Ancient Athens Research Articles

Military Tactics and Socio-Cultural Change in Ancient Athens

Military Tactics and Socio-Cultural Change in Ancient Athens

“I Was Following Orders”: An Ancient Greek Archetype of Modern War Crime Legislation

This article discusses Lysias’ Against Eratosthenes as an ancient Athenian instance of the superior orders plea, a line of defence made notorious during the Nuremberg trials, which in turn became the cornerstone of modern war crime legislation. Whereas the pre-Nuremberg jurisdiction largely embraced the principle of superior responsibility, whereby a subordinate executing criminal orders was not to be held liable for them, the trials of the Nazi war criminals brought about a complete reversal of this doctrine. While remaining faithful to the spirit of the Nuremberg jurisdiction, the subsequent legislative acts (which dealt, among other things, with the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia) sought to further elaborate its underlying principle of absolute liability, in order to precisely determine the question of guilt and innocence. I argue that despite the close relationship between modern legal systems and Roman law, which fully embraced the doctrine of superior responsibility, it is in the juridical thought of ancient Athens that one finds the archetype of contemporary war crime legislation.

Secret ballots and costly information gathering: The jury size problem revisited

Suppose paying attention during jury trials is costly, but that jurors do not pool information (as in contemporary Brazil, or ancient Athens). If inattentive jurors are as likely to be wrong as right, I find that small jury panels work better as long as identical jurors behave symmetrically. If not paying attention makes error more likely than not, jurors may coordinate on two different symmetric outcomes: a “high attention” one or a “low attention” one. If social norms stigmatize shirking, jurors coordinate on the high attention equilibrium, and a smaller jury yields better outcomes. However, increasing the jury up to a finite bound works better if norms are tolerant of shirking, in which case coordination on the low attention outcome results. If jurors always act as if they are pivotal, a larger jury may work better. Allowing deliberations is efficient if the jury panel is relatively large, and if the police and prosecution are effective. However, barring deliberations is better at smaller jury sizes, specially if the police and prosecution are not too efficient.

On Sortition. Comment on \u201cProposals for a Democracy of the Future\u201d by Bruno Frey

Among the several thought provoking arguments for reforming democracy, Bruno Frey advocates sortition, that is, appointment to (some) public offices by lottery. Sortition was the hallmark of the direct democracy of ancient Athens. The paper assesses the Athenian practice of sortition by the criteria of representativeness, equity, partisanship, rent seeking, resource economy, and suitability of candidates for office. It concludes that, in view of fundamental conceptual differences between the Athenian democracy and the modern representative government, introduction of sortition into modern representative democracy poses extremely demanding challenges.

David D. Phillips, The Law of Ancient Athens.

David D. Phillips, The Law of Ancient Athens.

Who pays taxes? Liturgies and the Antidosis procedure in Ancient Athens

Ancient Athens developed a constitutional democracy. A core, time invariant political economy problem is that of providing public services when wealth is imperfectly know. I model theoretically a unique institution developed in Ancient Athens known as the Antidosis. It allowed a citizen on the list of tax-payers to challenge a citizen not contributing to replace him and make the public goods contribution. The challenged citizen, rather than allow the claim to go before a jury trial, could choose to swap wealth with the accusing tax payer. I argue this acts as a screening mechanism and improves upon the asymmetric information problem the government has in identifying who is indeed those who have the highest wealth to provide the tax revenue to finance the public services.

Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic

Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic

How Can Liberal Democracies Defend Themselves against Tyranny?

ABSTRACTTyranny in the modern era turned toward totalitarianism through the idea that human nature needed to be “perfected”; communism's enemy was a matter of class, Nazism's a matter of race. Democracy would seem by definition to resist such ideologies, but even the modern democratic state now possesses mechanisms that can be turned in tyrannical directions: regulatory powers, social welfare systems, and the new tools of artificial intelligence and “big data.” American democracy has been trending toward the “direct” form of democracy that the Founders recognized in ancient Athens and were determined to avoid, a degree of popular sovereignty capable of producing demands upon government that, in turn, could transform a people's government into a government's people. The best defense may be found in classic American literature's examination of national character and identity.

