Are we giving Athens too much credit?

[HansMustermann]

I keep seeing Athens credited with basically inventing democracy and all that is good and western, and lately I've begun to wonder if that's deserved.

At a surperficial view, it is: Athens went democracy around the middle of the 6'th century BCE, while for example Rome went republic by the end of the same century. Clearly, Rome copied the Greeks' idea. Yay for Athens.

But is it so? I'm sure most of you know what I'm going to say, as it's just bog-standard history, but let me present my case anyway.

As counter-point I would present the Roman Monarchy.

Now of course some would say, yeah, but monarchy is not the same thing as a democracy. And there is some truth in that too.

Except the Roman Monarchy was more like a modern constitutional monarchy (well, sorta) than your average absolutist monarchy.

For a start, the king had to be elected. One or more suitable candidates were selected by the senate, but the final choice was decided by the vote of the curiate assembly. Think sorta like the lower chamber of a parliament.

Also, a king could not rule by edict. A king could propose laws, but they had to be voted by the curiate assembly, and then by the senate.

I would also point out that at this point the Roman concept of "law" was somewhat broader than ours, and included pretty much any government act or decision. As an illustration, the first act of a king would be to propose a "law" to the curiate assembly that gives him the actual powers of a king. The assembly would then vote on it, and at least theoretically they could refuse to give the guy any power. But at any rate that was the kind of thing that was filed under "law" for them.

The same kind of voting covered such "laws" as declarations of war, or ratifying admissions of a family in a different curia, or ratifying events like the intercalary months to keep the calendar aligned, and even wills and adoptions.

A Roman king, while lacking many legal safeguards on their power (presumably also because there was not much they could do that didn't require a vote), was bound by customs in a lot of aspects, e.g., for when to convene the Senate, how to appoint senators, etc. At face value, a custom isn't really a safeguard, but let's just say the first king who decided to screw traditions and customs and do his own thing was Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. He's also the last king of Rome, which really tells us how well that went.

What I'm getting at, though, is that a lot of our modern institutions and ideas about government actually come from the Romans, not from the Greeks. And those in turn evolved pretty naturally out of the institutions they had during their monarchy, some two centuries before Athens came up with their democracy. They were voting over whether they should do this or that, at a time when the Greeks were just finally picking themselves up from their dark ages.

Not to mention that some pretty pivotal ideas in our modern western society, such as the rule of the law, are also Roman ideas. The Greeks never discovered that, actually. Athens had more like mob rule, with all sorts of unpredictable outcomes that had nothing to do with a predictable legislation.

So, are we giving Athens too much credit?

 

[Craig B]

Hans

You may wish to consider, in the course of this discussion, the Laws and constitution established by Solon the Athenian who lived c638 to 558 BCE. I'm not sure that "mob rule" is a satisfactory description of the Athenian state.

 

[Brainache]

Couldn't you also argue that a lot of Germanic and Norse people came up with their own versions of democracy? I'm pretty sure they had a big influence on the way government developed in the west, especially in Britain.

 

[Brown]

This thread really confused me until I realized that I had mis-read the word "Athens" in the title as "Aliens."

 

[HansMustermann]

Hans

You may wish to consider, in the course of this discussion, the Laws and constitution established by Solon the Athenian who lived c638 to 558 BCE. I'm not sure that "mob rule" is a satisfactory description of the Athenian state.

Actually I WAS thinking of Solon when I said their democracy started around the middle of the 6th century BCE.

I'm also pretty sure that "mob rule" is actually a pretty mild way to describe their screwed-up judicial system. Rule of the law it certainly wasn't, or not how we understand that concept.

As I may have mentioned before, Athens had a peculiar system in which pretty much everyone could sue everyone for criminal stuff. While theoretically you did have to say he's done something wrong in the existing legal framework, "impiety" or basically conduct improper for a Greek were catch-all categories, and not only that, but they counted as crimes against the state.

