Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens by Alex Gottesman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens by Alex Gottesman Susan Lape Alex Gottesman. Politics and the Street in Democratic Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii, 247. $95.00. ISBN 978–1-107–04168–4. Athenian politics, Gottesman argues in his new book, was not confined to political institutions but rather also happened in the “Street,” his metaphor for Athens’ public spheres, which include the Agora, workshops throughout the city, sanctuaries, and associations of various kinds. Gottesman understands politics as “the production of public meaning,” a more pervasive and capacious model of politics than found in most recent treatments of Athens’ democracy. To assess the role of the “Street” in Athenian politics, Gottesman examines how politicians, slaves, tragedians, and philosophers either used it for their own ends or critiqued its transgressive influence on political institutions. The first two chapters flesh out the contours of the “Street” and the distinctive kind of politics that it made possible; subsequent chapters discuss how individuals manipulated and/or critiqued its extra-institutional politics. In the first chapter, Gottesman describes the Agora, emphasizing that people of different statuses frequently came into contact in the Agora. That there were many [End Page 431] opportunities for cross-status interactions supports one of the book’s key claims, namely that politics in the “Street” was much more inclusive than in political institutions. The full import of this inclusivity emerges in chapter 2, where Gottesman argues that the ability of people to connect and socialize across statuses created numerous and overlapping small networks, which, when aggregated, allowed the city “to take on the characteristics of a single face-to-face society that transmitted information quickly along the networks through word of mouth” (63). This is significant, Gottesman emphasizes, because it explains how democracy was able to function without any formal bureaucracy. It was talk in small networks, which were composed of citizens and noncitizens, that gave teeth to decisions made in formal political institutions (45, 63, 75, 212). In contrast to previous scholars who focus on gossip’s role in securing conformity and social control, Gottesman convincingly argues that gossip was also a politically productive force: gossip and rumor in the public sphere transformed political and judicial decisions into social facts. Throughout, Gottesman discusses the multiple ways savvy elites sought to mobilize the resources of the public sphere for their own ends. For some, it meant hiring rumormongers to make the rounds of the Agora and workshops to promote their view of a case or an issue (85). Others, however, skipped the middleman and orchestrated “publicity stunts”: staged displays calculated to create or cast public opinion in ways that would influence institutional proceedings. On Gottesman’s reconstruction, publicity stunts (think Pisistratus’ pretense of returning to Athens under divine escort) largely waned by the end of the fifth century and were replaced in the fourth century by political pamphleteering (147). The idea that orations and letters circulated like pamphlets to influence public opinion is not a view that nowadays enjoys wide currency. In part, this is because it seems to require a higher degree of literacy than most scholars believe existed in Athens. That said, Gottesman makes a convincing case for pamphleteering in Athens by citing comparative evidence from early modern Europe, where pamphlets circulated not only to be read by individual readers but also to be read aloud and discussed in groups (149). Chapter 6 discusses how some individuals used the public sphere to create new social facts. Gottesman suggests that slaves at the Theseion were able to exchange their status and identity by orchestrating effective public performances. By getting someone to say that they were free or to claim them as a new master, some slaves may have been able to improve their situation. That the social ontology of the “Street” was malleable in just this way is a leitmotif of the book. The final chapter considers how Plato may have drawn from and modified the Athenian “Street” in constructing a robust and inclusive public sphere in the Laws’ Magnesia. In sum, this is a wide-ranging and thoughtful book. Many of the arguments and insights are obvious in a good sense; that is...