CRITICISM ANCIENT AND MODERN.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE CRITICAL TRADITION OF

ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Dino Piovan1

Abstract: This essay considers the tradition of criticism against Athenian democracy,
in both ancient and modern times. Often this critical tradition has been seen to adduce
greater interest than the very democratic experience from which it arose; in this it has
been aided, in part, by the asserted absence of an ancient theory of democracy. Yet
there are significant traces of a democratic theory in the ancient sources, which ought
to serve both as a theoretical and ideological riposte to the critics. Some of the modern
objections to classical Athenian democracy take up the argument of the ancient critics
and display an anti-democratic orientation (German scholarship between the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries). Others, however, are motivated by a certain sensibil-
ity, grown out of liberalism and the legal state, as well as the emancipation of women
and the abolition of slavery. Nevertheless, these objections are sometimes lacking in
historical perspective. If we reassess Athenian democracy, it may yet be seen to con-
stitute a useful point of reference, at a time when the current model of democracy finds
its legitimacy questioned.2

Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries BC has, for over two mil-
lennia, been subject to a long tradition of criticism. In the history of Western
culture, such criticism has often been far more vigorous and developed than
the appreciation of the authentic democratic experience. At the same time, the
assertion is often found in modern studies that while an institutionalized
democracy indeed existed in Athens, it lacked a theoretical counterpart, a
framework to systematize its laws and values. Nobody, however, including
historians, philosophers and pamphleteers, has ever doubted that there was a
significant theoretical element inherent in the ancient criticism of democracy.
Hence the paradox, on the one hand, of the practice of democracy without the-
ory and, on the other, a critique of democracy, often explicitly anti-demo-
cratic. This critical position was consolidated in subsequent Western culture

1 University of Pisa, Department of Classical Philology, via Galvani 1, 56100 Pisa.

Email: dinopiovan@alice.it
2 A version of this essay was read at Humanitas-Convegno internazionale sull’
attualità dell’umanesimo, organized by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici and
by the Accademia Vivarium Novum (Naples, 15–22 July 2007). I thank Professors Ugo
Fantasia, Carlo Franco and Emilio Gabba for having read a previous draft. I am also
grateful to Professor Chris Carey and to University College London, for the visiting fel-
lowship which I took up in the winter of 2007/08, during which time the text was elabo-
rated. Last but not least, I thank my friend Adam Greenwood, who was responsible for
the English translation.
POLIS. Vol. 25. No. 2, 2008
306 D. PIOVAN

and it has determined, even in non-specialist circles, views and judgements on

the Athenian political experience right up to present times.
The present article argues, in the first section, that the paradox of a demo-
cratic practice without theory needs to be re-examined. In the Peri-
cles-Thucydides’ funeral oration, and in other writings too, utterances can be
identified that seem to indicate that there was full consciousness among sup-
porters of democracy of the criticisms directed at the democratic system. Fur-
thermore, the democratic orators seem to respond to the objections of their
critics. In this way key terms of the current political lexicon (such as demos) and
values which characterize the democratic ethos (such as the principle ‘live as
one pleases’) come to be defined or redefined, and in the process they are
removed from the ideological delegitimation of the critics. In the utterances of
these orators, then, there is a significant theoretical dimension to consider, even
if it is not arranged in a strictly systematic manner. Concerning the objections
raised against the democracy, it is certainly not possible to get rid of them
quickly; nevertheless, the often anti-democratic basis of the criticism will be
foregrounded while the so frequent non-critical acceptance will be avoided.
Subsequent sections examine significant points in the negative reception of
Athenian democracy, which is explained in part by the authority and prestige
of the ancient critics, such as Plato and Aristotle, and in part by a historical
perspective which aims more at the contemporary than at the past. In particu-
lar, the second section summarizes the positions of some key figures of Ger-
man classical scholarship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the most
influential school up until the Second World War. It is argued that a close
bond exists between the criticism of ancient democracy and conservatism in
relation to contemporary political realities. It is not possible, therefore, to
accept the harsh censure of prestigious classicists such as Meyer and
Wilamowitz as objective interpretation, as if it were born from the study of
historical events ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’.
Following the Second World War, the objections of a political thinker such
as Isaiah Berlin, which go back to Benjamin Constant, presented a contrasting
picture of Athenian democracy, especially in the political culture. The exclu-
sion of women, foreigners and slaves, which characterized Athenian democ-
racy, was found to be unacceptable to democratic sensibilities of our time.
The third and fourth sections therefore discuss the validity of these objec-
tions. It will be suggested that a more authentically historical prospective
proves that these objections do not take sufficient account of the nature of the
political, social and cultural context of the ancient world. It is in the light of
this context that the Athenian example needs to be understood and valued.
The fifth and final section seeks to encourage a more positive re-evaluation
of Athenian democracy in the classical period, making use of the ideas of
Moses Finley and Hannah Arendt. Set against the crisis in quality of contem-
porary democracy, the ancient democratic experience may provide a positive
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 307

contrast with which to criticize the dominant political order, touted by its
apologetics as the best of all worlds.

I
A Practice without Theory? The Paradox of Athenian Democracy
The Athenian democracy of the fifth to fourth centuries BC is the oldest exam-
ple of political democracy known to us, or rather, the oldest of those which
historical documentation allows us to reconstruct. It has left a unique and
seemingly paradoxical legacy: among all the texts that have passed down to us
from antiquity, those that criticize it are far more numerous and systematic
than those in praise of it. As a result, a number of modern scholars believe that
no texts of democratic political theory have survived, in spite of the extraordi-
nary literary output of that time. Arnaldo Momigliano went so far as to say
that ‘non è poi assolutamente sicuro che un pensiero democratico ben articolato
sia esistito nel V secolo’, that is, in the very century in which the democratic
experience progressively reached its maturity.3 Moses Finley denied outright
that a theory of democracy had ever been formulated in Athens.4
We are left, therefore, with an active democracy without equivalent in the
ancient world on the one hand and an absence of democratic theory on the
other. The paradox may be explained and also qualified. Firstly, it is by no
means true to deny that a democratic theory in classical Athens ever existed.
The famous funeral oration in honour of those who fell in the Peloponnesian
war, which the historian Thucydides assigns to Perikles, shows that the lead-
ing figures in the democratic government had a significant awareness of the
principles which underpinned the Athenian politeia.5 It is certainly not by
chance that they did not leave us any written evidence themselves or that the
evidence of this awareness has been transmitted indirectly. It is well known
that political oratory of the fifth century BC, as Plato notes, was not written but
oral. The oral form was for a long time the chosen mode of communication,

3 A. Momigliano, review of E. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics

(Yale, 1960), reprint in Momigliano, Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e
del mondo antico (Rome, 1966), vol. II, pp. 709–18, p. 709.
4 M.I. Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’ (1960), reprint in Studies in Ancient Society,
ed. Finley (London and Boston, 1974), pp. 1–25 (‘I do not believe that an articulated
democratic theory ever existed in Athens’, p. 9).
5 It is not possible here to go into the complex and lively debate concerning the nature
and worth of the Thucydidean-Pericles funeral oration. Assuming it to be a manifesto of
Athenian democracy and not simply a display speech, scholars disagree as to whether or
not there is intent, in 2.37.1–2, to reform the actual democracy by assigning a decisive
role to individual aretê. See the comments of U. Fantasia in Tucidide, La guerra del
Peloponneso, Libro II (Pisa, 2003); D. Musti, Demokratía. Origini di un’idea
(Rome-Bari, 1995), pp. 3–19, 99–102; L. Canfora, La democrazia. Storia di
un’ideologia (Roma-Bari, 2004), pp. 11–6.
308 D. PIOVAN

