标签： Finley Politics Ancient World

Finley: Politics in the Ancient World

M. I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Finley: Politics in the Ancient World
PREFACE
I STATE, CLASS AND POWER
II AUTHORITY AND PATRONAGE
III POLITICS
IV POPULAR PARTICIPATION
V POLITICAL ISSUES AND CONFLICT
VI IDEOLOGY

PREFACE

The English word 'politics' has a semantic range that differs somewhat from that of its synonyms in other western languages. (p. vii)

• On the one hand, 'politics' is not normally employed in the sense of 'policy';
• on the other hand, it has more of the implication of the ways, informal as much as formal, in which government is conducted and governmental decisions are arrived at, and of the accompanying ideology.

Politics in that sense are essentially my theme. (p. vii)

I STATE, CLASS AND POWER

the prevailing modern social-contract theory of the state 'obscures our recognition of the fact which Aristotle had long ago pointed out, that the constitution of a State has its roots in what moderns term its social system'. （p. 1)

The ambiguity of the word demos is directly relevant:

• on the one hand, it meant the citizen-body as a whole, as in the opening words of the formal decrees of a democratic Greek assembly - 'the demos has decided';
• on the other hand, it meant the common people, the (p. 1) 
  many, the poor, as in Plato's Gorgias. (p2)

The Latin populus had the same double connotation. (p2)

The language of ancient politics thus confirms Aristotle's 'important truth', that (no longer in Newman's formulation) the state is an arena for conflicting interests, conflicting classes. (p2)

Yet, perhaps surprisingly at first sight, many modern commentators and historians seem hardly to have noticed what the Greeks and Romans were saying on the subject. (p3)

For my purposes it is sufficient to enunciate some elementary and obvious postulates. (p8)

• The first is that in a study of politics there is no meaningful distinction between state and government. 
  Political metaphysicians notwithstanding, the citizens (or subjects) in any regime equate the two, even in a revolutionary situation.
• Government, the state, implies power both internally and externally - that is my second postulate, and I am not immediately concerned (as I shall be later) to distinguish power in its sense ofpotestas from power in its sense of auctoritas. (p8)
• The third simple postulate is that the choice of those who govern and the ways in which they govern depend on the structure of the particular society under examination. (p9)
• A central feature of the societies with which we are concerned was the important presence of slaves;
• another was the severe restriction among the Greeks of access to citizenship;
• a third was the exclusion of women from any direct participation in political or governmental activity. (p9)

I have also used the term 'class' loosely, as we customarily do in ordinary discourse. (p10)

• Aristotle's 'rich' and 'poor' were such classes, undefined but nevertheless identifiable by contemporaries. (p10)

We must therefore restrict ourselves to the ancient connotations of the word-pair, rich and poor, and we must sedulously avoid the modern corollary of a substantial middle class with its own defined interests. (p11)

In democracies, Aristotle generalized disapprovingly (Politics 131oa3-10), 'demagogues are always dividing the polis into two, waging war against the rich', while there are oligarchic states in which the oligarchs swear, 'I shall be ill-disposed to the demos and plan whatever evil I can against them.'

• That exemplifies class, class consciousness and class conflict sufficiently for my purposes.(p11)

My present subject is politics, and specifically city-state politics. (p11)

• my sole concern is with the self-governing city-state, or at times with what pretended to be a city-state (excluding not only the monarchies but also the Greek tyrannies).
• That means the Greek world from the (p11) 
  late archaic period, say the mid-seventh century, to the conquests by Alexander the Great or a little later; the Roman world from the mid-fifth century B.C. to the late Republic.(p12)

The very label 'city-state' implies the existence of common elements sufficient to justify taking Greece and Rome together, at least as a point of departure. (p12)

At the beginning of our story, the social structure was notably alike in the Greek city-states and in Rome:

• they were agrarian societies, in which the open class conflicts, so central in archaic Greek and Roman history, were regularly and exclusively between landed aristocratic creditors and peasant debtors.(p12)

Some aristocrats had no doubt managed to become impoverished; more important, a number of outsiders acquired enough wealth to feel themselves entitled to share in the monopoly of power. (p13)

• In Athens, for example, Solon in 594 B.C. divided the citizenry into four wealth categories for various purposes, including eligibility for public office. (p13)
• the members of the fourth and highest category were called pentakosiomedimnoi (fivehundred-bushelmen), a blatantly artificial coinage that symbolizes the timocratic quality of the scheme. (p13)
• In Rome, too, the timocratic principle was introduced into the governmental (and military) system at a roughly comparable stage, and became so firmly entrenched that Nicolet has rightly labelled 
  Rome a cite censitaire. (p13)

What matters in the present context is that, at the point at which we begin our inquiry, both the Roman plebeians and their counterparts in Greece, the bulk of the citizenpopulation, overwhelmingly rural, were already differentiated by wealth and status. (p14)

However, all the city-states had in common one feature, the incorporation of peasants, craftsmen and shopkeepers into the political community as members, as citizens; even those who had neither the obligation nor the privilege of bearing arms, it is important to underscore. (p15)

• it is symbolized by the very inventive political subdivision of the state into smaller territorial units, 'demes' in Athens and other Greek poleis, 'tribes' in Rome, most of which were rural. (p15)