The first step would be that the accuser would try to convince the jury that the other guy is verily a low life deserving punishment, while the defendant would try to convince them that he's done nothing wrong, or at the very least he has an excuse. If the jury voted guilty, step 2 would be that the accuser tried to convince the jury that a certain punishment is warranted (e.g., "death is too good for such impiety!"), while the accused got to argue a counter proposal (e.g., "wait, can't I just be banished?")

The low hanging fruit for why I call such a system "mob rule" is that such a system produced aberrations like the trial of Socrates. The guy got a death penalty basically just for annoying his fellow Greeks and giving the youth funny ideas.

But ok, let's say maybe Plato made up a part of that.

But we have documented cases where generals got death penalties for losing a battle, for example. Get tried by a jury who lost friends and relatives in that battle, and you were pretty much guaranteed to not see the next day.

Or at least one case where someone got basically banished for being the wrong kind of gay. Yeah, in Athens. Go figure.

There was no knowing in advance what is allowed and what isn't, nor any limits on what you can demand in what today we'd call a civil lawsuit. If the mob wanted you dead, you'd get a death penalty, and that was that. If a more popular opponent wanted you out of the town, you'd get chucked out of town.

And we're not just talking early stuff, when they were just discovering how it works. A century later, Pericles managed to solidify his position by getting Cimon chucked out of town for just having a rather unpopular political position. (Cimon wanted peace with Sparta, Pericles and a lot of others wanted the war with Sparta that would eventually prove incredibly disastrous fo Athens. Also note that Cimon wasn't some hated guy like Socrates, but a pretty popular guy in his own right, and apparently in a habit of winning support with generous "gifts".) Then he did the same with Thucydides (the politician, not the historian), whose fault was pretty much just opposing the out-of-control building expenses. Pericles himself got tried and stripped of power, plus fined a hefty sum (we're talking in the range of several hundreds of yearly wages for a skilled trireme crewman) when a plague hit Athens.

Really, THAT absurd reasons worked.

Now I'm not saying that the Roman system were perfect, but they had been working on at least a good start towards the rule of law for quite some time, at the time when the above absurdities were happening in Athens.

 

[HansMustermann]

Couldn't you also argue that a lot of Germanic and Norse people came up with their own versions of democracy? I'm pretty sure they had a big influence on the way government developed in the west, especially in Britain.

In some aspects, yes, that is correct. The Norse cultural influence cannot be understated in Britain. Still, eventually everyone got a boner for Rome, so arguably the systems we have today are more based on that than on Norse ideas.

 

[gumboot]

Well, I don't know who this "we" is, but personally I've always thought that Greece's contribution to modern society was pretty limited, and almost entirely amounts to secondary influence through the Roman state. The Roman state, by contrast, made an enormous contribution to modern western civilisation.

I've studied both Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, and nothing I've encountered would lead me to any other conclusion. Greece's primary contribution to the modern state was in influencing the establishment of the Roman state.

 

[kedo1981]

I don't we give the Greeks to much, but we don't give other cultures enough.
A side note
A person I know tried to tell me that he was descended from "black Irish" and that meant he had African blood, I tried to convince him that black irish were descendants of Danes or other europeans who had dark hair, he didn't buy it.

 

[Loss Leader]

Sad to see that this thread wasn't about the University of Georgia.

That being said: my understanding is that the rediscovery of Greek works at the beginning of the European Renaissance led to an almost fetishistic love of all things Greek. That nostalgia colored western thought all the way through to today.

So, yes, we are giving Athens, Greece too much credit. Athens, Georgia, on the other hand, kicks ass. Go Dawgs!

 

[Craig B]

... I've studied both Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, and nothing I've encountered would lead me to any other conclusion. Greece's primary contribution to the modern state was in influencing the establishment of the Roman state.

If it exercised this influence, it can hardly be true that the Athenian state was in a condition of "screwed-up" lawlessness and "mob rule".

 

[HansMustermann]

It's worth mentioning though that a lot of the Greek influence on Rome was from Greek colonies and states that didn't practice the Athenian democracy at all.

E.g., probably the most influential and powerful city in Magna Graecia (the Greek colonies in southern Italy), and which largely dominated the other Greek cities, was Tarentum, which was a Spartan colony. And needless to say, the Spartans were a monarchy.