responding as it did to the requirements of the time.6 Theoretical remarks are

not quite as difficult to find in the oratory of the fourth century BC, either in
speeches made before the popular tribunals or in solely deliberative contexts.
These speeches, however, always refer to questions that are strictly contin-
gent in nature, which do not therefore allow for an exhaustive treatment of the
matter. It is possible then, even probable, that a fully developed and system-
atic theory was never written, but to say that there were only ‘notions, maxims
generalities’ — the famous statement of Moses Finley7 — is perhaps a little
too reductive.8
It is nevertheless important to note that there was a body of criticism in Ath-
ens against democracy that was sufficiently developed to produce important
works which have come down to us in integral (or almost) form while count-
less other texts of the tradition have perished. Any account aspiring to be com-
plete should start, at least, with Pseudo-Xenophon Athenian Constitution,
moving on to consider selected pages of Thucydides and Xenophon and,
finally, entire works of Isocrates (for example, the Areopagiticus) and, above
all, Plato (Gorgias, Republic, Laws in particular), not to mention the numer-
ous pages in Aristotle’s Politics.
What was the substance of these criticisms?9 One of the most frequent and
significant objections seeks to deny that democracy is the government of the
people, conceived as the whole population, redefining it as government of the
poor (the many) who rule over the rich (the few). This is the view put forward
by Pseudo-Xenophon, for whom the few also represent ‘the best’, whereas the
many represent ‘the bad’.10 Another common reservation is the argument that
6 Cf. R. Nicolai, ‘L’eloquenza perduta. Tradizioni antiche sulle orazioni di Pericle’,
Quaderni di storia, 44 (1996), pp. 95–113.
7 Finley, ‘Athenian Demagogues’, p. 9: ‘there were notions, maxims, generalities …
but they do not add up to a systematic theory.’
8 I agree with K. Raaflaub, ‘Contemporary Perceptions of Democracy in Fifth-
Century Athens’, in Aspects of Athenian Democracy, ed. W.R. Connor, M.H. Hansen,
K.A. Raaflaub, B.S. Strauss (Copenhagen, 1990), pp. 33–70, p. 34: ‘[B]oth Momigliano
and Finley underestimate the amount and intensity of thought that was given to democ-
racy in the fifth century by its opponents and supporters.’ The existence of a democratic
theory in fifth-century Athens is the framework that underpins the cited book of Musti,
Demokratía.
9 An ample and still useful summary of ancient critiques of Athenian democracy in
A.H.M. Jones, ‘The Athenian Democracy and its Critics’, in Athenian Democracy
(Oxford, 1957), pp. 41–72 (the distinction between the four principle criticisms listed
above are borrowed from Jones). See also J.T. Roberts, Athens on Trial. The
Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton, 1994), pp. 48–92. A hypothet-
ical debate between an oligarch and a democrat is reconstructed, with precise citation of
sources, in Raaflaub, ‘Contemporary Perceptions’, pp. 60–8.
10 Cf. Pseudo-Xenophon 1.4–9; see also Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.2.36–37; Plato,
Republic, 8, 565e; Aristotle, Politics, 1292b. These and other significant passages in
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 309

democracy is not the rule of law, but the rule of the ignorant and uncultured
masses who trample over the laws.11 Democracy is said to promote an unfair
equality, in that it treats unequal persons equally.12 Lastly, in a democracy
‘everybody lives as they please’, giving rise to rampant anarchy.13
How did the democrats respond to these criticisms? There are some clues in
the work of Thucydides, in passages where democratic orators are speaking:
It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is run with a
view to the interest of the many, not of the few.14
I say, first, that democracy is a name for all, oligarchy for only a part; next,
that while the wealthy are the best guardians of property, the wise would be
the best counsellors, and the many, after hearing matters discussed, would
be the best judges; and that these classes, whether severally or collectively,
enjoy a like equality in a democracy.15
In short, the democrats believed that demos, ‘people’, denoted not only the
poor (and numerically superior) section of the population, but the entire popu-
lation of the city, and that demokratia was not the name of a government of a
certain class, but of a system that included, unlike other constitutional models,
even those who had to work to live. It is not possible here to discuss either the
argument ‘democracy = government by some’ or its response ‘democracy =
government by all’. It is sufficient to show that there was full awareness of
this objection and its delegitimizing potential among the democrats. Further-
more, as we shall see later, the democratic response attempts to redefine the
key terms and undermine the negative connotations inherent in the discourse
of its critics. It takes away these terms from the ideological control of its
adversaries and transforms them into defining aspects of its own discourse, of
its own definition of democracy. The struggle is not merely rhetorical, it is
ideological too. It exploits the symbolic dimension of language as a medium
to carry values and principles which, already present in the community, find

which demos appears in this negative context are collected by D.P. Orsi, ‘Lessico polit-
ico, demokratia’, Quaderni di storia, 11 (1980), pp. 284–7.
11 Cf. for example, Xenophon, Memorabilia, 4.4.13–14; Aristotle, Politics, 4.4,
1292a; 4.6, 1292b–1293a.
12 Cf. for example, Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.9; Plato, Republic, 8, 558c;
Isocrates 7.21; Aristotle, Politics, 2.9, 1280a; 5.1, 1301a; 6.2, 1317b.
13 Cf. for example, Pseudo-Xenophon 1.10–12; Isocrates 7.37; Plato, Republic, 8,
557b, 563b; Aristotle, Politics, 5.9, 1310a; 6.2, 1317b; 6.4, 1319b.
14 Thucydides 2.37.1 (trans. S. Hornblower).
15 Thucydides 6.39.1 (trans. C. Forster Smith). In this passage the orator Athenagoras
appears to distinguish three different functions or capacities which are distributed among
the population; here I only wish to emphasize the meaning of demokratia as ‘government
by all the people’ and not only by the poorest classes.
310 D. PIOVAN

legitimacy and dynamism in public discourse. To borrow an expression from

Foucault, it is a discourse which aims to produce ‘truth’.16
Second, orators of the fourth century BC, speaking before the Athenian
courts, often used the definition of democracy as government by laws, as in
the following passage from Aeschines:
There are … three forms of government in the world: tyranny, oligarchy,
and democracy. Tyrannies and oligarchies are administered according to
the tempers of their lords, but democratic states according to their own
established laws … This is why the lawgiver placed first in the jurors’ oath
these words, ‘I will vote according to the laws’. For he well knew that if the
laws are faithfully upheld for the state, the democracy is also preserved.17
The democratic conception of ‘governance by law’ did not of course envisage
either that legislation was delegated to an elite set of sapientes, as in the Pla-
tonic model, or that the application of the laws was reserved exclusively to a
body of magistrates-censors, according to Aristotle’s proposals.18 While
‘governance by law’ was, for critics, equivalent to ‘control over the people’,
in democratic minds the formula ultimately signified ‘control by the people’.
Hence the fundamental role of the Heliaia, the popular tribunal, which was
made up not of legal specialists but of ordinary citizens who were invested
with the authority to judge even the members of the elite, on any kind of
crime.19 Moreover, the effective role of the Heliaia as one of the mainstays of
the democratic regime does much to explain not only the attacks of the critics
but also its suppression by the oligarchs during the brief government of the
Thirty in 404/403.
As for the objection that democracy is founded on an unfair equality, which
does not reward according to merit but indiscriminately, this is precisely what

16 See the seminal work by J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Rhetoric,
Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, 1989), one of whose central themes is
the crucial dimension of public rhetoric in the functioning of the Athenian democracy. I
use the term ‘ideology’ in its general sense, not the Marxist one. Cf. the definition of
Ober, Ibid., p. 38. For the concept of ‘truth’ in Foucault (one of Ober’s theoretical refer-
ence points), see M. Foucault, Entretien avec Michel Foucault (1976), reprint in
Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954–1988 (Paris, 1994), vol. III, pp. 140–60.
17 Aeschines 3.6 (trans. C. D. Adams).
18 Cf. D. Cohen, Law, Violence and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge,
1995), pp. 34–51. This book has been severely criticized, not always unjustly; see, for
example, the review by G. Herman in Gnomon, 70 (1998), pp. 605–15; this section nev-
ertheless seems more acceptable to me, even if Cohen’s assertion that Aristotle is more
hostile than Plato towards the democratic institutions is not convincing.
19 On the relationship between popular tribunals and Athenian democracy, see also
M. Christ, The Litigious Athenian (Baltimore and London, 1998), pp. 22–5; S. John-
stone, Disputes and Democracy. The Consequences of Litigation in Ancient Athens
(Austin, 1999), pp. 124–5; A. Lanni, Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens
(Cambridge, 2006), pp. 111–3, 178–9.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 311

