Athenian Politics Research Articles

ROMANS AT BESA: NEW LIGHT ON AN ATHENIAN DEME IN THE IMPERIAL PERIOD

Abstract This article presents an overview of Roman citizens registered in the small Attic deme of Besa. The epigraphic record indicates that three Roman emperors—Hadrian, Commodus and Severus Alexander—were enrolled as citizens in this deme, as was the influential eastern magnate G. Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos and several men who dominated Athenian politics during the High Imperial period. We argue that Hadrian's enrolment and repeated sojourns in Athens encouraged various individuals—including two of his successors—to join this deme, but why did the emperor himself choose Besa and not a larger, more important deme in the city's civic centre? Consequently, where did he live while serving as eponymous archon of Athens in 111/112 and later during his visits to the city as emperor? By synthesizing epigraphic, literary, archaeological and environmental sources, this paper offers the first comprehensive examination of Besa and its Roman citizens, highlighting the deme's significance within imperial Athens and the broader Roman empire. Finally, it suggests avenues for further interdisciplinary research in the study of this region of south Attica.

Elite Politicians or Ordinary Citizens? Decree Making and Political Friendship in fifth-century Athens

Summary This article aims to advance our understanding of Athenian politics through a quantitative study of the proposers of decrees in the Assembly during the fifth century BC. Based on the accounts of Greek historians, biographers and orators, scholars have traditionally envisioned Athenian politics as dominated by an elite whose members competed for power and prestige and controlled the Assembly through dynamics of political friendship. Recent studies of the decree proposers attested in the epigraphical and literary sources have questioned this model. They have shown that, at least during the fourth century, political initiative was not the prerogative of an elite but was rather widespread among ordinary citizens. Yet, the traditional, elite-centred view of Athenian politics is still widely supported among scholars working on the fifth-century democracy. This article challenges this view through a comparative study of the respective pictures of fifth-century decree proposing provided by the literary and epigraphical evidence. By means of statistical tests and analyses, it argues that, while wealth certainly gave elites an advantage in the Assembly through rhetorical training as well as an edge in the run for elective offices, Athenian democracy since the fifth century provided occasional proposers and ordinary citizens with significant pathways for exerting political agency. By reviewing the problematic evidence for the practice of proposing decrees through proxies, this study also shows that the significant level of popular participation attested in the observed data was not a by-product of political friendship, and that Athenian democracy since its early history encouraged models of political aggregation which could cut through friendship groups and enable forms of participation not limited to passively supporting one’s political leaders.

Religious faith and social justice: on Hägglund’s incompatibility thesis

ABSTRACT Is religious faith necessarily a barrier to the achievement of a just society? In This Life, Martin Hägglund answers ‘yes’, defending a form of political atheism based on the claim that a wholehearted commitment to social justice presupposes the recognition of humans as altogether finite, mortal beings. Hägglund’s thorough contribution offers a useful entry point for exploring widely perceived—but seldom articulated—obstacles to more conciliatory approaches for seeking radical social change. In this article I unpack and reject what I call Hägglund’s incompatibility thesis on religious faith and social justice. I argue that it ultimately rests on false oppositions that present no insurmountable obstacles to firm coalitions for social activism across secular and religious worldviews. While Hägglund’s arguments raise relevant questions and challenges for some theological views, his global rejection of theistic faith from coalitions for social justice turns out to be (1) unnecessary, (2) illiberal, and (3) counterproductive. Considering the possibilities and hindrances for stable alliances for liberal equality across groups, I contend that political philosophy and social justice activism cannot afford to cut off or alienate theistic believers from egalitarian political struggles.