One further variable requires consideration: a few states acquired (p15) 
control over relatively extensive foreign territory, either incorporating it completely, or dominating and exploiting it without formally (or even substantively) destroying all independence, or varying the extent and nature of the control from place to place. (p16)

one important distinction between Greece and Rome imposes a qualification. (p19)

• The strictness of Roman military discipline is a commonplace. (p19)
• Closely linked with that difference was the Roman concept of a magistrate's imperium (to be examined in the third chapter), which allowed him, if he were high enough in the hierarchy of offices, to exercisecoercitio in everyday civilian life against a citizen (and of course against women and non-citizens) who failed to obey an order; (p20)
• ** Imperium was an undefined power; it embraced anything within a magistrate's sphere of competence that had not been excluded by law.** (p20)
• His Greek counterpart could, for example, fine a delinquent shopkeeper, but he could not exercisecoercitio in this or any other situation unless specifically authorized to do so by a legislative act, and no such act ever allowed him to imprison or banish. (p20)

The two incidents had significantly different political overtones: (p21)

• the Roman Senate saw in the Bacchanalians a subversive threat from 
  below, whereas in Athens in 415 the fear was of a conspiracy aimed 
  at both the Sicilian expedition and democratic institutions (whether 
  or not either fear was well founded is beside the point).
• What they had in common was the fact that a large proportion of the citizens possessed military arms as a matter of obligation and were practised in their use. (p21)
• In an internal crisis, or what was held to be a crisis, the army as such was not available as a coercive force, but armed men could be summoned as volunteers. (p22)

II AUTHORITY AND PATRONAGE

The unavoidable conclusion is that, at least in the stable states, acceptance of the institutions and of the system as a whole was existential: their legitimacy rested on their continual and successful existence. (p24)

Our concern is less with arguments of the 'goodold-days' variety than (p25)

• with the psychological need for identity through a feeling of continuity, and
• with its concomitant feeling that the basic structure of social existence and the value-system inherited from the past are fundamentally the only right ones for that society. (p25)

The pertinent question is not: Did Augustus restore the res publica? but:

• Did Romans and Italians in sufficient numbers persuade themselves that he had?
• What mattered was the ability of the stable societies to maintain without petrification their strong sense of continuity through change, their resolute acceptance of what the Greeks callednomos and the Romans mos, habitual practice, usage, custom. (p25)

With the emergence of the state and state cults, religion was a factor in providing legitimacy to the system as a whole: the psychological effect of a continuous, massive, solemn sharing in state rites that passed the pragmatic test over long periods. (p26)

No doctrinal or, in a proper sense, ethical justification was provided by religion for either the structure of the system or the governmental policies being pursued or proposed. (p27)

• Therefore, although I do not underestimate the impact of religion, I do not find it the decisive, let alone a sufficient, factor in the process by which such great authority was acquired by the system and then maintained for a long time. (p27)

The first is fundamental to all the others.

• Because no city-state was genuinely egalitarian and many were not democratic either, political stability rested on the acceptance in all classes of the legitimacy of status and status-inequality in some measure, not only of the existence of boni but also of their right to greater wealth, greater social standing and political authority.
• Only the limits, the qualifications, the nuances varied.
• The point is not that Plato or Aristotle, Polybius or Cicero thought so but that the improbi and hoi polloithought so, too, or at least behaved as if they did. (p27)

Hierarchical values were built into the education of Greeks and (p27) 
Romans of all classes (p28)

• in the ancient world, apart from the inevitable exception of Sparta, the state played little direct part in education and none at all in pedagogy.
• Yet these ordinary citizens, those who were illiterate as well as those who were technically literate, were far more educated (in the non-pedagogical sense) than historians usually allow.
• The communities were relatively (and often absolutely) small 'face-to-face societies', 9 in which there was continuing contact from childhood with public life. (p28)

I have insisted on the political education of the illiterate as well as the literate because the ancient world remained predominantly one of the spoken, not the written word. (p29)

The implications and consequences of an oral culture with a component of literacy are complex and often inaccessible to us. (p29)

• whatever one may mean by a 'really literate society', whatever the undeniable importance of literacy in the history of philosophy, science, historiography or 'religion of the book', for politics the accent needs modification. (p30)

The plain fact is that never in antiquity did any but the elite (or their direct agents) consult documents and books. (p30)

Popular 'semi-literacy', in sum, made little contribution one way or the other. (p31)

Yet there is a fundamental difference when compared with any society, including the Graeco-Roman, in which there was no popular 'literature', no mass media, no popular pamphlets or broadsheets, no popular magazines or novels.

In this area, the difference between democratic Athens and oligarchic Rome lay primarily not in popular literacy but in the fact that in Athens the elite divided in the critical period, with the dominant section accepting democratic institutions and offering themselves as leaders, an off er that the demos did not reject or resist. (p31)

What, then, was expected of the leaders? (p31)

Hence the material base - or aspects if one dislikes base - of political auctoritas requires serious consideration. (p32)

In the city-states, including those that did not fall within the conquest category, governmental costs, including the military, fell almost entirely on the wealthier classes of the citizenry in so far as they could not be shifted to external subjects.

