This post was written in 2015, but not posted then.
The importance of beginning this investigation with a discussion of Athenian democracy --- "Greek" democracy would be a misnomer because it was not a form of government that was shared or favored across the entire land we now know as Greece --- is due to the fact that for Socrates and Plato democracy was a third or possibly fourth best form of political governance. Yet both were Athenians and thrived in Athens. Late in life, Socrates found himself at odds with his community, Athens, and he was ultimately convicted of crimes against the community and executed in substantial part because of his disdain for democratic governance as practiced in 5th century Athens. Plato must have found himself at odds with Athens too; he felt more comfortable pursuing self-exile from Athens for a period of time after the death of Socrates, probably because he was identified with Socrates. So to understand Socrates and Plato, I choose to follow the previous post's discussion of the early evolution of democracy in Attica with a study of democracy in 5th century Athens and the Athenian leader most closely identified with Athenian democracy, Pericles.
In contemporary America we can become weary of the two and four year cycles of electioneering for public office in our representative democracy. It seems that just as one election is over and the representatives are sworn to office, the campaign to re-elect or unseat these representatives begins anew. In contemporary America, we consider only the first 100 days following the inauguration of the President as the time period that political adversaries will play "wait and see" how the new President will exercise his or her leadership and politely leave the new leader alone before challenging the new President's policies and talking about who will succeed the new President. Contemporary Americans may be surprised to learn that in 5th century BCE democratic Athens, leadership --- comprised of ten generals --- was elected for a one-year term, and re-elected or removed from office every year. While it is not clear to what extent there was any electioneering for these official positions, one's promise of tenure was short and those who survived to serve a longer tenure were few.
Athens enjoyed a direct legislative democracy responsible for enacting laws and deciding policy as well as judicial forums to resolve private and public disputes. There was no executive branch of government that would be familiar to contemporary Americans. While there were leaders of the legislative body, their powers were limited. Real power rested with the Athenian Assembly, a Council of 500 drawn from the Assembly who were chosen by lot, and, particularly since 5th century (BCE) Athens was a litigious society, with the judicial forums that were really a type of mini-assembly as well.
The Athenian Assembly met in the area of Athens known as Pnyx hill, an area below the Acropolis on which the Parthenon was later built by Athens under Pericles' leadership. Participation in the Assembly was open to all who were eligible --- citizens. If you chose to participate in the Assembly, you just showed up. And thousands of men did, and the Assembly of thousands addressed every issue that a public body might be expected to discuss or legislate. It met forty times each year. Kagan describes how this process was managed as follows:
"An assembly of thousands, of course, could not do its business without help. For that it relied on the Council of 500, chosen by lot from all the Athenian citizens [who were term limited at two years]. Although it performed many public functions that the larger body could not handle efficiently, its main responsibility was to prepare legislation for consideration by the people. In this respect, as in all others, the council was the servant of the assembly. The assembly could vote down a bill drafted by the council, change it on the floor, send it back with instructions for redrafting, or replace it with an entirely different bill. Full sovereignty and the real exercise of public authority rested directly with these great mass meetings. Almost no constitutional barrier prevented a majority of the citizens assembly on the Pnyx on a particular day from anything they liked.
"In Athens, the executive was severely limited in extent, discretionary, and power, and the distinction between legislative and judicial authority was far less clear than in our own society. To begin with, there was no prime minister, no cabinet or any elected official responsible for the management of the state in general, for formulating or proposing a general policy. There was nothing that Americans would call an "Administration" or that the British would call a "government." The chief elected officials were the ten generals all serving one-year terms. As their title indicates, they were basically military officials who commanded the army and navy. They could be reelected without limit, and extraordinary men like Cimon and Pericles were elected almost every year. But they were most exceptional. The political power such men exercised was limited by their personal ability to persuade their fellow-citizens in the assembly to follow their advice. They had no special political or civil authority, and, except on military and naval campaigns, they could give no orders.
"Even in military matters, the powers of the generals were severely limited. Leaders of expeditions were selected by vote of the full Athenian assembly, which also determined the size of the force and its goals. Before the generals took office they were subjected to a scrutiny of their qualifications by the Council of 500. After completing their year of service, their performance on the job, and especially their financial accounts, were subject to an audit in a process called euthyna. ***
"Even with these severe controls, the Athenians filled only a few public offices by election, choosing their military officials, naval architects, some of their treasurers, and the superintendents of the water supply in that matter. All other officials were chosen by lot, in accordance with the democratic principle that any citizen was capable of performing civic responsibilities well enough, and this corollary that feared the fall of executive and administrative power into the hands of a few men, even those with experience or special abilities."
Among the Council of 500 there was a board of presidents of the council who presided over meetings of the assembly and there was a chairman of each day's meeting. The treasurers were likewise selected by lot, as were vendors who farmed out public contracts to operate public facilities (like mines), collectors of taxes, examiners who checked accounts of officials, inspectors of weights and measures and the like.
