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Did the Greeks knowdemocracy?

Paul Veyne

I.

The Greeks invented the words ‘‘city,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘oligarchy,’’

‘‘liberty,’’ and ‘‘citizen.’’ So, if it were not for slavery, which would be the

major difference between their democracy and true democracy, it is tempting

to assume that they invented the eternal truth of politics, or of our politics. For

then there would be an eternal politics about which we could philosophise,

instead of just writing its history. Across the centuries we would find again an

identical essence of the political; political regimes, despite their differences,

would exhibit a functional analogy that could be represented in a number of

ways: establishing justice, getting men to live together peacefully, defending

the group, exercising class domination by the owners of the forces of

production . . .But let’s suppose that this is all just appearance and that the words mislead

us. Let’s suppose that what is defined as politics in different epochs is based

upon presuppositions that escape the consciousness of the historical actors,

and that they also elude a posterity that is too eager to recognise itself in its

ancestors, even if this trivialises their features. Identical words and vague

analogies would then conceal huge and invisible differences, like trees

concealing the wood.

We will try here to clarify some fragments of this hidden part of the iceberg.

We will call the biggest of these fragments, which is not the only one, the

ancient citizen’s ‘‘militantism’’; it roughly corresponds to what Claude Nicolet,

in a fine book (1980), called the citizen’s profession. Because an ancient citizen

does not have human rights or citizen’s rights, he has no freedoms or even

freedom; he has duties. We won’t find the democratic semi-ideal of Western

Copyright # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online

DOI: 10.1080/0308514052000343903

Economy and Society Volume 34 Number 2 May 2005: 322�/345

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nations back in ancient Athens, but the mental climate of political parties

formed by activists.

II.

Militantism was a semi-ideal, just as democracy or human rights are for us: it

was neither pure ideology nor entirely a practice. Admittedly, this activist

‘‘presupposition,’’ never explicitly stated but present everywhere, came up

against indifference or passive resistance in its applications; it is true that it

deceived both profiteers and victims about the reality of social relations;

nonetheless it filled the air with imperatives that were sometimes obeyed, it

limited the inventiveness and choice of arguments in polemics, it inspired

political reformers and revolutionaries, and it paralysed demands and

outbursts of anger.

To express the strange conception of the relations between State and society

involved in civic militantism, we must start by making a quick detour through

more recent centuries: a bit of political ethnology will bring out the contrast

more clearly.

Politics has always sought men’s good, but of what man? For us, man makes

up a population, in the sense in which statisticians speak of a population of

microbes or even of trees. So, living within the borders of a national territory, a

human population works, reproduces and goes on holiday. For a long time the

doctrine of the public authorities was one of non-interference, of laisser faire ,

since this liberalism was supposed to bring about, by itself, the optimum for

the population; today we think that the population’s welfare [English in

original] is best secured by State intervention: public intervention will channel

the flows of demography, the economy, society and tourism. In other words, as

we understand it, politics is comparable to the task of a river inspector or forest

warden: he does not leave nature to itself, in a state of neglect, but neither does

he own it; he does not exploit it in his own interest like a farmer. Rather, he

wants to ensure the happiness of nature itself, and to this end he respects and

follows its natural tendencies: he confines himself to organising them. We

could also compare politics to the policeman’s job of traffic control: he does not

leave cars to themselves or decide where drivers must go, any more than he

redistributes vehicle ownership; he organises the natural circulation of cars and

pedestrians, he regulates the flow of traffic.

Just two centuries ago things were not yet like this. Politics was then a

matter of making the subjects happy. What was this happiness? Having a king:

it was thought that they needed nothing else. This king was a kind of

gentleman-farmer [English in original], a grand knight; he did not organise the

happiness of nature, like our forest warden, but exploited it to his own

advantage: his subjects were not a population but a flock, of which he was the

shepherd, and his whole art consisted in shearing the animals without skinning

them. Actually the king possessed a dominion in which a human fauna

Paul Veyne: Did the Greeks know democracy? 323

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survived as best it could and frolicked as it wished; it was not the king’s affair,

and he confined himself to the deduction of his share from nature’s crop.

Thanks to this tax, he pursued his own profession as king, which was

completely taken up by his relationships with other kings, his cousins and

rivals. As we can see, this king had his own activities and his subjects theirs,

and the king’s affairs, which were not those of his subjects, were called raison

d’etat . The king interferes as little as possible in his subjects’ affairs, and they,

for their part, would consider the excessive proximity of the royal tax collector

with some unease; the less the king concerns himself with them, the more they

will love him. At the most, thanks to someone like Colbert, the king will switch

from a tax collecting economy to the plantation and development, in his own

interest, of some forgotten corner of the realm. If he becomes aware of traffic

on a road or waterway passing through his lands, he will only interfere with

this natural flux in order to levy a tax, called tonlieu, on this resource.

Let us turn now to the Greek or Roman city-state. The group sociology of

each of these tiny states was less like that of a modern nation, whether

democratic or not, than that of a militant political party. An ancient city-state

was not constituted by a population with its leaders, by a civil society to be

governed as something distinct from the State: it was formed by its population

itself, with its economic and social life, but only to the extent that all or part of

this population was required to take an active part in an institution set up

within it and which was the city-state; those who are governed and the public

authorities are not clearly distinguished: all are involved in the measures taken.

The civic institution did not exploit the population, like a king: it made it take

an active part; the public authorities were only activists, like others that their

comrades had elected or accepted as officials. As Christian Meier writes in his

fine study: ‘‘A rift opened up between the social order and the political order.

While society, with all its inequalities, remained essentially unchanged . . .’’(Meier, 1990: 145). This was accompanied by an intense politicisation: ‘‘It is

only among us’’, says an Athenian, ‘‘that a man who takes no part in political

affairs is not considered a peaceable man, but a bad citizen’’ (Thucydides:

II.40.2).1

What, then, was the relationship between city-state and society? It cut every

citizen in two, a bit like the relationship, in a modern party, between the

militant as such and the militant as a private person immersed in the world of

economic forces and social relations. For example, every citizen earned their

living as best they could, was rich or poor, and property was sacrosanct;

nonetheless, the zeal with which the citizen made his efforts and resources

available to his fellows had to be more spontaneous than that of a simple

taxpayer. We know that civic festivals and also some military expenses were

usually financed by richer citizens who felt morally obliged to contribute in

this way, or whom were made to feel morally obliged; because civic

sponsorship arose from two very different motives. In a world where city-

state and society formed an equivocal or antagonistic couple, liturgies and

euergetism had a social motivation: the rich displayed and legitimised their

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wealth by giving it away, and these showy gifts were just as much spontaneous

as they were interested. But the second motivation was civic and more

compelling: while not being a formal duty, like a tax, euergetism was a moral

obligation nevertheless. Now, for a militant, morality is a strong obligation,

since he must do everything he can without meanly calculating his own share;

he could not deny his devotion to his own people.

III.