Pericles seeks to refute in another memorable passage from the funeral

oration:
The law secures equal justice to all in their private disputes; the claim of
excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distin-
guished, he wins promotion in the state, not in rotation, but as the reward of
merit. Nor is poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country despite his
lack of authority.20
It is not possible to examine in detail the contradictions between, on one side,
the democratic ideals as put forward by Pericles — and in different ways by
other orators of the fourth century BC — and, on the other side, the perennial
inequalities of the social and economic reality, in which even access to the tri-
bunals which resolved disputes was selective. For our purposes it is necessary
only to emphasize that democratic politicians were able to articulate a
response to their critics. We could summarize this response as follows:
democracy is government by merit, not by the privilege of birth or wealth. It
seems unquestionable to me that in this there is a theoretical and ideological
dimension.
Finally, with regard to the attack on ‘live as one pleases’, the best response
is once again found in the Periclean oration:
And not only in our public life are we liberal, but also as regards our free-
dom from suspicion of one another in the pursuits of every-day life; for we
do not feel resentment at our neighbour if he does as he likes, nor yet do we
put on sour looks which, though harmless, are painful to behold.21
In Pericles’ speech, the principle of freedom informs not only political life,
but also private and social life. He does not deny that the maxim ‘live as each
pleases’ applies in Athens. Quite the opposite, he underlines its value with
great force and pride, using a particularly pithy and effective form of expres-
sion. It is, in brief, a desire that is manifested in a reluctance to regulate the
private sphere through legislation.22 That said, it would be mistaken to sug-
gest that legal duty towards the community and personal preference were
never confused in the tribunals when passing judgement on public conduct.
Indeed, this was sometimes the object of particularly heated discussion, as is
seen in Aeschines’ Against Timarchus.
20 Thucydides 2.37.1 (trans. Hornblower).
21 Thucydides 2.37.2 (trans. Forster Smith). This passage, as many others from the
funeral oration, has often been interpreted as making an implicit comparison with Sparta.
The contrast with Sparta is certainly present in the discourse, especially ch. 39, but,
according to Gomme, it shouldn’t be overstated; see A. W. Gomme, A Historical Com-
mentary on Thucydides (Oxford, 1956), vol. II, pp. 107, 109, 111, 130.
22 See Christ, The Litigious Athenian, p. 23: ‘Athenians were reluctant to regulate the
private sphere through legislation.’ According to Musti, Demokratía (throughout), the
distinction between the public and private spheres was part of the democratic theory of
democracy.
312 D. PIOVAN

In conclusion, the democrats did not fail to respond to their critics. They
either denied that things were as their critics said they were and redefined key
terms and concepts (as in the case of demos) or they valorized ideas that had
been devalorized (as in the case of the principle ‘live as each pleases’). More-
over, their answers were made in the realm of ideology, precisely that of their
critics, and they succeeded in hegemonizing communication with the public
for the whole duration of the democratic regime.23 Therefore, a theoretical
dimension to Athenian democracy does exist, even if not particularly system-
atic, and it cannot be ignored in favour of critical sources when dealing with
matters of Athenian democracy.24
One fact remains to be explained: the mass of criticism that grew up in
intellectual circles in response to Athenian democracy. The argument that
seems most plausible to me is that this criticism itself shows the real-world
vitality of Athenian democracy. It is no coincidence that the opponents are
often authors who belonged to the traditional elite, to groups accustomed to
consider the government of the city as their particular business, as a right
reserved to them by virtue of birth or education. They were men who came
from that elite which, by virtue of birth, education and patrimony, deemed
itself better than the masses, which for this very reason found it hard to accept
that the government of the city was no longer exclusively in its grasp or that in
the Assembly, where state affairs would be discussed, a carpenter, a
shoe-maker, a merchant or a mariner, could stand to speak just as easily as a
man of wealth or nobility.25 It is well to remember that their writings exposed,
at times with extraordinary accuracy, the contradictions and limits of the con-
crete experience of democracy. It is quite possible that some of these objec-
tions served to create changes in the laws and to introduce new procedures.26
These contradictions and limits tended to be covered up by the democratic
23 The concept of ‘ideological hegemony’ is obviously borrowed from Antonio
Gramsci. See Quaderni dal carcere, ed. V. Gerratana (Turin, 2007), pp. 1518–9, 1565–7,
2010–3; for the use of Gramsci by Ober see Mass and Elite, p. 338.
24 The reference is to J. de Romilly, Problèmes de la démocratie grecque (Paris,
1975).
25 Plato, Protagoras, 319b–d.
26 This is the argument of E. Harris, Was All Criticism of Athenian Democracy Nec-
essarily Anti-Democratic?, in Democrazia e antidemocrazia nel mondo greco, ed.
U. Bultrighini (Alessandria, 2005), pp. 11–23. However, some points in this essay are not
convincing, as for example the acceptance of the stereotype of the sycophant as the
ancient sources represent it; on this issue I would rather agree with Christ’s interpreta-
tion, The Litigious Athenian, pp. 72–117. Furthermore, Harris (p. 11) suggests that there
is a link between the military defeats of Chaeronea and Crannon against Macedonia and
problems within the Athenian institutions, an argument which seems to be very question-
able. After the battle of Chaeronea (338 BC), the democracy continued to exist. The bat-
tle of Crannon (322 BC) was certainly decisive, but between these dates Macedonia had
become a great empire, founded by Alexander’s conquests in the East. Harris does not
seem to consider this change in the geo-political landscape.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 313

ideology in public discourse, as can be seen in the funeral orations written for
ceremonies in honour of soldiers fallen in war. The ideology is crystallized in
encomiastical descriptions that cannot be accepted as faithful reflection of the
reality that they claim to represent.27
Nevertheless, it is because classical democracy was the government of the
people not only in appearance — it was proven to work over a long period of
time and altogether effectively — that it drew so much criticism from the
intellectuals of the Athenian elite.28

II
Altertumswissenschaft and Athenian Democracy between the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Turning to the ways Athenian democracy has been interpreted by the mod-
erns, it is clear that until relatively recently it has been very much the hostile
criticism that has benefitted from greater attention and credit.29 The scorn
which thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle heaped on democracy influenced,
for example, Immanuel Kant, who not only valued democracy negatively as
‘tyranny of the people’ but also preferred to use the term ‘republic’ to denote a
form of government that aimed at the common good.30 So deeply rooted was
the prejudice that Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of American democ-
racy, looked upon the example of ancient Athens with ‘horror and disgust’.31
It is not difficult to follow this line of thought in the modern
Altertumswissenschaft, especially in Germany, the country that for a long
time (until 1933 one might say) dominated the field of classics. It is

27 The best work on funeral orations and their ideological implications is still
N. Loraux, L’invention d’Athènes. Histoire de l’oraison funèbre dans la ‘cité classique’
(Paris, 1981).
28 Concerning ancient criticism of Athenian democracy, see J. Ober, ‘How to criti-
cize Democracy in Late Fifth- and Fourth-Century Athens’ (1994), reprint in Ober, The
Athenian Revolution. Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Prince-
ton, 1996), pp. 140–60. Ober assumes an intimate link between the development of Athe-
nian democracy and the birth of political theory, envisaged as a discursive space outside
of the dominant ideological regime. He develops this interpretation, with analysis of
individual texts, in Political Dissent in Democratic Athens. Intellectual Critics of Popu-
lar Rule (Princeton, 1998).
29 For an ample treatment of how Athenian democracy has been interpreted in mod-
ern culture, see Roberts, Athens on Trial, esp. pp. 119–255; for a more pithy and incisive
picture, see M.H. Hansen, ‘The Tradition of Democracy from Antiquity to the Present
Time’, in Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for
Modern Democracy (Copenhagen, 2005), pp. 5–43.
30 The distinction between republican constitution and democratic constitution is
seen in I. Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden (1795, reprint Erlangen, 1984), pp. 24–6.
31 See A.W. Saxonhouse, Athenian Democracy. Modern Mythmakers and Ancient
Theorist (Notre Dame and London, 1996), pp. 12–3.
314 D. PIOVAN