If one had to settle on one aspect of Kagan's portrait of Athenian democracy that disturbed Socrates and Plato the most, it would be the principle that "any citizen was capable of performing civic responsibilities well enough," followed by direct participation in legislating and public discourse by any citizen. The idea that officials were selected by lot rather than skill or intelligence or even birthright would be an anathema to both Socrates and Plato.
And the Athenian judicial system was not ideal in the minds of Socrates and Plato either. Socrates would ultimately face that judicial system in 399 BCE and lose his life. As Kagan describes the Athenian judicial system:
"The distinction between the assembly and law courts . . . is almost a technicality. The idea behind both institutions is the same: full, direct, popular sovereignty. The panel of six thousand jurors who enlisted to serve in the courts each year, in fact, was called the Heliaea, a name given in other states to the assembly. From this panel on any given day jurors were assigned to specific courts and specific cases. The usual size of a jury was 501, although there were juries from 51 to as many as 1501, depending on whether the case was public or private and how important it was. To avoid any possibility of bribery or partiality, the Athenians evolved an astonishingly complicated system of assignments that effectively prevented tampering.
"Legal procedure was remarkably different from what takes place in a modern American court The first surprise is the absence of any public prosecutor or state's attorney. There were, in fact, no lawyers at all. Complaints, whether civil or criminal, public or private, large or small, were registered and argued by private citizens. Plaintiff and defendant, suer and sued, each made his case in his own voice, if not in his own language. Anyone was free to hire a speechwriter to help him prepare his case, and the profession flourished, although it did not reach its peak until many years after the days of Pericles. Another surprise is the lack of any judge. The jury was everything. No self-respecting Athenian democrat would allow some individual, whatever his qualification, to tell him what was relevant evidence, what was not, or which laws and precedents applied. That would give too much weight to learning and expertise; it would also increase the danger of corruption and of undemocratic prejudice. It was therefore, up to the contestants in the case to cite the relevant laws and precedents and up to the jurrors to decide between them. Thus, in fundamental matters of justice and fairness, the Athenian democrat put little faith in experts." Penalties were proposed by the Plaintiff and, if found guilty or liable, the defendant would counter-propose an alternate penalty. The jury would select one or the other, but could not choose another.
This particular form of self-governance by a city was truly unique in the history of human affairs at the time and that distinction is one of the reasons that historians give significant attention to this time and this location in human history. We see not only emergence of the intellectual concept that the governed are governed by their consent, but we also see the emergence of a governmental structure trying to protect that form of government from itself. We might refer to this as a system of checks and balances --- not quite like the American constitutional checks and balances --- but a system aimed at preventing abuse of power and controlling factions.
Direct democracy did not mean there were not spheres of influence within Athens. As the prior post discussed, aristocratic families remained prominent in Athens and male members of these families were active in the Assembly and the military. They possessed wealth that others did not. Over the course of the 5th century BCE, Athenian democracy was challenged and a few times interrupted by conflict with the Athenian aristocracy who believed their fortunes were threatened by the judgments of the Assembly and democratic leaders, and who aligned themselves with militaristic, non-democratic Sparta.
One of the reforms introduced by Cleisthenes as a limit on abuse of power and to deter factionalism and treason, encourage cohesion and consensus, was the process of ostracism. To the modern eye, ostracism would be perceived as arbitrary and capricious deprivation of the rights of citizenship because the process was designed to "vote people off the island" of democracy, at least for a temporary period not exceeding ten years. "Each year," reports Kagan, "the Athenian assembly voted on the question of whether there should be an ostracism. If the majority voted no, there was none. If they voted yes, it took place in a single day in March. On that day, each citizen could write the name of the man eh wanted to remove from the city on a broken piece of pottery --- an ostracon, the scrap paper of antiquity --- and bring it to the Agora. At the end of the day, the archons counted the votes to see if there were six thousand, the number required for some types of important decisions in the Athenian assembly. If six thousand Athenians had voted, the one who had received the most ballots was compelled to leave Attica for a period of ten years. The idea was to allow a popular politician like Cleisthenes, who was confident of majority support, to deter a coup by a hostile faction. The threat to a rival leader, it was thought, would serve as a deterrent to keep him and his faction in line. The institution, a kind of rough-and-ready vote of confidence, seems harsh by modern standards. But it appears to have worked, helping protect Athenian democracy from subversion for almost a century." Recall the prior post that described the formation of Greek cities from a collection of family-controlled communities across Greece. Athens essentially represented a constitutional collection of several families as a polity, and these family or factional rivalries and prejudices remained in the background of the emergent democracy. Ostracism came to be deployed to address these factional rivalries. Members of the maternal side of Pericles' family --- the Alcmaeonids, of which Cleisthenes was a member --- were targets of ostracism and exiled under this process. When Pericles was ten, his father took his immediate family into exile, returning early to Athens to fight invading Persians. Pericles' father was declared a hero of Athens for his effort in several naval battles that resulted in the Persian defeat, and he became a major political figure in Athens.