It Seemed Like Such a Good Idea at the Time … - Expected and Unexpected Consequences when Athens & Other Major Greek City States Leveraged Philip V to Draw Rome into the Eastern Mediterranean

The grand theme of the "liberation of Greece" is peculiar in the second and first centuries B.C. by being proclaimed more often by outsiders than by Greeks, and far more often by outsiders than by Athenians. The Athens that ultimately became wholly Roman after the disastrous hostage crisis provoked by Mithridatic forces on the Acropolis in the 80's started down that road by joining with a few other Greek city states to call in Roman aid against Philip V of Macedon in the 190's, and did so, arguably, believing it could leverage a projection of force by a war-weary Roman Republic to make itself again political master of the Greek mainland. To attract Roman aid against the raids of Philip V's Macedon, Athens and its allies had to make both a case that Macedon posed a genuine threat to the eastern Mediterranean (and to Rome, in the aftermath of its war against Hannibal, and Philip's apparent offer to support that war), and the case that it was a key strategic asset for Rome not only in defeating Philip, but also for stabilizing Greece. To play this hand effectively, Athens not only mobilized its legendary propaganda skills, but also worked public feeling hard in its own streets to make Rome feel welcome, and to make Roman intervention feel natural and attractive at home. By playing this hand, Athens also provoked reprisals from Philip, the damage to Athens' physical heritage foreshadowing more extreme destruction a century later when the city would be caught between the insurgents of Mithridates and the renegade Roman forces of Sulla. The Athenian public became, as a result, even more ready to 'be Roman.' At the time, the intent of Athenian politicians to create a specially protected micro-empire for the city on the Greek mainland appeared achievable, but the Roman response, as so often, moved in unexpected directions, and pulled Athens inexorably into the future empire of Rome. Athens’ secondary intention: to become the default educator of the whole ruling culture in Rome’s next generations (it believed it was reaching this goal with the Hellenistic east) would require secondary tactics – including a demonstration using a staged lawsuit in Rome. This study intends to examine the earliest stages of the piecemeal, and only partially intentional, first step of Romanizing in Athens – I addressed a later stage in my study of the Mithridatic hostage crisis on the Acropolis.

THEOPHRASTUS’ ‘OLIGARCH’ AND THE POLITICAL INTENTION OF THECHARACTERS

The intention of Theophrastus’Charactersstill escapes us. This paper offers a new answer to that centuries-old question by looking closely at the one political sketch of the collection: ‘The Oligarch’ (C.26). We argue that C.26 reveals a political intention in theCharacters, presenting oligarchy as the inherently flawed projection of a character trait onto political events. Read in this way, C.26 appears as a medium through which Theophrastus can take a definite but careful stance in contemporary Athenian politics.

Thucydides: the Historian and His Surroundings

In this paper, an attempt will be made to consider poorly studied aspects of the biography of Thucydides: both historical figures, and the social and natural environment of the historian. The ancient Greek historian was well oriented in Thracian affairs and history. The factor of personal acquaintance and deep awareness of the historian about the circumstances of the life of a particular politician is most manifested in the Thucydides description of the biography and activities of the famous Athenian politician Nicias. Another important aspect is the attitude of the historian towards the island world and its perception of the islands. The islands were viewed by the Athenians as territory over which Athens exerted its dominance. The study of the social environment and the natural and geographical environment of the historian makes it possible to more accurately understand his motivation when working on “History”.

The distant proximity of infrastructural harm: the contested and (in)visible dynamics of waste politics in Athens, Greece

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the entanglements of waste infrastructures and harm in the wider Athens region. It focuses on Fyli landfill, which is currently the only formal waste management facility to serve the entire region. Associated with pollution, privatization, and allegations of corruption, the landfill has been formative of differential modes of uncertainty, interruption, and (in)visibility. By paying attention to the infrastructural contestation surrounding Fyli landfill, we conceptualize waste infrastructures as techno-political devices that engender harm. Our paper, first, examines the ways in which the spatio-temporal modalities of harm play out within this context, and secondly, rethinks modes of contestation and (in)visibility in relation to urban infrastructures. It argues that thinking through harm further elaborates the complex enmeshment between spatio-temporal and moral dynamics of infrastructures and forms of disruption, accountability, and participation. Hence, while we rethink waste infrastructures through harm, we also attend to the infrastructural codifications of harm.

