Democracy, Civic Motivation, and the Search for the Everyday Athenian

For the duration of my residency at the Center for Hellenic Studies (Spring of 2024), my research plan involved the expansion of the work already undertaken for my dissertation with an aim to produce a monograph on civic behavior in Classical Athens. The particular focus of my project is on the public payments instituted by the democratic polis so as to facilitate civic participation and their effect on the behavior of Athenians in terms of motivation. The political experience of the everyday Athenian is, of course, not readily available in our sources, and even the sources that occasionally address it directly, such as the works of Thucydides and Aristophanes, call for unremitting caution vis-à-vis issues of authorial bias and conventions of genre. Accordingly, considering that my project necessitates a familiarity with all of the literature that has any light to shed on issues of democratic civic behavior, I devoted my time at the CHS to a perusal of philosophical works (the Platonic corpus, Xenophon’s Socratic works, as well as Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics). This process resulted in the compilation of a catalogue of every passage in this body of literature that speaks to the behavior of Athenians in terms of civic motivation and participation, and below I provide a report on some preliminary findings.

A major problem in the study of the Athenian politeia is that no author of the Classical period articulated anything approximating a theory of democracy. For the ancient historian, thus, the way Athenians qua citizen-group viewed their political organization as well as the way Athenians qua individuals viewed their place within that organization are two frustratingly obscure issues. The only evidence for the framework within which the citizens of Athens understood their democracy appears in a uniquely Athenian genre of public oratory, namely funeral orations.

It has long been argued (Loraux 1986) that funeral orations were the only official ideological discourse that the polis of Athens ever developed, and that discourse, according to Nicole Loraux, projected “aristocratic” ideals. More recently, Dominique Lenfant (2024) convincingly counterargued that, despite its conformity to conventions and ad hoc innovations on the basis of politico-military context, the content of the surviving funeral orations would not sit easily with those opposing Athens’s regime, for no orator failed to affirm democratic slogans, such as freedom, power shared by all, and equality before the law. In this regard, Perikles’ funeral oration, which was delivered for the dead of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, is unique among the surviving examples of the genre in its extensive narrative on the advantages of Athens’s democratic constitution. At some point during his oration, Perikles famously proclaims about Athenians that (Thuc. 2.40): In Plato’s Republic, Sokrates reiterates this seeming communis opinio among Athenians in even more emphatic terms when he says that one sees “people minding their own business being called foolish in the city and being of little account, while those who meddle being respected and praised” (550A τοὺς μὲν τὰ αὑτῶν πράττοντας ἐν τῇ πόλει ἠλιθίους τε καλουμένους καὶ ἐν σμικρῷ λόγῳ ὄντας, τοὺς δὲ μὴ τὰ αὑτῶν τιμωμένους τε καὶ ἐπαινουμένους). As discussed in detail by L. B. Carter (1986), some Athenians, especially from the group of citizens wealthy enough to perform liturgies, indeed preferred to abstain from politics. But what about the ones who would concur with Perikles? What can be said about the motivation behind their civic participation?

Before any attempt to explore the possible answers to the above question, it should be noted that Athens’s constitution actively sought to guarantee a fundamental prerequisite of functionality for any democratic system, namely leisure. As noted by Aristotle in his Politics (1269A): In Classical Athens, the opportunity cost involved in civic participation was counterbalanced by pay. For Aristotle, the ultimate form of democracy eventuates when everyone partakes in the government, and that level becomes attainable “because even the poor are able to have leisure by receiving pay” (Pol. 1293A μετέχουσι μὲν πάντες τῆς πολιτείας… κοινωνοῦσι δὲ καὶ πολιτεύονται διὰ τὸ δύνασθαι σχολάζειν καὶ τοὺς ἀπόρους λαμβάνοντας μισθόν). Athens’s course towards the ultimate form of democracy, according to Aristotle, started with Perikles’ institution of pay for court service (sometime around the late 460s BC) and continued with an ever-expanding subsidization of civic participation undertaken by successive popular leaders (Pol. 1274A τὰ δὲ δικαστήρια μισθοφόρα κατέστησε Περικλῆς, καὶ τοῦτον δὴ τὸν τρόπον ἕκαστος τῶν δημαγωγῶν προήγαγεν αὔξων εἰς τὴν νῦν δημοκρατίαν).