Blending Arendtian Exemplarity with Weberian Ideal-Typic Analysis: Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ as a Vehicle for Social Critique

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization.

Utilising 3D Realistic Models in Serious Games for Cultural Heritage

In the cultural heritage field, many Serious Games applications have been developed whose goal is to educate players and users not particularly specialized or familiar with this field. On the other hand, 3D models of cultural heritage objects created with precise 3D modelling methods can be a very useful asset for these applications. In this paper a composite Serious Game for the Stoa of Attalos, a prominent monument in the Ancient Athens Agora, is developed and presented. 3D models are used, which were produced mainly with automated image based modelling techniques. The creation of the 3D models is described and presented along with the development of the application, which offers three options for the player. These options are: a quiz game, a 3D visual quiz and a virtual museum. The user interaction is described and, based on an evaluation questionnaire, the application is assessed by a group of people in the Cultural Heritage field.

Contested Space at the Entrance of the Athenian Acropolis

Public spaces of protest in ancient cities, whether deliberately crafted or organically formed, can prove elusive, but the existence, appearance, and function of such spaces should not be ignored because of their relative invisibility. In Contested Space at the Entrance of the Athenian Acropolis, Jessica Paga looks to ancient Athens to demonstrate how such spaces were built and used, as well as their potential role in propagating the success of the world's first democracy. Concentrating on the archaeological record and the historical context surrounding the use and transformation of public spaces in Athens, Paga posits the entrance area to the Athenian Acropolis as a consciously elaborated site of dissent and unity for the burgeoning democratic polis in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE.

Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic by Angus Fletcher

Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic by Angus Fletcher

Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: the evolution of the frequency of decision making

Contrary to modern representative democracies where elections tend to take place years apart, in the direct democracy of ancient Athens the assembly of the citizens met to decide policy up to forty times per year. The paper explores a model of constitutional choice where self-interested citizens decide how long to wait until they vote by maximising the net gain from an uncertain voting outcome. It is found that the frequency of voting increases unambiguously when the probability of being a member of the winning majority increases, and decreases with the loss from being a member of the losing minority and the resource cost of the vote. Under some plausible conditions, the frequency also rises with increases in the utility gain from the vote, the discount rate, and the required majority to pass a policy motion. It is argued that those conditions were met in Athens.

Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic. By Angus Fletcher

Comic Democracies: From Ancient Athens to the American Republic. By Angus Fletcher

Boundaries of Culture

So begins Constantine Cavafy's classic poem of November 1898, “Waiting for the Barbarians,” in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's assured translation. Cavafy was a writer who tested all manner of boundary conditions. His every identity came with an asterisk. He was a Greek who never lived in Greece. A government clerk of Greek Orthodox upbringing, in a tributary state of a Muslim empire, he spent his evenings on foot, looking for pagan gods in their incarnate, carnal versions. He was a poet who resisted publication, save for broadsheets he circulated among close friends; a man whose homeland was a neighborhood, and a dream. Much of his poetry is a map of Alexandria overlaid with a map of the classical world—modern Alexandria and ancient Athens—as Leopold Bloom's Dublin neighborhood underlies Odysseus's Ithaca. And I conjure Cavafy because, as I want to persuade you, he is representative precisely in all his seeming anomalousness.

Engineering the Rule of Law in Ancient Athens

Scholars typically regard the “rule of law” – a stable and predictable process by which laws are implemented, enforced, and changed – as a cornerstone of good governance and a key factor supporting economic growth. Yet establishing the rule of law involves a tradeoff: ex ante commitment is promoted, but potentially valuable ex post adjustments to new information are rendered more costly. We develop a model in which the value of using a stylized “law” to constrain future majority-rule decisions depends on expectations regarding the net social benefits and the distributional consequences of policy decisions. We apply the model to what was perhaps the first rule-of-law state: ancient Athens.

