Political Prisoners in Democratic Athens, 490–318 BCE Part II: Narrating Incarceration in Athenian Historiography and Oratory

Abstract

Part I of this study, a survey of inmates in the Athenian prison, traces the emergence of imprisonment as a political weapon in periods of partisan tension, civil discord, and breakdown in intra-elite cooperation in classical Athens. Part II complements the aggregative and quantitative analysis of Part I with close readings of Athenian accounts of incarceration from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Athenian narratives of imprisonment reveal profound shifts in perceptions of the prison particularly in response to the undemocratic regimes of 411/10 BCE and 404/3 BCE. Early and mid-fifth-century authors often portray imprisonment as a mechanism of democratic self-governance, a judicial procedure used (and abused) by the dêmos and its leaders to check antidemocratic factions, seeking to destabilize popular rule. Post-404/3 BCE narratives of imprisonment, by contrast, represent the prison as coopted by elites hostile to democracy in Athens and abroad, and emblematic of antidemocratic subversion, oligarchy, and tyrannical ambition. The conclusion attempts to reconcile ancient perceptions of the prison as a political institution with the conventional tripartite classification of Athenian imprisonment as custodial, coercive, and punitive.