• Direct taxation, whether on property or on the person (a poll-tax), was a mark of tyranny (internal or external) and was rejected by both oligarchies and democracies.
• Exceptions were made to meet military needs when other sources of public revenue were insufficient. (p32)
• That is why taxation, which was so central in late medieval and modern social struggles, hardly ever appears as an issue in classical antiquity before the Roman Empire. (p33)

These 'negative gains' are not to be underestimated, but they cannot be said to have established of themselves a solid material base for political authority. (p33)

My question is not about them but about the poor, the majority of the citizenry in the city-states,(p33)

• Only in Athens, to the best of our knowledge, did the state provide massive economic support for the poor. (p34)
• The buttressing effect was substantial and politically significant; one could reasonably call it a form of permanent, governmental 'subsistence crisis insurance'. (p34)

The stress in Aristotle, as generally among ancient authors, was on what may be called community patronage, that is, large-scale private expenditure, whether compulsory or voluntary, for communal purposes - temples and other public works, theatre and gladiatorial shows, festivals and feasts - in return for popular approval; often, as we shall see, for popular support in the advancement of political careers. (p35)

The Greek word Aristotle used in his criticism of the oligarchs, which I have rendered as 'public service', is leitourgia, (p36)

• The classical Greek liturgy, known from a number of poleis but in detail only from Athens, was a formal, institutionalized 
  device whereby certain public services were assigned on a rota system to individual members of the richer sector of the population, who were directly responsible for both the costs and the performance, bypassing the treasury, so to speak. Liturgies were compulsory and honorific at the same time. (p36)

**That seems to me to warrant the inclusion of this peculiar form of community service under the heading of patronage despite the absence of a man-to-man patron-client relationship. (p37)

The word 'liturgy' did not disappear in the post-polis Greek world.

• It even retained its honorific form in the more or less autonomous Greek cities that survived.
• In the Hellenistic monarchies, however, a new type of liturgy became widespread and often oppressive;
• Imperial Rome took over the Hellenistic practice - leitourgia under the bilingual Empire was the synonym for the (p37) 
  Latin munus- and steadily extended it almost to the breakingpoint. (p38)

The Romans did not adopt the classical Greek liturgy-system.

• The difference between the two structures is beautifully exemplified by the navy. (p38)
• The numerous public religious festivals illuminate the difference 
  still further.
• Alongside the navy they were the chief occasion for Greek liturgies, whereas in Rome the principle was long maintained that they had to be financed from the treasury. (p38)

The ancient sources provide considerable, though not systematic, documentation of the various kinds of community patronage.(p39)

• On the other hand, they are almost completely silent about patronage of individuals outside the elite strata. (p39)

The relationship between patron and client is a reciprocal one between unequals, involving not only a subjective element, the 'evaluation of the relationship' by the client, but also the objective one of a genuine exchange of goods or services. (p41)

• It is also very flexible, not only within any society and even within an individual relationship but also among different societies and epochs. (p41)

If Greek and Roman aristocrats were neither tribal chieftains nor feudal war lords, then their power must have rested on something else, and I suggest the obvious, their wealth and the ways in which they could disburse it. (p45)

It has been demonstrated that members of the wealthiest census-class, the pentakosiomedimnoi, were widely scattered among the Attic demes. (p46)

• if they wished, they could have exercised patronage.

Once we have exorcised the spectre of tribalism, together with such consequent errors as the notion that Cleisthenes substituted 'locality for birth' as the basis for political relationships and controls, the whole tradition about archaic Athenian politics points to the deme, the neighbourhood, as the base from which political careers were launched through the deployment of wealth, through local patronage.(p46)

It is significant that of the few innovations by Pisistratus that have survived in the historical record, two were obviously designed to weaken the local power of the richer landowners by undermining major devices that fostered patron-client relations. (p46)

• Pisistratus set up (p46) 
  a revolving loan-fund for peasants and (p47)
• he created a board of thirty 'deme-judges' who went on circuit; (p47)

In that respect, Pericles was a direct heir of Pisistratus:

• he reestablished the apparently defunct board of deme judges (Aristotle, Constitution of Athens 26. 3) and
• he instituted a long series of measures giving financial assistance to the poor from state funds. (p47)

What, then, did Cleisthenes contribute? 
How did his 'mixing everyone up' in his newly created tribal structure block the powerful individuals from making use of their patronage networks for political ends? (p47)

• There were means of overcoming some of the effects of 'mixing up' through horizontal and vertical alliances among patrons, thereby pooling the voting strength of their supporters. (p48)

What I have been trying to suggest, in sum, is that inquiry into the ancient state and government needs to be lowered from the stratosphere of rarefied concepts, by a consideration not only of ideology, of 'national' pride and patriotism, of DER STAAT, of the glories and miseries of war, but also of the material relations among the citizens or classes of citizens as much as those more commonly noticed between the state and the citizens. (p49)

III POLITICS

By 'politics' I mean something specific (p51)

Three distinctions seem to me to be necessary.

