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Overview
Classical Greek Oligarchy thoroughly reassesses an important but neglected form of ancient Greek government, the "rule of the few." Matthew Simonton challenges scholarly orthodoxy by showing that oligarchy was not the default mode of politics from time immemorial, but instead emerged alongside, and in reaction to, democracy. He establishes for the first time how oligarchies maintained power in the face of potential citizen resistance. The book argues that oligarchs designed distinctive political institutions—such as intra-oligarchic power sharing, targeted repression, and rewards for informants—to prevent collective action among the majority population while sustaining cooperation within their own ranks.
To clarify the workings of oligarchic institutions, Simonton draws on recent social science research on authoritarianism. Like modern authoritarian regimes, ancient Greek oligarchies had to balance coercion with co-optation in order to keep their subjects disorganized and powerless. The book investigates topics such as control of public space, the manipulation of information, and the establishment of patron-client relations, frequently citing parallels with contemporary nondemocratic regimes. Simonton also traces changes over time in antiquity, revealing the processes through which oligarchy lost the ideological battle with democracy for legitimacy.
Classical Greek Oligarchy represents a major new development in the study of ancient politics. It fills a longstanding gap in our knowledge of nondemocratic government while greatly improving our understanding of forms of power that continue to affect us today.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400885145 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/27/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Problem, Background, Method
Oligarchy, the harsh and unjust greed of a few rich and wretched men arrayed against the poor majority.
— DIO OF PRUSA
1.0 The Problem of Oligarchy
At least since the time of the poet Pindar in the mid-fifth century BCE, the ancient Greeks understood that political regimes could be classed according to rule by the one, the few, or the many. Twenty-five centuries later, if one were to press Classical historians on how much attention they have paid to each type, they might respond, with some sheepishness, that two out of three ain't bad. Work has proliferated on the study of the rule of the many, demokratia (democracy). While Classical Athens has usually been the focus, scholars are starting to venture beyond the territory of Attica and beyond the constricting temporal boundaries of 508–322 as well. A less intensive, but still impressive, amount of work has gone into understanding the rule of one. Scholarship has traditionally been interested in the Archaic tyrants, but more recently attention has expanded to encompass multiple forms of sole rulership in ancient Greece, including Classical-era tyrants, Hellenistic kings, and longstanding dynasties.
Studies devoted to the rule of the few, oligarchia (oligarchy), by contrast, are practically nonexistent. The last comprehensive treatment in English, by Leonard Whibley, was published one hundred and twenty years ago. Subsequent studies, while adding to our knowledge of oligarchy, have not attempted to replace Whibley's work. Moreover, historians have typically focused on the Athenian oligarchies of the late fifth century, and in particular on the oligarchic ideology that inspired them, rather than on the concrete actions of historical oligarchs from across the Greek world as they appear in the ancient sources. It has rarely been asked what oligarchs in the Classical period actually did in their capacity as oligarchs. What was the relationship between the rulers and the wider male citizenry (the demos) of an oligarchically governed polis? To what extent was oligarchic rule contested by popular movements? And how might oligarchs have collectively responded in an attempt to retain their power? All of these questions will be concerns of this study, which, as the title states, is primarily a political history (one that treats of the development and functioning of political institutions over time) rather than an intellectual history or a study in political thought.
It is worth asking why historians have attempted so few studies of Classical Greek oligarchy. One reason is that the evidence for oligarchic governance is so lamentably thin. Finley, for example, despaired of being able to say anything systematic about oligarchies: "Unfortunately, the information is lacking for a meaningful discussion of politics in the oligarchic Greek ... states." This claim is disputable. First, although there is admittedly much less evidence for oligarchy than for democracy, the sources that do exist — which include many important epigraphic discoveries not available to Whibley — have not been systematically collected. Second, the evidence has not been analyzed through the most productive methodological lens. When we view Classical Greek oligarchy as a species of authoritarianism, as I propose to do here, we are better able to organize and make sense of the available historical evidence.