noticeable, for example, in the writings of three of the greatest classicists of

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Eduard Meyer, Julius Beloch and
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf.
Meyer paid close attention to Pseudo-Xenophon, as well as to the more crit-
ical passages of Aristophanes’s comedies and the work of Thucydides, while
he deemed the irreplaceable testimony of the Attic orators to be dispensable.
There were two sides to this approach. First, Meyer criticized the idea of dem-
ocratic equality and took up the objection of Plato, that everyone ought to be
allotted not an equal share but the share that each merits. He was therefore
critical of the ideal of democracy too and, like Pseudo-Xenophon, he was con-
vinced that democracy was the form of government in which the majority,
formed of the worse, oppress the minority, which comprises the best. Second,
Meyer believed that the ideal of ancient democracy did not at all reflect the
political reality. He was an attentive observer of the contemporary political
situation, especially in America, which he interpreted in the light of the work
of the sociologist Robert Michels (along with Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo
Pareto, one of the first to formulate the so-called ‘theory of the elites’,
whereby politics, regardless of its various forms, is always a struggle for
power among competitive groups). It was precisely from his examination of
American politics that he drew the conclusion that the principle of equality
was only apparent, that in the democratic societies of today it is only the offi-
cial power that sits in parliament and the governmental buildings while the
real power, that which matters, lurks behind the scenes among the economic
potentates. He applied this theory to ancient Athens.32 Democracy may well
be government of the worse, but a superficial government, obscuring the real
mechanism of power. It is difficult to ignore, in Meyer’s analysis, the failure
to reconcile the various positions, which are perhaps not reconcilable at all.
Beloch too, the scholar who refounded the study of ancient Greek history in
Italy, was a merciless critic of Athenian democracy. It is interesting to
observe, however, that he failed to avoid a curious contradiction. On the one
hand, he repeatedly defined it in negative and, furthermore, often deprecatory
terms (such as, extreme, absolute, unbridled).33 On the other, he believed that
32 See Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 3rd edn. (Stuttgart, 1939, essentially a
reprint of the 2nd ed. of 1912), especially ch. V (‘Die radikale Demokratie in Athen und
der Bruch mit Sparta’), vol. IV/1, pp. 496–549. On Meyer and democracy, ancient and
modern, see L. Canfora, ‘La critica della democrazia borghese in Eduard Meyer’, in Le
vie del classicismo (Rome and Bari, 1989), pp. 63–79 (from which the references to the
position of Meyer towards American democracy are taken).
33 J. Beloch, Die Attische Politik seit Perikles (1884, reprint Stuttgart, 1967): ‘der
schrankenlosen Demokratie’ (p. 6); ‘die extreme Demokratie’ (p. 110); ‘der absoluten
Demokratie’ (p. 111). It is perhaps worth adding that similar terms‚ above all ‘radical
democracy’ and its opposite ‘moderate democracy’ are still used. Yet, they are in reality
linguistic traps which, by unduly modernizing the ancient example, end up misconstru-
ing it. Cf. the critique of B.S. Strauss, ‘Athenian Democracy: Neither Radical, Extreme,
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 315

until the start of the Peloponnesian War, the great aristocratic families contin-
ued to exercise a decisive power on the politics of the state, by dint of their
patrimony, their abilities, the mutually-supportive network of families and
the force of habit. These families were therefore the most ardent supporters of
the democratic regime, since it provided them with a level of respect and
influence that would have been impossible to obtain elsewhere.34 This para-
dox does not seem to find satisfactory explanation in Beloch.
Finally, it is worth considering the position of Wilamowitz, the princeps
philologorum. He too was especially fond of the work of Pseudo-Xenophon,
considered to be a libellus aureus, and even more so of the works of Plato. It is
no surprise then that he too was a fierce critic of ancient democracy, inter-
preted according to modernising categories as a parliamentary regime ruled
by corrupt officials. Just as in Meyer, criticism of ancient democracy in
Wilamowitz goes hand in hand with that of modern democracy. Particularly
in his writings from the period of the First World War, he clarifies his prefer-
ence for an ethical and organic state, in which there was no room for the prin-
ciples of equality and liberty as practised in the nations who were at war with
Germany (France, Britain, the USA). Instead he dreamt of an aristocracy of
great people, interpreters of the true spirit of the community, an aristocracy
that was moreover restricted in terms of ethnicity (his writings are not without
racist undertones).35
All in all, it seems clear that the great German classicists of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries tended to exaggerate analogies between ancient
Greek politics and modern politics. By modernizing the Athenian democratic
experience, these analogies misconstrued some fundamental differences
between the ancient and contemporary situations (hence the use of concepts
and categories which were alien to the ancient system, such as parties, depu-
ties, etc.). Furthermore, the negative evaluation of the popular government in
Athens seems often to be accepted a priori, the result of a political and cul-
tural choice based on circumstances in the present. The German classicists,
like so many other European intellectuals at that time, opposed calls for more
rights, for wider political participation and, above all, for greater equality,
which the popular masses were beginning to articulate through new organisa-

Nor Moderate’, Ancient History Bulletin, 1 (1987), pp. 127–9; and of P. Millett, ‘Mogens
Hansen and the Labelling of Athenian Democracy’, in Polis & Politics. Studies in
Ancient Greek History Presented to M. H. Hansen, ed. P. Flensten-Jensen, T. Nielsen
and L. Rubinstein (Copenhagen, 2000), pp. 337–62.
34 Beloch, Die Attische Politik, pp. 4–5.
35 See U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, ‘Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen’, in
Die Kultur der Gegenwart, ed. P. Hinneberg (Leipzig, 1923), vol. II, 4.1, pp. 99–142. On
Wilamowitz and democracy, ancient and modern, cf. Canfora, ‘Wilamowitz tra scienza
e politica’, in Canfora, Le vie del classicismo, pp. 80–111 (from which I take the refer-
ences to writings of Wilamowitz during the period of war).
316 D. PIOVAN

tions such as the trade unions and the political parties.36 Against this attitude,
there did appear in the middle of the nineteenth century a monumental history
of Greece: the History of Greece by George Grote, an exponent of the radical
wing of English Liberalism. Drawing on the resources of German scholar-
ship, the History of Grote nevertheless maintained an independent stance, dis-
playing great respect for Athenian democracy. Grote’s work was vehemently
attacked by scholars like Beloch and Wilamowitz and, despite a wide distribu-
tion (it was translated into other languages), it does not appear to have altered
the general view of classical democracy. Indeed, his re-evaluation of Cleon
was left undeveloped for almost a century, until Moses Finley’s essay on
‘Athenian Demagogues’ and Robert Connor’s book on The New Politicians.37
German classical scholarship has enjoyed, not without reason, great pres-
tige within modern classical studies. This prestige is partly the result of its
adherence to Ranke’s principle of recounting historical events ‘as they really
happened’, employing the strictest objectivity.38 In reality, the attitude of the
German classicists towards Athenian democracy is highly conditioned by a
hostility caused by demands for democracy in the contemporary political situ-
ation. Hence the privileged position which they assign to the detractors of
democracy, like Pseudo-Xenophon and Plato. Like the latter, they too were
critics of democracy, both of the ancient and modern democratic varieties.

III
Liberty Ancient and Modern
After the Second World War, there was a dramatic change in political and cul-
tural conditions. In a word, having been fiercely opposed for so long by politi-
cal and cultural forces which proposed different forms of government,
democracy emerged victorious. After the fall of the fascist regimes, it no lon-
ger had any significant ideological rivals, in time becoming by far the most

36 The studies of L. Canfora are seminal on this subject: other than the cited Le vie del
classicismo, see also Intellettuali in Germania: tra reazione e rivoluzione (Bari, 1979);
and Ideologie del classicismo (Turin, 1980).
37 For Grote see, inter alia, A. Momigliano, ‘George Grote and the Study of Greek
History’ (1952), reprint in Momigliano, Contributo alla storia degli studi classici
(Rome, 1955), pp. 213–31; C. Ampolo, Storie greche. La formazione della moderna
storiografia sugli antichi Greci (Turin, 1997), pp. 61–3. For the criticism of Grote, cf.
Beloch, Die Attische Politik, p. 9; U. von Wilamowitz, Aristoteles und Athen (Berlin,
1893), vol. I, pp. 375–81; but there is also evidence of even later attacks on Grote, for
example in E. Drerup, Aus einer alten Advokatenrepublik (Paderborn, 1916) with refer-
ence to the figure of Demosthenes. The reference to Connor’s book is to The New Politi-
cians of Fifth- Century Athens (Princeton, 1971).
38 The reference is to the famous ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’ which became a refrain
of nineteenth-century historiography: see L. von Ranke, Sämmtliche Werke (Leipzig,
1874), 33/34, p. VII (the original text is from 1824).
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 317

esteemed system of government in the world.39 It is true that, for a long time,
the word ‘democracy’ could be significantly qualified depending on the
adjective. ‘Liberal democracy’ stood in contrast to the ‘popular democracy’
of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. However, in 1989 this
alternative to the Western model vanished, exposing in the process the propa-
gandistic use of the term ‘democracy’, intended for the purposes of
legitimization.
Nevertheless, criticisms of a different kind were aimed at Athenian democ-
racy. In brief, they deny the possibility that the ancient example of democracy
can be of any value for the contemporary world. The most significant criti-
cism is that of not recognizing individual liberty or, to use the terminology of
contemporary political philosophy, of recognizing only ‘positive liberty’ and
not its negative counterpart. This is an idea that had already been formulated
at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Benjamin Constant, in his essay
‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’. According
to the French thinker, the personal liberty of modern peoples resided in this:
It is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested,
detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one
or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion,
choose a profession and practise it, to dispose of property, and even to abuse
it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for
their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other
individuals, either to discuss their interest, or to profess the religion which
they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or
hours in a way which is most comparable with their inclinations or whims.
Finally, it is everyone’s right to exercise some influence on the administra-
tion of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or
through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are
more or less compelled to pay heed.40
Modern liberty refers above all to the rights belonging to the individual in
relation to the state, while the liberty of the ancients, according to Constant,
consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the com-
plete sovereignty; in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace;
in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronounc-
ing judgements; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the

