Solon appears, in retrospect, the representative figure in a great transition. In Homer there are no cities to speak of (except for utopian Troy), just large aristocratic holdings, like those of Odysseus on Ithaca and Menelaus at Sparta, surrounded by lesser landowners, interspersed with peasant farmers, free tenants, and slaves. As these familiar clustered settlements, known to agricultural societies throughout the world, grew into cities—with demarcated streets, temples and other official buildings, marketplaces and other gathering centers, import-export warehouses, and docks where exotic cargoes and even more exotic foreigners were unloaded—power shifted somewhat from landed aristocrats to the better-placed urbanites, who controlled trade and who in the diversity of their experience began to think new thoughts. Though this process is typical of the development of city culture everywhere, the Greeks, with their well-established spirit of innovative and independent thinking, were in a position to push urbanization in directions never before dreamed of. This was especially true of Greek cities in possession of natural harbors that could be turned into thriving ports, such as Athens with its large, beautifully sheltered harbor of Piraeus, facing southeast toward the stepping-stones of the Cycladic isles and, beyond these, the coast of an Asia overflowing in desirable commodities.
In Homer’s day, Greek communities were ruled by a basileus like Odysseus. This word, usually translated as “king,” had in early times the somewhat humbler connotations of chieftain, captain, lord, leader, judge. (It will be the word put into the mouth of Jesus in the New Testament parables about God and his basileia, his kingdom or dominion.) But it was a decidedly hereditary position, one that did not fit well with city life. Since cities were experiments in themselves, it made sense to the Greeks to experiment with modes of urban government. As the day of the landed gentry began to fade, Greek cities adopted, or sometimes had forced upon them, the new office of tyrannos. Though tyrannos gives us our word tyrant, the initial difference between the basileus and the tyrannos was that the tyrannos was a nonhereditary king, one who had obtained his position by sheer excellence. It was only as the tyrannos turned (as often as not) into a dictator unconcerned for the wishes of his people that the designation acquired a pejorative connotation.
Though tyrants would continue to rule many Greek cities for much of their history, Athens in the early sixth century was already experimenting with a system based on the consensus of its citizens. Solon came to be eponymos of Athens neither by heredity nor by force but by election; and his rule was limited to one year. By this point, Athenian government had evolved from monarchy to aristocracy, that is, rule by a consortium of archons (of whom the archon eponymos was chief), supplied by Athens’s leading families. Aristocratic Solon, however, used his year to enlarge the political and economic power of all freeborn male citizens.
The city’s existing law code, drawn up in 621 by one Draco, was so harsh that it has given us the word Draconian, though Draco’s code did remove from individual families the right to pursue vengeance on their own—the Hatfield-McCoy premise on which Orestes and Electra pursued their father’s murderers. Solon labored intensively to give every citizen a stake in Athenian society. Henceforth, every male born at Athens to a citizen father—very nearly the only way one could become a citizen—would have the right to prosecute a crime, even if he were not the direct victim. Solon fashioned this innovation to impress on all their unrelinquishable obligation to the commonweal. Every citizen now had the further right to appeal unfavorable decisions of the magistrates to the great Assembly of citizens, in effect a jury of their peers. By abolishing the universal Greek custom of enslaving debtors who defaulted on their bond, Solon encouraged the security of small landowners; and he divided the citizenry into four classes, based on their holdings.
Each class now possessed specific legal rights and honors, and each was taxed accordingly. Though the wealthiest class—the pentakosiomedimnoi, whose holdings yielded five hundred bushel measures or more of grain, wine, or oil—bore by far the largest tax burdens, these were linked to their eligibility for the highest public offices and their status as financial sponsors of the great festivals, both of which conferred such public honor that no one would attempt to evade his obligations. In making this change, Solon tied the office of archon to wealth rather than birth and thus broke the stranglehold that the wellborn had previously exercised over politics. The two middle classes—the hippeis (riders of horses) and the zeugitae (keepers of oxen)—were also eligible to hold public office, though not at the exalted levels of the five-hundred-bushel chaps.
The upshot was that every citizen felt empowered, all assured a say in something; and even the lowest class of citizens—the thetes (tenant farmers and those whose tiny plots produced fewer than two hundred bushels)—had new dignity as members of the Assembly, which had the final say in most matters. Though the big winners in this new system were the smaller landowners, who gained unprecedented new rights and at last achieved defined political status, Solon carefully left many of the hereditary privileges of the aristocratic families intact. Without the goodwill and public beneficence of the aristocracy, nothing could be accomplished; and Solon’s goal was never perfect justice but the emergence of a secure and balanced society that could remain viable from one generation to the next.