More importantly, however, it is clear that scholars consider the topic of oligarchy less interesting because the political phenomenon is (supposedly) so overwhelmingly common. Wherever we look, whether in ancient Greece or in the modern world, we are apt to find a relatively small number of people doing the active work of governing in any given state. The early-twentieth-century political theorist Robert Michels designated this the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" (1962), from which no political organization could escape. Ober (1989) has decisively shown that Classical Athens defies the Iron Law, but all other Greek states remain potentially open to the charge. Some historians, therefore, might consider the ancient distinction between oligarchia and demokratia unhelpful and potentially misleading, since in fact all poleis were governed by a few. At the same time, scholars tend to overestimate the conservatism of the Greeks outside of Classical Athens, and thus to overestimate the total number of oligarchies as well. Indeed, some assume that oligarchy was the most common type of constitution.
This book takes a very different view. It contends that by confusing the "oligarchy" of Michels's "Iron Law of Oligarchy" with oligarchia in ancient Greece, we are in danger of misunderstanding much of ancient Greek politics. The "Iron Law" threatens to blur differences between regimes that were clear and often extremely important to political actors at the time. As much as we may want to conflate ancient Greek democracy and oligarchy — because ancient democracy seems unjustifiably exclusionary to our modern sensibilities — the labels were crucial for many contemporaries. To quote Finley once again: "'Rule by the few' or 'rule by the many' was a meaningful choice, the freedom and the rights that factions claimed for themselves were worth fighting for." It would be presumptuous, therefore, to ignore or second-guess the claims of the sources. By the same token, we should not foist untested assumptions about the frequency of oligarchy onto the ancient evidence. New resources, such as the Copenhagen Polis Center's Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (IACP), are enabling us to begin the process of tracing constitutional developments over time. Teegarden has recently demonstrated, using data taken from the Inventory, that "the ancient Greek world became increasingly more densely democratic during the Classical and early Hellenistic periods." As this book will show, democracy not only increasingly coexisted with oligarchy in the Greek world, it also largely replaced it during the Hellenistic period. Oligarchy, as it turns out, was not "inevitable" for the Greeks — in fact, it became less and not more common over the course of the Classical period.
The next section of this introductory chapter argues for a new and distinctive historical understanding of ancient Greek oligarchia, based on a careful reading of the ancient sources. According to this view, oligarchia does not refer to just any regime in which a small number of people govern, but to a specific constitutional alternative that arose as a reaction to demokratia between the late sixth and mid-fifth century. Thus, the meaning of oligarchia, both as a concept and as a form of political practice, cannot be understood apart from demokratia, alongside which it developed pari passu. Once the Greek elite perceived demokratia as a potential threat to their interests as a class, many members of the elite, working in different poleis and under differing local conditions, created what nevertheless became a broadly similar repertoire of political and social institutions designed specifically to avoid the danger of democracy. The term for this bundle of defensive and reactionary techniques was oligarchia.
This book therefore attempts to "de-naturalize" our inherited and largely taken-for-granted ideas about oligarchy. Once we see that oligarchia was a specific historical reaction to another concrete phenomenon, that of demokratia, we can begin to wonder afresh at how Classical Greek oligarchy managed to sustain itself as long as it did. For if, as I will argue, oligarchy was never intended to be popular with the mass of the demos, and if the average Greek citizen of the Classical period preferred democracy to oligarchy, we may well be puzzled by how anything so unpopular managed to survive for any length of time, let alone several centuries. With the situation framed in this way, the central question of this book is the following: Given the general unpopularity of oligarchy and the widespread appeal of democracy as a constitutional alternative, what accounts for the survival of oligarchy during the Classical period? The answer, in brief, is institutions. The understanding of institutions employed here stems from engagement with the scholarship of political scientists working within the tradition of the "New Institutionalism." New Institutionalism, in contrast to older variants, recognizes that institutions, far from simply being either instruments of raw coercion or mere reflections of existing ideology, structure behavior by influencing individuals' expectations of others' actions. Its choice of institutions strongly affects the future stability of a given political regime, in that institutions tend to produce certain "equilibrium" states of behavior. When political actors design institutions effectively, they can engender equilibria in the aggregate that no individual would have chosen left to his or her own devices. In the case of authoritarian institutions, this can mean that populations acquiesce to an unpopular regime, even in the absence of thoroughgoing coercion or a legitimating ideology. Institutions in this scenario represent a particularly effective instrument in the toolkit of the authoritarian ruler.