• The first is between states and the manifold groupings which exist within a state, social, economic, educational or whatever. (p51)
• The second is between states in which decisions are binding and enfo.rceable and pre-state structures in which they are not. (p52)
• The third is between states in which one man or a junta has the absolute power of decision regardless of how much advice may be sought beforehand, and those in which binding decisions are reached by discussion and argument and ultimately by voting. (p52)

Politics in our sense rank among the rarer of human activities in 
the pre-modern world. (p53)

• In effect, they were a Greek invention, more correctly perhaps, the separate inventions of the Greeks and of the Etruscans and/or Romans.
• I stress the originality chiefly for its corollary, the iron compulsion both Greeks and Romans were under to be continuously inventive, as new and often unanticipated problems or difficulties arose that had to be resolved without the aid of precedents or models. (p53)

The Greeks and Romans invented politics, and, as everyone knows, they also invented political history, or rather history as the history of war and politics.(p54)

But what everyone knows is imprecise:

• historians in antiquity wrote the history of policy, which is not the same thing as politics;
• they wrote primarily about foreign policy, concerning themselves with the mechanics of policy-making (apart from speeches in Senate or Assembly) only in moments of acute conflict turning into civil war. (p54)

Soon enough, politicians found ostracism to be a useful device for decapitating the opposition - a neat illustration of one implication of an oral culture:

• remove a man physically from the state and he has no lines of communication with the citizenry.
• But it was a weapon with a dangerous double edge;
• so it was used sparingly - there is no certain instance between 443 B.C. and the ostracism of Hyperbolus in 416 - and after 416 it was allowed to die a quiet death. (p55)

However, a number of general points are too essential for the study of politics to be left unsaid (p57)

One must begin with a generalization:

• every city-state government consisted of at least a larger assembly (and usually of only one), a smaller council or councils and a number of officials rotated among the eligible men, most often on an annual basis. (p57)

The tripartite constitutional structure rested on the need for efficiency, or at least for a workable machinery; (p58)

Nor was there the modern separation of powers in the judicial sphere.

In principle there was also no separation between the civil and the military departments of government. (p58)

• This identity of civilian and military roles existed in principle, as I have said, and the notable fact is not that there were eventually important departures in practice, but that the principle was clung to so tenaciously. (p59)

Change is of course what the history of politics is about; in the final analysis, change in one or another respect was both the objective and the consequence of political disagreements and conflicts. (p59)

We must therefore turn from broad constitutional outlines to the important variables.

• The first of these is size. (p59)

It would be difficult to overestimate the impact of war on ancient politics. (p60)

• The unparalleled Roman record of war and conquest should not blind us to the fact that there were also few years in the history of most Greek city-states (of Sparta and Athens in particular), and hardly any years in succession, without some military engagements. (p60)

The variables immediately begin to proliferate. (p61)

• The first distinction is between conquest-states, those which subjected relatively extensive territory or a relatively large number of previously independent communities to their authority, and the others, which did not.

Schematically stated, imperial states favoured, and of ten imposed, preferred constitutional systems on their sub.ie1:ts and intervened politicaJly or militarily in order to achieve the desired result. (p61)

Politics are by their nature competitive, and the first distinction is between communities in which the competition is closed to a property-owning sector of the citizenry - oligarchies in the narrow sense - and those in which the poorer classes have some right of participation. (p63)

Only Athens and Rome lend themselves to analysis, and, for all their differences, they bad in common an element of popular participation. (p63)

• Hence the political leaders, whoever they were and however they acquired their status, were compelled not only to manoeuvre among themselves but also to manoeuvre so as to secure popular support for various purposes.
• That is politics, and the tendency among historians to stress the lack of initiative among the mass of the citizenry and then to conclude that they therefore counted for little 'in reality' evades all the questions.

That political leadership was monopolized by the wealthier sector of the citizenry throughout the city-state era is well established, and some of the explanation has already been suggested. (p63)

Politics at the leadership level, in shon, was a full-time activity, a way of life. (p64)

But the latter, too, no matter how incompetent or indifferent to politics, had imperium during their year in office, as did the praetors. (p65)

• The visual symbols of imperium were the fasces (bundles of rods and axes bound together by red thongs) carried by lictors, always in attendance on consuls and praetors, a permanent reminder to Roman contemporaries of the military basis of civic (p65) 
  authority; (p66)

military glory was an undoubted factor in achieving leadership, (p66)

And again important differences are to be noted between Greece - that is to say, Athens - and Rome.

• In classical Athens, there was no automatic tie between any of the traditional magistracies (such as archons) and high military command. (p67)
• In republican Rome, in contrast, military command remained both a duty and a prerogative of the two consuls, and was no doubt often enough the main reason why an individual sought the office. (p68)

Obviously the quality of the relationship between civilian and 
military activity coloured political life and was in turn affected by 
the latter.

• Thus, in fourth-century Athens an important change set in, as I indicated earlier. Despite the continued warfare, there was a growing divorce between political and milit.ary leadership. (p68)

IV POPULAR PARTICIPATION

The equation, democracy = electoral regime, is so strongly entrenched in our culture that a conscious effort to put it wholly aside is required in the study of ancient politics. (p70)

'Electoral regime' is a completely wrong label for Greece, an inadequate one for Rome.