In short, in Greece and Rome political thought always hesitated between two

models. One, usually corresponding to reality, admitted that some govern and

the others have only to obey. Certainly, the governors are not from a different

race than the governed, and they are not their masters; they come from the

ranks of the governed and will later return to them. Even so, governing is a

specialised activity. On the other hand, according to the second model the

distinction between governors and governed is less important than a larger

whole that unites them: the civic body made up of activists. The one who

governs is simply a citizen, albeit more active than others, who has been given

responsibilities by his peers. There was a constant temptation to interpret

reality through this schema, or even to apply it to reality. The hesitation

between these two schemas can be seen in the final six pages of The Crown ;

Demosthenes concedes to the Athenian crowd, who are his judges for the day,

that ‘‘it is true that one can live quietly without thereby being at fault and

failing to serve the city; this is the life most of you lead my dear fellow

citizens.’’ After this concession, the orator nevertheless depicts the good

citizen as an activist who is not content with the performance of

duties prescribed by the public authority, but takes on numerous other

commitments: he advises the people in the assembly, travels as an ambassador,

and spends his own fortune to construct fortifications or equip warships. To

our eyes, this good citizen is a politician by vocation. We can see the difference

from other epochs. A prince of the ancien regime expected only loyalty or

negligence from the subjects of his realm, and that they pay the taxes. All that

is required of a modern population is that it does not destroy the possibility of

life in common within a certain system; submission to a minimum of public

spirit, public order and military obedience is necessary for a population that

one has to take care of. An ancient city-state, on the other hand, considered

that, in a way, its citizens had chosen it (this is what the Laws of Athens say to

Socrates in the Crito ) and it expected them to have the zeal of professional

soldiers.

There is, then, no limit to what a city-state may rightfully expect from its

own people. When Xenophon writes that ‘‘a good citizen respects the laws’’

(Xenophon [a]: I.ii.iv), he does not mean that in order to perform one’s duty it

is enough not to violate the code. What was called the Law was much more

than that what we designate by the word2: the Law included laws, unwritten

Paul Veyne: Did the Greeks know democracy? 325

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customs, political decisions, orders of officials, and, more generally, the

collective will, which was a source of legitimacy over and above temporary

forms of legality (Xenophon [a]: IV.iv.2). The Law was the genius of Athens: in

the Crito, the patriotism of Socrates is attached to the laws, not to the soil,

ancestors, or nation. Obeying the Law meant zealously devoting oneself to the

will of the group. Obeying, and not demanding: a militant serves his party, he

does not make use of it to improve his lot; his political activity is added to his

social life and remains distinct from it. We can well imagine that the

presupposition of militantism will be more clearly and durably successful the

less it affects the interests of the wealthy.

Alongside society, militant zeal thus defined a political arena in the

restricted sense of the word (Meier 1990). A consequence of this was a

collective passion, a politicisation of thought that gives a misleadingly modern

look to ancient Athens. The fact that the citizen was an activist also means that,

as Rehm puts it (1896: 78), he was not the object of government but its

instrument; one did not govern the citizen but made use of him in order to

govern. This State was a strange ship without passengers: apart from the

captain (or rather, as one said, the pilot3), it carried only members of the crew;

when Plato and Aristotle speak of the ship of State, they only ever mention

seamen (Plato [a]: 488 a; Aristotle [a]: 1276 B 20).4 Whoever belongs to the

ship was supposed to be involved in handling it. With a slip that reveals his

modernity, a recent and otherwise excellent translator5 wrongly speaks of a

crew and passengers. Nothing is insignificant in a text, and content is

indistinguishable from form; far from being insignificant ways of speaking,

supposed nuances of expression often reveal chasms in thought, misunder-

standings between the ancients and ourselves6; if we overlook these nuances we

trivialise the text and think to find ‘‘eternal’’ truths in it.

Bourgeois liberalism will organise cruises in which all the passengers fend

for themselves as best they can, the crew providing them only with collective

goods and services. The Greek city-state, however, was a ship whose

passengers were the crew; individuals, with their different abilities and wealth,

find themselves having to cross historical time and its reefs7; they organise

themselves into a group for survival and each contributes the best of himself

for their common salvation.

Where does such a singular conception, which dominated thought and to a

degree practice, come from? We may think of two possible origins: war and the

community. War, in the classical epoch, was half of a citizen’s life (Aristotle [a]:

1254 B 30 and 1333 A 30; Xenophon [a]: II.i.6). Max Weber contrasted the

warrior democracy of antiquity with the medieval commercial city (Vidal-

Naquet 1986: 105; Meier 1990: 38). It may also be the case that militant

commitment and group solidarity have a more political origin. Christian Meier

has pointed out the nature of Cleisthenes’ reform: mobilisation of the masses of

the countryside in order to detach them from the patronage of the eupatrids

(Meier 1973: 115�/119). Maybe too the question of origins is a false problem:

the schema of militantism could have been invented on the basis of models of

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thought taken from contexts far removed from political and military action,

granted we accept that there is invention in history.

To a society as unequal and divided as many others, historical chance, or

inventiveness, juxtaposed a politics of equality and solidarity in civic virtue. It

is pointless to add that, since political life is very sensitive to social powers, the

outcome will be more complicated and ideological or, if you like, more

edifying: in Rome the poor will be imperiously called upon to put love of the

State before hideous greed. It remains true nevertheless that antiquity thought

politics in terms of militantism with the same naturalness with which we think

of it in terms of democracy, and it could not conceive of it otherwise. Such is

the ambiguity of the term ideology: apology, but also blinkers. We will confirm

this by considering the relations between political activism and the social

powers of time, in other words between civic virtue and free time or leisure.

IV.

To understand the importance of leisure or free time, or what was called this,

we must first understand the very specific nature of the would-be ‘‘demo-

cratic’’ Greek city-state. A city-state is an institution set up in the midst of

human beings, but full membership of which is normally restricted to the

privileged,8 those whose time is their own, obviously because they are rich.

Sometimes the privileged circle was extended to include the entire ‘‘people’’

(as in Athens), but this was either a great privilege or excessive laxity.9 Plato

restores healthy doctrines to the institution: all the participants in his model

city will have to have a patrimony that will enable them to devote themselves

exclusively to collective life, for which they have the leisure.

We can see that the Greeks posed the political problem in a way that is more

or less the opposite of ours. Plato does not mean to make men happy, or to get

them to live together peacefully, or to provide human society with a sovereign;

he does not propose to take in hand the human fauna but to establish the

existence among men of a well-made institution, the city-state. It is as if he

were recruiting a regiment, or rather, in his case, a contemplative order; he is

not trying to take the human masses in hand, but putting together a fine

regiment, and to that end the recruits are hand-picked. Plato wants to recruit a

city of individuals of leisure, as if he were recruiting them for a monastery of

monks who are sufficiently wealthy to be able to spend all their time singing

hymns, without having to work.

This (and it has not been sufficiently noted) is the presupposition of The

Laws (Veyne 1976: 205�/207), which is no different from the implicit

presupposition of the political thought and practice of the Greeks in general.

The Greeks did not question themselves about social life: they set out to

constitute a well-made city-state, instead of living in amorphous tribes, like the

barbarians, or in passive kingdoms, like the Orientals. When Aristotle writes

that man is a political animal, he does not take on the organisation of humanity,

Paul Veyne: Did the Greeks know democracy? 327

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he means that the ideal, the telos of the perfect man, is to live in a polis rather

than elsewhere; what this means, in other words, is that the Greeks are

superior to the barbarians and that are they are the masterpiece of humanity

(Defourny 1932: 383).

The ancient problematic and the modern problematic were able to intersect

because some Greek city-states were extended to all of the people, and,

conversely, modern politics has sometimes distinguished between active and

passive citizens. Nonetheless, they derive from two diametrically opposed

points on the horizon: the modern problematic starts from a population, for

which politicians take responsibility and ask themselves how these people can

be organized as citizens; the Greeks ask themselves who alone will have full

entitlement to citizenship and take on the responsibility of constituting a

well-ordered city-state. We can see how idle it would be to speak of ‘‘one’’

eternal democracy, extending from the Greeks down to us; a modern

democracy may be limited to only active citizens; with the Greeks, the

movement was centrifugal and some city-states were extended to the whole

demos. Ours is a movement from universality towards the institution, while

they started from the institution and, even if they moved on to their

democracy, they never felt universalism as an ideal or a regret. Something else

was possible for them that would be unthinkable for us: they sometimes

reversed direction, returning to a suffrage based on a poll tax (while for us

universalism is a natural right the full realisation of which may initially tolerate

some restrictions, but from which, once it has been attained, it would be

unthinkable to turn back).