39 The development of one of the great Italian intellectuals of the twentieth century,
Benedetto Croce, that from an initial conception opposing liberalism and democracy
towards one which theorized their necessary co-existence, represents a more general
change of European intellectuals from suspicion to confidence in democracy; Croce, La
religione della libertà. Antologia degli scritti politici, ed. G. Cotroneo (Milan, 1986).
40 B. Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’
(1819), English translation in Constant, Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana (Cambridge,
1988), pp. 310–1.
318 D. PIOVAN

magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in

accusing, condemning or absolving them.41
Summarizing the differences, Constant argued that ‘among the ancients the
individual, almost always sovereign in public affairs, was a slave in all his pri-
vate relations’, that is, there was collective liberty but not individual liberty.42
According to Constant, Athens is only partly an exception. While the citizen
indeed enjoyed a greater individual liberty in Athens than elsewhere, the pol-
icy of ostracism reveals how the society had full authority over all its
members.
In more recent times, Constant’s thesis has been revisited and developed by
Isaiah Berlin, in equally famous passages. This great liberal thinker also
believed that
the issue of individual freedom, of the frontiers beyond which public
authority, whether lay or ecclesiastical, should not normally be allowed to
step, had not clearly emerged at this stage [that is, in the age of classical
Athens] … I do not say that the ancient Greeks did not in fact enjoy a great
measure of what we should today call individual liberty. My thesis is only
that the notion had not explicitly emerged, and was therefore not central to
Greek culture, or, perhaps, any other civilization known to us.43
This is a significant criticism, worthy of close attention. One cannot ignore
the fact that the rights of the individual were not constitutionally embodied in
classical Athens, as they are today in our constitutions. There is nevertheless
an explanation for this. The necessity of codifying individual rights was born
of a certain historical experience that was unknown to classical Athens and
perhaps to the entire ancient world. In particular, the birth of the modern state,

41 Ibid., p. 311.
42 Ibid., p. 311. Constant’s ideas have greatly influenced scholars both of political
philosophy and of ancient history; cf. the comment by Momigliano on Grote, ‘George
Grote and the Study of Greek History’, p. 230: ‘when Grote committed his most notori-
ous mistake by identifying the Athenian liberty of the fifth century with absolute liberty,
he overlooked the warning already given many years before by Benjamin Constant in his
classic essay on the differences between ancient and modern ideas of liberty.’ For a more
recent discussion, see F. Hartog, ‘Il confronto con gli antichi’, in I Greci. Storia cultura
arte società, ed. S. Settis (Turin, 1996), vol. I, pp. 3–37 (at 30–36), and P. Cartledge, ‘La
politica’, Ibid., pp. 39–72 (at 55–56).
43 I. Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, 1969), p. xli; see in the same volume,
(pp. 118–72), the famous ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ (1958), in which the distinction
between negative liberty and positive liberty is delineated. For a philosophical critique of
Berlin, see C. Taylor, ‘What’s wrong with negative liberty’, in The idea of freedom.
Essays in Honour of I. Berlin, ed. A. Ryan (Oxford, 1979), pp. 175–93. For a counter-dis-
cussion of Berlin’s arguments on ancient liberty, cf. M.H. Hansen, Was Athens a Democ-
racy? Popular Rule, Liberty and Equality in Ancient and Modern Political Thought
(Copenhagen, 1998), pp. 8–11, where various arguments are proposed (at times, how-
ever, the argumentation of Hansen is a little schematic).
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 319

along with its bureaucracy, its centralisation, its police agencies, has height-
ened the need to safeguard the liberty of the individual from state interference,
by means of the legal state (indeed, that which the liberal theorists call ‘nega-
tive liberty’).44 To give an example, in classical Athens, some magistrates (but
also common citizens) who had been charged with a crime could avoid the
sentence of the trial by voluntarily exiling themselves. There was no police
force of sufficient size to prevent them from escaping or in general to enforce
order and the sentences passed.45 Moreover, there was not even a public pros-
ecutor that could sustain the charge (even in public cases the prosecutor was a
private citizen). The policy of ostracism, which was criticized by Constant,
does not have modern equivalents. The person who was subjected to it did not
actually lose either his goods or the right of citizenship — after a period of
separation he could return and reclaim full possession of them (as happened,
for example, to Cimon and many others before and after him). Doubtless it
was a drastic measure but it was nevertheless accepted by those it targeted as a
policy designed to prevent political struggles inside the polis from escalating
into open conflict or the emergence of a tyranny. It would therefore be mis-
taken to compare ostracism to the persecution of political dissidents in mod-
ern authoritarian regimes.46
It is equally true that the right to religious freedom, so important in modern
thinking, was born of an historical experience that was completely unknown
to the Greek world — that is, of religious wars that plagued Europe for almost
a century. As a result, certain rights were not codified because, quite simply,
there was no need for them to be codified or there was no demand for the
rights themselves. It is worth considering the repeated criticism of the popular
Athenian tribunals or, more generally, the observation, common also in the
German classicists, that there was no division of powers in Athens between
the political and judicial components of the system, that the trials were politi-
cal, etc. In one sense, it is true that the principle of the division of powers is

44 See M. Barberis, Libertà (Bologna, 1999), p. 89: ‘La formazione di una

concezione liberale della libertà come libertà dallo Stato sarebbe stata inimmaginabile
nell’antichità o nel Medioevo, quando lo Stato moderno non esisteva, o anche nei primi
secoli dell’età moderna, quando esso era ancora troppo debole per poter attentare ad
alcunché.’ Linked to the concept of state is that of sovereignty, often used inappropri-
ately with regard to the political reality of the ancient world: cf. the rigorous critique of
B. Shaw, ‘The Paradoxes of People Power’, Helios, 18 (1991), pp. 194–214, esp. 201–2.
45 See G. Herman, ‘How Violent was Athenian Society?’, in Ritual, Finance, Poli-
tics. Athenian Democratic Accounts Presented to D. Lewis, ed. R. Osborne and
S. Hornblower (Oxford, 1994), pp. 99–117, p. 114.
46 On Athenian ostracism see S. Forsdyke, Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy. The
Politics of Expulsion in Ancient Greece (Princeton and Oxford, 2005), pp. 144–204. She
argues that ‘the democratic institution of ostracism served as a practical mechanism for
deterring intra-elite strife and was a key symbol of democratic moderation in the use of
power of expulsion’ (p. 204).
320 D. PIOVAN

modern, beginning with Montesquieu and the French Enlightenment (or even
earlier with Locke’s tripartite division of powers). Again, however, it was a
principle born in a context of absolute monarchy where the separation of the
political and judicial powers was an indispensable measure to safeguard the
personal security of those who criticized the government in office. At the
same time, the requirement to limit power was by no means absent in Athens.
Quite the opposite, the requirement was manifested variously: the vote for a
number of magistracies, the obligation of accounting for expenses after the
political term, the annual duration of political positions, etc. The popular tri-
bunals, which included hundreds of jurymen drawn by lot, acted as a further
guarantee and control over the activities of the political leaders. It was con-
ceived to prevent abuses and could even serve as the forum where the legisla-
tive measures approved by the popular assembly were contested and,
following declamations for and against, confirmed or rejected.47 It seems rea-
sonable to assert that the fundamental logic of the Athenian democratic sys-
tem consists precisely in the effort to control and distribute power and to
promote rotation in office even above participation.48 The modern legal state
is an indispensable juridical creation, but one of the principle reasons for its
existence — the desire to limit degeneration and abuse of political power — is
common also to Athenian democracy.
If we were also to imagine a conversation with an Athenian democrat of the
fifth century BC, he might respond to us in this way: without ‘positive liberty’,
there can be no ‘negative liberty’. This was also recognized by Constant. In
the second part of his treatise (which is cited far less than the first part), he
asserts:
Individual liberty, I repeat, is the true modern liberty. Political liberty is its
guarantee, consequently political liberty is indispensable … It is not politi-
cal liberty which I wish to renounce; it is civil liberty which I claim, along
other forms of political liberty … The danger of modern liberty is that,
absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of
our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political
power too easily.49