So, yeah, a lot of the Greek culture the Romans absorbed, and which eventually also may have led to other stuff like Roman women having it better than Athenian ones, was Spartan not Athenian. So, again, crediting Athens there is IMHO missing the point.

Plus, most of the contact of Romans with Greek culture, and the time when they ditched their own gods and a lot of culture in favour of the Greek ones, was after Alexander The Great pretty much put the kibosh on that democracy. (While it was somewhat restored later, it's still argued exactly how much of a democracy it was.)

As for lawless excesses and mob rule, I would point out some more historically documented excesses, such as:

- They tried and executed 9 out of 10 treasurers of the Delian league for embezzlement, one after the other, and were about to execute the tenth too, when someone discovered the accounting error in the audit. So, oops, they had been innocent.

(By contrast, if you were popular enough, like Pericles was, you could get some bribe done with public money accepted as special expenses.)

- In 406 BC, they tried and sentenced 6 out of 8 fleet generals to death, for failing to save survivors in a storm. The only thing that had been technically illegal about it, was that they had been tried as a group instead of individually, one by one.

- Then they repented that, and tried and executed those who had accused the generals. No, literally.

 

[anor277]

Interesting thread.



It is worth remembering that the Athens of Pericles was a slave society as much as a democracy. The Sparta of Pericles’ age was also a slave society, where the society was the slave owner rather than an individual.



As regards the rule of law in 5th century Athens there are several instances of gross miscarriages of justice (of which the Athenians were ashamed). For the one in 406 BC, after the battle of Arginusae, amongst those executed was the son of the elder Pericles (interestingly also that Socrates was one of the few who argued the illegality of putting the generals on trial). I can remember reading one of the texts (Bury’s) who said of Arginusae, ‘that the Athenian people were probably right in assuming that there had been criminal negligence somewhere’.



Had Athens been an oligarchy, or had a different method of jurisprudence, would the generals have been tried; would Socrates have been tried and convicted? ‘Democratic’ Athens probably had a better record than the oligarchy that ruled briefly after the war. I also tend to think that Socrates would have been swiftly ridden out of town on a rail from republican Rome.

 

[Giz]

I don't we give the Greeks to much, but we don't give other cultures enough.
A side note
A person I know tried to tell me that he was descended from "black Irish" and that meant he had African blood, I tried to convince him that black irish were descendants of Danes or other europeans who had dark hair, he didn't buy it.

Is that perhaps akin to the "black highlander" which I'd always heard of as having descent from shipwrecked survivors of the Spanish Armada. (Note: I'm not vouching for that being accurate, just the story I'd heard).

 

[TubbaBlubba]

I always thought that Aristotle's "Constitutional republic" was much more similar to today's democracies than that of Athens - and Aristotle's work was written in opposition of Democracy. It owes a lot to Plato's Republic, of course, but it was a tad less like Apokolips...

 

[gumboot]

If it exercised this influence, it can hardly be true that the Athenian state was in a condition of "screwed-up" lawlessness and "mob rule".

Huh?

 

[Craig B]

Huh?

I mean of course that if the early Roman state was established under the influence of Athens, as you suggest, and if it was a law-based state, then the Athenian state would appear to have been one as well.

 

[gumboot]

It's worth mentioning though that a lot of the Greek influence on Rome was from Greek colonies and states that didn't practice the Athenian democracy at all.

E.g., probably the most influential and powerful city in Magna Graecia (the Greek colonies in southern Italy), and which largely dominated the other Greek cities, was Tarentum, which was a Spartan colony. And needless to say, the Spartans were a monarchy.

Well... kind of. A few things need remembering;

1. Sparta was a Monarchy, but it also practised democracy, and over time power shifted from the hereditary kings to the democratically elected ephors.
2. Taras (as the colony was called) was founded by exiles from Sparta.
3. While Taras was founded as a monarchy, in about 466 BC it became a democracy.