This is why the Greeks drafted constitutions and Laws when they

speculated; they did not write The Mirror of Princes, obviously, but nor did

they write The Social Contract or The Leviathan. They did not wonder about

the origin of society; their speculation consists in founding an ideal city-state,

and this schema was based on a reality: the foundation of real city-states given

a constitution by a founder who had first of all selected the future citizens. The

schema for Plato’s The Laws is the foundation of a colony (Plato [b]: 704 A�/C;

707 E-708 D; 735 E; 737 B; 744 BC). But why and how was the philosopher’s

city-state reserved for the rich? Why is the possession of free time hereditary?

For, in Plato’s city-state, there is succession and inheritance; Plato insists on

this: every man desires eternity and wants to leave his goods to his

descendants.

V.

In Plato’s city every citizen will receive a patrimony, which will remain his

property; each may enrich himself and increase his patrimony up to four times

the initial endowment. Citizens will not have to work; this was so obvious for

Plato that he only mentions it in passing, or rather as the minor premise of his

syllogism: ‘‘What way of life, then, will these men have to pursue, now that

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they have been assured of the right amount of necessities, others are doing the

skilled work, and slaves have been entrusted with agricultural work, providing

a sufficient part of the produce for our men to lead the well regulated life?’’

(Plato [b]: 806 DE). The young Aristotle, who also formulated a plan for a

city-state, was no less strict: ‘‘Citizens must not lead the life of artisans or

tradesmen (such a life being ignoble and inimical to quality), and nor must

those who wish to be citizens be farmers, since free time is needed both for the

development of quality and for political activity’’ (Aristotle [a]: 1328 B 35).10

It is easy to see that free time was not measured with a stopwatch in hand

but designated a permanent level of life: it signified wealth and, par excellence,

wealth based on land.11 In The Laws , Plato lays down that a citizen worthy of

the name must not do anything, but two pages later he maintains that the same

citizen will have to ‘‘stay awake at night to perform his tasks, political tasks if

he is a magistrate, or, if he is not, economic,’’ that is, domestic tasks: overseeing

his farms cultivated by slaves (Plato [b]: 806 D; 808 B). This rich man has time

to himself not because he does not work at all, but because he is not dependant

on anything or anyone, in accordance with the ancient conception of work. In

this sense, the man of leisure does not have a profession but is identified as the

possessor of a patrimony, and to possess one does not have to do anything: it is

enough to take life as it comes. However, and it does not even need to be said,

this patrimony must be administered: but this is the exercise of property

rights, not work.

It did not necessarily follow from this that the big landowner was an

absentee landlord content with a level of income sufficient to maintain his

rank. To the contrary, he often sought to develop his productivity in order to

pass on a larger patrimony to his children. It was even less likely that his

management was autarchic; rather, he produced for exchange on local and

distant markets. The market is only a means for getting richer; it is not the end

that organises the rationality of administration precisely because this end

remains internal to the family: to pass on a patrimony to one’s descendants.

Returning to a fine page of Alain Guillemin, ‘‘they are real landowning

entrepreneurs and they seek to make a profit, rationally organizing cultivation

so as to respond to the market. However, the principle that founds this

rationality is not the maximisation of profits, as it is for the capitalist

entrepreneur, but the management of a patrimony to be passed on to one’s

children; and this patrimony is not conceived of synchronically, in the manner

of jurists, but is associated with the lifespan of a family. The notables readily

contrast this purpose with the immorality of the commercial pursuit of an

immediate profit’’ (Guillemin 1980: 251�/257).12

Aristotle argues no differently when, in embarrassing or embarrassed pages

at the start of the Politics , he contrasts good chrematistics with the immoral,

bad sort. The cult of autarchy was not the rejection of exchange: it meant that

exchange is a means and not the end of patrimonial rationality. The millennial

contempt for trade lasted until the establishment of anonymous capitalism, in

which the enterprise is no longer the patrimony of a dynasty seeking to

Paul Veyne: Did the Greeks know democracy? 329

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perpetuate its own social and political power. This dynasty is essentially, but

not exclusively, founded on landed property: a commercial, craft or banking

enterprise can also be managed as a patrimony, rather than as an anonymous

machine for generating profit. In that case, since the merchant or craftsman

shares the dynastic aim of the leisured class, he will be presumed not to work;

the ideology of the free use of one’s own time is an ideology of patrimonial

rationality. Roman law will put it thus: ‘‘To manage as a good father.’’ Either

one has a patrimony of landed property that one manages oneself or gets

someone else to manage, or one may also have an interest in commerce or a

skilled craft, but on a large scale, so that one is not reckoned to be a tradesman

or manufacturer: one remains oneself.13 For work or a job evoke the idea of

need, of the risk of privation. If one was rich and worked in order to remain so,

or in order to become even richer, one was not working, since the spectre of

need was far away; one let resources flow in without making an effort to

procure them. The few hours of the day or night expended to this end did not

count: they were only a mundane necessity, like getting dressed in the

morning. A slave, on the other hand, even if had had time off, was never a man

of leisure,14 since he lived dependent on a master.

Two mechanisms are put to work here that we put together under the name

of ideology: valorisation and presupposition. Free time or leisure will be highly

valued as admirable, since it was the privilege of the socially dominant class;

and political philosophers, whose vision of everything was blinkered by the

presupposition of militantism, will link civic behaviour with leisure; this will

be their way of taking into account the social powers in which they share or

from which they suffer. The rich lived as men of leisure and were socially

influential: the value of these two facts, or rather these two forces, will be

increased by the justification of each by the other. In The Laws (Plato [b]: 846

D),15 and in Aristotle’s Politics, there is a leitmotif that recurs with such

insistence as to betray a trace of disquiet or bad faith: only wealth provides the

free time that enables one to concern oneself with public affairs; wealth is

justified by political activity and, political activity is transformed into a

privilege of the rich,16 in the name of political realism. But was it really true

that the exclusive occupation of the rich was to get involved with public affairs,

and that, stopwatch in hand, the poor could not find an hour for this? Let’s not

dwell on this: we are in the realm of fictions. Actually, elsewhere, Plato, and

even Aristotle, censure the apolitical attitude of the rich who think only about

accumulating money and completely neglect the city-state.17 However, in their

eyes this is not a fact so much as a fault: the rich are at fault for not always

conforming to their own essence.

The hint of disquiet in our Athenian thinkers arises from the fact that they

continue to hear a contrary assertion repeated in the city-state: ‘‘It is possible

for one to attend both to one’s own affairs, which are different for each person,

and to those of the city-state’’ (Thucydides: II.40.2).18 Against this claim,

Aristotle’s Politics develops an argument over many pages, which, in its

incoherence, employs every available means:

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1. Those who toil have limited time to devote to the city-state, therefore they

are not involved in politics.

2. Those who toil are not worthy to concern themselves with the city-state,

since a poor toiler is not a man of quality and so must be prevented from

being involved in politics, the privilege having to be reserved for men of

leisure.