47 The most significant work on the functioning of the Athenian institutions is

M.H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. Structures, Princi-
ples and Ideology (Oxford, 1991). For a condensed overview, see G. Daverio Rocchi,
‘L’autogoverno nel modello ateniese’, in La democrazia diretta. Un progetto politico
per la società di giustizia, ed. G. Schiavone (Bari, 1997), pp. 49–66.
48 Cf. Shaw, ‘The Paradoxes of People Power’, p. 208: ‘it was a system that methodi-
cally broke, distributed, controlled, and channelled power such that the people were
assured of their power, irrespective of the actual presence of large numbers of individuals
at this or that place in it.’
49 Constant, ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns’,
pp. 323, 324, 326.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 321

Of course, by ‘political liberty’ Constant did not have in mind the direct Athe-
nian variety of democracy, but rather a representative system. This was
deemed necessary not only because of the greater size and population of mod-
ern states compared to ancient ones, but also because of the particular bent of
this liberal thinker, for whom individual independence was more important
than political rights. By the same token, it ought not to be forgotten that when
Constant and the liberals talked of a representative system they did not at all
envisage that the right to vote for representatives should be given to all the cit-
izens of a country. They argued in fact that only those who owned a property
or some other good of similar permanence really held the welfare of their
country in their hearts. Only these, then, should have the right to vote. Con-
stant’s model was therefore one of a liberal state with limited suffrage (or, tak-
ing a different perspective, of limited democracy), in which a minority had the
right to govern without being beholden to the will of the majority of the
country.
Finally it is worth remembering that the archetypal, if not original meaning
of the term ‘liberty’ in Greek (eleutheria) seems to be defined in close relation
with the meaning of ‘slavery’.50 ‘Greece at one stroke invented both the free
citizen and the slave, the status of each being defined in relation to the
other.’51 ‘Liberty’, in the classical period, denoted ‘absence of slavery’, above
all for the farmers who, following Solon’s reforms, had been unburdened of
their forced dependence towards the lords and freed from their subjugation to
other men.52 Democracy was precisely the system that guaranteed political
equality among the citizens by means of political participation and, in so
doing, prevented the re-emergence of forms of subjugation of the free. In my
opinion, therefore, it is impossible to separate negative liberty from positive
liberty with regard to classical Athens.53 When the Athenians spoke of liberty
and democracy (eleutheria kai demokratia) as a harmonious whole they were
certainly thinking of a different liberty as compared to the one of the nine-
teenth-century liberals. But the liberal concept of liberty does not exhaust the
full history of the concept of liberty.

50 Barberis, Libertà, pp. 19–22.

51 J.P. Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (Brighton, 1980),
p. 82.
52 Here I follow the arguments of E. Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave. The
Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London, 1988), esp. pp. 126–37.
53 Cf. Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens, p. 6: ‘In Athens, negative free-
dom and positive freedom were inseparable and mutually entailing: a citizen remained
free because he, along his fellow, defended himself by political means against those
forces that constantly threatened to subject him to the will of another.’
322 D. PIOVAN

IV
On the Margins of Athenian Democracy: the Outsiders
In academic works and, more generally, in modern culture, it is not unusual to
find criticism which, differently to the positions advanced by the ancient lib-
erals, emphasizes the exclusive nature of Athenian democracy.54 As is known,
the democracy embraced all adult, male, free citizens but excluded women,
foreigners and slaves. Such exclusions offend modern democratic sensibili-
ties. To what extent, however, should our judgement of Athenian democracy
be conditioned by political rights which, often, have only recently been won?
As for the exclusion of foreigners (metics), we could reply that in the great
majority of democratic countries today, the matter is by no means straightfor-
ward either. Normally citizenship is only granted after a residence of many
years, although this latter varies depending on the country. While there are
countries like France who uphold the ius soli, automatically granting citizen-
ship to the children of immigrants born in the new country, this is not the case,
for example, in Italy and elsewhere. Certainly, the democratic orators show
great pride in the idea of indigeneity in the funeral orations. If this myth of
indigeneity is considered in the light of the law on citizenship of 451/50,
according to which only children born to two Athenian parents had the right to
citizenship, it could be interpreted as racist. This would be mistaken. It seems
that indigeneity applies neither to the historical reality (of how the Attic popu-
lation was formed), nor to the social reality (the Attic society of the classical
period). It seems more likely that it was intended to distinguish the collective
excellence of the polis from the excellence of the individual and the family, on
the basis of the prestige pertaining to lineage.55 Furthermore, the periodical
need in the fourth century BC to review the lists of citizens suggests that the
idea of Athenian citizenship as a closed corporation has more to do with ideol-

54 See for example, S. Cataldi, ‘Il modello ateniese’, in: La democrazia diretta,
pp. 19–48, esp. 45–7; and the thoughtful treatment of this subject by P.J. Rhodes, Ancient
Democracy and Modern Ideology (London, 2003), pp. 46–53. R. Osborne, ‘Athenian
Democracy: Something to Celebrate?’, Dialogos, 1 (1994), pp. 48–58, provides a fasci-
nating reflection on the link between Athenian democracy and culture, on the one hand,
and homogeneity of population or ethnic group on the other and it deserves a longer dis-
cussion, which is not possible here. It suffices to say that homogeneity was no less pres-
ent in Sparta than in Athens, but it did not give rise to political institutions modelled on
those of Athens (less still to a comparable cultural production, at least in the classical
period).
55 I follow the interpretation of W.R. Connor, ‘The Problem of Athenian Civic Iden-
tity’, in Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology, ed. A.L. Boegehold and A.C. Scafuro (Bal-
timore and London, 1994), pp. 34–44, esp. 35–8. Connor proposes a vision of Athenian
civic identity that challenges the substance of traditional ideas. Similarly, see in the same
volume, P.B. Manville, ‘Toward a New Paradigm of Athenian Citizenship’, pp. 21–33.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 323

ogy than fact.56 Overall then, although citizenship had a well-defined legal
status in the formalities and procedures, the most recent studies have shown
how the line between citizen and non-citizen was less definite than was previ-
ously thought.
The difference between ancient and modern democracy concerning women
is undeniable. It should nevertheless be emphasized that while the extension
of the right to vote to women was a development of singular importance, it
was subject to many difficulties and was granted at different times as com-
pared to universal male suffrage. In England it was introduced in 1918, some
fifty years after John Stuart Mill had proposed the reform in 1869; in Italy it
was granted later still, in 1945; in Switzerland, the right was given only in
1971. Should Switzerland pre-1971 therefore be considered antidemocratic?
Similarly, it cannot be ignored that the advent of female suffrage has by no
means resolved the problem of female participation in politics. The number of
women working in public institutions, in civil or political positions, is still
low everywhere (particularly in Italy). Lastly, the argument that Athenian
democracy was generally a more oppressive regime for women than oligar-
chies must be rejected. While this may have been true for the noble Athenian
families, in which the woman lived in a state of semi-reclusion, it cannot hold
for those women from lower sections of the population, who would usually
leave the hearth in order to contribute to the subsistence of the family.57
The most sensitive issue naturally concerns slavery, especially when one
considers the argument of the direct causal link between slavery and democ-
racy, put forward even by scholars of a Marxist leaning.58 Constant had
already pointed out that without the slaves in Athens, the Athenian people
would not have been able to deliberate each day in the public square. To sum-
marize the argument, the reason that citizens in Athens (male, adult and free)
could afford to dedicate time to politics was that they had slaves who worked
for them. Here too we could ask whether the republic of the USA founded by
Washington and Jefferson should be considered democratic, given that legal
slavery was only abolished by Lincoln in 1863.