But rival aristocratic clans—the Coastmen, the Plainsmen, and the Hillsmen—continued their brawling attempts to eliminate one another. Solon, who spent his retirement traveling through foreign lands to broaden his knowledge of other cultures, returned to find his beloved Athens so rent by discord that it had become impossible to elect new archons. An-archia—anarchy, that is, a city without archons, ruled by nobody—swiftly followed. Solon, now past eighty, lived just long enough to see the rise of his cousin Pisistratus, a political grandstander of the vilest variety, a mine owner’s son who presented himself as a populist speaking on behalf of the Hillsmen, the poorest of the Athenian parties.
Pisistratus staged an attempt on his own life and in the ensuing chaos pushed the Assembly into voting him a bodyguard, which he then used—just after Solon’s death—to seize the Acropolis, the lofty citadel that loomed over the city. Declaring himself tyrant, Pisistratus was subsequently driven out by a temporary alliance of Coastmen and Plainsmen, an alliance that frayed soon enough, plunging Athens into tumult once more. Here was Pisistratus’s opportunity. He made a sensational return in a golden chariot accompanied by an extraordinarily tall and beautiful young woman dressed in full battle armor, who he announced was the goddess Athena come to restore order to her city. Simple people knelt along Pisistratus’s parade, raised their arms, and gave thanks in the streets. Though only the most credulous members of the Assembly could be counted on to swallow such nonsense, there were, as there often are, quite enough of them to ensure initial political victory to an unscrupulous liar who piously invoked the powers of heaven. Only later, when the damage is done, do such dodos of democracy regret allowing themselves to be so easily taken in.
Athens would be saddled with Pisistratus and his progeny for a generation and would reestablish its Solonian ideals only in the last decade of the sixth century after expelling the last Pisistratid. The citizens then began the long process of changing the nature of their Acropolis (or “city height”) from a threatening fortress to an airy civic promontory. Over the course of the next fifty years, the peak was flattened to a plateau, and lofty temples and sanctuaries, dignified memorials and promenades were constructed, none more august than the Parthenon, the Temple of the Virgin, dedicated to the city’s patronal goddess. By the mid-fifth century, the master sculptor Phidias set upon the promontory a towering statue of Athēnē Promachos, Athena Who Leads the Charge, her bronze helmet and spear tip gleaming in the sun and visible to sailors as far away as the Cape of Sounion. No one would again mistake a mere mortal for the awesome thirty-three-foot-high goddess who now stood on the Acropolis, protecting her city.
Solon’s laws were displayed along the promenades on wooden tabl
ets, and his moderating, sententious verses were learned by heart. Often enough in the nearly two centuries that followed the establishment of Athenian democracy—a political experiment that would end only with the coming of Alexander the Great in the final decades of the fourth century—Athens lived in the spirit of Solon’s ideals, its citizens acting toward one another in eunomia, the harmony, good order, restraint to which he had counseled them. By and large, they illustrated in their dealings with one another Solon’s characteristically Greek combination of practicality and wisdom, the political path he had opened to them. For, as the wooden tablets reminded them, “Men preserve agreements that profit no one to violate.”
Though American democracy is often compared to its supposed Athenian model, the American experiment—as well as other modern examples of democracy—derives not directly from Greece but from the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of our era. The rediscovery of Athenian political ideals by the humanists of the Renaissance certainly acted as a catalyst to Enlightenment thought, but as one surveys the actual terrain of Athenian democracy, one is more likely to be struck by the vast historical and cultural divide that separates the burgeoning of Athenian democracy from the seething North American colonies of Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York in A.D. 1765, the year the Stamp Act Congress dared to pass its Declaration of Rights and Liberties.
There are, of course, interesting similarities, such as the close association of citizenship and property. Life spans were notably shorter in both Athens and North America than they are today—mid-forties on average for men, mid-thirties for women (for whom pregnancy and childbirth presented major health risks)—but an exemplary diet and regular physical exercise gave both Greek citizens and American colonials considerable advantage over the many cultures of scarcity that subsisted around them. In both societies, the economic gap between rich and poor citizens was not nearly so dramatic as it is in our contemporary Western world. The five-hundred-bushelers, for instance, were on average five, at most ten, times as rich as the thetes, the lowest grade of citizen. Five times as rich would have seemed a whole lot in fifth-century Athens, where tunics were mostly interchangeable, domestic buildings and even public ones were modest in size, and the only form conspicuous consumption could take was sponsoring a public festival or throwing a memorable party for your friends. Today, the gap between, say, a municipal bus driver and a Fortune 500 CEO approaches infinity.