3. Besides, those who toil are concerned above all with earning a living and

readily leave politics to the rich; they judge themselves (Aristotle [a]: 1318

B 10; 1319 A 300).19

Politics is handed over to the rich, and must be, because they have the leisure

for it, in fact, and because being a man of leisure is a quality, a ‘‘virtue,’’ that

creates a right: distributive justice requires that unequal rights are due to

unequal merits.20

We have not sought to condemn an ancient ideology so much as show

how two independent facts �/ having time at one’s free disposal and

public spiritedness �/ were made part of a system. This took place thanks to

a syllogism whose major premise presupposes while its minor premise

accords value: in politics, the good consists in activism, free time is the

good, therefore men of leisure are activists, while the poor cannot be, must not

be, and do not want to be. The state of affairs in which the rich have or claim

supreme control of politics is accorded value outright, since every force

considers itself to be the good and is pleased with itself: ideology as valuation is

reduced to this,21 and power’s prestige is equally perceptible to those subject to

it and those who exercises it.22 Sensitive to power like common mortals,

philosophers will think that the link between having time freely available to one

and political power is the good, and so they will try to justify, to found this

state of affairs. ‘‘Knowing already, beforehand’’ that it is founded, they

reinforce themselves in the superiority of this conviction; it would not matter

to them that the argument is not perfect in its details: the certainty of the

conclusion is no less incontestable.

Nevertheless, this link was doubly contingent. The conduct of politics is

only in the hands of the socially dominant class in ancient societies where

superiorities are cumulative,23 the same individuals possessing power, wealth,

and culture. Equally contingent was the fact that the content of politics was

lived or thought as militantism, rather than in the thousand other ways to

which the relations of production would have been equally well suited. We do

not ask ourselves whether or not the State is the instrument of the dominant

class, but only whether the rich exercised the political profession themselves,

or if the roles were distinct as in our times. We have seen that Plato and

Aristotle assert both that men of leisure govern, and that too often they refuse

to govern; the philosophers do not succeed in thinking a valuation of free time

that is not founded on the civic presupposition of their time. Militantism, a

‘‘discourse’’ born from historical chance, belongs to a series that is

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independent of the economy, to put it like Cournot, but in its own way it

shaped the ancient valuation of wealth.

VI.

It also shaped real struggles. As the young Marx wrote: ‘‘The sole object of

existence and of the will was the political State, as political.’’ In Athens there

was a strange division between the political arena and social powers; the people

demanded democracy and was proud of having it, and of being able to ‘‘have its

say’’ on public and international questions,24 if not on economic interests.25

But its respect for the social superiority of the notables, for the valuation of

free time, remained intact. Athenian pork butchers and tanners were not

opposed to this state of affairs. As Christian Meier writes, unlike the

bourgeoisie,26 which was itself excluded from the political arena for a long

time, the Athenian poor did not invent its own scale of values. We can

understand then what this democracy was: for the people, political participa-

tion was a kind of question of honour, a way of affirming their own dignity in

front of the powerful; the people found its pride only within the political arena,

as in later centuries it will find it in the church, where it will be equal to the

grand; political democracy was the opium of the people. In Athens, it was the

people who made up the juries and the exercise of justice was a civic right par

excellence (Plato [b]: 768 B); what satisfaction jurors had, seeing the wealthiest

humbled before the popular jurisdiction (Aristophanes [a]: 575)!

Those who did not belong to the people could accept the extension of

citizenship to the entire people, but they did not really want democracy, even if

they were not out and out oligarchs. Whether they were loyal or just resigned

towards the people, they looked on this democratic phenomenon, which gave

their native land its singular stamp, from the outside; democracy was a reality

whose defects they knew only too well; it was not an ideal they would have

shared while acknowledging its imperfections. Thucydides or Euripides are

only partly sincere when they put eulogies to democracy in the mouths of

Pericles or Theseus; in these eulogies these men of leisure practice a certain

indulgence towards the ideals of a people they love, through which they

govern, and that must be taken as it is.27 Aristophanes was certainly not an

oligarch, but he taunted the popular regime because it is not the job of a satirist

to be a panegyrist. Yet without being opposed to democracy, he looked down

on it, secretly; he acted as if his popular public agreed with him in regarding

the defects of popular government as an obvious reality towards which one can

only be indulgent. But fundamentally, the people are not so stupid! It knows

full well that it is being deceived! In its own heart it thinks like the knights

(Aristophanes [b]: 1111�/1150), like those fortunate, upright men who, by

definition, incarnate civic virtue.

In short, men of leisure retained enough superiority to allow them to be

paternalistic towards the democratic oddity; this is the sign that, together with

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their social power, their political power remained intact, and that the people

itself continued to respect the powerful. Here is the language, somewhat

embarrassing for the modern reader, that Demosthenes allows himself to use

against Aeschines in front of the assembled people: ‘‘I am worth more than

Aeschines and better born than he; I would not like to appear as someone who

scorns poverty, but it must be said that, as a child, I went to the best schools,

and I was wealthy enough not to be forced by want into shameful jobs. Your

fortune rather, as a child Aeschines, was, like a slave, to clean out the hall

where your father taught . . .’’ (Demosthenes: 10.e.256�/258). This was not a

day on which one should displease the people who, on that occasion, were

judges. And Demosthenes does not displease them: he wins his case

triumphantly. His good conscience as landowner is explained by the fact

that wealth determined every other type of superiority, and the different scales

of value and antagonistic forces that nowadays call for modesty did not exist

then.28

In short, the people fully agreed with the notables in thinking that

democracy was not self-evident: as we have already said, it was seen as the

extension of a privilege rather than as the realization of a universal right. This

fragile political conquest will not withstand social power for two centuries: in

the fourth century, the nobles will take back power and never let it slip from

their grasp.29

For thinkers there remained the possibility of blessing this development by

explaining that a city-state needs citizens who make their own wealth and time

available to it (Aristotle [a]: 1238.a.14 and passim ), and the possibility of saving

the honour of thought by subtly distinguishing between the duty of the

wealthy to contribute more to the city-state by governing it and their claimed

right to govern because they are wealthy (Aristotle [a]: 1280.a.25; 1316.b.1).30

It was not thought, therefore, that wealth would guarantee the independence of

active citizens, as will be repeated from 1789 to 1848: rather it was held that it

would enable them to do more for the good of the city-state. It is true that the

argument could have been turned around: if we redistribute the patrimonies,

the city will have more useful citizens. So argued the most famous social

reformers of antiquity, the Gracchi: they proposed to strengthen the city, not

to make individuals happy (Appian: I.7�/9; 26�/37). The presupposition of

their politics was still militantism.

The ancient democracies were always fragile and lasted only as long as the

duration of a collective passion. Should this brevity be attributed to a

particular feature of constitutional technique? We know that they were all

direct democracies; antiquity was unaware of the representative system. Max

Weber wrote: ‘‘every direct democracy tends to turn into a regime of notables’’

(Weber 1979).

No doubt, but constitutional law does not exist without reason. The

notables do not inherit power because they have the time and ability to govern,

but because they are socially powerful. Wealth is surrounded by such prestige

that its power compels recognition: such prestige is even more decisive than

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the economic blackmail a rich man can exercise on those who depend on him.

The reason that things have not been like this for a couple of centuries in the

West is simply the professionalization of the political craft; the bourgeoisie

governs, no doubt, but not the wealthy themselves.

Direct or indirect democracy? The alternative does not depend on a

technique that can be isolated as such from the historical context; there are not

two varieties, but two formations that cannot be compared with each other.

Athenian democracy could only be direct. This is not because this way of

governing is technically possible when the political tasks are not too

complicated, or when the state is a small city in which everyone can assemble

in a public place, but rather because, historically, what we call direct democracy

was an attempt to remove from the notables the political part of their general

influence, by transforming citizens into activists. Whereas, on the other hand,

the indirect democracy of the modern West is a way of legitimising the power

exercised by professional politicians over a passive population. These

specialists are no doubt elected, but they start by electing themselves (they

are made or become candidates) and the electoral system inevitably distorts a

general will that does not exist beforehand and that the system helps to form;

the relationship between the electors and the politics pursued by the elected is

even more remote, if that is possible. The asymmetry between governors and

governed is as blatant today as it was when people had masters. The difference

is that the representatives of the people can no longer be considered as masters

of the governed: the real role of popular elections is not to select

representatives, but to underline that they do not govern by divine right,

since their power is dependent on chance; elections are a lottery that reminds

everyone that power is only on loan to the governors, and that they are not like

a king who was the legitimate proprietor of his realm.

