Athenian democracy

Now that Philip Hammond is promising yet more tax hikes, he might consider how Athens managed it. During the whole period of their direct democracy (which ended in 323 BC), the decision-making assembly was dominated by the poor. Their empire made Athens a wealthy place, and the poor ensured that wealth came their way, not that of the rich, in forms such as payment for jury service, rowing the triremes (which kept the empire together) and much more. Meanwhile, tax was paid only by the rich. The 300 top richest every year paid property taxes to, for example, construct and maintain Athens’ triremes and fund state festivals for public enjoyment. Neither

Hardly a week goes by without someone applauding Thomas Carlyle’s objection to democracy: ‘I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ In other words, infinitely wise politicians should tell the unenlightened mob what to think, not vice versa. Such feelings have been common ever since the Athenians invented direct democracy in 508 BC, which lasted till 323 BC and handed to citizens in the assembly (the dêmos) the power to decide all Athenian policy. One anonymous writer described the dêmos as ‘ignorant, ill-disciplined and immoral’, ascribing it to their ‘poverty and lack of education’. The philosopher Plato thought a state could be well governed only by Platonic philosophers. The historian Thucydides

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, raises his growth forecasts and suddenly everyone believes the ‘expert’. So is it wrong to say that people ‘have had enough of experts’? Yes, totally wrong. Expertise exists: the question is, with what scope? Socrates dissected the problem. In debates in Athens’ democratic Assembly, he pointed out, topics such as building or ship construction were taken to be the business of builders and shipwrights, and anyone who, though no expert, attempted to give advice in those areas was jeered off the platform. But when the debate moved on to deliberation about a course of action, then ‘any builder, smith, cobbler, merchant or

Ex-chancellor George Osborne is planning a book to be titled The Age of Unreason. He says that ‘it will be my attempt to understand why populist nationalism is on the rise in our western democracies’. An Athenian would have been most surprised by that title’s implications. If the ancient Greeks are famous for anything, it is for the invention of western ‘philosophy’. By that is usually meant the attempt to explain the world in humanly intelligible terms, i.e. by the exclusive use of reason and evidence, without calling in aid the supernatural. This sort of thinking, begun by eastern Greeks in the 7th century BC, reached something of an apogee

As self-important comics fantasise about unseating Donald Trump with their wit, they should remember the great Aristophanes. In 424 BC, he presented a comedy about the controversial politician Cleon. He was (apparently) the son of a tanner (ugh!), and was seen by contemporaries, including the historian Thucydides, as a ‘brutal’, ‘insolent’ but ‘very persuasive’ braggart — and all too successful. The play opens with two slaves driven out of their house after a beating by their new master Paphlagon (Cleon); he has risen to power by fawning on and flattering the gullible and senile Demos (‘the people’) and telling outrageous lies about his political rivals. So far, so Trump. In

Brilliant Oxford undergraduates argue that it is right to prevent us saying things they object to, because speech they do not like is the equivalent of actions they do not like. They had better not read classics, then. There is no safe space there. Greeks made a clear distinction between logos (‘account, reckoning, explanation, story, reason, debate, speech’, cf. ‘logic’ and all those ‘-ologies’) and ergon (‘work, deed, action’). For a Greek, to reject logos was to reject the expression of thought; and so to close down any possibility of people giving an account or reason for why they were thinking and acting as they did; and therefore to prevent any

Why do Greeks want to keep the euro, or remain in the European Union? The combative, creative, competitive, mercantile classical Greeks throve on independence. The farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) makes the point about competition by calling it Eris, ‘strife’, which he characterises as painful but also helpful. On the one hand, he said, it creates conflict and discord; on the other, ‘It gets the shiftless working. For when someone whose work does not come up to scratch sees someone else, a rich man, busy himself ploughing and planting and managing his household well, then there is competition between neighbours in the race to riches. This Eris is good for

‘This was the rule for men that Zeus established: whereas fish, beasts and birds eat each other, since there is no law among them, to men he gave law, which is by far the best thing’ (the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod, 7th century bc). Given the hostile reaction to the convicted rapist Ched Evans’s desire to return to his job as a footballer after serving his sentence, one wonders whether the fish, beasts and birds might not be on to something. The 4th century bc statesman and orator Demosthenes pursued Hesiod’s line of thought when he said, ‘If laws are abolished and each individual is given powers to do what he

Whatever problems Greeks and Romans faced, a politicised priesthood was not one of them. They might have made three observations on Egypt’s current plight. First, though Roman emperors were autocrats, the plebs regularly expressed their displeasure at them, sometimes in street riots, over matters like food shortages. But they did so fully expecting the emperor to respond. Only very rarely did he fail to do so. He was not that stupid: for all his power, he knew he had to keep the plebs onside. This basic insight seems to have escaped the fanatic ex-president Morsi. Second, the most important consequence of the Athenian invention of democracy was to generate a