Professor Donald
Kagan: I was trying to
describe to you how the Athenian
democracy in its full form,
after the reforms that were
instituted by Pericles,
after the death of Ephialtes,
how that system worked and I
had described what we would call
the legislative branch and the
much less significant executive
branch,
and now I'd like to turn to
what we would call the judicial
branch.
Now, this Athenian judicial
system, I think,
might seem even more strange to
the modern eye than the rest of
the constitution.
You start with this panel of
six 6,000 jurors who enlisted to
serve in the courts each year.
On any given day,
the jurors who showed up to
accept an assignment were
assigned to specific courts and
to specific cases.
The usual size of a jury seems
to have been 501,
although there were juries as
small as fifty-one to as many as
1,501, depending on what the
case was, whether it was public
or private, and also how
important it was.
To avoid any possibility of
bribery or partiality,
the Athenians evolved an
astonishingly complicated system
of assignments that effectively
prevented tampering.
That system is described in
Aristotle's Constitution of
Athens.
I think it's chapter 61;
if any of you think that you
have about a month or two to
spare, read that paragraph and
tell me what the hell it means,
how it works.
It's so complicated and the
point is that they wanted to be
sure that it was just impossible
for anybody to know who was
going to be on a particular jury
panel for a particular case so
that if you wanted to bribe
anybody you'd have to bribe
6,000 people and that might be
mildly discouraging.
You might say that's an honest
bunch of people.
Well, you don't devise such
a complicated system if
everybody isn't busily thinking
of a way to cheat,
it seems to me.
However, they would have
failed, the system certainly was
full proof I think.
Legal procedure was remarkably
different from what takes place
in a modern American court.
The first surprise you would
meet is the absence of any
public prosecutor or state's
attorney.
In fact, there are no lawyers
at all.
Think of that.
Think of how happy that would
make Shakespeare.
Complaints, whether they were
civil or criminal,
public or private,
large or small,
were registered and argued by
private citizens.
Plaintiff and defendant,
suer and sued,
each made his case in his own
voice,
if not in his own language,
because anyone was free to hire
a speech writer to help him
prepare his case and that
profession flourished in Athens.
Although it reached its peak
only many years after the days
of Pericles, the greatest
writers of courtroom speeches
that have been preserved,
and I believe they were
preserved because generations
thought they were the very best
speeches there were,
come from the next century,
from the fourth century B.C.
Here's another surprise.
There is no judge.
The jury was everything.
No self respecting Athenian
democrat would allow some
individual, whatever his
qualifications,
to tell him what was relevant
evidence and what was not,
or which laws or which
precedence applied.
From the Athenian point of
view, that would give too much
weight to learning and to
expertise,
and it would also create the
danger of corruption and
undemocratic prejudice.
I mean, if you couldn't conceal
who the judge was going to be as
you could the jurors,
you could--if there was a judge
and he was important,
you might be able to bribe him.
Indeed, in our own system it is
not unheard of that judges are
bribed.
It's not even unheard of that
they were unduly prejudiced in
one direction or another.
The Athenians would have
none of that.
So, it was up to the
contestants in the case to cite
the relevant laws and
precedence,
and it was up to the jurors to
decide between the plaintiff and
the defendant.
So, in fundamental matters of
justice and fairness,
the Athenian democrat put very
little faith in experts.
This was one of the most
democratic aspects of this
democratic constitution,
the assumption that all
citizens had enough sense and
enough of whatever else it took
to make the judgments that were
so important in the courts.
In the courtroom,
the plaintiff and defendant
each had an opportunity to
present his case,
also to rebut his opponent,
to cite what was thought to be
the relevant law,
to produce witnesses,
and then to sum up his case.
Now, here's another amazing
thing from an American
perspective, each case--I'm
sorry,
each phase in the case was
limited to a specific amount of
time, which was kept by an
official using a water clock,
and no trial,
get this, lasted more than a
single day.
Finally, the case went to the
jury, which, of course,
received no charge or
instruction since there was no
judge to tell them what they had
to think about and what
possibilities were available.
The jury did not deliberate;
you didn't have 1,501 angry men.
They just voted by secret
ballot and a simple majority
decided the issue.
If a penalty was called
for, and it was not one that was
described by law and very few
penalties were described by law,
the following procedure was
used: the plaintiff who had won
the case proposed a penalty,
the defendant then had the
opportunity to propose a
different penalty.