μισθοῦ μυϵῖν: Apsines, Aristogeiton and initiation for pay

AbstractThe Ars rhetorica attributed to Apsines of Gadara contains five cryptic references to a speech prosecuting the Athenian politician Aristogeiton for proposing an illegal law to raise state revenue. It is disputed whether Aristogeiton is supposed to have moved to legalize payment (μισθός) for ‘closing one’s eyes’ (μύϵιν, i.e. taking bribes) or for ‘initiating’ (μυϵῖν) into the Mysteries. It also remains a mystery how Aristogeiton’s scheme was to function. I argue that ‘initiate for pay’ is correct and that in fact Apsines wrote the declamation against Aristogeiton. I reason to the best explanation of ‘payment’: neither an entrance fee into the Mysteries nor a tax, but payment made by pilgrims to something like a syndicate empowered by contract to conduct preliminary initiation. Such a scheme would contravene religious norms. The declamation’s speaker therefore must have prosecuted Aristogeiton on an indictment of νόμον μὴ ἐπιτήδϵιον θϵῖναι (‘proposing an inexpedient law’) so far unparalleled in Greek declamation. Moreover, I suggest that Apsines’ marriage ties to the Keryx clan at Eleusis supports his authorship of the Ars. These cryptic references highlight the influence that the Mysteries and the figure of Aristogeiton exerted on composers of declamations in the Imperial period.

Greek History

This review commences with three very important recent works that raise an important question: how is it possible that we should have to wait until 2021 to have works devoted to these fundamental subjects? First, Athens is, for better or worse, at the very centre of what we understand and practise as Greek history; yet there are hardly any books that attempt to give an overview of Athenian political, social, economic, and religious history alongside its material and visual culture. It is probably no longer possible for a single scholar to write such a book; but the fact that, despite the surge of companions and handbooks of all sorts over the last fifteen years, there has been no Companion to Athens until now, raises some very interesting questions. Second, Greek economic history has experienced an explosion of publications over the last fifteen years, which have constructed new approaches, examined new questions, and utilized new forms of evidence in innovative ways. How is it possible that there has been no systematic attention paid to the most fundamental institution of Greek economies, that of the household? Finally, the Hellenistic period is one of the most vibrant fields of Greek history, but why are there almost no volumes devoted to Hellenistic social history, in particular given the substantial number of available sources? I will comment below on the contribution of these three works, but pondering on these questions, and trying to identify other huge black holes in the study of Greek history, has a value of its own.

