for us to grasp the idea, such notions are irrelevant.
This does not mean that we are entitled to regard them as irrational. Production was for
use - whether for necessities, for pleasure or for splendour. These may be provided
through the medium of profitable enterprise, but it is possible to achieve the same ends
directly.
The entrepreneur as such, the professional trader or manufacturer, was held in low esteem
throughout Greek and Roman history. But what, for us, constitutes the problem, the
anomaly, goes deeper. Not only was entrepreneurship regarded as vulgar and unworthy
(though of course necessary), but there was nothing about the processes of production
which could possibly bear the label of management, or formal organisation. Even in the
case of large-scale building construction, the remains of which are still standing,
everybody did his own job, or at most worked in a team along with a handful of other
craftsmen, and was apparently left to keep of his own accord to the general design and the
planned sequence. They presumably consulted each other about this, and on occasion
would follow the lines laid down by some one with an established reputation for being
good at design work and planning; in the case of the larger and more important buildings,
the major design responsibility would lie with officials, or the representatives of the polis,
or the citizen who was footing the bill, and they might, or might not, consult known
experts.
In Rome, later on, Cicero accorded the same standing to architecture as to medicine and
teaching. All were occupations which were for the most part filled by slaves. The great
divide was not so much between manual work and what we know as clerical work and the
higher professions as between 'employment' (producing goods - other than farm produce,
of course - or services for others), and self-sufficiency. Agriculture was honoured beyond
even the superior civil occupations, even if for the most part this was lip-service, a gesture
of deference towards traditional values, amounting at best to what used to be known in
England as 'gentleman farming'. Working for another for pay, or producing goods for sale
(which was reckoned to amount to much the same thing), or engaging in trade, was mean
and despicable, because it meant being dependent on others. An exception to this
principle existed in the case of commercial enterprise if it were on a large enough scale
(and therefore in all probability involved public officials). It might then be rated as
respectable, partly because it could be said to benefit the public at large rather than to
mark dependence on individual customers, clients or employers, but more especially
because it could, and unfailingly did, enable the successful merchant to buy land.
46

A.Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, O.U.P., 1931, p.263.

30

Practising law, engaging in politics and other pursuits which were unpaid in any direct
sense, remunerative though they might be, was respectable, even honourable. Lawyers,
and some other 'professionals', collected no fees, but were able to call on the financial
resources, or the social and political influence, of those whom they represented in the
courts, or advised, or to whom they dedicated or addressed their writings. Money-lending,
which was by far the most profitable business, and the most widely practised by Roman
patricians, was eminently respectable, if not particularly honourable. Best of all was to
possess estates which could provide all one could possibly need or want.
Quite apart from its evident practical utility and from any increment in social standing,
self-sufficiency represented a moral ideal fundamental to the ancient world, Greek and
Roman alike, something which was both underpinned by, and supported, moral
philosophies of different schools. For Platonists, Neo-platonists, cynics like Diogenes,
stoics and epicureans, freedom from all dependence on anything external to the individual
represented the essence of 'the Good' - and also the foundation of true citizenship.
The essential, central, value attached to personal autonomy goes some way towards
explaining the absence of formal organisation, as we know it, in the industrial system of
classical Greece and Rome. Authoritative control over others, outside the army (and the
prescribed powers of Roman magistrates which stemmed, by and large, from military
command), was limited to that extended over the women, children and slaves of a citizen's
own household - the patria potestas of the Romans. To accept direction from others
meant that one was less than a man. It followed that even to work for wages, or to
produce goods for individual customers, was demeaning, though obviously necessary for
the poorer citizens.
Such 'organisation' as went into industrial production and other operations which we
regard as demanding some kind of formal structure of management organisation is best
understood as a set of assumptions which served as the tacit, unacknowledged
infrastructure of the way in which people worked together. It has some parallel with the
'regulative organization' said to apply to specialised economic activities of the present
time like the stock market and even, by extension, to markets and to civic life in general
(although these are nowadays pervaded more and more by legal restrictions and
regulations), but the resemblance is a distant one. It seems more appropriate to relate the
organisation of industry and commerce almost entirely to what modern economists like to
call 'external' factors:47 in this case the social order of the Greek polis, with all its political,
moral and religious overtones. What provided the basic organisational structure for this
aspect of life, as for so many others, is the participative community of equal citizens,
bound together by a common ethos, which acknowledged, in spite of all the manifold
backslidings and contraventions, the overriding need to pursue a common way of life in
justice and harmony beyond any minimalist principles of live-and-let-live.

47

See T.Burns, "Sociological Explanation", British Journal of Sociology, Vol.18, 1967, p.355.