Populations were much smaller in ancient Athens and in colonial America than they are today. At their height, Athenians probably numbered no more than a quarter million, of which as many as 100,000 may have been slaves—another similarity between democratic Athens and early democratic America. Women and children, both Greek and foreign, were commonly enslaved by the victors in war, after their husbands and fathers had been put to the sword; and though it was possible to win one’s freedom, most slaves were born to their condition and remained so to their deaths, passing on their status to their children. Slaves had virtually no rights and could be bought and sold at will; and, though both male and female slaves were completely at the disposal of their masters’ whims, women slaves were especially ill-used because they could become pregnant and often died in childbirth. It was a precept of Athenian law that female slaves had to be tortured before giving evidence in court cases; and if a slave owner showed himself reluctant to offer his female slaves to the torturers, he fell immediately under suspicion. Worse than torture and death was to find yourself a slave in the privately administered silver mines of Laurion southeast of Athens, source of much of Athens’s prosperity, where miners were routinely starved, savagely beaten, and, seldom seeing daylight, worked to death.
It is possible that slaves made up as much as forty percent of the population of Athens and its outlying farms and that metics—resident aliens, nonvoting freemen engaged in trade—made up close to another forty percent. This would leave a citizen population of little more than twenty percent, which would have included males who had not reached their majority as well as females. Such a society, based economically on the slavery of others, has actually been rare in recorded history: Athens, central Roman Italy, the American South, the Caribbean, and Brazil provide our only known examples. In other “slave” economies, such as ancient Mesopotamia and Israel, the so-called slave was not viewed as mere chattel and, more like a medieval serf, possessed a number of rights, nor was the proportion of serfs to freemen in such societies as high as it was in genuine slave economies.
However similar Athens and colonial America may appear in these respects, the differences remain glaring and decisive. For one thing, Athens was a city, not a country; and the Greeks never thought to unite all Greek speakers in one political union. Because each Greek gloried in his singular excellence—and each Greek clan gloried similarly—it was hard enough to unite a city. Each city or polis—from which come our words politics, politician, metropolis—thought itself unrivaled in some essential quality and reveled in its reputation. Corinth, for instance, situated strategically between two seas on the isthmus that joined northern Greece to the Peloponnesian peninsula, was the unbeatable merchant city, principal trade route between north and south and between east and west. Crossroads of desirable refinements, Corinth became in time a byword for sybaritic self-indulgence.
Landlocked Sparta, not many miles south on the Peloponnese, ruled by its gerousia, or council of old men, was an airless, artless nightmare of xenophobic2 military preparedness, the North Korea of its day. A Spartan boy was taken from home at age seven and thereafter raised in barracks, directed by an older boy with whom he was encouraged to develop a permanent and ardent relationship. He could neither leave the barracks nor marry till the age of thirty, by which time he had become a brutal army grunt; and he could not leave the army and settle in a house of his own till the age of sixty. Black broth and much-diluted wine were his daily fare through all this time; his occasional baths were cold. Girls hardly fared better, since theirs was a similar single-sex regimen, shortened only by Sparta’s need to produce children. With such a regimen, it is not surprising that the city’s population declined, a perilous precipitation for Sparta, which depended on an abysmally servile population of helots, fellow Greeks who lived under permanent military occupation in the neighboring countryside and who tended the land while Sparta’s citizenry, who despised farming, trained for war. These state-owned serfs—there were seven of them for every citizen—led comfortless lives and were perennially on the verge of revolt. Each year the newly elected ephors (Sparta’s five chief magistrates) declared ritual war on the helots and every potential leader among them was assassinated. Sparta’s teenage citizens were encouraged to roam in bands through the helots’ territory, ruining their pitiable compounds and spreading abject terror. Sparta needed a constant show of armed power by sufficiently massive forces just to keep its serfs in check. It was the helots who truly knew what Spartan meant.
Each of the principal Greek cities had a highly distinctive personality that set it off from its sisters. Athens was the home of thoughtfulness, democracy, and art. Its Solonian political establishment and its open culture, which put a higher premium on individual accomplishment—political, cultural, intellectual—than any human settlement prior to the European Renaissance, spread far and wide as its uniquely attractive qualities were imitated by its hundred fifty or so colonies throughout Eurasia. Athenian democracy was different from the much later American form, not only because it was the expression of a single city-state but because it was a direct, rather than a representative, democracy. To us, looking backwards, it may seem imprudent to invite all citizens to vote on all major initiatives, but Solon was right to appreciate that no Athenian freeman could allow himself to be left out of anything.
The continual buzz of conversation, the orotund sounds of the orators, the shrill shouts from the symposia—this steady drumbeat of opinion, controversy, and conflict could everywhere be heard. The agora (marketplace) was not just a
daily display of fish and farm goods; it was an everyday market of ideas, the place citizens used as if it were their daily newspaper, complete with salacious headlines, breaking news, columns, and editorials. For more formal occasions, there nestled beside the Acropolis the hill of the Pnyx, where thousands of citizens voted in their Assembly. They faced the bēma (speaker’s platform) and, behind the speaker, the ever-changing backdrop of Athens itself. Though there were wooden benches, set into the steps of the hill, participants were too taken up by the proceedings to bother to sit down. The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was Ekklēsia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church (and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word, which connoted equal participation in all deliberations by all members, came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia—which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times, who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly).
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