The jury then,
again no deliberation,
just voted to choose one or the
other, but they could not
propose anything of their own;
no creative penalties were
possible, just one or the other
of the ones proposed by each
side.
Normally, this process led both
sides, if you think about it,
to suggest moderate penalties.
For the jury would be put off
by an unreasonable suggestion
one way or another.
If the plaintiff asked for
too heavy a penalty that would
guarantee they would take the
other guy's penalty and vice
versa.
Critics of this system
complained that democracy made
the Athenians litigious.
The system contained a device
therefore--well,
not therefore but as a matter
of fact, in contradiction to
that--Let me back up.
Of course, the Athenians were
litigious and knowing that they
built in an element meant to
reduce the degree of unfounded,
unreasonable,
silly, or just terrible
accusations.
The system contained this
device.
If the plaintiff did not win a
stated percentage of the jurors'
votes, then he was required to
pay a considerable fine.
In public prosecutions he
paid it to the state.
In private prosecutions he paid
it to the defendant.
Surely, this must have served
as a significant deterrent for
frivolous, malevolent,
and merely adventurous suits.
Just think of how it would
change our system if we had
something like that.
In a way, we do have some of it
available in our system.
It is possible,
for instance,
if somebody brings a suit
against somebody else and fails,
it is possible for the judge to
decide that the defeated side
must pay court costs which is a
form of defense against the
frivolous charges.
But it isn't anything as
thorough as the Athenian system,
which always had that around.
So, if you had a case that
wasn't going to win many friends
on the jury it was going to cost
you one way or another.
Well, this Athenian system of
justice had many flaws
obviously.
Decisions could be quirky and
unpredictable since they were
unchecked by precedent.
Juries could be prejudiced and
the jurors had no defense except
their own intelligence and
knowledge against speakers,
who cited laws incorrectly and
who distorted history and we
have speeches in law courts in
which these guys are making up
laws that nobody ever heard of
and that they are making
arguments that are terrible.
So, that they did abuse this
opportunity, there's no question
about it.
Speeches unhampered by rules of
evidence and relevance,
and without the discipline
imposed by judges could be
fanciful, false,
and sophistical.
There's one anecdote that
is handed down about a famous
Athenian orator that I think
gives you some clue about this.
This was Lysias,
who lived at the end of the
fifth century and into the
fourth, and he was one of the
great successful speech writers
in Athens.
Well, somebody came to him and
said, "I'm involved in this
lawsuit Lysias and I'd like to
pay you for writing a speech on
my side,"
and Lysias said, "fine."
He went home,
he wrote the speech,
he brought it to the man,
and said, "here it is."
The guy read it and he said,
"Lysias this is terrific,
great speech,
I can't lose,
thanks a million";
Lysias goes home.
Little while later Lysias hears
a banging on his door,
it's the same guy.
He said, "Lysias I read that
speech again,
was I wrong,
it's filled with terrible
arguments,
contradictions,
there are holes in your logic
that they can run trucks
through" and Lysias says,
"calm down my friend,
the jury will only hear the
speech once."
So, of course,
all of these flaws were there,
yet from a modern perspective I
would argue that the Athenian
system had a number of
attractions.
The American legal system and
court procedures have been
blamed for excessive
technicality verging on
incomprehensibility and for the
central role of lawyers and
judges which give an enormous
advantage to the rich who can
afford to pay the burgeoning
costs of participating in the
legal system.
The absence typically of a
sufficient deterrent to
unfounded lawsuits has helped to
crowd court calendars.
Time spent in jury selection,
which didn't take any time at
all of course in Athens,
and wrangling over legal
technicalities stretches out
still further,
a process that has no time
limit.
It is not uncommon for
participants in a lawsuit to
wait for many years before
coming to trial.
Sometimes the plaintiff has
died before his case gets to
court.
Not everyone is convinced
that the gain in the scrupulous
protection of the participant's
rights in an increasingly
complex code of legal procedure
is worth the resulting delay,
and some point to the principle
that justice delayed is justice
denied.
Often, in our courts,
decisions are made by judges on
very remote, difficult,
legal or procedural grounds
that are incomprehensible to the
ordinary citizen.
As a result,
there is much criticism of
judges and lawyers,
and a loss of faith in general
in the legal system.
