The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter
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The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter
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Overview
A lively and accessible introduction to the Greek and Roman origins of our political ideas
In The Birth of Politics, Melissa Lane introduces the reader to the foundations of Western political thought, from the Greeks, who invented democracy, to the Romans, who created a republic and then transformed it into an empire. Tracing the origins of our political concepts from Socrates to Plutarch to Cicero, Lane reminds us that the birth of politics was a story as much of individuals as ideas. Scouring the speeches of lawyers alongside the speculations of philosophers, and the reflections of ex-slaves next to the popular comedies and tragedies of the Greek and Roman stages, this book brings ancient ideas to life in unexpected ways.
Lane shows how the Greeks and Romans defined politics with distinctive concepts, vocabulary, and practices—all of which continue to influence politics and political aspirations around the world today. She focuses on eight political ideas from the Greco-Roman world that are especially influential today: justice, virtue, constitution, democracy, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, republic, and sovereignty. Lane also describes how the ancient formulations of these ideas often challenge widely held modern assumptions—for example, that it is possible to have political equality despite great economic inequality, or that political regimes can be indifferent to the moral character of their citizens.
A stimulating introduction to the origins of our political ideas and ideals, The Birth of Politics demonstrates how much we still have to learn from the political genius of the Greeks and Romans.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400865543 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/22/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Birth of Politics
Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter
By Melissa Lane
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Melissa LaneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4008-6554-3
CHAPTER 1
Justice
Civilizing hubris
'Their justice is violence.' So the Greek poet Hesiod, sometime about 700 BCE, scathingly described the peasants among whom he lived in the mountainous region of Thebes, and indeed the whole generation to which he belonged. A small farmer embittered by losing a tussle over family land to his brother, Hesiod claims to have risen above his loss by taking the high road, writing an ambitious poem, Erga kai Hemerai (Works and Days), to instruct his brother in how to farm. Meanwhile he records his harsh assessment of the injustices practised by the likes of his brother in their generation, comparing their contemporaries unfavourably with the idealized justice of a legendary golden age.
Hesiod is one of the two major epic poets, with Homer, who wrote during what is called the archaic period of Greek history, from roughly the 8th through the 6th centuries BCE. Both Homer and Hesiod recount the doings of the panoply of gods whom the Greeks acknowledged in various hierarchies. (One set of gods, the Olympian gods headed by Zeus, had won a power struggle with an earlier set headed by Kronos; complex familial and affective ties existed among each set of gods, and between gods and favoured mortals.) These two poets likewise recount generations of human politics, interwoven with divine interventions. While Homer, considered as the author of poems composed somewhat earlier than those of Hesiod, looked back to earlier centuries dominated by Bronze Age kings, Hesiod centred Works and Days on the politics of the archaic period itself, which was dominated by alliances of aristocratic families as well as by internal power struggles among them. These 'oligarchical' polities, interrupted by bouts of tyranny when one family or individual would obtain the upper hand, were the crucibles in which dramatic changes in technology and social organization – such as the development and spread of coinage, writing and new military tactics – were forged. Struggles for power, among these polities and within them, came to include a new set of players: the non-elite multitude who were relatively poor, and who first asserted themselves in Athens in the 5th century BCE (the century most often counted as the beginning of classical Greek history) in the establishment of a democratic regime.
The fundamental political idea of justice can already be found in archaic poetry, and it is there that we will first explore it, moving on to some of its subsequent developments in poetry and philosophy, especially those in classical Athens. Setting the terms of right or fair treatment, justice was widely seen by the Greeks as the key to civilization. Living in over 1,000 separate communities of different sizes, scattered across a mountainous mainland with its Peloponnese peninsula as well as hundreds of islands, calling themselves Hellenes but speaking diverse dialects, the Greeks were acutely aware of how recently human societies had become civilized and how precarious the fruits of civilization remained. They knew themselves to be relative latecomers in comparison with the long-settled communities of Mesopotamia or Egypt from which they had learned much. Civilization freed humans from bare subsistence by developing arts and sciences such as agriculture, metallurgy, navigation, architecture and the very poetry that Hesiod composed. For Hesiod, whose poetic voice gave substance to archaic Greek ideas, it was justice that made all this possible. Why? Because without it, humans would be in the same position as the nightingale seized by a hawk, described in Hesiod's poetic fable. 'As I wish, I will make my meal of you, or let you go,' says the hawk to his hapless victim clutched in his talons (WD 209). Without justice, human society could never have risen beyond such an incessant struggle to kill or be killed.
