‘The danger of Mytilene had indeed been great’

Thucydides - in his History of the Peloponnesian War - narrated an epi­sode in the Assembly at Athens which took place in the fourth year of that conflict. In 427 B.C. the city-state on the island of Mytilene staged a brief but unsuccessful revolt against Athens.

When Athenian forces regained control of the island, the Assembly delib­erated the fate of the island’s inhabitants. The Athenians felt especially aggrieved by the fact that Sparta’s fleet was planning to land a force at Myt- ilene to support the rebels. On this account, Thucydides explained, Athe­nians concluded the Mytileneans had plotted ‘a long meditated rebellion’. After a day’s debate, the Assembly ordered a galley to set sail from Piraeus with orders to put Mytilene’s male inhabitants to death, even those who had not supported the revolt.¹

The day following, however, ‘brought repentance with it and reflection on the horrid cruelty of a decree, which condemned a whole city to the fate merited only by the guilty’.²

The assembly was therefore summoned, and after much expression of opinion upon both sides, Cleon, son of Cleaenetus, the same who had carried the former motion of putting the Mytileneans to death, the most violent man at Athens, and at that time by far the most powerful with the commons, came forward again.³

Cleon’s address to the Athenians - as Thucydides related it - opened with his well-known denunciation of democratic regimes: ‘I have often before now been convinced that a democracy is incapable of empire, and never more so than by your present change of mind in the matter of Mytilene’.⁴

The most alarming feature in the case is the constant change of measures with which we appear to be threatened, and our seeming ignorance of the fact that bad laws which are never changed are better for a city than good ones that have no authority; that unlearned loyalty is more serviceable than quick-witted insubordination; and that ordinary men usually manage public affairs better than their more gifted fellows.⁵

Thucydides pioneered the ‘inside-out’ technique in composing the History.

On the page these characters exhibited considerable insight into the state of their predicament and that of the city they inhabited. To make this tech­nique work in practice, it was Thucydides’s custom to relate a public speech as if he had been present and taking notes of the proceedings. Parliamentary assemblies offered a natural opportunity for Thucydides to exploit what most historians would consider a serious hurdle: the lack of a verbatim record of events. His approach to composing the History was ‘to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said’.⁶

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory.⁷

Cleon, according to Thucydides, had plenty to say on the subject of an assembly’s need to engage in self-appraisal, at least on this occasion. Mem­bers of the Athenian Assembly who were ‘more gifted’, he contended, were ‘always wanting to appear wiser than the laws, and to overrule every propo­sition brought forward’.⁸ These fellows, he went on, ‘too often ruin their country’.⁹ Those who mistrust their own cleverness, Cleon continued,

are content to be less learned than the laws, and less able to pick holes in the speech of a good speaker; and being fair judges rather than rival athletes, generally conduct affairs successfully.

Given that citizens had not learned how to govern ‘a democracy capable of empire’,¹¹ they should have resisted the temptation to renew the debate and reconsider action previously taken. Parliamentary procedure, Cleon argued, affected the quality of decisions made and laws adopted. Cleon argued that longevity (taken as a feature of laws enacted) should be valued above support enjoyed by the measure.¹² Process, in other words, promised to improve merit outcomes, at least if ‘gifted fellows’ would stop tinkering with it. Leaders like Cleon, possessed of serious autocratic tendencies, did not regard process as neutral.

Thucydides drew his portrait of Cleon to warn politicians of the dan­gers of bending process - in the heat of the moment - to accommodate the perceived need to obtain a desirable merit outcome. ‘Mytilene’s danger’, as Thucydides put it, ‘had indeed been great’.¹³ Cleon’s account, related by Thucydides, offers the pessimistic insight that Assembly had placed Athens’ constitution in far greater danger.