VII.

We know that ideology is only power’s satisfaction with itself; it thinks itself in

laudatory terms, but what terms are these? What every age holds to be such;

capitalism will call itself liberalism in the centuries of liberty, while wealthy

Greeks spoke of serving the city-state. Plato, who believes everything his

society says, is a philosopher inasmuch as he takes it literally31; he will

systemise incoherent assertions arising from distinct powers.

Plato never doubts the superiority of the rich32 and their right to command,

but while the wealthy direct belief in their own superiority against the poor, he

will turn this back against the wealthy themselves and establish duties for

them. The doctrine of the free disposal of one’s time claimed that a wealthy

man is not working, even when engaged in an activity that would be called

work when performed by someone less wealthy; Plato will require them really

to stop working and, to achieve his ends, he will institute as many festivals as

there are days in the year.

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Plato calls his idle rich contemporaries oligarchs, since he does not want to

honour them with the name of aristocrats. He reproaches them for always

seeking to become wealthier; instead of making good use of the time at their

disposal, they employ it, out of greed, in a reprehensible way: they work. Their

love of wealth ‘‘leaves them no moment of respite for being concerned with

anything but their private property; the soul of every citizen is completely

devoted to his enrichment and never thinks of anything other than his daily

profit. Each is ready to learn any technique, and practice any profession, so

long as it brings him profit, and he derides everything else’’ (Plato [b]: 831c].33

It is necessary to put an end to this situation, since a citizen worthy of the

name ‘‘already has a sufficient profession, that of creating a well-regulated city

and not altering it, and this is not a matter of an occupation of secondary

importance’’ (Plato [b]: 846d).

‘‘No transactions will be conducted with a view to profit’’ (Plato [b]: 847d).

Export and import will be reduced to a minimum. The young Aristotle’s

judgement will be similar: a city-state is not a shopkeeper, does not need

excessive earnings, and should not have a port that is too big; a smaller shop, so

to speak, will suffice.34 Whether it is a matter of citizens considered

individually or of the city-state itself, the main enemy is greed, that is, wealth.

Is this a Vichy-like fear of an economic development that would oust the

dominant class? Not at all. The idea was the more disconcerting one of

autarchy, in the ancient meaning of the word: one must be economically

independent, or, better, one must not depend on the economy, because trade is

greed and luxury, and luxury means political decadence. This idea of autarchy

had a very weak influence on economic behaviour in antiquity, but it had a

considerable influence on ideas. It has, then, more or less the same degree of

reality as civic militantism, or rather, it is the same idea: when one concerns

oneself with profit one neglects the public good. So, if we want to measure the

importance of the militant presupposition in ancient thought, we should

consider that it is as great as the themes of luxury and decadence, which have

filled entire libraries, from Solon35 and Plato up to Rousseau, passing through

half a millennium of Roman ‘‘decadence,’’ from Cato to Heliogabalus, or to

Romulus Augustus.

We confess that this theme remains incomprehensible to us. So, injustice,

rivalry and lack of discipline are the products of wealth (Plato [b]: 678bc), and

this ruins the city-state? Increasing wealth presupposes, in fact, that citizens

look to their own egotistical interest rather than to the single public good, and

we know36 that they cannot do two things at the same time. What’s more, wealth

makes one lose one’s self-control: the wealthy no longer obey the Law and

become ambitious.37 Finally, wealth generates jealousy and internal struggles.38

How was it possible to think this for two millennia? In what respect was the

U.S.A. a more fragile power than the poor and virtuous Japan of 1941? Are poor

countries free from social conflict? And how could the collective dimension, in

which the destiny of societies is at stake, be reduced solely to the virtue of

individuals? The collective dimension is made up of material forces, automatic

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mechanisms, aggregate effects, of false consciousness, and the ‘‘virtue’’ of each

individual is a consequence rather than a cause, assuming that this virtue is

more socially useful than egoism. Faced with ancient sermons on decadence, we

are overcome by a kind of laziness; we let them talk and give up any idea of

finding a meaning in this simple-minded sociology.

We will only find meaning if we bring out its two or three presuppositions.

Society does not survive by itself but needs an energy that continually recreates

it, or else it will degenerate; this energy will be individual and ethical, for the

collective and material dimension is unknown; and ethics is a morality of effort

against temptations. The decadence of city-states is a natural fact like ageing

(Polybius: VI.9; VI.57)39: the inertia, or the ‘‘invisible hand,’’ is lacking that

would make society endure independently of individual intentions and create

the social dimension from an aggregation of egoisms; disorder is more natural

than order and only effort will maintain the stability of the city-state. Militancy

is not sustained by anonymous forces: it is distinct from society, we know; it is

an action that transforms a society into a city-state. So there would be no city-

state without the Law that trains militants and obtains their obedience.40

Without the Law, everything collapses: the Law creates the city-state. Also, it

does not have to be not too far ahead and not too far behind the customs of

society, as modern laws cautiously are: the Law creates society, makes it exist,

and fashions its customs by means of a training that is called education; it may

even diverge widely from society, so as to reform it, to revolutionize it. Plato’s

Laws will be seen as utopian dreams, whereas their revolutionary audacity is

only an illustration of the ancient legislator’s voluntarism.

This voluntarism is also typical of the citizens who actively obey the Law.

There is no salvation except through individual virtue: ancient thought

explained social facts on the basis of what it knew; when it did not resort to the

gods and Fortune, it explained them through the individual and morality.

Psychology is the driving force of politics. But, more precisely, how does lack

of self-control generate avidity, from which lack of discipline and ambition are

born? It was not really known, and there was no great concern to know: from

Plato to Sallust, the details of the progression were pictured in different ways,

when they were not left vague, or taken to be self-evident rather. It was self-

evident that every imaginable vice crowds in at the gate, and evil nature

spreads, when there is a fall in ethical tension.41 There is a single means of

defence: training individuals by means of the Law, which forms customs. If the

customs are evil and, in other words, the Law is no longer obeyed, or if the

Law itself is wicked, then there is no remedy.

Militancy was a permanent ethical tension and this voluntarism pervaded

everything that Greek and Roman society believed in and wanted to be. From

classical Athens to Quintilian, education �/ to speak only of this �/ induced

the child to submit to good order (eutaxia ) and to flee laxness: there is a Greco-

Roman obsession with virility . . . Not even fears and sorrows escape the imprint

of the moral militant. When the Greeks and Romans have nightmares of the

complete collapse of the city, they dream of this catastrophe as decadence, as the

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decomposition of social muscle; unlike the more passive citizens of gendarme

states or welfare states, they do not fear the spread of partisans of social equality,

of disorder and anarchy: in short, their fear is of themselves. And their

opponents behave likewise. Because, from Plato to Saint Jerome, there have

been men who felt themselves to be in exile in real society, who thought it badly

made, and whose days were sad; like Andre Breton when he renounced

bourgeois society, they lived in a constant ‘‘state of fury.’’ When they try to

formulate the grounds for their malaise, they do not blame the gap between the

ideal of real liberation and the poverty of bourgeois freedoms: rather, they take

as their target the distance between the militant ideal (that they assume was real

in the good old times) and social reality. Say, after this, whether Juvenal was of

the left or the right. In the militant presupposition, the ethical requirement was

blended with political conservatism. Plato experienced the unhappiness of the

militant consciousness for all his life, from Crito to The Laws.

VIII.