For all its flaws,
I think the Athenian system was
simple, speedy,
open, and very easily
understood by its citizens.
It did contain provisions aimed
at producing moderate penalties
and at deterring unreasonable
lawsuits.
It placed no barriers of
legal technicalities or legal
experts between the citizens and
their laws,
counting as always on the
common sense of the ordinary
Athenian.
Now the Athenian democratic
system as a whole,
brought to its height in the
time of Pericles,
has been harshly criticized
through the ages immediately by
contemporaries,
who were hostile to the
democracy, and through the
centuries by people who have
looked at Athenian history as it
was depicted by the surviving
authors and concluded harsh
conclusions about democracy.
Ancient writers directed most
of their attacks against the
idea of government by mass
meeting and the selection of
public officials by allotment.
The Athenian renegade
Alcibiades told a Spartan
audience, as for democracy
nothing new can be said about
it, an acknowledged foolishness.
Plato has Socrates make the
same point more fully and
seriously.
Socrates observes that when it
is a matter of building a house
or a ship the Athenian assembly
listens only to experts.
If someone without expert
qualifications tries to give
advice in such things,
even if he is very handsome and
rich, and noble they refuse to
listen to him.
Instead they laugh and hoot at
him until either he is shouted
down and withdraws of his own
accord,
or the sergeants at arms drag
him off, or he is expelled by
order of the presidents.
So, just imagine that when you
get up to speak in the Athenian
assembly, you better be ready
for anything.
But when the discussion is
about affairs of state says
Socrates, anyone can get up to
speak,
carpenter, tinker,
cobbler, passenger,
ship owner, rich and poor,
noble and commoner,
and nobody rebukes him as they
did in the earlier case;
for trying to give advice when
he has no knowledge and has not
been taught.
Now in fact the Athenians did
appreciate the importance of
knowledge, skill,
talent, and experience,
when they thought these things
existed and could be used in the
public interest.
So, they did not allot,
but elected military officers,
some treasurers,
naval architects,
and managers of the water
supply.
These are essentially questions
of life and death,
or of the financial security of
the state;
apart from that they did not
care much about expertise.
If they did not elect
professors of political science
or philosophers,
or lawyers to govern and judge
them,
it was because they were
skeptical that there is a useful
expertise in these areas,
and that if it did exist it
could safely and profitably be
employed for the public good.
It is not clear,
to me anyway,
that the experience of the last
twenty five hundred years has
shown them to be wrong.
I don't know what percentage of
the representatives and senators
in our Congress are lawyers by
training,
but whatever that figure is,
it's far too large.
It's really extraordinary that
we all sit still for that kind
of thing.
The kind of variety of
profession that one can find in
our society is absolutely not to
be seen in our government
institutions.
Well the Athenians would never
permit anything so undemocratic
as that.
Secondly, it is most unlikely
that many fools or incompetents
played a significant part in
public affairs.
Of course,
that's the flip side of
rejecting expertise and
experience;
you may end up with people who
don't know what they're talking
about in any shape,
manner, or form having
influence.
Well the Athenians knew that
and they were worried the fact
that there was a possibility of
idiots,
fools, jerks,
and other unworthies dominating
the political decisions.
I don't think that it's clear
that we are better off than they
are in this respect.
I remember William Buckley once
said, he would rather be ruled,
governed by the first forty or
whatever he said forty-fifty
people in the Boston Telephone
Directory,
than by the Harvard faculty.
I thought we could all agree
with that, maybe even the Yale
faculty.
I think that we ought to think
a little bit longer before we
assume our system is the only
way one can think about
conducting a democracy.
But to get at how the
Athenians coped with this
problem the assembly itself was
a far less unwieldy or
incompetent body than is
generally assumed by its critics
and that you might ordinarily
think would be the case if
you've got five or six thousand
people out there trying to make
a decision.
Think of this,
if an Athenian citizen attended
no more than half the minimum
number of sessions held each
year,
he would hear twenty sets of
debates by the ablest people in
the state, chiefly,
elected officials or those who
formerly had held elective
office, the leading politicians
in all factions,
and a considerable number of
experts on a variety of subjects
who would simply get up and
express their views.
These were true debates in
which it was not possible to
hold prepared remarks and look
at your--what do they call these
books that they use?
Their policy books or whatever;
they were real debates and the
speakers had to respond
extemporaneously to difficult
questions and arguments from the
opposition,
nor were they irresponsible
displays, but serious
controversies leading
immediately to votes that had
important consequences for the
orators and their audiences.