This was the constitutional and political environment in which Pericles was raised and later participated as Athens' leading citizen for several decades. It was the political and constitutional milieu that Socrates and later Plato found themselves in and prompted their philosophic discourse on government. As a leader, Pericles had little constitutional power, except that power that was enabled by a political process that relied on the ability to persuade in an environment we would characterize today as "free speech." That power of persuasion was another anathema for Socrates and Plato. Persuasion was part of the toolbox of sophists, who relied upon rhetoric; Socrates and Plato were philosophers, who relied on logic and dialectic. Both of these tools can be labeled tools of intellectual reason; however, the tools did not necessarily reach the same intellectual outcome. Rhetoric in the hands of the hoi polloi was an anathema to Socrates and Plato.
461 BCE was a defining year in the political emergence of Pericles as leader. Cimon, a general who led Athens following the ostracism of Themistocles and strived to build acceptable relations with rival Sparta, was ostracized himself in response to policies that shifted some power in the Athenian democracy to aristocrats. Pericles, then a new, young general was recruited by Ephialtes, another general, to rally political opposition to Cimon's pro-Spartan, aristocratic policies and to prosecute Cimon in the Assembly. Cimon prevailed in this skirmish, but Pericles made a name for himself. Cimon later fell when Ephialtes was able to take advantage of Cimon off helping Sparta with thousand of supporters while they were away from Athens. Cimon's legislative changes that shifted power to aristocrats were undone. When Cimon returned to Athens, he no longer had the power to persuade the Assembly or any other unit of government. Pericles emerged as a leading general in Athens at the time Cimon was ostracized, the same year Ephialtes was the target of a political assassination (most likely by supporters of Cimon). Pericles continuing leadership as a general of Athens continued for 32 years, until his death from plague in 429 BCE. This was a period that include a major conflict with Sparta, known as the First Peloponnesian Wars, and the very beginning of a second major conflict with Sparta (the Second Peloponnesian War, divided by a period of peace. Socrates was nine years old in 461 BCE.
Pericles pursued a policy of naval dominance because conflict after conflict, whether with Persia or other parts of Greece, including Sparta, revealed the navy was Athens' military strength. In contrast, Athens land-based military power was relatively weak. Sparta dominated on land. Athens built walls to protect itself from Spartan aggression. As leaders before him did, Pericles did pursue and contemplate the benefits for Athens of an accord with Sparta. Following the first Peloponnesian War from 461 to 451 BCE, there ensued a five-year truce between the two city-states. This was followed by the negotiation of a Thirty-Year Peace in 445 BCE, that was cut short by the beginning of the second Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Socrates was 41 years old when Pericles succumbed from plague two years later in 429 BCE.
According to Rebecca Goldstein, Socrates and Plato distinguished themselves from the traditional Greek perspective by cementing the self's view of the self as the referential benchmark for determining whether one's behavior was virtuous, ethical, or just rather than society's or even history's perspective on the self (kleos) . (See June 29, 2014 post). I should care less about what others think of how I behave; the primary question is whether I can live with my behavior? Self-respect is more important than public respect or memory. In the Greek tradition, Kagan notes, happiness lies not merely in "moderate material comfort, good health, long life, virtuous offspring, and opportunity for kleos --- the last two representing man's hopes for immortality preserved in the memory of his family and his polis."
In a democratic political environment where the officials are accountable to the hoi polloi in so many ways ---- not just in the accounting sense where one's financial transactions are subject to the review of officials, but in the case of the generals who have a continuing need to be able to persuade fellow citizens in the wisdom of their views, policies and proposals for action --- this accountability means that what others think of us counts. A democratic system of governance does not match well with Socrates and Plato's self-referential perspective of excellence, justice, morality, and virtue. From this perspective it should not be surprising that democracy would not fit well with the general philosophic perspective of either Socrates or Plato. We have seen in the study of social emotions --- shame, sympathy, and empathy --- that the "self" is not truly an insular self, but a complex set of feelings that depend in part on how others see ourselves and how one sees themselves in the eyes of others: a social self. (See November 21, 2012 post and September 17, 2012 post and February 27, 2011 post) . With reference to Socrates and Plato, we are not dealing with the selfish self, driven by egotistical impulses that has characterized discussions of Western economic philosophy (see January 30, 2010 post). But Plato and Socrates are promoting an egotistical social construct to defend and justify the philosopher's leadership of a new, non-democratic social order: if the philosopher-king can live with the way he or she administers justice, what else counts?
Pericles made a speech in 431 BCE, two years before his death, known as Pericles' Funeral Oration that is venerably regarded as the Gettysburg Address of the classical Greek period. It is a brief speech about the glory that is Athens. Part of that glory is its mode of governance. "Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment." In the italicized text Pericles connects kleos to the individual in a democratic society. Whereas the notion of kleos is something that aristocratic Greeks has historically aspired to, Pericles is saying that in Athens every citizen could aspire to kleos.
The difference in methods of discourse that distinguish philosophers from the sophists --- dialectic versus rhetoric --- is likewise consistent with the contrast that marks Socrates and Plato from historical Greek tradition.
