Athenian Society and Democracy in the Classical Period 479-336 BCE

Thucydides may have thought that the Athenians of the fifth century bce lived in more peaceful times than those of their predecessors, but violence played a central role even in Classical Athenian society.

The Athenian legal system was a cornerstone of Athenian democracy, and thus unique in many ways. Yet the realities of the need for self-help in enforcing the law or protecting one's rights within Athenian society, verging on vigilantism even if legally sanctioned vigilantism, and the exclusive power of elite citizens to exploit the legal system for their own benefit at the expense of others, even lower status citizens who lived within the community, appears self-evident when reading fourth-century bce legal speeches and circumstantial stories, which appear in our ancient texts. Clearly, the impor­tant question requires estimation of the difference between theory and practice. Cohen recognised that ‘The debates have largely turned around what has become the cliched trinity of retribution, deterrence, and rehabilita­tion or, from a Foucauldian perspective, the exercise of the ever-increasing disciplinary power of the modern state.'^{[1053] [1054]} The important question remains, to what extent does either model by which the state or the individual exercised violence against transgression fit Classical Athens?

The Athenian courts and our evidence for them, primarily found in the corpus of legal speeches from the very last years of the fifth and from much of the fourth century bce, tend to present more theoretical and idealised visions of Athenian practice. Gabriel Herman offers an optimistic view that Athenian society ‘must be classed among the less violent societies of pre-industrial Europe’.^[1055] He bases this conclusion on four key points: unarmed citizens; a non-militant ideology; the absence of a culture based on vendetta, duelling and blood feud; and the judicial system. But as we shall see, several legal cases illustrate that disputes between parties were in fact violent affairs and that legal self-help, by which individuals who had won in the law courts were still required to use their own initiative and resources to extract recompense from their opponent, and thus individual rather than community-driven action, was a central part of the Athenian socio-legal system that required, if this is not too extreme a term, citizens to use force against fellow citizens in order to extract justice.

It is, therefore, perhaps misleading that many of our Athenian sources associate violence with oligarchy and aristocracy, more especially with the coup of 411 bce, which Thucydides connected to private concealed murders and violent attacks.^[1056] More significantly, the major aggression and violence of the Thirty Tyrants during their brief rule of Athens in 404-403 bce attracted extensive commentary and criticism from later writers. The Spartans, appar­ently alone among Greeks, encouraged physical assault by one citizen against another, admittedly within controlled environments. Spartans carried this reputation with them when they travelled abroad and interacted with other Greek citizens. Thus, the Spartan regent Pausanias alienated his fellow Greeks at the Hellespont by his use of corporal punishment in the aftermath of the Persian invasion of Greece, and Clearchus did the same thing with the mercenaries he commanded on the Anabasis campaign.¹⁵ Yet, the Athenian democracy was well known for acts of brutality abroad itself during the imperial period of the fifth century bce in destroying states, killing men and enslaving women and children, and even at home democrats were just as capable of violent acts as their oligarchic compatriots. For example, most of the men involved in the 411 bce coup died violent deaths at the hands of democratic sympathisers, perhaps most famously Phrynichus, who was publically hacked down in the Athenian agora in front of large numbers of on-lookers. This was an act of violence lacking any legal sanction whatsoever, and a deliberately staged event.

It is now a common trope that the Athenian democracy was a military machine requiring the services of an increasing number of Athenian citizens, especially for the Athenian navy. Several studies demonstrate the militarised nature of the Athenians of the fifth century bce. Indeed, many scholars now consider that democracy itself may well have been responsible for the violent and imperial nature of fifth-century Athenian thinking. The tenor of Thucydides' assessment of Athenian decision making also suggests this view. Military service inured Athenian citizens to extreme acts of violence as they regularly fought together as hoplites or naval personnel.^{[1058] [1059]} Even oarsmen might be required to fight as light infantry or beat opponents to death at sea with their oars. We all know that ancient Greek citizen males were far more likely to experience war than any of us today. In the Classical period Athens was at war two out of every three years. The likelihood of any Athenian man finding service on board a trireme as an oarsman or, if affluent enough, fighting in the hoplite phalanx was certainly more likely than other Greeks from smaller communities. Men made war and war made men, and military combat would have desensitised men to violence at every level. Athenians were not averse to voting for massacres. The sombre (and incom­plete) list of towns destroyed and populations enslaved recalled by Xenophon after the disaster at Aegospotmi pushes home the point regarding the violence of imperial Athens.1⁸ Thucydides (3.82) chose his words carefully when he wrote that in this period (as in others) ‘war was a violent teacher', using the word biaios here emphatically.

In non-military contexts, however, violence permeated Athenian society as well.

In this context violence played a crucial role in managing Athenian social relationships and delineating socio-political groups. Its enaction enforced and sanctioned social boundaries. Thus violence acknowledged and reinforced such differences wherein the perpetrator and the victim delineated the active from the passive, the male from the female, the free from the slave, the citizen from the non-citizen. With all this in mind, Jason Crowley has recently stated that Athenians had a ‘high level of tolerance to low level violence', to which he adds that ‘it is no wonder, then, that the interaction between Athenian men could be, and indeed often was, downright violent'.²³

discussed by Lawrence Tritle, From Melos to My Lai (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 119-23,141-2.

19 On theories of punishment see Cohen, ‘Theories of Punishment', pp. 170-90 and also ‘Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law in Classical Athens', in Gagarin and Cohen (eds.), Companion to Ancient Greek Law, pp. 211-35. On violence against slaves see P. Hunt, ‘Violence against Slaves in Classical Athens', in Reiss and Fagan (eds.), Topography of Violence, pp. 136-61.

20 D. A. Campbell (ed.), Greek Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), vol.

V. Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits 420-320 BC (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 70-95, 154-84; Crowley, Psychology, pp. 173-4: Aeschin. On the Embassy 2.181; Dem. Against Aristocrates 23.69, 24.105, 47.12, Lys. 10.16, Pl. Rep. 2.361e-362a.

21 See Chapter 18 in this volume.

22 Aeschin. In Tim. 1.59-60; Demo. Against Conon 54.7-9; Xen. Cyn.; Xen. Cyr. 1.2.9-11, 3.14, 4.5, 7-9, 11, 13-24, 11.4.16-21, 3.3.5 and 8; of relevance perhaps see E. Csapo, ‘Deep Ambivalence: Notes on a Greek Cock-Fight', Phoenix 47 (1993), 115-24. For sacrifice see

W. Burkert, Homo Necans: Interpretation altgriechischer Opferriten und Mythen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1997).

23 Crowley, Psychology, p. 93.

But if this was true, and indeed it may well have been, from where did this tolerance come? To what extent was violence a natural part of the Classical Greek lived experience, especially in the world of Classical Athens? This unfortunately we cannot know, but we can perceive from the different types of evidence the level of violence and its portrayal within Athenian society.