Thus, to the question of why and how oligarchia persisted for so long in the face of demokratia, I answer that it was likelier to survive, all else being equal, when oligarchs implemented specialized social and political institutions that kept the elite united while discouraging the demos from collective action. These institutions, which comprise the "rules" that characterized the "rule of the few," are treated extensively in chapters 2 through 5. So long as the equilibria promoted by the various institutions obtained, the oligarchic polis was stable, even when large numbers of people among the demos individually preferred democracy to oligarchy. The focus throughout is not on what ancient oligarchs and their critics said about them, or how elite thinkers theorized about them, but what they actually did. The book is thus the first attempt to collect and analyze the characteristic actions of Classical-era oligarchic states. To make these processes clearer, I frequently adduce examples from "New Institutionalist" political science literature, especially from recent studies devoted to authoritarianism. Although the parallel is by no means perfect, modern authoritarian regimes, like Classical Greek oligarchies, have also discovered institutional means of staving off democracy and shoring up their own minority-run rule.
Chapter 6, by contrast, explores what happened when these same institutions broke down. Using examples from throughout Classical Greek history, I show that oligarchic stasis (civil war) and regime breakdown were not haphazard but resulted from a circumscribed set of scenarios that represented institutional failure. Here, in addition to surveying the contexts most conducive to democratic revolution, I use some basic game theory to illuminate the strategic choices at play in scenarios of oligarchic collapse. Oligarchs were often incapable of cooperating in high-risk, uncertain situations. Their need to save themselves frequently outweighed the benefits that would have accrued from maintaining unity against challenges to the oligarchic status quo. Over time, these tendencies fatally undermined the oligarchic project.
Thus, in a brief afterword, I look forward to the early Hellenistic period, when oligarchia ceded ideological ground to demokratia and shed all pretense of being a legitimate constitutional alternative. Hellenistic Greece, despite being cast sometimes as the graveyard of democracy, in fact became the high tide of democracy in the ancient world. Recent revisionist arguments about the survival of democracy beyond the fourth century show that democracy was the institutional "rules of the game" after the conquests of Alexander. By the same token, the foregoing Classical period represented the apex, not of democracy, but of oligarchy. It was the period when oligarchy was created, developed, but was largely abandoned as a potential rival to democracy. The arguments of this book allow us to see more clearly why and how democracy was able to step into the constitutional space abdicated by oligarchy in the late Classical period.
The remainder of this introductory chapter is taken up with three tasks. First (1.1), I present the evidence for the conception of oligarchy sketched above, as a reactionary form of government concerned to prevent democracy. To put this development in context I begin by surveying the Archaic period, when it would be more accurate to speak of "elite-led regimes" rather than "oligarchy" proper. It will become clear that, although the Archaic elite could assume a hostile and snobbish pose toward the common people, the demos nonetheless played a significant role in the political life of the period. Archaic elite-led government did not define itself, as Classical oligarchy later did, as a united front of the elite against the demos. At the same time, many of the institutional techniques used by Classical oligarchs were forged in the political furnace of the Archaic period, particularly those designed to prevent the emergence of a tyrant from the ranks of the elite. I then discuss the development of a distinctly oligarchic mindset following the advent of demokratia in several poleis in the late sixth and early fifth centuries. Here the most important arguments will be three: that the opposition between oligarchy and democracy developed relatively early in the fifth century; that democratization, and the oligarchization that emerged in reaction to it, was a Panhellenic process, encouraged by but not solely reliant on the growth of democracy at Athens; and, relatedly, that conflict between democrats and oligarchs predated the Peloponnesian War. The war may have exacerbated political tensions within the poleis, but it did not create them ex nihilo.