Having said that, you raise a very important point. The Roman government structure really bears little resemblance to the Athenian Democratic structure, but rather has much more in common with other Greek governments, and in particular that of Sparta (note that the Roman Republic had two Consuls, like the two kings of Sparta).

Importantly, Rome practised representative democracy (as exercised to varying degrees by many Greek states), not direct democracy (as was practised in Athens).

 

[gumboot]

I mean of course that if the early Roman state was established under the influence of Athens, as you suggest, and if it was a law-based state, then the Athenian state would appear to have been one as well.

Well, to be fair I was arguing about Greece's influence on Rome, rather in Athens' influence in particular. I don't know that I would argue Athens' relationship to law was particularly similar to Rome's, and certainly Athens didn't have the Roman concept of "the rule of law" whereby "the law" existed as an entity independent of the mechanisms of the government. "The Law" was essentially whatever the Assembly or the Jury decided it was for that given vote, and they were perfectly able to contradict their application of the law in different cases.

That contrasts with Ancient Rome, where law was codified, and case law would be used to guide future decisions - indeed, in the Roman decision there was no distinction made between legislation and case law - they were both given identical legal authority.

 

[Craig B]

Well, to be fair I was arguing about Greece's influence on Rome, rather in Athens' influence in particular. I don't know that I would argue Athens' relationship to law was particularly similar to Rome's, and certainly Athens didn't have the Roman concept of "the rule of law" whereby "the law" existed as an entity independent of the mechanisms of the government. "The Law" was essentially whatever the Assembly or the Jury decided it was for that given vote, and they were perfectly able to contradict their application of the law in different cases.

That contrasts with Ancient Rome, where law was codified, and case law would be used to guide future decisions - indeed, in the Roman decision there was no distinction made between legislation and case law - they were both given identical legal authority.

My intention was to examine the suggestion that Athens was "lawless" and governed by "mob rule"; I am concerned because some authoritarians even today disparage modern democracy in these terms. That is why I referred to Solon. One source states that

Solon laid the foundation for a democratic system of justice through the first of a series of constitutions that gave birth to democracy. He instituted changes and established a legal code that brokered a non-violent social revolution and transformed the passion for vengeance into a justice system. This system was based on rule of and equality before the law, a redistribution of power through law, and resolution of conflict through a public court system with juries of peers in an adversarial process before the presiding judge. ... Solon converted private revenge into public justice. He harnessed wild justice and made it a central part of democracy.

http://www.aapl.org/newsletter/N242hist_justice.htm This (if it is true) makes Athenian law seem more formal and secure than some posters have suggested.

 

[HansMustermann]

I didn't say it was lawless. But, like gumboot said, the "law" was whatever the large group of peers elected as jury and judges decided it should be at the moment. If they decided that being for peace with Sparta or opposing draining the public funds in the middle of a war with grandiose construction projects were the mark of a traitor and crimes against the state, that was that.

Solon's reforms more like laid out the framework for how those trials should work, than a code of laws like the Romans or western nations today have. (And incidentally even Athens eventually found that system screwed up, and ditched those trials by assembly in the middle of the 4'th century BC.) It said that you should try a group of people one by one, instead of as a group, for example, but it didn't say you can't try them for not supporting the troops or for asking annoying questions.

And see what I said before: even those rules of trial were occasionally broken, if the mob decided they want to do it differently. Those 6 admirals should have been tried individually, as the law said, but if the mob decided they want to try them as a group, they did.

Essentially if USA today were to work like 5'th century BCE Athens, you'd have a code of laws that says how many jurors you must get and who speaks first. But otherwise if the local demagogue wants to bring you to a criminal trial for not supporting the troops or even just for having opinions that remind him of Communism, and demand a death penalty for being so un-american, he jolly well could.

That's not the same as being "lawless", because it does enforce a certain conformity and deters acts against the group.

But it's not the same as the rule of the law either. The rule of the law means, among other things, that there are some laws and rules you can know in advance, and you will be tried by those. A system in which anything can be legal or illegal, depending on who has the better lawyer and how the mob opinion goes that day, is not the rule of the law.