Now if you assume that each
attendant at the assembly had
been listening to such
discussions for an average of
only ten years,
and many of them would have had
a much longer stretch,
think of it,
such experiences alone must
have fashioned a remarkable body
of voters.
Probably,
I would argue,
more enlightened and
sophisticated than any
comparable group in history.
Apart from that,
every year five hundred
Athenians served on the council,
where everyday they gained
experience in the management of
Athens affairs from the most
trivial to the most serious,
producing bills that served as
the basis for the debates and
votes of the assembly.
So, in any particular assembly
thousands of those attending,
perhaps a majority of them
would have had that kind of
training on the council.
In light of that breadth of
experience, the notion that
decisions were made by an
ignorant multitude is simply not
persuasive.
I like to compare that
situation with something that I
think perhaps we can understand.
In the nineteenth century,
when people went to a concert
of what we call classical music,
almost everybody in the
audience was a musician of some
kind.
Before radio,
television, recording systems,
if you wanted music you had to
play it and so people,
especially women but men too,
studied how to play various
instruments and they could.
So, they could read music and
they could understand it in a
way that only a participant can.
Hardly anybody who goes to a
concert today is in that
situation.
So, Beethoven and Brahms and
people like that wrote their
compositions and orchestras and
so on and they played to people
who were in a certain sense
almost experts,
in any case,
very well educated amateurs.
That's the analogy I would
suggest that we're talking about
that.
A professional politician so to
speak, insofar as there were any
in Athens, we're dealing with
people who didn't just come in
off the street and didn't know
anything about it.
They were prepared by their
life's experience to be a very,
very tough audience indeed.
But that raises the question,
were debates in the assembly
carried on by ordinary citizens
without the necessary special
knowledge and capacity for
informed advice?
The evidence,
I think, suggests not.
For there were impressive
deterrents, both formal and
informal, that would make an
inexperienced,
ill informed,
poorly educated man reluctant
to speak up in the assembly or
the council even.
To begin with I would
suggest another analogy for you.
For the many,
many years I have attended
meetings of faculties at great
American universities,
what I have seen is that very
few and generally the same few
are bold enough to speak for or
against some not very
controversial policy argued in a
group of fewer than hundred
people,
not to mention those rare,
larger meetings when subjects
arousing passions are at issue.
Now the people we're talking
about, these faculty meetings,
have extraordinary educations,
they are alleged to have
unusual intellectual ability,
and they belong to a profession
where public speaking is part of
the trade.
The meetings are conducted in
the decorum of established rules
of order that forbid
interruptions and personal
attack.
If a guy wants to say that
man is a goddamn liar,
somebody will call him to
account and say that was a
violation of personal privilege
and you should cut it out.
That's not the way it happened
in the Athenian assembly.
Yet, even at these very,
very gentile faculty meetings
I'm talking about,
those who attend them speak
very rarely if ever.
Why?
Why?
What is that deters them?
I ask you, for instance,
you all know the answer but you
won't speak up.
Why?
Why are you afraid to answer
that question;
you know the answer.
Student: You don't
want to look
stupid.Professor Donald
Kagan: Thank you.
That's exactly the reason.
People really are afraid of
that.
They're just afraid that even
if nobody even tells them
they're stupid,
just the way they react may
make them feel as though they
are stupid.
This is a fantastic deterrent
and if we don't understand that
we will not understand the way
the Athenian assembly worked,
because that--but of course you
know perfectly well their
problem was much greater.
Meetings of the Athenian
assembly were not quiet,
seemly occasions.
We should not forget what
Dekaioplis said in Aristophanes
plays, sitting there on the
Pynx,
he threatened to shout,
to interrupt,
to abuse the speakers.
We shouldn't forget Plato's
report of how the Athenians
laughed and hooted,
or shouted down speakers who
lacked what they thought was the
necessary expertise.
Now, these informal
deterrents alone,
I believe, sharply limited the
number of speakers in the
assembly,
but there was also a formal
device that encouraged them to
take thought before they
intervened and to be careful in
what they said in these debates
on the Pynx.
At some time,
perhaps during the career of
Pericles, but certainly not more
than fifteen years after his
death the Athenians introduced a
procedure called the
grafe para nomo
that had the effect of making
the citizens in the assembly the
guardians of the constitution.