The ideal of this ancient democracy was that the citizens be its slaves. Its

generating movement was the opposite of that of our democracy; modern

times have conquered a zone of freedoms and private life against the State,

whereas the only freedoms the Athenians had were those left them by the city-

state; a modern State only concerns itself with the morality of citizens in

explicitly defined cases, whereas a city-state’s right to examine the private life

of its citizens was unlimited, even if it was seldom exercised.

Comparing the freedom of the ancients and the moderns, Benjamin

Constant said that the city-state was free, but its citizens were slaves. Jellinek

has shown that this to be an exaggeration: ‘‘For the ancients, as for the

moderns, the individual had a sphere of free activity at his disposal,

independent of the State, except that antiquity was never aware of the

juridical character of this sphere of independence’’ (Jellinek 1921: 307), it did

not formally guarantee this freedom. However, rather than a lacuna, a mere

oversight, is this not the sign of a radical difference? As Menzel says in his

memorable study of the trial of Socrates: ‘‘It remains the case that this freedom

was only a de facto status, that it was never a subjective right that could be

asserted against the State’’ (1938: 59). For us, even if human rights are often

violated or annulled, they nonetheless exist; what existed in Greece, on the

other hand, was the city-state’s right to pry, which was nothing other than the

correlate of the militant presupposition: the citizen was not a sheep in the flock

of the governed, but an instrument of the city-state that expected him to have

the private morality that modern states demand from their officials. The right

to pry therefore had the same degree of reality as the ‘‘discourse’’ of

militantism: it was rarely put into practice. It was in the trial of Socrates. To

establish freedoms against the city-state would have been unthinkable,

immoral; it was already too much that the city was constrained to formulate

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prohibitions, itemizing them one by one: good citizens should not need such

detailed prescriptions, their consciences should be enough to dictate what

should or should not be done in every case.

Isocrates also prefers civic morality to written laws. Only the ignorant ‘‘can

think that men are better where the laws are more detailed’’; as if one could

inculcate morality by decree! ‘‘Quality, virtue, is not developed in this way, but

by daily habits; the number and precision of the laws are the sign of a badly

organized city in which one has to erect barriers, and lots of them, against

wrongdoings; when the straight and narrow path of civic virtue is followed, the

porticos are not filled with laws, duty is carried in the soul’’ (Isocrates: 39�/41).

In short, there is no need for barriers when citizens know how to govern

themselves and their conduct is dictated by their zeal for the Law. But what if

their zeal is not steadfast? In that case, the simplest thing for the city would be

for it to cast the master’s gaze on their consciences directly, instead of

channelling them as best it can by means of barriers. We can see that the

militant ideal, which was willingly inquisitorial, and the more permissive

reality, which confined itself to enforcing respect for the laws, correspond

respectively to the two possible modalities of power between which Greek

thought wavered.

The best modality would be for the city to have a direct hold on the soul of

its instruments, rather than to govern them from outside with orders and

prohibitions. If citizens were fully educated in obedience to the rule, in

eutaxia , then each would carry the Law of the city within himself and the city

would not have to govern an entire flock of citizens as a whole, by confining

itself to correcting deviations after the event; every citizen would follow the

straight path. However, since this ideal is almost never realised, since

education is never perfect (which is why one talks so much about it), the

city is founded as a substitute for the weaknesses of conscience: it undertakes

the supervision of each individual’s private morality.

But why supervise it, rather than reserve public severity for acts that harm

others or the group? What private vices matter to the State? We will see. In any

case, for the Greeks it was self evident that the group could not be indifferent

towards private life, and when they tried to explain why, they maintained that

prevention is better than cure. We know that luxury and wealth form

undisciplined characters, and ‘‘love of innovations is also caused by the habits

of private life; it is good to create magistrates who will keep their eye on those

whose way of life brings danger to the constitution’’ (Aristotle [a]: 1288.b.20);

it is also good to prevent wicked teachers from corrupting young people.42 No

one protested against this principle, and neither Plato nor Xenophon invokes

freedom of conscience in defence of Socrates; in their eyes atheism43 is

rightfully judged blameworthy, and they defend Socrates only by challenging

the facts: he was not really an atheist. If he had been, Plato would have been

the first to make him drink the hemlock; the death penalty also awaits the

impious in the city-state of The Laws, whose citizens live under constant

surveillance and surrounded by denouncers, whom Plato does not call

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informers however. On occasions real cities established magistrates responsible

for private morality: ephors, gyneconomes , and censors in Rome, and the

Areopagus in Athens.

We won’t be surprised to learn that the activity of these inquisitors will

remain symbolic or limited to making some examples. An old archon was

excluded from the Areopagus for having dined in an inn (Athenaeus: XIII,

566),44 which was very loose conduct (Isocrates: 49).45 Someone who

squandered his patrimony on pleasures was no longer a good citizen46; an

Athenian who frittered away his own wealth on courtesans dared to reply to

the censure of the Areopagus that he was doing what he liked with his own

money,47 but this defender of the right to a private life no longer had the title

of citizen and became an agent of the Macedonian kings who then had Athens

as their protectorate. Aristotle rightly said that tyranny is indifferent towards

private morality (Aristotle [a]: 1919.b.30); no doubt because a tyrant no longer

has fellow citizens, but only slaves.

On the other hand, can Athenians remain indifferent to the impiety of one

of their fellow citizens? Socrates’ religious shortcomings concern solely the

duties of the moral individual (there was no State religion forming a distinct

order of things). However, ‘‘every activist is a public man,’’ as a proverb says

somewhere, and Socrates was condemned. He could have fled, but in a dream

the Laws of his land told him not to: ‘‘What are you thinking about Socrates?

Of destroying us, the Laws, and with us the city itself?’’ (Plato [c]: 50ab). For

only the Laws enable the city to survive (Aristotle [d]: I.4.1360.a.19).48

Socrates preferred an undeserved death to giving an example of disobedience

of the laws and thereby destroying what in his eyes was the framework of his

homeland. He may be compared with those old Bolsheviks victims of show

trials who, out of party patriotism, and so as not to wreck an organisation based

on discipline, died without saying anything. Perhaps this is sublime, but if it

was not sublime? It would be revealing.

IX.

It would be revealing of what ancient politics thought it was.

If we ask how the moral individual matters to the State, political thinkers

have given, and give, a thousand answers, all of them false: fear of scandal and

the contagion of example, protection of individuals, magical fear of the

consequences of impiety for the group, the idea that personal morality is the

weak point in the chain and that if it gives way the collective fabric will break

up. These bad reasons are of little importance: the rationalisations count less

than the force that pushes men to think them true and leads them to be

continually reborn. Bergson called this force social obligation, because he

situated the energy of morality in the pressure of others, of society, and not in a

Kantian imperative. Public opinion cannot not be scandalised by private vices;

if it wants to be a political force, it will provide a political rationalisation for its

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moral indignation; if it is armed with a secular arm it will act ruthlessly, even if

the culprit’s fault consists solely in what he thinks in his own head. There is no

original specificity of politics; this confused initial state is offered by Plato’s

The Laws , where morality and civic duties are on the same level. The State will

impose private morality for so long as it is not distinct from society and public

opinion. It remains to know when, in what cases, public opinion has the secular

arm at its disposal; here again we will find the two possible modalities of

authority between which the Greeks wavered.