In the next section (1.2), I provide a synchronic overview of the key features linking oligarchies during the Classical period. I show that oligarchies defined themselves overwhelmingly by a wealth criterion, and that the threshold for full citizenship was usually set in such a way as to encompass the leisured wealthy. This section also demonstrates that the so-called "hoplite republic" was largely a myth. This concept, attested mainly in the political works of Aristotle, has entered numerous discussions as an explanatory via tertia between broad democracy and narrow oligarchic "dynasties" (dunasteiai), or juntas. I show, by contrast, that attested instances of the "hoplite republic" are extremely rare, and that the arguments advanced for its widespread existence are unconvincing. An investigation into the actual makeup of the ruling groups in oligarchies mentioned in the historical sources reveals that they were quite small, including at most the wealthiest 20 percent of the free male adult population of a polis but more typically less, around 10 or 15 percent. More often than not, in fact, hoplites can be found fighting in support of democracy against oligarchy during the Classical period.
The final section of this chapter (1.3) lays out the book's methodological approach. It defines "institutions" and the "New Institutionalism" in greater detail and specifies the extent to which these ideas can be adapted and applied to the ancient world. I also introduce some concepts that will be crucial for the argument going forward, specifically "equilibrium," "common knowledge," "coordination," the "collective action problem," and a few elementary games from game theory. The proof of the legitimacy of these concepts is, of course, their usefulness for explaining the ancient evidence, which will become apparent in subsequent chapters.
1.1 From Archaic Regimes to Classical Oligarchy
To recognize the extent to which Classical-era oligarchy represented an unprecedented attack on the political participation of the demos, we must first acknowledge the considerable involvement of the common people in the poleis of the Archaic period. Such a view, while fully supported by the available evidence, nevertheless runs counter to certain elitist theories of Archaic government that have recently gained prominence. Consider, for example, this particularly strong-worded claim by Anderson, describing the Greek poleis of the seventh and sixth centuries: "Poorer individuals as yet had no political presence whatsoever." Other historians have similarly emphasized the outsize role of the elite in Archaic political life, in the process playing down or even denying any significant participation by the wider community of free male citizens. There is no doubt that the elite played the leading role in the political communities of Archaic Greece. On the other hand, Greece did not have to wait until the emergence of demokratia to witness political participation by the demos. A survey of our earliest Greek texts, both literary and epigraphical, provides a corrective to the strongly elitist view. What is striking is not the sudden and unexpected appearance of the demos in the late sixth century, but rather its consistent presence in the political systems of Archaic Greece, starting from the earliest times. The members of the Archaic elite, while they could on occasion be extraordinarily harsh and even violent toward the common people, seem overall to have tolerated the presence of the demos in everyday political life. The mitigating factor was that that presence was limited. When democracy appeared in the late Archaic and early Classical periods, heralding a much more extensive political role for the common people, the stance of many members of the elite toward the demos hardened into what we know as oligarchy.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Preface ixAcknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations and Conventions xv
1 Problem, Background, Method 1
2 Oligarchic Power-Sharing 75
3 Balancing Coercion and Co-optation 107
4 The Politics of Public Space 148
5 The Manipulation of Information 186
6 Processes of Regime Breakdown 224
Afterword: The Eclipse of Oligarchia 275
Appendix 287
Works Cited 291
Index Locorum 323
General Index 343
What People are Saying About This
"In contrast to the huge amount of work done on ancient and modern democracy and democrats, there is a yawning absence of work on ancient—or modern—oligarchs and oligarchy. That gap is now triumphantly filled by Matthew Simonton's brilliant book on oligarchy in the ancient Greek world."—Paul Cartledge, author of Democracy: A Life"This is the first full-length study of Greek oligarchy as a regime type in more than a century. Well-crafted and multilayered, this important book does much more than situate oligarchy within the spectrum of Greek and Aristotelian regimes; it argues the provocative new thesis that oligarchy came into existence in the early fifth century BCE as a reaction to democracy, and it seeks to understand how, despite being unpopular and authoritarian, oligarchies thrived throughout the fifth and fourth centuries."—Peter van Alfen, Margaret Thompson Curator of Ancient Greek Coins, American Numismatic Society