1 & 2 Thessalonians by Douglas Farrow

Reviewed by: 1 & 2 Thessalonians by Douglas Farrow Andrew R. Talbert douglas farrow, 1 & 2 Thessalonians (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible; Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2020). Pp. xx + 316. $35. Farrow's work on 1–2 Thessalonians is a masterly representation of the possibilities of a biblical commentary focused on the "realities engaged or implied by the text" (p. 16). It is exegetical—without getting lost in "grammatical constructions and semantic or historical possibilities" (p. 16)—and expository—operating under a participatory ontology that seeks to avoid the inadvertent manipulation of the text by the preacher who might forget that the Word is the subject of Scripture and not the congregation (p. 2). The preamble opens by situating the discussion within Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Pentad of Operative Christianity, which, though reading like the work of a Hegelian convert to Christianity, ultimately assists F. in framing the question of the responsibility of the theologian-commentator to the preacher of the Word and in considering the purpose of the commentary. This leads F. unashamedly to offer his commentary, concluding that the theologian is well primed to comment because of the overtly theological subject matter of 1 and 2 Thessalonians and the letters' honesty regarding their hermeneutical presuppositions. Stylistically, the work is canonical, articulating the epistles' meaning from the breadth of Scripture; it is magisterial by its location within the Catholic history of interpretation; and it is modern in its articulation of the ongoing meaning of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, for example, as it confronts both the church and the various empires in conflict with God's Word, from Xi Jinping's Three-Self Church to Western political atheism (p. 224), as well as its attention to rhetorical structure and grammatical constructions. Lastly, it is personal, as F.'s ongoing feud with David Hart over universalism appears with some frequency. Several selections from the commentary will give a general picture of F.'s theological reading of the epistles, but his opening emphasis sets the tone. Taking "grace" as his starting point, the commentator turns to the pronouncement of the angel Gabriel over Mary (Luke 1:28) as the powerful antitype that gives fullness to this term and the experience of the Thessalonians, who are themselves "being filled" with Christ via his eucharistic presence. F. likewise ends the commentary by pronouncing the Magnificat as something of an eschatological benediction over the reader. Farrow's pastoral/expository and magisterial reading materializes especially in his attention to the term πορνεία, which he defines as "any sexual violation of love [which is] the fundamental vocation and determining feature of image-bearing creatures" (p. 95), and to which he dedicates twenty pages because the issue is of utmost pastoral concern. In many ways, F.'s reading is of a single term through the lens of Vatican II in light of the modern West's conjoined sexual obsession(s) and shamelessness. On the controversial "rapture" text, he situates the impulse of 1 Thess 4:13–18 within the perennial interest in the nature of the resurrection and the second coming of Christ. He reads this (rightly) as a pericope blending Danielic and imperial imagery to communicate [End Page 497] the victory of God's chosen who have endured tribulation for God's sake, recognizing that Daniel's "being caught up" to receive a heavenly vision foreshadows the consummation of all things spoken of in 1 Thessalonians, the union of heaven and earth, and the complete victory of Christ over the "prince of the power of the air" (Eph 1:15)—no longer a vision but a reality. From the Second Epistle, Farrow sees the difficult material in 2 Thess 2:1–10 as Paul providing a warning against an overly imminent eschatology through a Danielic framework for the parousia of Christ. While guiding the reader through OT and historical background to this apocalyptic "man of lawlessness," he outlines this character's features in nine points drawn from the text and the more sober readings of the historical church. Yet his identification of the man of lawlessness with the beast of the sea in Rev 13:1–6 is problematic in that it seems to read Revelation as a simple...

The political system of the city of Athens

The city of Athens has emerged in ancient Greece in all fields, the most important of which is the process of political organization, as this city witnessed several ruling political systems in addition to legal legislation that contributed to the development of Athenian politics as well as the social structure. Therefore, the city of Athens is one of the advanced Greek cities that have made great achievements, especially in Its political systems at the time, therefore, our study focused on the concepts of its political systems, in addition to the achievements and developments that it had achieved in all fields during that period, and consequently the city of Athens struck the most wonderful examples of developing political systems at all different stages.

The Urban/Rural Divide in Athenian Political Thought

Contemporary analyses of Athenian democracy have focused on binaries such as mass/elite, free/slave, and male/female, overlooking the urban/rural divide. In this article, I argue that urban/rural was a central cleavage in the Athenian demos. Ancient thinkers including Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle paid close attention to urban/rural differences and their consequences during the fifth century. Plato and Aristotle in particular developed sophisticated institutions and strategies to mitigate urban/rural divisions. Attending to the Athenian urban/rural divide deepens our understanding of the demos and highlights the importance of attachments to place, home, and customary ways of life for democratic stability.

Thucydides's Tragic Science of Democratic Defeat

AbstractThis article reinterprets Thucydides's analysis of the post-Periclean turn in Athenian politics by reading it within the context of contemporary “tragic” and “scientific” explanatory traditions. It finds in this analysis an ambitious attempt to reinvent the traditional, tragic pattern of hubris-driven reversal by reinterpreting its underlying causal logic according to a scientific perspective in which the overdetermining effects of deities are replaced by the variable power dynamics of democratic deliberation. The resultant analysis identifies a change in the relative standing of leaders as the determining cause of democratic reversal, not the absolute decline in leadership, thus tracing the Athenian turn towards hubris, great error, and civil discord to the egalitarian ordering of the post-Periclean assembly. In so doing, it shows how Thucydides's analysis posed a powerful challenge to previous attempts, both tragic and scientific, to prognosticate the fate of imperial democracy, as well as offering an exemplary moment of Thucydides's synthetic approach towards tragic and scientific explanatory perspectives.