When authority is exercised with a firm grip, opinion reigns and the city-

state is nothing other than the set of its members; governing is not a particular

profession with its own maxims and esprit de corps. It is the same individuals

who govern the city, that is to say, themselves, and who constitute public

opinion, the source of obligation, ever ready to censure the other person and to

consider deviations as challenges to its shrewdness; the city will condemn a

fellow citizen for scandalous conduct in the same way as it will flare up against

an enemy city. Let us suppose, on the other hand, that a specialised organ takes

power or that power is given up to it; this division of roles will entail the

constitution of a particular domain, that of politics, which will be the province

of a new modality of authority. For the group that governs, fellow citizens are

no longer peers whose private life is commented on by all the neighbourhood

gossip, and their possible deviations are not a State affair: they do not

compromise the survival of the civic flock. Politics now concerns only the

collective interest, and it matters little that the flock has its fun; what matters is

that they do not fight amongst themselves and produce disorder in the ranks.

All that matters is public order and public security; the rest is private life. One

won’t go so far as to recognise the latter as a formal right to freedom, but one

does more perhaps: one forgets it.

Preferences were divided between these two forms of authority: their

respective effectiveness is practically the same, and in our own times we have

seen dictatorial regimes waver between puritanism and a supposedly

depoliticising permissiveness, without them losing or gaining authority in

either case. On the other hand, the effects they produce and the expenditure of

energy they call for are unequal. For some professional politicians, control of

individual life is only pointless zeal, which one tacitly abandons; politics is

carried out at the level of mass effects. If an official puritanism is nonetheless

imposed, it will be less as a method of government than as a threatening

message: moral laxity is prohibited in order to signify that subversive ideas are

also prohibited and that every citizen must feel himself to be an instrument of

the State, which is the conscience of its members.

Thinkers, however, take puritanism seriously: Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle

prefer the method of controlling consciences to that of the overall conduct of

the flock; they reproach Athenian democracy with having abandoned the first

method, allowing each to ‘‘live as they see fit’’ (Aristotle [a]: 1310.a.30;

1317.b.10; Isocrates: 37; 20; Plato [a] 557b), since it is human to ascribe an

inevitable evolution to a political regime that one does not like. Intellectuals are

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fearful and proselytes; less sensitive than politicians to aggregates, they are

disturbed by isolated disorders that they see as symptoms; out of ethical zeal,

they do not make a clear distinction between politics and individual morality

that they consider to be a political necessity. Public opinion has the same

reflexes; it likens the government of civic aggregates to the educational control

of a household and calls for strict authority.49 Antiquity, then, saw the constant

rebirth of a militant ideal that had very little to do with its real politics, except

when some reformers undertook to put this more exacting ideal into practice;

because in troubled times this civic ideal was taken literally. Socrates had the

misfortune to live in one of these periods of zeal, but in truth, with regard to

this ideal, he was of the same view as his killers.

The last word falls to Rene Char: ‘‘History is the long succession of the

synonyms of an identical word. To contradict it is a duty.’’

Translated by Graham Burchell

Source : ‘Les Grecs ont-ils connu la democratie?’’ appeared in the journal

Diogene . . .’ No. 124, (1983), pp. 3�/33.

Notes

1 See Meier (1990: 141). We call this presupposition or ‘‘discourse’’ (in Foucault’ssense) what Meier calls the ‘‘political identity’’ of a society. On politicisation, see pp.165�/176.2 On the Law, see Victor Ehrenbeg (1957: I. 77).3 Since the gubernator, or pilot, was also the captain of the ship, as J. Rouge (174) hasshown.4 The metaphor of the politician as a gubernator has been studied by C.M. Moschetti(1966).5 See Tricot’s note (Aristotle [b] 1962: 1276 B 20).6 On the method, see O. Ducrot: ‘‘We can search in every text for the implicitreflection of the deep beliefs of the epoch: it will be understood therefore that the text isonly coherent on condition of completing it with these beliefs. Although we know that itdoes not appear as an affirmation of these’’ (1976: 13).7 ‘‘The State is like a ship at sea . . . steered through the waves of internationalaffairs’’ (Plato [b]: 758 A 5); Polybius, (VI.44).8 Either one participated in the city-state, or one didn’t; some felt themselves‘‘excluded from the city’’ (Plato [b]: 768 B) and suffered as a result.9 Down this road one will end up assigning offices in the city-state to beggars andslaves, complains the Athenian Theramenes (Xenophon [b]: II.iii.48). This text revealsnot the slightest hesitation on slavery; Theramenes wants to associate his adversary withthe absurdity of democracy pushed to its ultimate consequences and resorts tohyperbole that his adversary himself finds exaggerated; it is as if in our world childrenwho have just reached the age of reason wanted to vote. Or to give citizenship to beastsof burden. There is no point in saying that no one ever tried to open the city-state toslaves, or to the metics.10 The term arete is best translated as ‘‘quality,’’ rather than as ‘‘virtue’’which distorts the nuance and makes many pagan texts incomprehensible. ‘‘Virtue’’

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opposes the single moral value to other, true or false, advantages; ‘‘quality’’ designatesequally well a virtue and the noble title of a ‘‘man of quality’’; being rich was aquality.11 The problem of the disparagement of work in antiquity is quite complex; it variesaccording to social class, as De Robertis has easily been able to show. The variation itselfis expressed through four different variables: 1) what was considered to be work in theeyes of the ancients, that is the fact of depending on another person or on things, is notwhat we understand by work; 2) the place of work in the ancient definition of the socialindividual is different from our epoch: a noble ship owner was a noble, not a ship owner(one who was happy to equip the ships); a ship owner who was not noble, however, wasdefined as a ship owner; people of no worth, precisely, are defined by their job: this iswhy work was esteemed by the popular classes; 3) a particular case was thedisparagement of commerce and of manual trades; 4) if a notable is not defined byhis own economic activity, he is nevertheless proud of being good at business or as afarmer: it was a talent that was appreciated, an extra quality. With regard to thesuperstition that valued agriculture but deprecated commerce and artisanal activities,see the brilliant arguments by which Xenophon tries to rationalise it (Xenophon [c]:IV.2 and V.4). On the double attitude of the Greeks and of Plato towards artisans, andon the hesitation between two models (‘‘the political level separates what the technicallevel joins’’), see P. Vidal-Naquet (1986: 224�/245).12 As Maurice Godelier writes (quoting from memory): ‘‘The intentional rationalityof economic behaviour is not an absolute given but depends on the hierarchy of socialrelations.’’13 It will be the same in Rome where the artes liberales only keep their specific liberalcharacter on condition that they are exercised by a free man; exercised by a slave or by afreedman they do not have any liberal character at all. After the work of De Robertisand D. Norr, see now J. Christes (1975).14 This was a proverbial expression (Aristotle [a]: 1334 A 20).15 More generally, The Laws in their totality are a programme that immerses the richin a sort of contemplative civic life in which they no longer have time to concernthemselves with their economic affairs.16 ‘‘The contempt for work was born from the ideal of political life; whoever has toearn a living does not have time to satisfy their political vocation’’ (Christes 1975: 25).In The Suppliant Women (Euripides: 419), the herald of an oligarchic city declares:‘‘Even if a poor farmer is not ignorant, his work will prevent him from being occupiedwith common affairs.’’17 For Plato, see the end of this article; for Aristotle, Politics, 1286 B 13.18 Pericles’ speech.19 See Polybius (IV.73.7�/8).20 On distributive justice in politics see, Plato ([b]: 744 BC; 757 B�/E), Aristotle ([a]:1280 A 10; 1282 B 20; 1301 A 25, and [c]: 1131 A 25) and Isocrates (21).21 That is, ideology serves for justifying before others, it is a functional, finalisedassumption, that the facts often contradict (one can eulogise oneself with arrogance,with challenge, one can assert one’s own strength rather than justify oneself, oftenmoreover the ideology is only read and known by its own beneficiaries; it is also possibleto keep silent and harden oneself in one’s own haughtiness).22 Those who suffer it can also react against power, they can display anger andrebel, but they may also ‘‘resent’’ it (overcompensate), asserting the superiority ofhumility and the eminent dignity of the humble who will get their reward when the lastwill be first.23 See Veyne (1976: 117) where an idea of Robert Dahls’ is developed.24 On freedom as the right to express one’s own opinion, see Meier (1990: 169�/170)and ‘‘Freiheit’’ in, O. Bruner, W. Conze and R. Kosellek (1984�/1992: v.II, 247).