Any citizen could object to a
proposal made in the council or
in the assembly simply by
asserting that if contradicted
an existing law.
That assertion stopped action
on the proposal or suspended its
enactment, if it had already
been passed.
The proposer was then taken
before a popular court and if
the jury decided against him,
his proposal was disallowed and
he was fined.
Three findings that a person
had done this,
deprived him of his rights as a
citizen.
The expectation of the assembly
and its procedures,
formal and informal,
made it most unlikely that
ignorance and incompetence
played a very significant role
in its deliberations.
Of course, there are some
ignorant imbeciles who nothing
will deter, but that's true of
our system too.
An even graver charge has
been leveled through the ages
against the kind of democracy
promoted by Pericles.
It is said to be inherently
unstable, inviting faction and
class warfare.
It is said to be careless of
the rights of property and to
result in the rule of the poor,
who are the majority over the
rich minority.
These arguments weighed very
heavily in the thinking of the
founding fathers of the American
Constitution,
who rejected democracy.
You need to be aware of that.
Their notion of what democracy
was Athenian democracy as
described by its critics and
they consciously and plainly
rejected democracy.
They thought something else,
they thought they were creating
a popular republic,
and by republic they meant
something different from
democracy.
Starting with the fuller
democracy, instituted by
Ephialtes and Pericles,
in fact,
we discover an almost unbroken
orderly regime that lasted for a
hundred and forty years.
Twice it was interrupted by
oligarchic episodes.
The first resulted from a a
coup d'état in the
midst of a long and difficult
war.
The government of that
oligarchy lasted just four
months.
The second was imposed by the
Spartans after they won the
Peloponnesian War that one
lasted less than a year.
On each occasion,
the full democracy was restored
without turmoil,
without class warfare,
without killings or exiles or
revenge, without confiscating
the property of anybody.
Through many years of hard
warfare, military defeat,
foreign occupation,
and oligarchic agitation,
the Athenian democracy
persisted and showed a restraint
and a moderation rarely equaled
by any regime.
Now this behavior is all the
more remarkable in light of the
political and constitutional
conditions that prevailed in the
Periclean democracy and
thereafter.
Remember that the mass of
Athenians were not faced with
the power of what has been
called a military industrial
complex.
They were not thwarted by the
complexities of representative
government by checks and
balances,
by the machinations of
unscrupulous lobbyists,
or manipulated by the
irresistible deceptions of mass
media.They had only to walk
up to the Pynx on assembly day,
make speeches,
and vote in order to bring
about the most radical,
social and economic changes.
They could, if they had wanted
to, they could have abolished
debt which presumably would be
something the poor would favor.
They could institute
confiscatory taxation of the
rich to the advantage of the
poor.
The simple expropriation of the
wealthy few, all of these things
they simply could have done,
nothing would have stopped them
but they never did.
Although political equality,
that is to say,
equality before the law,
that was a fundamental
principle of democracy,
but economic equality had no
place in the Athens of Pericles.
On the contrary,
the democracy he led defended
the right of private property
and made no effort to change its
unequal distributions.
The oath taken by jurors each
time that they sat on a jury
included the following clause.
"I will not allow private debts
to be canceled,
nor lands or houses belonging
to Athenian citizens to be
redistributed."
In addition,
the chief magistrate each year
swore that whatever anyone owns
before I enter this office,
he will have and hold the same,
until I leave it.
The Athenians respect for
property and their refusal to
insist on economic equality go a
long way towards explaining why
their democracy was so peaceful,
so stable, and so durable.
But why were the majority of
citizens so restrained and
moderate?
Part of the answer lies in
the relatively broad
distribution of property in
fifth century Athens.
It was by no means equal.
I want to emphasize the word
"relatively" compared to states
that were oligarchical or
aristocratic.
Also, in its growing
prosperity, through the greater
part of that time,
it's very hard to sustain any
kind of a reasonable,
moderate regime in times that
are hard, in times in which
there is great poverty so that
was - these were certainly among
the reasons why Athens was so
successful.
But there was always,
you should remember,
a group of fabulously wealthy
citizens and also thousands who
were poor by any standard.
It certainly seems clear that
at any time in this period the
majority of Athenian citizens
were not rich enough to be
hoplites.
Not rich enough even to have
those small family farms that
supported your infantrymen.