56 J. Ober, ‘Quasi Rights. Participatory Citizenship and Negative Liberties’ (2000),

reprint in Ober, Athenian Legacies. Essays on the Politics of Going Together (Princeton
and Oxford, 2005), pp. 92–127, 117–8.
57 See Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, pp. 115–20.
58 The reference is usually to the thesis of Marx-Engels, on the ‘slave method of pro-
duction’. On the problem of slavery in Greece, see M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and
Modern Ideologies (London, 1980), ch. 2–3; ‘Was Greek Civilization based on Slave
Labour?’ (1959), and ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’ (1964), reprint in Finley, Econ-
omy and Society in Ancient Greece (London, 1981), ch. 6–7; Wood, Peasant-Citizen and
Slave, esp. pp. 42–80. For a recent summary cf. P. Cartledge, ‘The Political Economy of
Greek Slavery’, in Money, Labour and Land. Approaches to the Economies of Ancient
Greece, ed. P. Cartledge, E. Cohen & L. Foxhall (London & New York, 2002), pp.
156–66.
324 D. PIOVAN

The argument of the causal link between slavery and democracy does have
a certain plausibility, at least in appearance. No-one can deny the real and
consistent presence of slaves in classical Athens. Slavery might perhaps be
thought to be one of the conditions that allowed Athenian democracy to pros-
per. Even if this were conceded, it could not alone be deemed a sufficient rea-
son to explain the rise of ancient democracy. How else could we explain the
fact that slavery was a phenomenon which even in the particular Athenian
variety of chattel slavery characterized other civilizations in the ancient
world, including Rome, while democracy is a specifically Greek and, above
all, Athenian phenomenon?
Second, to judge from ancient sources, it would seem that the treatment of
slaves in Athens was upon the whole better than that of other Greek places or
than was normal in the Roman-Italic society during the age of the conquest of
the Mediterranean. For example, Pseudo-Xenophon, who has already been
cited, argued:
Now among the slaves and metics at Athens there is the greatest uncon-
trolled wantonness; you can’t hit them there, and a slave will not stand aside
for you. […] If anyone is also startled by the fact that they let the slaves live
luxuriously there and some of them sumptuously, it would be clear that
even this they do for a reason … We have set up equality between slaves and
free men, and between metics and citizens.59
It might be said that the author, having clear oligarchic sympathies, was exag-
gerating the situation for polemical purposes. The fact remains that when an
oligarchic government formed in Athens, following the military capitulation
of 404 BC, the ensuing democratic resistance led by Thrasybulus included in
its ranks both slaves and xenoi. If slaves were fighting for the restoration of
democracy, it would suggest that under that regime they enjoyed, or could
hope to enjoy, a better quality of life than under the oligarchy of the Thirty,
which was determined on imitating the Spartan ‘model’. Even when their
expectations of liberation from their servile state were not completely satis-
fied, it was nevertheless a significant event, which seems to indicate, if noth-
ing else, that the term ‘slavery’ could apply to rather different sets of
conditions.
Finally, recent studies have definitively disproved the myth of the ‘idle
mob’, the unfounded conviction that the demos of Athens was a parasitic pop-
ulation that lived off the work of the slaves and payouts from the democratic
system.60 In reality, the demos of Athens, while constituting no more than a
59 Pseudo-Xenophon 1.10–12 (trans. G. Bowersock).
60 I refer to the previously cited work of Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave. Wood’s
book has provoked contrasting reactions among experts: cf. the harsh criticism of
S. Meikle, Classical Review, 39 (1989), pp. 278–9 and the more positive reaction by
J. Ober, ‘The Athenians and their Democracy’ (1991), reprint in Ober, The Athenian
Revolution, pp. 123–39, 135–9.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 325

part of the total population of Attica, consisted mainly of workers (artisans,

merchants, small-scale farmers), who needed to work to live. Moreover, they
could not afford many slaves, especially the small-scale landowners, who cul-
tivated their apportioned lot personally with their own family and who could
not maintain a very large family, let alone many slaves. Where we have docu-
ments concerning large concentrations of slaves, it is mostly in relation to
non-agricultural activities, such as the mining of the silver in the Laurio, and
these are activities which are associated with a small number of great families.
Therefore, while it is impossible to deny the important presence of slavery in
the economy and society of classical Athens, its link with democracy could be
drastically reformulated: ‘the growth of the democracy and the status it
accorded to the poorer citizens of Athens, peasants and artisans, made them
unavailable as dependent labour, thereby creating an incentive for their
wealthier compatriots to seek alternative modes of exploitation.’61 Further-
more, although it is difficult to measure in its concrete effects, it is well to
remember that the law which protected citizens from acts of violence (hybris)
extended also to metics, women and slaves. It goes to prove, perhaps, that the
contradictions in the political and social spheres served to extend, if uninten-
tionally, the spectre of ‘negative liberties’ even to those who were officially
excluded from citizenship.62
Lastly, we come to those who were excluded and living outside the Attic
society but who are supposed to have borne the costs of its democracy — in
other words, the argument that there exists a direct and necessary link
between the inauguration of democracy and the Athenian empire of the fifth
century BC. Without the taxes from the allies-subjects, it would never have
been possible to meet the costs of the system (indeed, in Athens, public posts
were remunerated, in order to allow each person to fulfil the duties of his
office for the community without financial loss. Even the members of the
popular juries, of which there were several hundred, received a modest fee).63

61 Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, p. 82; Shaw, ‘The Paradoxes of People Power’,
criticizes the work of Wood (p. 212 n. 39) but asserts that ‘the relationship between an
important economic fact, such as slavery, and democratic power is not likely to be an
easy or direct one. It is, rather, a complex problem of assessing new networks of relation-
ship in which chattel slavery was part of a new system of power in the Mediterranean’
(p. 198). Cf. also M. Jameson, ‘On Paul Cartledge, The Political Economy of Greek Slav-
ery’, in Money, Labour and Land, pp. 167–74, esp. 172–3.
62 This is the intriguing argument of Ober, ‘Quasi Rights’. Cf. nevertheless
C. Patterson, ‘The Hospitality of Athenian Justice: The Metic in Court’, in Law and
Social Status in Classical Athens, ed. V. Hunter & J. Edmondson (Oxford, 2000),
pp. 93–112, on the social conditioning that drastically limited the access of metics to the
tribunals.
63 Cf. for example, M.I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (rev. edn. New
Brunswick, N.J., 1985), pp. 87–8; Raaflaub, ‘Contemporary Perceptions’, pp. 35–7. A
326 D. PIOVAN

Here too, the argument is not without some merit, particularly if the beginning
of the democracy is taken to coincide with the reforms of Ephialtes (462 BC),
rather than those of Cleisthenes (508 BC), that is, after the Persian wars and the
birth of Athenian maritime supremacy. Nevertheless, we know that the mari-
time empire collapsed in 404 after the military defeat and, moreover, that it
was not restored after the brief oligarchic interlude. In spite of this, the
restored democracy lasted, indeed thrived, until the Macedonian conquest in
322 BC. What is more, remuneration for public posts was not abolished; rather
it was extended to those participating in the popular assembly, which was not
the practice in the fifth century BC. While the empire may too be among the
reasons for the prosperity of Athenian democracy in the fifth century BC, it
was clearly not the conditio sine qua non.