Within this civic context, our philosophical sources for the most part suggest a peculiarly one-dimensional motivational profile for politically active wealthy Athenians. Public life was a source of social distinction throughout the ancient Greek world, and love for this kind of distinction (i.e., φιλοτιμία) was apparently the spur to civic participation for many of the well-to-do. Plato highlighted the competitive motives of wealthy Athenians—himself included, given the authenticity of Ep. 7—within the public sphere of activity in several of his works. Most notably, in Gorgias it is said that a man shunning the centers of public life risks becoming unmanly, for it is there, Kallikles insists, that men distinguish themselves ever since the time of the Homeric heroes (485D ὑπάρχει τούτῳ τῷ ἀνθρώπῳ… ἀνάνδρῳ γενέσθαι φεύγοντι τὰ μέσα τῆς πόλεως καὶ τὰς ἀγοράς, ἐν αἷς ἔφη ὁ ποιητὴς τοὺς ἄνδρας “ἀριπρεπεῖς” [cf. Il. 9.441] γίγνεσθαι). Besides this utility-maximizing attitude with a focus on social distinction, however, there are rare moments that Plato’s Sokrates couches his arguments on a different kind of motivation. Later on in the same dialogue, for example, Sokrates reminds Kallikles of their earlier agreement on the premise that an orator is supposed to make citizens better people (Grg. 515C). As a consequence, it appears that the potential for civic participation driven by other-regarding, altruistic motives was something that Athenians entrained as a possibility.

At this point, the question as to what we know about the civic participation of the so-called penētes (i.e., the poor) of the Athenian body politic comes to the fore. Without doubt, wealth afforded good education and adequate leisure for an Athenian citizen to be involved in politics full-time, and many wealthy Athenians indeed devoted themselves to politics (see Rhodes 1986). Still, this does not mean that the liturgical class of Athens monopolized policy-making nor that their proposals were ratified without challenge. Peter Rhodes (2000; 2016) has demonstrated that Athenian orators, irrespective of socio-economic standing or reputation, were nothing more than habitual speakers at Assembly meetings, sometimes successful in winning their fellow citizens over to their policies and other times not. The pluralistic nature of democratic politics, thus, invites an investigation into the portrait of the politically active poor Athenian in our sources.

An interesting detail in the conversation between Sokrates and Kallikles in Plato’s Gorgias is the motivation ascribed to poor Athenians. As discussed earlier, Aristotle described the public payments originally engineered by Perikles as a means to facilitate participation within a democratic status quo. When Plato has Sokrates voice the criticisms circulating against Perikles for these subsidies, however, a bleak picture emerges regarding the civic motivation of penētes. Specifically, Sokrates argues that Perikles has been accused of corrupting the Athenians, for public payments made them “idle, cowardly, talkative, and avaricious” (515E διαφθαρῆναι ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνου … πεποιηκέναι Ἀθηναίους ἀργοὺς καὶ δειλοὺς καὶ λάλους καὶ φιλαργύρους, εἰς μισθοφορίαν πρῶτον καταστήσαντα). The straightforward implication here is that poor Athenians were charged with volunteering for court service out of avarice. Upon hearing this, Kallikles is quick to point out that Sokrates merely reproduces the criticism of wealthy elitists and, given that the same kind of criticism is articulated in both the Aristotelian (27.4) and the pseudo-Xenophontean (1.13) Athenian Constitution, he does not seem to be mistaken about the source of Sokrates’ argument.

Taking the above into account, I would like to conclude this short investigation into the civic motivation of everyday Athenians with the information on the issue afforded by Old Comedy, and specifically Aristophanes’ Knights. The play presents the struggle for the stewardship of Demos’ household between a Sausage-seller and a wicked Paphlagonian slave, which unfolds in a series of three comic agōnes. During these agōnes, the Sausage-seller strives to prove that he has all the credentials necessary for the stewardship, which paradoxically means proving himself to be a worse scoundrel than Paphlagon. In the end, the Sausage-seller rejuvenates Demos and swaps places with Paphlagon, who is condemned to a life of disgrace near the city’s gates.

The play is an apparent political allegory: Demos stands for his namesake, the citizens of Athens (i.e., the dēmos ), and his slaves for orators who pledge themselves to the citizens’ service; thus, the struggle for Demos’ stewardship is a struggle for political prominence. For 1315 out of the play’s 1408 lines, the thematic axis of its plot is the search of Demos’ slave-orators for salvation from Paphlagon, which according to an oracle would appear in the form of another villain—one who would out-Paphlagon Paphlagon (Eq. 109-149). Coming from the dregs of society (Eq. 178-194, 409-426, 1236-1247), the Sausage-seller certainly beats Paphlagon in his own game as he reaches the apogee of bombast (Eq. 285-301, 335-343, 691-727), shamelessness (Eq. 356-381, 903), slander (Eq. 315-318, 429-452, 461-474, 801-819, 823-835, 847-857, 896-898, 927-940), and cajolery (Eq. 733-755, 769-795, 869-889, 906-911, 1154-1223). Accordingly, after assuming the steward’s position, he is expected to turn into one more exploiter of Demos, but one of friendlier disposition towards his fellow slave-orators. Nevertheless, when the Sausage-seller magically rejuvenates old Demos, he not only offers relief from Paphlagon’s insidiousness but also readjusts Demos’ entire political outlook. The post-rejuvenation Demos declares that he will no longer yield to demophilic rhetoric and self-serving orators—to which old Demos yielded willing for the sake of his own financial gain (Eq. 1340-1345, 1350-1354).