We can think of justice as opposed to the idea of hubris, which in Greek signified a form of status violation, a disrespecting of what is owed to someone. Justice is giving people what they are owed. The disrespect involved in hubris, by contrast, upsets the natural order and threatens to bring down divine retribution. In the bitterness of Hesiod's words quoted at the outset of this chapter, we find evidence that the Greek attachment to justice was as vulnerable as it was deep. Justice is not an idea unique to the Greeks, but they developed powerful understandings of what it might require, especially between the rich and the poor, alongside corrosive challenges to the claim that it merits being followed at all. We will explore their statements of aspiration to justice, as well as their challenges to its nature and value.
Rich and Poor
In ancient societies, justice among citizens was as important as it was regularly threatened in the relations between rich and poor. Each Greek city-state harboured a small but powerful group of wealthy families, together with a much larger body of the poor. Some of the rich had inherited their wealth, largely in land and in the harvests of grain, grapes or olives that it could provide. Others would engage in trade, financing ships sailing to trading posts like Persia and Egypt, or (especially from the 5th century onwards) investing in industries like shipbuilding. Greek vases depict the good life that the rich enjoyed: wining and dining, listening to the music of hired musicians, adorning themselves with jewellery. By contrast, many of the poor lived at the margin of survival – as landless peasants or urban scavengers – although others made a decent living as artisans or small farmers. Whatever their actual income or wealth, all of those considered members of the 'many' lacked the luxury and status possessed by the 'few' and bestowed by wealth, especially the relatively secure wealth of the landed elites.
The elites thought of themselves as hoi aristoi, the best men, from which we get our word 'aristocracy'; in Athens, their families were known as the Eupatridae, the well-born. Sometimes they simply called themselves, or were called by others, hoi oligoi, the few, contrasted with hoi polloi, the many. That so few are rich that the rich can even be defined as 'the few', while the vast multitude are destined to be relatively or absolutely poor – such an equation is not a matter of strict logic, for why, in principle, can't there be more than a few who are rich? Yet it was endemic in ancient Greek history, and it remains a powerful description of many societies today. A society based on a class between rich and poor – on a middling class – would be an alternative, as Aristotle would come to recognize, and as Americans especially would demonstrate in the 20th-century post-war boom. But as many societies currently slide into further polarization of wealth, the key question of Greek politics from 600 BCE onwards is increasingly resonant again: on what terms can the rich and the poor live together in a single polity?
The poor must not routinely threaten the lives or property of the rich; otherwise, social peace is impossible. But unless the laws are fair enough to the poor, why should they respect them? (History shows that the margin of fairness required has often been far less than an impartial observer would have imagined necessary.) In seeking that balancing act, some regimes simply imposed terms by force. But even then the rulers had to define 'justice' and present their laws as embodying it. The struggle to establish justice between rich and poor – or to label the arrangements that were imposed as just – was the fundamental point of intersection between economic and political power, then as now.
We find a perfect vantage point from which to view this process in the work of Solon (c. 630–c. 560 BCE), an Athenian aristocrat who made a name for himself as a 'wise man' and poet, but most of all as a legislator called on by his countrymen to help quell the bitter struggles between rich and poor and set his city on a new just path. Solon wrote new laws that amounted to what we might call a new constitution (the idea of a constitution is discussed in Chapter 2). By giving the poor a defined role in politics, Solon put an end to exclusive aristocratic domination and so marks a crucial point in the transition from archaic towards classical Greek politics.
How did Solon achieve civic peace? By focusing on economic relations. Like certain lawgivers and rulers in other ancient societies, including the Near Eastern societies of Egypt and Phoenicia with which the Greeks traded goods, stories and ideas, he abolished the right of the poor to pledge their bodies as security for debt and so, upon defaulting, to be seized or sold as slaves by their creditors. This was clearly a restriction on the contractual liberty of the poor: they were not to be allowed to incur debts with such security, even should their children starve for want of cash. But it was a restriction of their contractual liberty for the sake of protecting their political liberty: as Solon explained it, for the sake of justice. Wherever the poor are vulnerable to contracts that make them potentially liable to be used or sold as slaves, they cannot be equal citizens, because they cannot be secure in their status as citizens at all. They are in those circumstances always at risk of falling into some form of bondage. The abolition of bodily security for default on debt among citizens, then, was crucial to the establishment of the justice that could make poor and rich alike full citizens of Athens.