There were elections, and they had their element of ritual, their pretensions and conventions, their apathetic voters.

But there were also assemblies with the (at least formal) power of final decision on issues.

** There was, in short, a measure of genuine popular participation. ** (p70)

The Athenians were following the principle of rotation, not of representation, thereby funher strengthening the direct democracy of the Assembly. (p74)

• At least half the Athenian multitude deciding from ignorance on matters of state, a favourite target of Thucydides and Plato and many modern historians, thus melts away on close examination. (p75)

The narrowness of the activities allowed to the assemblies cannot be overstressed, at least with respect to the citizenry at large. (p91)

it would not be far from the truth to say that the Roman populus 
exercised influence not through participation in the formal machinery of government, through its voting power, but by taking to the streets, by agitation, demonstrations and riots, (p91)

One other weapon in the armoury of the Roman ruling class requires some consideration, namely, its exclusive right to interpret supernatural signs and portents and to take the consequent practical steps. (p92)

• Behind the practice lay the notion, characteristic of the way Roman religion developed, that 'human interpretation of signs had as much if not more effect than the will of the gods sending the signs'. (p92)

Every public act in antiquity was preceded by an attempt to gain supernatural support, through prayers, sacrifices or vows, but the Romans also sought to divine the attitude of the gods in advance.

• The taking of auspices was a standard procedure; a declaration of unfavourable auspices was automatically accepted without dispute, so that in effect an augur possessed the power of 'veto on every public transaction'. (p93)

In short, I can find no warrant for any notion of direct manipulation of religion in support of substantive programmes or interests of the ruling classes. (p95)

• Both the necessary doctrine and ecclesiastical organization were lacking.

In the present context, the decisive fact is that though appeals to ancestral tradition were frequently heard in the constitutional crises, the gods were not invoked by those who were resisting or advocating change. (p95)

When an augur cancelled an assembly meeting, he declared that the day was inauspicious for public business, not that (p95) 
the proposal to be voted on had receiv~d divine disapproval. I find that a critical distinction. (p96)

V POLITICAL ISSUES AND CONFLICT

I am saying no more than the commonplace that men who voted in elections or assemblies did not divorce personalities from issues, that they believed that in one way or another the issues mattered enough to them to warrant their participation in politics at some level. (p97)

The question is rather if the mass of voters thought that it mattered, somehow, whether X was elected or Y, regardless of the realism or folly of their thinking. (p98)

If their decisions were influenced, consciously or subconsciously, rightly or wrongly, by the attribution of a programme, a posture, a course of action to a political figure, then the effectiveness or otherwise of their votes and the differences in judgment among them do not serve to deny that they had 'decisions of state' in view. (p98)

• for them politics were instrumental. (p98)

What I cannot believe is that the electoral contests and military operations were a game for (p98) 
honour and booty, for titles and triumphs, and nothing else. (p99)

They were years that fell within what Brunt has called the 'era of quiescence, .287-134', during which, he explains, 'popular agitation' had 'almost ceased'.(p99)

why there were long periods of such quiescence and other periods of turbulence. (p100)

For the years 200-167 (chosen only because they were Astin's subject), my list includes a sufficient number of occasions when interests were seriously touched, when disagreement and conflict can reasonably be assumed, even though they fell short of armed riots and 'secessions'. (p100)

That mass opinion made little direct impact on the Roman ruling class at this time is no doubt true, but it does not follow from the impotence of the people (or from Livy's silences) that the citizenry at large had no interest in matters of policy and made no attempt to indicate their views, or that the contestants for high position did not allow those views to enter into their own calculations (and behaviour). (p100)

It is also possible to examine Greece and Rome together once again, for the issues were sufficiently similar, much as the final outcome of the conflicts diverged.

The obvious starting-point is constitutional conflict, and in no area does the existence of two different levels of intensity seem more evident.

• One was the level of outright struggle for power:
• the lower classes fought, often literally, for a share in government, and where they succeeded the upper classes sought to regain the political monopoly they had lost. (p101)

All levels of intensity were embraced by the splendid Greek portmanteau-word stasis. (p105)

• When employed in a social-political context, stasis had a broad range of meanings, from political grouping or rivalry through faction (in its pejorative sense) to open civil war.
• That correctly reflected the political realities. (p105)

But from that standpoint all politics are seditious in any society in which there is a measure of popular participation, of freedom for political manoeuvring.(p106)

It is wrong, in sum, to divide the history of the ancient city-states into long neatly demarcated periods of either 'struggle' or 'quiescence'. (p106)

However, a certain pattern can be discovered.

Then a fundamental divergence developed:

• in states in which the new system was sufficiently stabilized, continuing political conflict was on the whole contained well short of extreme stasis;
• but in many states, perhaps most, that level of stability was never reached, and so there was the frequent, bloody oscillation between oligarchy and democracy, or between one oligarchic faction and another.
• The main variable was the extent of stabilization; that is what requires explanation, (p106)

War as such was not a variable because it was an omnipresent activity.

• What mattered was the outcome of continuing warfare, above all, the consequences for the peasant majority. (p106)

I thus return to a point with which I began this chapter, the instrumentality of politics. (p106)

Roughly their interests fell into two broad areas.

