Democracy's Beginning: The Athenian Story by Thomas N Mitchell (review)

Abstract

Review Article Democracy’s Beginning: The Athenian Story, Thomas N Mitchell, (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2015), 350 pages. The euphoric assumption that the collapse of communism in 1989 signalled the triumph of democracy and the arrival of a post-ideological world – the end of history, perhaps, as Francis Fukuyama suggested – is the context in which Thomas Mitchell, the distinguished classicist and former provost of Trinity College Dublin, sets his study of Athenian democracy. He notes that the number of electoral democracies decreased over the ten years to 2015 and that fully developed liberal democracy, ‘one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience’, has had a very short history since the rebirth in the seventeenth century of the ideal which first flourished inAthens in the fifth and fourth centuries bc. The study of the development of the world’s first democracy could scarcely fail to be interesting, and Mitchell presents us with a master class. He marshals the evidence for the institutional arrangements devised by the Athenians to ensure the functioning of their democracy but never loses sight of the ideals and principles which inspired these institutions. He provides a summary of the salient events of the period in so far as they are relevant to the story of the democracy. Where there are differing views on the historical narrative or the reliability of the historical sources, particularly Thucydides’s history, he discusses the evidence and gives his considered opinion. The polis, or city state, developed as the dominant form of political organisation in the Greek world between 800 bc and 500 bc and, by the end of the fifth century, there were over eight hundred such states. Each was a small, self-governing unit with an urban centre and hinterland. Two waves of Greek colonisation in the eighth and seventh centuries, the first towards Sicily and southern Italy and the second along the Hellespont and the Black Sea, led to the emergence of a well-to-do population of traders alongside the relatively prosperous farmers. This weakened the monopoly power of the ascendancy, as did the development of a new battle array for Greek armies, the hoplite phalanx of heavily-armed massed infantry. The phalanx required large manpower and was possible only because of the growing numbers who could afford to equip themselves, thanks to the wealth acquired from Studies • volume 107 • number 425 99 trade. The broader winds of change in the Greek world at this time saw the beginnings of philosophy, when people sought answers to questions about the origin and nature of the universe, not in myth, but in human powers of observation and logical reasoning. Athens and Sparta responded in diametrically opposite ways to these changes, and to the social and political unrest arising from the oppressive rule of privileged elites in the seventh and sixth centuries bc. Sparta developed a constitution which had a blend of monarchic, aristocratic and democratic features. Its dominant characteristic was the imposition on young male citizens of a strict community-based educational and military regime. The role of soldier was inseparable from that of citizen. Sparta was lauded for its adherence to the rule of law and enjoyed political stability for four centuries. Aristotle observed that Sparta’s warrior culture was appropriate only to conditions of war, while ignoring the arts of peace. Sparta did not participate in the new wave of literary and artistic creativity and intellectual discovery that was sweeping across most of the rest of Greece. Athens was ruled by a narrow group of noble families. The unrest there resulted in the election in 594 of Solon, an aristocrat, with full powers to reform the political and legal system. Solon’s vision centred on the closely connected concepts of justice (dike) and the order and harmony (eunomia) that came with it. Solon cancelled debts and freed those enslaved by the practice (which he banned) of lending on the security of the debtor’s person. He extended access to justice to all by giving the right of appeal to a court of the people. Solon’s most fundamental change was to use wealth rather than birth as a...