REPRESENTING THE DEMOS: ADAPTING INSIGHTS FROM THE CONSTRUCTIVIST TURN IN POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

One of the commonest clichés in the study of ancient and modern democracy is the claim that the former is ‘direct’, the latter ‘representative’. A few scholars have recently explored areas in which the Classical Athenian democracy had representative features, particularly the magistracies. These studies continue, however, to understand ‘political representation’ according to the definition proposed by the political scientist Hanna Pitkin, that is, as ‘acting [on the part of the political representative] in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them’. In this paper I introduce the insights of the recent ‘constructivist turn’ in studies of political representation to the analysis of Athenian politics in the hope of suggesting, in what will necessarily be a brief and incomplete exercise, how productive this exciting new paradigm can be for understanding the dynamics of ancient democracy. I first lay out the basic tenets of constructivist representation, particularly the notion of the ‘representative claim’ as developed by the political theorist Michael Saward, and argue for their suitability for studying ancient Greek history and political thought. Next, I adapt the model of the representative claim to two episodes of Athenian democratic deliberation, showing how it illuminates processes of demotic will- and identity-formation. I conclude by briefly underscoring how approaching Athenian politics in terms of constructivist notions of representation restores an aesthetic dimension to ancient democratic debate, one that allows us to compare more productively the ‘demos’ of symbouleutic oratory with its counterparts in poetry, sculpture, and other media, namely as a represented object fashioned for creative and rhetorical purposes.

‘FOR THEMISTOCLES OF PHREARRHIOI, ON ACCOUNT OF HONOUR’: OSTRACISM, HONOUR AND THE NATURE OF ATHENIAN POLITICS

AbstractThis article offers a new interpretation of the Athenian institution of ostracism and explores its significance for our understanding of democratic politics. A popular scholarly trend interprets ostracism as an instrument for pursuing (or regulating) conflict among aristocratic politicians, in accordance with a view of Athenian democracy as dominated by a restricted elite competing for power and prestige. This article aims to reassess this picture by investigating ostracism in the light of recent studies of honour, which have stressed honour's potential for balancing competition and cooperation within communities. By using the ostracism of Themistocles as a case study, it argues that ostracism was a manifestation of an institutionalized concern for honour in Athenian democracy. On the one hand, ostracism could punish politically active citizens who, in excessively enhancing their own honour, failed to respect democratic equality. On the other, it could be employed for tackling shameful behaviour which placed the agent below the community's standards of honour. The article then sets ostracism against Athens’ broader institutional framework and argues that Athenian democracy was not so much concerned with policing intra-elite conflict as much as it was designed to foster a balance between competitive and cooperative values and ensure broad participation in the political domain.

Hellanicus as Peripheral and a Critic of Athens? Notes on a Study of a Fragmentary Historian

This paper explores the possibility of imagine Hellanicus of Lesbos as a politically critical author. Many works suggest that Hellanicus was a partisan of Athens or at least a sympathizer of that polis. However new approaches have proposed that authors like Herodotus criticized the external politics of Athens, even in subtle ways. Therefore this paper argues the possibilities of thinking on Hellanicus as a peripheral critic of Athenian politics and on the limitations the fragmentary condition of the texts imposes.

Is <i>Gorgias</i> an Early Draft of an Unfinished Dialogue?