• One was their power (in a formal sense) to defend themselves and their rights at law. (p107)
• The same can of course be said about the law through the whole of history: substantive inequality before the law has been accepted by the weaker classes as a fact of life, while they struggled, when they did, on other fronts, for tangible material gains rather than formal privileges. In agrarian societies that meant, above all, relief from the burden of debt - the fact of indebtedness, not just the legal formalities - and from land hunger. (p108)
• These two issues together - they were often joined in moments of crisis - constituted the second broad area of interests that political gains were expected to advance.

It is only too easy to brush aside generalized or rhetorical comments. (p108)

Nor can suspicion about the possible ideological distortions of a Plato or an Isocrates be extended to official documents:

• the oath taken by Athenian jurors included 'I will not allow the cancellation of private debts or the redistribution of land or houses belonging to Athenian citizens'; (p109)
• Such programmatic statements, supported by oaths and maledictions, are unlikely to have been adopted on the basis of purely imaginary fears. (p109)

Ancient writers were not wrong, in sum, to assume that grievances over land and debt were standing in the wings whenever there was a political conflict in which the poor were involved more or less directly; or to reflect (p109) 
upper-class fears that radical demands might emerge from the wings onto the stage. (p110)

Substantive issues, I submit, lay behind popular interest in constitutional reforms and elections, in political conflicts.

Ordinary Greeks and Romans, like ordinary people everywhere, were not egalitarian Utopians.

• Even when roused to the extremes of civil war and strikes against military conscription, in the end they usually accepted 'reformist' measures, patronage devices to secure protection in legal disputes rather than more far-ranging changes in the law itself, abolition of debt-bondage, moratoria and interest maxima rather than cancellation of debts, colonization when that was possible rather than redistribution of land.

One can reasonably surmise no more than that so many venturesome emigrations in small groups reflected conflict at home, renewed in some cities time and again. (p110)

• One may also surmise that a demos that was becoming more and more politically conscious, say by the sixth century, was also increasingly unwilling to accept such a solution to their land hunger. (p110)

Very few Greek communities had the power to seek an external solution nearer home by conquest. (p111)

But we can say that stasis was a permanent threat, appearing in the record, when it does, as a political or constitutional conflict; not only between oligarchy and democracy but also between factions within either camp. (p111)

The Roman story on this score needs only the briefest outlinestatement.

• From the beginning of the Republic to the end and then on into the Empire, both the burden of debt and the distribution of land were constant issues. (p111)

My interest, of course, is not in the economic history of Rome (or Greece) as such but in the issues that stimulated or exacerbated political conflict. (p112)

What I am suggesting is that the nature and shape of Roman politics were always closely bound up with war, conquest and land settlement, that shifts between periods of 'agitation' and 'quiescent' times were both causes and consequences of specific political behaviour. (p113)

No one in the city-state world, and certainly no social class, was 
opposed to war, conquest and empire.(p113)

Such tactical debates were, by their nature, a matter for the political and military leaders of the community to conduct, even when the decision rested with a popular assembly.

To untangle the motivations of this unceasing hunger for war and conquest is not easy.

• Proper allowance must be made for such psychological or strategic considerations as patriotism, military glory, national interest, national defence; also to the hopes for personal booty. (p113)

For Athens and Rome, however, there was another prospect, decisive in understanding (p113) 
their politics, namely, the material benefits of empire. (p114)

• In Athens they were varied, with conquered land a significant component;
• in Rome, land and settlement became the dominant factor. (p114)

Bue I do suggest that Athenian cleruchies and what the Romans called 'public land' were never far beneath the surface of consciousness among the citizenry when some question involving conquest or empire was being discussed;

lsocrates knew what he was doing when in proposing a panHellenic invasion of the Persian empire under the leadership of Philip of Macedon he stressed the opponunity for opening up vast new territories for settlement. (p114)

Yet the time came when serious politics disappeared from the Greek city-states and from Rome, and we have to ask why and how (p115) 
that happened. (p116)

• There is no single answer. The typical Greek city-state was too small to hold out indefinitely against larger and stronger states, Athens, Sparta or Thebes in the classical period, then Macedon, the Seleucid and Attalid rulers, and finally Rome. (p116)

Finally Rome. The last century of the Republic was filled with all the traditional political manifestations - electoral excitement, factional politics, laws and plebiscites. (p117)

Political conflict that is under permanent threat of massacres, proscriptions and invading armies ( even though Roman, not foreign) - a threat that became a reality with growing frequency - ceases to be the politics which we have been studying.(p117)

If I am asked, as I have been, what difference there was between the 'gangs' of the first century B.c. and the 'mobs' that took to the streets in earlier centuries, my answer is that there was a fundamental qualitative distinction.

• Gangs of hired professional thugs became for the first time a permanent element of the political scene (p117) 
  in Rome.(p118)

In one important respect, the change that came about during the last century of the Roman Republic was the last stage in a continuous development rather than a sudden breach with the past. (p118)

Throughout the history of the city-state, Greek even more than Roman, rivalry within the political elite had an all-or-nothing quality. (p118)

That said, the critical questions still remain:

• Why in antiquity was it necessary to 'destroy' political opponents and not just their political positions?
• And why in the Roman Republic did the (p118) 
  practice turn into continued armed combat that brought an end to the system itself? (p119)

Central to both questions, I suggest, is direct popular panicipation in government ( even as restricted as it was in Rome), an element that has been absent from all the subsequent history of politics, barring a few exceptions.