Without a balanced regime that gives the poor some political clout, they will always be at the mercy of the rich. Law is the most important way in which a city can achieve justice. Solon claimed to have combated hubris – the violence and insolence that threaten justice – by the establishment of eunomia, or a condition of good laws and law-abidingness. He boasts in his poetry: 'These things prevail, power and justice [dike] having been fit together by me, and I saw it through as I had undertaken. I wrote laws [thesmoi] too, the same for the poor and the rich, and inscribed straight justice fitly for each' (w 36). Indeed, while both sides agreed to abide by Solon's proposed constitution in order to put an end to civil strife, neither side liked it. That is a good measure of his success: as Solon himself describes it, he established 'a strong shield' for each side against the other, 'not allowing victory to either unjustly' (w 5).
Justice for Whom?
Some people in the Greek world lacked the full protection that justice offered. That was true above all for the slaves, who in Greek societies were mainly non-Greek (though Greeks were liable to be seized as slaves should they find themselves on the losing side of battles abroad, or simply unlucky in their encounters there: the philosopher Plato is said to have been put up for sale as a result of his unhappy experiences with a tyrant in Syracuse). Most slaves were captured in warfare or piracy, sold either en masse from conquered cities (often women and children, all of whose menfolk had been massacred) or as individual prisoners (though many of these were ransomed by remaining friends or family).
A slave was the conceptual opposite of a free person. Indeed, it has been argued that it was in Greek reactions to the social role and experience of slavery that the concept of freedom was fully born. The conceptual opposition between slavery and freedom would become enshrined in the first title of the Digest of Roman Law, which made no effort to conceal the conventional, rather than natural, origin of the status of slaves (adapting the original Greek contrast between nomos and phusis): 'Slavery is an institution of the ius gentium [the law common to all peoples], whereby someone is against nature made subject to the ownership of another.' In the Greek and Roman legal systems, while certain legal provisions for slaves varied, slaves were nonetheless broadly conceived as chattel. They were property, not persons. Justice was left behind, or almost so, in the near-absence of any legal protections or secure entitlements for slaves.
Athenian slaves, for example, were almost entirely excluded from the very site of justice, the law-courts. They could not generally bring suit or serve as witnesses, and their testimony was admitted only if obtained under torture and if both contending parties agreed. They could not marry without their master's consent; in this sense Athenian slaves were as Roman slaves would later be described, under an alien jurisdiction (alieni iuris) rather than their own (sui iuris). Their labour was more varied: while some slaves worked the city's silver mines in nightmarish conditions, others ran households for their masters or were even deployed by the city as public administrators.
Alongside the formal public role of some slaves, the crowded and informal collective life of Athens led to slaves in general being accorded some legal protections in practice even though they were deprived of them in theory. For example, in classical Athens, as in republican Rome, slaves wore clothes that were indistinguishable from those of free persons. Likewise, Athens, like most Greek cities, prohibited by religious customary law the killing of a slave (or of anyone), in that case in stark contrast to Rome, where the lives of all members of the household – wives, slaves and children – were in the absolute power of its head, or paterfamilias. Still, while such maximally harsh (capital) punishment of slaves was allowed in Rome, a Roman master might mourn a slave boy's accidental death, as a bust of 'the dearest Martial, a slave child, who lived two years, ten months and eight days', commissioned by his master sometime between 98 and 117 CE, suggests. Yet, overall, the fundamental point remains: slavery was conceptually alien to justice.
What did it mean for the Greeks to tolerate such an abrogation of justice as slavery, at the same time that they celebrated justice as one of the foundations of civilized society? We can follow the lead of the late British moral philosopher Bernard Williams here, in seeing slavery as having been understood at the time as the imposition of necessity. The Greek view of slavery seems generally to have been not that it was un-just, but that it was non-just. It marked the limits of where justice could apply. Beyond that was a matter of sheer necessity. Williams pointed out that those in wealthy democratic societies today tolerate gross abrogations of justice too. The existence of the global poor is seen as a regrettable by-product of capitalism, or of feudal economic relations, but too often it is not seen as something that can be made just. It is tolerated as if it were a necessity, or at least an inevitability, as an institution. For any one individual, being enslaved was a matter of cruel and unlucky fate. Just as most slaves were indeed hapless prisoners of war, so most commentators on their lot saw it not as a matter of nature, but of misfortune, as in a fragment of Sophocles:
One day showed us all to be one tribe of humans, born from father and mother; no one is by birth superior to another. But fate nourishes some of us with misery and some with prosperity, while others are compelled to bear the yoke of slavery.