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Isegoria is the right to express one’s own opinion on politics without having to keepquiet in favour of just the powerful; parresia is the right to speak frankly on politicalmatters or the courage to speak freely without fear of the powerful: see, for example, forparresia, Aeschines, 6, and for isegoria , Polybius, II.38.6; IV.31.4; V.27.6; VI.8.4 and 9.4;VII.10.1; XIII.12.9, where the term is often linked to parresia.25 Meier (1990: 146).26 Meier (1990: 145).27 Euripides’ Ion, or Book VIII of Thucydides, in which he speaks in the first person,are very different from The Suppliant Women or the speech given by Pericles in Book II.28 Or, at least, were almost nonexistent. There was the sense of solidarity that willlead loans of money between citizens to be seen as fraternal conduct that does notthreaten property rights. From Isocrates to Cicero, this fraternity is widely praised.There is also (Isocrates: 44; Aristophanes, Pluto ) eulogies of (agricultural or evencommercial) work, with a Hesiodic tone: ‘‘In the good old times people of lower rankwere directed towards agriculture and trade, because it was known that poverty is bornfrom idleness and criminality from poverty’’ (Isocrates). Instead of wondering what theancients thought about work, it would be better to wonder what they thought about theworkers: they despised them as socially inferior; work was nonetheless a good thing. Ifnot for the privileged class, at least for the people of little account.29 With Aristotle, citizenship ceases to be a function so as to become a status; so thereare governors and governed facing each other. See C. Mosse (1979: 241). Even duringthe century and a half of democracy, Athens had its own clan of oligarchs who heldthemselves aloof and peered at the actions of democracy; ‘‘What’’ they repeat ‘‘wouldbecome of the people without us?’’ (Pseudo Xenophon, The Constitution of theAthenians ); ‘‘We have nothing in common with them’’ (Theophrastus, Characters,XXVI, The Oligarch, 3). The particularity of this attitude is obvious: the oligarchs feelthey are foreign to Athens. Hellenic patriotism is a patriotism of the band, of theconcrete group; either you are in the democratic band or you are opposed to it: sincecity-state and civic body are the same thing, one cannot dream of an eternal Athens,which survives beyond the errors of democracy, as does Action Francaise , which serveseternal France and detests the Republic, or like De Gaulle, who preferred France to theFrench. The career of Alcibiades is a good example of this group patriotism: theAthenians are Athens, that is the men with whom Alcibiades breaks every relationshipfor another city, and then with whom he makes peace . . . After the Athenian defeat of405, the oligarchs destroy Athens’ wall to the sound of flutes, as if it were a festival: theydid not feel themselves involved in the defeat of an eternal Athens; they had prevailedover a rival band.30 The wealthy have the duty to serve the city-state: they are its slaves, Isocrates (26)maintains.31 It would be tempting to contrast Plato’s attitude with Stoic universalism, whichextends responsibility to the poor and to slaves. But, once again, we need to see thereasons for such universalism; it arises not so much from a consideration of the poorand the slave as from the difference in comparison with wealth and false privileges,which do not ensure security, autonomy. The wealthy and powerful can be overthrownand reduced to slavery. Faced with these blows of destiny, they will only be autonomousby learning to despise wealth and liberty. In short, the real addressees of Stoicuniversalism are the privileged.32 According to Letter VII, 334 BC, a city’s strength is constituted by five in everythousand of the civic body, namely the old citizens of noble birth, who have a sufficientpatrimony.33 In The Republic, the greedy rich who work are depicted as obsessed and repressedpuritans, preoccupied only with accumulating and saving.

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34 Aristotle ([a]: 1327.a.30), a text we have retranslated in Annales E.S.C., 1979, p.230 and note 70. In this article we tried to show the curious contrast between theautarchic ideal and the real, scarcely autarchic situation; it is a contrast that we cannotexplain if we have not understood the extension, in the ancient subconscious, of thissubmerged continent that we have baptized, to the best of our ability, thepresupposition of militancy: the autarchic ideal, in the theoretical prohibition ofcommerce and international trade, is only a piece of this continent. The reality was verydifferent; see, for example, L. Gernet (1909: 375sq ).35 For Solon, see the fragment 3, verses 5�/10. On the vacuity of the theme of thedecadence of Roman customs at the end of the Republic, see F. Hampl (1959: 497).36 See note 16.37 Excessive wealth makes submission to reason and the public authority difficult(Aristotle [a]: 1295 B 5�/20); only poverty generates restraint, while wealth producesindiscipline (Isocrates: 3). For the ancients, being wealthy signifies believing thateverything is permitted (this will be the double meaning of luxuria in Latin).38 Plato, Aristotle, Polybius (VI.57)39 While humanity continues to exist, after every period of decadence everythingbegins again, and the constitutions evolve, all in all, cyclically.40 See a fundamental page of The Laws (Plato [b]: 875a�/d).41 Man is made for toil: if he relaxes, danger threatens (Plato [b]: 779a); lack of self-control is the source of all lack of discipline and every excess (734b); only self-controlenables us to prevail over the pleasures (840c). Everywhere political life is contrastedwith pleasure.42 On the legal basis of the accusation of corrupting young people, see Menzel (1938:26). In my view we should assume that corruption is judged not for its material effects(the particular actions of corrupted adolescents) but for the content of the teaching; sothat we would call it a crime of opinion (but this expression would have no meaning fora Greek).43 ‘‘Socrates does not worship the same gods as the city.’’. For theous nomizein seeMenzel (1938: 17), and W. Fahr (1969: 156), who shows that Plato modified themeaning of this expression in accordance with his own religious opinions. Greekreligion is not defined according to the criterion of a profession of faith, in which oneconfesses one’s ‘‘belief ’’ in the gods, but according to the criterion of cultural practices.44 That is, Hyperides.45 In Rome, good emperors, the enemies of licence, prohibited innkeepers fromselling food.46 One of Solon’s laws prescribed atimia for whoever squandered their patrimony(Diogenes Laertius, I, 55). The censors in Rome were extremely severe with knightswho, as public figures, were held (like Greek citizens, in theory) to follow a morerigorous morality. See Quintilian, IV, 3, 44 and 74. Abdera persecuted the philosopherDemocritus for having squandered his patrimony (Athanaeus: IV, 168 B).47 Athenaeus, VI, 167e�/168a and 168f. A Roman knight will respond similarly to thereproofs of a censor: ‘‘I thought that my patrimony was mine’’ (Quintilian).48 See Aristotle ([a] 1310.a.35): ‘‘it is not slavery to live in obedience to theconstitution; it is rather salvation’’ (salvation of the city, obviously, and with it of thecitizens); Plato ([b]: 715d).49 Immorality is both a direct threat and a disturbing symptom for the city-state; inthe absence of public supervision, customs are corrupted (Isocrates: 47); when everyonedoes exactly what they please, this is a sign that the city is breaking up and that citizensare as independent of each other as cities are (Aristotle [a] 1280.b.5). In antiquity, theconstant theme of the present day disorder of customs is due to a quite natural illusion:politics is conceived only as a constant control that either comes from the publicauthority or arises from the individual moral sense, formed by education. Now, when it

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is observed that sadly this control hardly exists, it is concluded that people will surelytake advantage of this to behave badly. The theme of decadence comes down to theunreality of the ideal.

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