The closing scene of Knights has been considered by many scholars as an inconsistency of the plot, leading to a long history of negative assessments of the play’s dramatic structure (see Landfester 1967, 83-89; Brock 1986; Bennett and Tyrrell 1990). Indeed, while presented as a loathsome character throughout the play, the Sausage-seller seemingly becomes a wholly different person in the end. Yet, a close reading of the play suggests that this turn of events is no incongruity. Despite his obnoxious credentials, the magic that the Sausage-seller performs on Demos is not out of character; instead, it is the miraculous result following from the manifestation of his altruistic civic-mindedness. During the third agon, the Sausage-seller and Paphlagon bring out their baskets, and each vies to prove that he can serve Demos the best delicacies. The Sausage-seller plainly demonstrates that his aspiration to stewardship is informed by altruism rather than self-interest, as he serves Demos everything in his basket, whereas Paphlagon only serves the scraps of what he withholds in his basket for himself (Eq. 1211-1223); thus, he carries the day only after showing his selfless devotion to the head of the household. This proof of altruistic motivation might come late in the play, but it does not come as a surprise. Although unseen during his attempts to establish that he is worse than Paphlagon, the Sausage-seller’s distinct character was hinted at quite early in the play. On entering the stage, the Sausage-seller was immediately accosted by two slave-orators who try to make him join their cause, but he remains hesitant about his ability to become “a leader of Athens” (Eq. 164), “a great man” (Eq. 178), “a chief of the crowd” (Eq. 191-192), and “a steward of the people” (Eq. 212). In an attempt to convince him otherwise, one of the slave-orators recites an oracle portending Paphlagon’s demise, the message of which is part cryptic and part obvious. The first part refers to a defeat of a “leather-eagle” by a “blood-sucking snake” (Eq. 197-199), and the second part explains that “the god grants great glory to the sausage-sellers, unless they prefer to sell their wares” (Eq. 200-201 κοιλιοπώλῃσιν δὲ θεὸς μέγα κῦδος ὀπάζει, ｜αἴ κεν μὴ πωλεῖν ἀλλᾶντας μᾶλλον ἕλωνται.). The slave-orator obviously misses the operative word in the second part of the oracle, which is none other than “unless” (αἴ κεν μὴ). In other words, the Sausage-seller will never bring the current state of political affairs to a halt, unless he decides to pursue an active participation in politics. By the end of the play, then, a political layman has taken a bold step into the arena of politics and has done so for the benefit of the Athenian citizens collectively. As a consequence, it appears that Aristophanes’ Knights would have imparted on its original audience a strong impression of the transformative potential of a citizen’s altruistically motivated participation in democratic politics.

In conclusion, although the agonistic motivation behind the civic participation of Athens’s wealthy has received adequate scholarly attention, there is more work to be done with regard to the civic motivation of Athenians for whom lack of leisure would not allow for a constant, full-time involvement in democratic politics. The surviving philosophical works from the Classical period, composed by authors in radical opposition to Athens’s democracy, have nothing positive to say about the everyday Athenian who attended Assemblies or sat on judge-panels. Nevertheless, if Plato’s Sokrates entertained the potential for altruism behind the civic participation of the elite players of Athenian politics, then there seems to be no reason to assume that the same could not be applicable for the rank and file of the body politic. In a study on altruism in classical Athens, Matthew Christ (2012) explored how Athenians conceived of helping in different contexts, and after a detailed analysis of our sources, he concluded that altruism in the civic context was a behavioral ideal more projected than excepted. Specifically, Christ noted that “although Athenians are drawn to the ideal that citizens place the city’s needs above their own and come to its assistance solely out of patriotic zeal, they pragmatically accept the reality that citizen helping of the city can have a more selfish side to it” (89). This pragmatism, however, did not mitigate criticism against the selfishness and lack of altruism everyday Athenians would exhibit through civic behavior oriented towards personal gain on the comic stage. As seen above, Old Comedy, in its intimate attention to everyday realia, at times promoted an other-regarding mindset as salutary for the functionality of Athens’s democracy. Consequently, the cultural factors that would either encourage or discourage the development of an altruistic mindset in Athenian politics call for further investigation.