• No matter how closed and solidary the ruling class, its politically ambitious members were compelled to seek continuing support from the mass of the citizenry, and to undermine support for their rivals. (p119)
• The combat was highly personal because of the constitutional and governmental machinery.
• Power did not rest on, or derive from, office or any other formal 
  base.
• The forums in which it expressed itself constitutionally were large bodies, councils or assemblies, which met frequently and had few restraints on their right of decision-making;
• hence the continuous tension in the lives of the leaders. (p119)

To be sure, the ancients failed to make the necessary constitutional adjustments that would have permitted political parties to come into being, but that was not a 'cause' of breakdown.

No constitutional system has ever prevented civil war and dissolution, and the question still remains:

• Why was there so little resistance in all sections of the Roman citizenry to the visible breakdown of the system? (p119)

The soldiers, commented Syme years ago, 'now recruited from the poorest classes in Italy, (p119) 
were ceasing to feel allegiance to the State; military service was for livelihood, or from constraint, not a natural and normal part of a citizen's duty'. (p120)

• In other words, there was a widespread and fundamental change in attitudes with respect to the state. (p120)

By the middle of the second century B.c ., however, the costs were becoming visibly too disproportionate to the benefits.

Military (p120) 
demands became more and more of a burden and from the end of the third century it became increasingly necessary to draw into the armies men who lacked the traditional property qualifications. (p121)

Therefore, in the absence of a serious challenge to the traditional legitimacy of hierarchy (itself a question deserving extended analysis), Romans and Italians in their tens and hundreds of thousands turned to individuals to provide them with what the state had failed to offer.

• To repeat Syme's words, men 'were ceasing to feel allegiance to the state'; or in Weberian terms, conquest and the state itself were also no longer 'value-rational'. (p121)

Politics had ceased to be instrumentally useful to the populace, and the ultimate solution proved to be the end not only of popular participation but of politics itself. (p121)

VI IDEOLOGY

However, once we free ourselves from the emotionalism of the word 'treason', it should be clear that Alcibiades' self-defence (however we assess its strength or weakness) opens in an extreme case two central, interrelated questions: (p122)

• What gives a regime legitimacy?
• What are the nature, limits and warrant of political obligation?
• More concretely, why, apart from the thre:tt of punishment, should a citizen accept as binding on him an order to go to war, to pay taxes, or to stand trial on a charge of blasphemy? (p122)

It is no less a fact that many city-states -were unable to command sustained allegiance and went fromstasis to stasis. (p123)

• This fact, along with the variety of governmental arrangements to be found within the Greek world, stimulated the first attempts in history at conscious political analysis and reflection, as we glimpse them from the middle of the fifth century B.c. (p 123)

Political reflection need not be systematic analysis, and rarely is. (p123)

• In the realm of politics only Plato and Aristotle (and possibly as a transitional figure, the Sophist Protagoras) may properly be labelled systematic thinkers. (p124)
• They do not and cannot tell us what Greeks generally understood by legitimacy, political obligation or proper political behaviour; they only tell us why the Greeks were held to have persistently and unavoidably misunderstood what they were doing and why they were doing it. (p124)

the evidence is decisive that nearly all of them would have accepted as premises, one might say as axioms, that (p125)

• the good life was possible only in a polis,
• that the good man was more or less synonymous with the good citizen,
• that slaves, women and barbarians were inferior by nature and so excluded from all discussion;
• that therefore correct political judgments, the choice between polis regimes or between conflicting policies within a particular polis, should be determined by which alternative helped advance the good life.

The main divergences were in practical judgments, not in the (p125) 
premises. Both Plato and Aristotle shared the premises, (p126)

with respect to political reflection and discussion, the difference between Greeks and Romans was about as wide as it is possible to be. (p126)

• (Romans) they lacked any public, generally shared communal mode either for representing political conflict or for putting their politics to the philosophical question.
• None of the vehicles for political reflec-(p126) 
  tion that we enumerated in fifth-century Athens existed in Roman society. (p127)

For political speculation we have to come down as late as Polybius, and it is decisive that he was a Greek writing for Greeks in the mid-second century B.C . (p127)

Polybius' 'philosophical' views were without any influence or even resonance among contemporary Romans. (p127)

On any assessment of Cicero, in the end the capital fact remains that the Romans had to wait for him and his younger contemporary, the historian Sallust, to offer Roman political reflection of the sort the Greeks had been familiar with from the fifth century e.c. (p128)

• The Romans were not faced with the puzzle of the great variety in constitutional arrangements that characterized the classical Greek world. (p129)
• Secondly, the severe stasis of the early history of the Roman Republic was a conflict provoked by plebeian demands for concessions, not a civil war over alternative forms of government.
• Hence the Romans had no experience of the 'cycle of constitutions', not even of the choice between democracy and oligarchy or of the menace of tyranny.