By and large, the Greeks did not see slavery as a case of injustice. Rather, justice arose as a question only among those who were not slaves; slaves were outside the reach of its full protection. Although they did receive certain minimal protections in the law, these were not protections that they could themselves act legally to claim. In extraordinary circumstances however, further legal protections could be bestowed, as in the case of the personal freedom and political citizenship bestowed by the grateful Athenians upon their slaves who had helped to man the fleet in the battle of Arginusae in 406 BCE.
Other groups in the polis also stood at a certain distance from justice, but they were not as wholly alienated from it as were slaves. Athens, for example, harboured an especially large population of free-born foreigners, mainly from other Greek cities. Some, like the travelling 'sophists' (intellectuals and orators) or visiting merchants, were merely passing through. But other foreigners settled in the city and could, if sponsored by a citizen, gain the legal status of 'metic', which was, broadly speaking, in between that of slave and full citizen. Metics paid special taxes and were obliged to serve in the military; they were recognized in certain religious processions, as an honoured foreign contingent in the city; and they could trade on equal terms with citizens (apart from having to pay a special fee for establishing a market stall). But they could not vote in the assembly, hold office or serve as court jurors. They could use the courts to bring lawsuits seeking justice, but they could also be subjected to torture to elicit evidence, and certain crimes against metics were punished less severely than those against citizens.
Plato's Republic is set at the house of one of the wealthiest and most prominent metic families; one son would die fighting for the restoration of the democracy and another would become famous as a speechwriter. As shown by the dialogue's depiction of the patriarch of that family (Cephalus, originally from Syracuse), metics could conceive of justice in their economic relationships with other men (paying their debts) and in their relationship with the gods (paying the debts, as it were, of their sacrifices), even though they were aliens to political justice in its fullest form. Perhaps the most famous metic in Athenian history is Aristotle, who wrote his account of man as a political animal while living outside his own political community, unable there to fully exercise his own nature as a citizen.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Birth of Politics by Melissa Lane. Copyright © 2014 Melissa Lane. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
LIST OF FIGURES ixLIST OF MAPS x
INTRODUCTION Possibilities of Power and Purpose 1
CHAPTER 1 Justice 25
CHAPTER 2 Constitution 57
CHAPTER 3 Democracy 93
CHAPTER 4 Virtue 129
CHAPTER 5 Citizenship 181
CHAPTER 6 Cosmopolitanism 215
CHAPTER 7 Republic 241
CHAPTER 8 Sovereignty 285
CONCLUSION Futures of Greek and Roman Pasts 313
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 325
GLOSSARY 327
ATHENS MAP KEY 332
BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OF KEY PERSONS, EVENTS AND PLACES 333
REFERENCE LIST AND ABBREVIATIONS 341
NOTES 357
INDEX 377
What People are Saying About This
"The Birth of Politics is a splendid introduction to the world of ancient Greek and Roman political thought. Melissa Lane is a sure-footed and wonderfully knowledgeable guide through the varied terrain of ancient ethics and politics. Her writing is at once profound, engaged, elegant, and lively. Revealing both the familiarity and strangeness of classical thinking about justice, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and much else, she reminds us why the classics matter today, how often our own political ideas find their antecedents in ancient practice, and how much we still have to learn from the past."—Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece "This is the best introduction to ancient political thought—accessible, stimulating, thoughtful, and accurate. Melissa Lane, a scholar of the first rank, is a trustworthy guide who brings recent thinking to bear on the central topics and does an excellent job of writing with an eye to contemporary relevance, without removing ancient thinkers from their very different historical and political contexts."—Kinch Hoekstra, University of California, Berkeley"This is a lucid, effective, and accessible account of ideas central to Greek and Roman political thought. Melissa Lane does an excellent job of synthesizing important developments in the study of the subject, and she also makes her own subtle, original argument, showing how we might well draw upon the ancients as we think through our own problems."—Danielle Allen, author of Our Declaration