Rekindling Union Democracy Through the Use of Sortition

There is a long-standing and growing interest in democratizing labor unions. Union democracy is important for many reasons, including fostering greater member voice in the workplace and society, improving the internal effectiveness of unions, building members’ capacities to engage in democracy in other contexts, and helping foster union renewal. Despite these benefits, democracy in unions as practiced today is characterized by several problems. In this paper, I analyze several of the remedies to increase union democracy proposed to date by scholars and practitioners, finding that despite their potential positive impacts, many of them may have inherent limitations. I then argue that sortition—the use of lotteries in selecting leaders—shows potential in helping address many of the problems facing union democracy and overcoming the limitations of recent remedies. An important democratic tool in Ancient Athens and other city-states, sortition has a long history in political theory and practice, yet application to unions is in its infancy. I conclude by developing and evaluating several ways in which sortition could be used as a tool in union governance structures, and by discussing the implications of my theorizing for ongoing work on union democracy and union renewal.

“From Contested Concept to Cornerstone of Administrative Practice”: Social Learning and the Early History of U.S. Tax Withholding

The process of establishing a stable and effective system of taxation is a hallmark of nearly all modern states. Indeed, securing the ability to tax is a sine qua non of the historical process of state-building. From ancient Athens to the modern United States, nearly all societies have been concerned with the process of successfully collecting tax revenues. One critical concern that all taxing authorities face is limiting the “tax gap”— the difference between what should be paid voluntarily and on time and the amount that is actually paid. Among the many modern administrative innovations adopted to facilitate effective tax compliance, arguably none has been more significant than the use of thirdparty reporting and tax withholding. Since at least the early nineteenth century, when Great Britain first adopted a crude form of withholding as part of its national income tax, governments have increasingly relied on harnessing the knowledge and power of third parties to increase income tax compliance. As a result, employers, financial institutions, and business corporations have become instrumental remittance vehicles and reporting agents for nearly all modern taxing agencies.

Ancient Athenians, Californians and Modern Greeks: A Comparative Analysis of Choice Set Under Direct Democracy Procedures

In the present essay we examine decision-making and choice under direct democracy procedures, focusing on three famous examples: Themistocles’ Naval Law of 483/2 BCE, California’s Proposition 13 on taxation and modern Greece’s referendum of June 2015. They concerned, in a broad sense, the choice between the finance of public good(s) versus the increase in available personal income. We analyse the similarities and differences in the institutional setting, the means available for discussion and consensus-building and the actual outcomes, which were different in each case: in ancient Athens the outcome was in favour of the “public good” defense, in California it was in favour of an increase in available income and in modern Greece, it was of no consequence since the final actual outcome was contrary to the referendum. Lastly, we offer some thoughts regarding the different outcomes, which were dependent on the specific perceptions of each issue, the possibility of disaggregation of choice elements, the time horizon and historic context and the perception of citizens-voters, as to the “quality” of their government.

Writing the History of Slavery: Between Comparatism and Global History

Should we consider, along with the great specialist Patrick Manning, that “the field of slavery studies has become a model of comparatism in social and economic history”? This depends on what we mean by the term “comparatism,” which has come to denote approaches as different in their methods as they are varied, and even contradictory, in their goals. Since the end of the 1990s, the global history of slavery has highlighted the epistemological naivety of a certain comparatist tradition that understands slavery from the perspective of its institutions, and not as a dynamic process resulting from specific historical conditions. It is nevertheless important to identity the limits of such a “global” approach when it claims to be the only method capable of defining slavery throughout history. After reviewing the theoretical challenges that traverse the contemporary historiography of slavery, this article seeks to show what a “morphological” comparatist approach, using redefined scales of observation, methods, and goals, can contribute to the study of one particular society: Athens during the Classical period. By looking at a specific organization of servile labor common to numerous slave societies, in which a slave tied to the running of a piece of land, a workshop, or a commercial store made regular payments to his master, it is possible to reinterrogate some fundamental aspects of the institution of slavery in ancient Athens.