One other distinction merits consideration. 
Stress has been placed earlier on the citizen-soldier link and on the 'normality' of war in the city-state, both Greek and Roman. 
However, there were differences that gave the behaviour of the Romans, and particularly their psychology, a quality, or at least a nuance, setting them apart from the Greeks.

• In the first place, the regularity, scale, duration, and geographical spread of Roman campaigning were incomparable with Greek practice,
• Secondly, the Roman citizen-militia was totally integrated into the hierarchical structure of society, as the Athenian was not. (p129)
• thirdly, imperium was but one expression of the central place of war in the religion, including the formal ritual system, of the Roman state. (p130)

All this encourages me to believe that obedience to the authorities became so deeply embedded in the psyche of the ordinary Roman citizen that it carried over into his explicitly political behaviour.

As with the Spartans, that fortified acceptance of the system to the degree that there was no genuine political discussion. (p130)

Nevertheless, there was broad agreement on a few generalizations. (p131)

• The first is in fact a negative one: the absence of any need to grapple with the problem of legitimacy, which today 'figures at the very heart of our concern with the nature and value of modern society' as 'a main dimension of political culture'. (p131)

What was discussed seriously from a relatively early date was the nature of justice. (p132)

• A proper state was an instrument of justice, and states were accordingly evaluated in terms of good or bad, better or worse, not (except rather casually in the case of tyranny) of legitimate or illegitimate. (p132)

legitimacy 'consecrated by time' was often a more powerful ideology than consecration by God in the face of competing dynastic claims or revolutionary threats. (p133)

An effective belief in legitimacy cannot, of course, be guaranteed by long continuity in time alone, whether real or fictitious. (p133)

It was as true of the ancient city-state as it is in our world that among the citizenry at large there prevailed 'a broadly utilitarian consensus that. political obligation is owed (and only owed) to political forms towards which it is to the long term collective advantage to acknowledge it'.

How difficult it was for the Greek poleis to maintain this consensus is immediately revealed by the frequency of stasis.

• Why? The only answer I can offer is one I (p133) 
  have given repeatedly, that under ancient city-state conditions conquest alone made possible political stability, and therefore a utilitarian consensus. (p134)

Political obligation, a corollary of legitimacy, was also examined in antiquity in the most casual way, when it was not simply taken for granted, again in marked contrast to its central position in modern political thought from the late Middle Ages. (p134)

The one exception, the only surviving attempt known to me of an argument to justify political obligation, appears in an unexpected place, in Plato's Crito, a brief early dialogue. (p135)

• His argument, in brief, is a minimally contractarian one:
• any man who has chosen throughout all his long life to remain a resident and citizen, and who, furthermore, has served on the Council and has carried out his military duties, has thereby agreed to obey the law and the decisions of legitimate authorities.
• Therefore an act of disobedience, even when the decision was an unjust one, would be morally wrong. (p135)

Behind the argument of the Crito there lurked another proposition:

• **the essential condition for a genuine political society, for a true polis and therefore for the good life, is 'Rule by laws, not (p135) 
  by men.' (p136)

The disagreement was over who formulated the laws that then bound everyone, rulers and ruled alike.

• There lay the great divide among ancient city-states, in their forms of government and therefore in the shape and direction of their politics; (p136)

All city-states firmly acknowledged that all citizens were free (p138)

I do not propose to pursue that here, apart from the minimal aspect of freedom ('equality before the law') that is pertinent in the present context.

• Most, if not all, city-states formally accepted that principle in the private sphere, that is to say, in all personal relations between individuals that could be actionable at law, and even in such relations between an individual and the state as were subject to judicial decision in case of dispute. (p138)

In antiquity it was of course the Athenians who best exemplified 
that proposition. (p139)

• For them (and presumably for smaller democracies on the Athenian model), isonomia, the word we translate as 'equality before the law', came also to mean equality through the law;
• that is, equality among all the citizens in their political rights, an equality that was created by constitutional developments, by law.

That equality meant not only the right to vote, to hold office, and so on, but above all the right to participate in policy-making in the Council and the Assembly. (p139)

An appropriate Greek word was even coined in the early fifth century B.c., isegoria, meaning freedom of speech not so much with our conventional negative tone of freedom from censorship as in the more significant sense of right to speak out where it mattered most, in the assembly of all the citizens.(p139)

The evidence strongly suggests that even in Athens few exercised their right of isegoria, and demonstrates beyond any (p139) 
doubt that political leadership was monopolized by a relatively small stratum though not a self-perpetuating one as in Rome.(p140)

Apathy cannot be attributed to the many thousands who attended Assembly meetings with some frequency, who served on the Council once or twice, and who made up the jury-courts, again in the thousands.

• The only alternative, it seems to me, is to think of widespread civic responsibility, a moral attribute that historians seem to shy away from. (p140)

The ideology of a ruling class is of little use unless it is accepted by those who are being ruled, and so it was to an extraordinary degree in Rome. (p141)

Then, when the ideology began to disintegrate within the elite itself, the consequence was not to broaden the political liberty among the citizenry but, on the contrary, to destroy it for everyone.(p141)

 

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