The argument that Gorgias is an early draft rests on non-literary considerations. The location of the conversation of the interlocutors in our Gorgias is indeterminate. The content of the participants’ speeches are the core of Plato’s dialogues and would naturally have been composed first. Supplying a physical location for the discussions would have been a secondary task. Unlike Gorgias, in all early and middle period Platonic dialogues, the locations of the conversations and even the bodily posture of the interlocutors are specified with the possible exception of Meno regarding location. There is a second compositional device peculiar to Plato’s dialogues, namely the insertion of dramatic incidents and/or remarks which correspond to specific topics addressed in Socrates’ speeches and in those of his interlocutors elsewhere in a dialogue, sometimes confirming and sometimes refuting a specific opinion. Like the specifications of the location of the conversations, these too would have been worked into dialogues after the speeches were composed. In Gorgias, there are two incomplete instances of this literary device at 487c1–d2 and 471d5–10. Tied in knots by Socrates’ elenchus, Callicles goes so far as to endorse a life of unfettered gluttony, which is in contradiction with his intention to be a mover and shaker in Athenian politics. The latter ambition is incompatible with the life-style of a glutton. No less contradictory is Callicles’ opinion that individually weak citizens, but collectively strong, whom he terms a “motley pack of slaves and a random assortment of worthless men,“ set down the nomoi of what is just and the sympathy he expresses for the unjust strongman and, on the other hand, the information supplied by Socrates that Callicles is a lover of the dēmos and obeys its every whim. Why then did Plato never return to the task of specifying the location of the conversations and providing the missing details of the significant incidents? Writers report that characters in their books sometimes acquire a kind of fictional autonomy of action and speech seemingly independent of the author’s intention. This effect seems to have occurred in Gorgias: Callicles’ core opinions radically contradict one another and as they stood could not be reconciled, in contrast to Socrates’ interlocutors in every other dialogue whose opinions are non-contradictory and of a piece. In all the other dialogues, Plato was interested in types; the malleability of a person’s opinions and behavior, as are found in realistic novels, was a literary genre yet to be invented..

“Family” and “Genus” in the Archaic Era of Ancient Greece: Solon’s Reforms in the Field of Family and Marriage

The work is devoted to the study of the reforms of the Athenian policy Solon, which relate to property issues in the field of marriage and family. The information of ancient authors is analyzed in close connection with the historical features of the development of Athens of the archaic era. The paper concludes that after Solon’s transformations, property relations within the family and the genus are fixed in legal form, and cases of marriage because of money are suppressed. In addition, the transformation of Solon leads to the emergence of a will, a document that allows to transfer property outside the genus in case of its suppression. The aim of this work is to review and analyze antique evidence of the reforms of Solon, which affected property issues in the field of family and marriage as well as reforms of Solon which regulate the funeral rite of the archaic Athens. The study provides an overview of the socio-economic and political situation of the Athenian society of the time of Solon. We study the testimonies of Aristotle, Demosthenes, Plutarch, Diogenes of Laertes, which transmit to us information on the reforms of the Athenian family and marriage policy. The author comes to the following conclusions: 1) Solon's reforms led to the legal registration of property relations within the clan and in the event of its suppression; 2) The legal provisions of the Athenian politician were directed against marriage because of economic goals; 3)The laws of Solon limited the magnificent funeral cult, testifying to the elitist position of aristocrats; 4) Reforms of Solon combined both elements of aristocratic conservatism and at the same time innovative principles that contributed to the preservation of property, money of the family within it, but in the absence of heirs, they allowed to transfer property by will to representatives of other families.

The Hellenistic Reception of Classical Athenian Democracy and Political Thought, edited by Mirko Canevaro and Benjamin D. Gray

The Hellenistic Reception of Classical Athenian Democracy and Political Thought, edited by Mirko Canevaro and Benjamin D. Gray

Aristide il giusto e l’arche ateniese: la giustizia al potere

This article proposes a new interpretation of the figure of Aristides, the Athenian politician known as ‘the Just’. The study shows how Aristides’ fame was far from undisputed in the fifth century....