V
A Possible Epilogue: A Reassessment of Athenian Democracy
In my opinion, both the criticisms of liberal thinkers like Constant and Berlin
and those pertaining to modern democratic sensibility are lacking in authentic
historical perspective. The objections of Constant judge Athenian democracy
according to the requirements of the legal state, which is a modern creation
born essentially out of a modern historical process. The evaluations of Berlin
are made in the light of legal and social victories which have been recently
accomplished, even though are sometimes incomplete, even in modern
democracies. This allows the possibility of reconsidering the significance of
the democratic episode in Greece for contemporary culture. To this end, we
may be guided by the reflections of two contemporary intellectuals — Moses
Finley, a classicist by profession, and Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher.
While they do not overlook conditions and limits of ancient democracy, they
both consider it to be of fundamental importance even for the modern world.
In Democracy Ancient and Modern Moses Finley criticizes the modern
idea of democracy, which justifies drastic changes in the political participa-
tion of the demos by invoking the theory of the so-called ‘elitists’ (Mosca,
Pareto, Michels and their students Lipset and Schumpeter). To cite the prob-
ing summary of Finley, ‘the elitist theory … holds that democracy can func-
tion and survive only under a de facto oligarchy of professional politicians
and bureaucrats; that popular participation must be restricted to occasional
elections; that, in other words, popular political apathy is a good thing, a sign
of health in the society’.64 The political apathy of modern western democra-
cies, whereby the average citizen takes little interest in politics and often
abstains from voting, is, for many academics and political scientists, a good
thing, a symptom that the system is sound. For Finley, on the contrary, this is a
critique of this argument is found in Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, pp. 122–5; Ober,
Mass and Elite, pp. 23–4.
64 Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, p. ix.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 327

bad thing, extremely bad, which may even result in the emergence and rise of
extremism among marginalized groups — that is, groups of people who are
excluded from the decision-making process and are politically impotent.
Finley thus argues against the system of representative democracy, which he
defines as an oligarchy of professionals, and he contrasts it with Athens,
where politics was ‘the art of reaching decisions by public discussion and then
of obeying those decisions as a necessary condition of civilized social exis-
tence’.65 Finley recalls that in Athens, for the first time in history, even
semi-literate workers who had to work in order to live took part in the political
decision-making process. This is not to say that Athens lacked political lead-
ers, but these leaders had little of the decisional power of their modern coun-
terparts. Furthermore, by participating in community organisations, the
common Athenian people developed a sense of civic responsibility, which is
noticeably absent in the modern day. Finley is quite aware that it is impossible
to recreate the circumstances of classical Athens, involving too many
changes, above all the transformations in the economy and technology, not to
mention the bureaucracy which was almost inexistent in ancient Greece. He is
no less inclined to conceive new forms of popular participation, ‘in the Athe-
nian spirit though not in the Athenian substance’.66
Unlike Finley, Hannah Arendt was not a specialist of the ancient world. An
incisive and fascinating thinker, it was above all after her death that she
became an important reference point in contemporary political philosophy.
Like Finley, Arendt too was fiercely critical of the tenets of contemporary
political developments. In particular, she judged representative democracy to
be an illusion of liberty by means of which the many are administrated by the
few. Conversely, in the Greek polis and in Athens in particular, Arendt redis-
covered the original meaning of politics:
That which distinguished the communal life of men in the polis from all the
other forms of community life, as the Greeks knew well, was liberty ... To
be free and to live in a polis were in a certain sense the same thing ... The
politics, in the Greek sense, therefore lives in the sphere of liberty, a liberty
understood negatively as not-being ruled and not-ruling and, positively, as
a space which can only be created by many and in which everyone moves
among their equals. Without these others, who are my equals, there does not
exist liberty. For this reason, those who rule over others, and therefore by
definition are different from others, are certainly happier and more enviable
than those over whom they rule, but they are no freer.67

65 Ibid., pp. 13–4.

66 Ibid., p. 36.
67 H. Arendt, Was ist Politik?, ed. U. Ludz (München-Zürich, 1993), pp. 38–9. (‘Was
das Zusammenleben der Menschen in der Polis auszeichnet vor allen anderen Formen
menschlichen Zusammenlebens, die den Griechen sehr wohl bekanntwaren, war die
Freiheit … Frei-Sein und In-einer-Polis-leben waren in gewissem Sinne ein und dasselbe
328 D. PIOVAN

One of the fundamental aspects of Greek liberty which was inseparable

from democracy was the liberty to dialogue, understood as an experience
whereby one surpasses one’s own individuality to contemplate the world as it
is ‘really’, that is, as something common to many.68 Therefore, like Finley —
albeit from a different point of view — Arendt saw in classical Athenian
democracy a model of popular participation and political deliberation. Her
interpretation may seem utopian; indeed, it has been criticized as such many
times.69 In this respect, it should be noted that Arendt herself knew that that
experience could not be repeated. It nevertheless provided her with a precious
marker, both conceptual and historical, with which to criticize the modern
expropriation of politics, that process whereby democracy is reduced de facto
to an oligarchy with the consent of the masses. Obsolete as a practical exam-
ple, Athenian democracy was indispensable to Arendt as a source of concep-
tual models.
From the time when Hannah Arendt and Moses Finley formulated these
ideas, the world has witnessed revolutionary historical events. 1989 was par-
ticularly significant, seeing the fall of the Eastern European regimes, which
labelled themselves ‘popular democracies’. Never had ‘representative
democracy’ or ‘liberal democracy’ seemed more assured in glory than it did
then, unchallenged by any presentable rivals. Indeed, there has been a quanti-
tative increase in the number of countries which can be defined as ‘demo-
cratic’: in 2000 there were some 120 out of 192 UN members. For the first
time in history, democracy seemed to hold a majority in the world. And yet, in
recent years, a crisis in the quality of modern democracy has emerged, with
ever increasing clarity. As the studies of Finley and Arendt had already
shown, politics has fallen into the hands of the few; an elite composed of pro-
fessionals and bureaucrats and separated from the demos, which is eventually
absorbed by a consumerist ideology, thus disregarding the public sphere. At
the same time, the power of concentrated wealth is always increasing, allow-
ing political elites to condition democratic politics as well as to dictate
… Das Politische in diesem griechischen Sinne verstanden ist also um die Freiheit
zentriert, wobei Freiheit negativ als Nicht-beherrscht-Werden und Nicht-Herrschen
verstanden wird und positiv als ein nur von vielen zu erstellender Raum, in welchem
jeder sich unter seinesgleichen bewegt. Ohne solche Anderen, die meinesgleichen sind,
gibt es keine Freiheit, und darum ist der, der über Andere herrscht und daher auch von
Anderen prinzipiell verschieden ist, zwar glücklicher und beneidenswerter als die,
welche er beherrscht, aber er ist um nichts freier.’)
68 Ibid., pp. 51–2. These are arguments already formulated in The Human Condition
(Chicago, 1958).
69 In general, on the political thought of Arendt, see La pluralità irrappresentabile. Il
pensiero politico di H. Arendt, ed. R. Esposito (Urbino, 1987), in particular the essays by
C. Galli, ‘Hannah Arendt e le categorie politiche della modernità’, pp. 15–28, and
P.P. Portinaro, ‘La politica come cominciamento e la fine della politica’, pp. 29–45.
Arendt’s position on Greek democracy has been critically analyzed both by Ober, ‘How
to criticize Democracy’, pp. 144–5, and Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, pp. 40–1.
 CRITICAL TRADITION OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY 329

governmental agendas and promote anti-egalitarian policies which deeply

undermine the rights of citizenship.70
John Stuart Mill observed that the opinions of humanity have consecrated
the realities that exist, conceiving of that which does not yet exist as either
dangerous or unobtainable. It has been stated often, so often that it would be
superfluous to provide examples, that today’s democracy represents the best
of all possible worlds. The example of Athenian democracy, albeit with its
anachronisms and the limits which critics, both ancient and modern, have
highlighted, is testimony that the current form of democracy is neither the
only one imaginable nor the only one possible.71

Dino Piovan UNIVERSITY OF PISA

70 The bibliography on the problems of contemporary democracy is colossal: here I

mention only a few recent Italian works: C. Crouch, Postdemocrazia (Rome and Bari,
2003); A. Mastropaolo, La mucca pazza della democrazia. Nuove destre, populismo,
antipolitica (Turin, 2005); P. Ginsborg, La democrazia che non c’è (Turin, 2006).
71 For the relevance of Athenian democracy to the theory and practice of contempo-
rary democracy, see Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, p. 9; The Athenian Rev-
olution, p. 5; Athenian Legacies (in particular the essay ‘Classical Athenian Democracy
and Democracy Today’, pp. 27–42). Doubts are voiced against this approach in Rhodes,
Ancient Democracy and Modern Ideology, pp. 70–90, on the basis of a traditional pro-
spective whereby the classicist should avoid becoming involved in debates which carry
too many contemporary resonances. A recent analysis of some recent proposals for a
direct democracy, taken from the Athenian example, is provided by Hansen, ‘Direct
Democracy, Ancient and Modern’, in The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its
Importance for Modern Democracy, pp. 45–69; Hansen nevertheless seems to take it for
granted that the institutional aspects represent the most significant legacy of Athenian
democracy. This is perplexing, as it seems to ignore the ethical-cultural dimensions.