So, it's not as though there
aren't a lot of poor people in
the state.
The poorest,
moreover, those who lacked the
property to quality as
infantrymen,
were the very men who rode the
ships that brought Athens wealth
and power and glory.
The last 30 years of the
century furthermore were
terrible times of war,
plague, impoverishment,
and defeat.
Yet neither during nor after
the war did the Athenian masses
interfere, in any way,
with private property or seek
economic leveling in the two
ways the revolutionaries always
wanted it,
canceling debts and
redistributing the land.
In the Periclean democracy,
the Athenian citizens demanded
only equality before the law.
I think that is the key
principle to understand when
you're thinking about Athenian
democracy.
Full political rights for
all citizens,
and that is what separated the
Athenian democracy from
oligarchies and aristocracies in
other Greek states,
and the kind of even chance
that is provided by these two
things, equality before the law
and participation in the
political process for all
citizens.
By these rules,
the Athenian was willing to
abide in the face of the
greatest disasters and the
greatest temptations.
It was this politically equal,
individualistic law abiding,
and tolerant understanding of
the democracy that Pericles had
done so much to create and to
which he could appeal,
and point with pride confident
that his fellow citizens shared
his views.
In their rational,
secular, worldly approach to
life, in their commitment to
political freedom,
and to the autonomous
importance of the individual in
a constitutional republican and
democratic public life,
the Athenians of Pericles day
were closer to the dominant
ideas and values of our own era
than any culture that has
appeared to the world since
antiquity.
That is why Periclean Athens,
I believe, has so much meaning
for us.
But if there is much to learn
from the similarities,
there's at least as much to
learn from the differences
between the Athenians and
ourselves.
Although the Athenians
value wealth and material goods
as we do, they regarded economic
life and status,
both as less noble and less
important than participation and
distinction in public service to
the community.
Although they were pioneers in
recognizing the importance,
the autonomy,
and legitimate claims of the
individual,
they could not image the
fulfillment of the individual's
spiritual needs apart from his
involvement in the life of a
well ordered political
community.
To understand the achievement
of Pericles and his
contemporaries,
we thus need to be aware of
these significant differences.
I think we ought to also study
them with a certain humility.
For in spite of their
antiquity, the ancient Athenians
may have known and believed
things we have either forgotten
or never known,
and we ought to keep open the
possibility that in some
respects they might have been
right about some of these
things.
Now what I've been talking
about up to now is the workings
of the Athenian Constitution for
active citizens,
and I remind you,
that means free men,
adults, who have citizen
parents.
That excludes a lot of people,
who lived in Athens and so I'd
like to spend a little time also
talking about two groups of such
people,
who were excluded from the
political process:
women and slaves,
both of which have caught the
attention of modern scholars
eager to demonstrate the
undemocratic aspects of ancient
Athens when judged by our
criteria,
which seem more and more to
require that every living
creature--I was going to say
every living thing be treated
with equality.
I know that of course there
are feelings that people who
wanted to say that--we all say,
we all agree there should be no
discrimination between men and
women.
There, of course,
should be no slaves,
but now we're moving towards
saying that people should
receive citizenship or citizen
rights who aren't even legally
citizens.
There are many people who want
to give protections to animals
that now are limited to people
and there are people also who
want to include trees and other
vegetation under these
protections.
So, we need to examine the
Athenian situation and make our
judgments about that.
Let's talk about women first.
Greek society,
like most cultures throughout
history, was dominated by men.
This was true of the democratic
city of Athens in the great days
of Pericles, no less than in
other Greek cities.
Nevertheless,
the position of women in
classical Athens has been the
subject of a great deal of
controversy.
The bulk of the evidence coming
from the law,
the actual laws of Athens,
from philosophical and moral
writings,
and from information about the
conditions of daily life and the
organization of society shows
that women were excluded from
most public aspects of public
life.
They could not vote,
they could not take part in the
political assemblies,
they could not hold public
office, or take any direct part
in politics.
Male citizens of all
classes had these public
responsibilities and
opportunities.
The same sources show that in
the private aspects of life,
women were always under the
control of a male guardian.
A father at first,
a husband later,
or failing these,
an appropriate male relative
designated by the law.
Women married young,
usually between the ages of
twelve and eighteen.
I think if we think of them as
being about fifteen years old
we'll probably have a reasonable
average.
Husbands, on the other hand,
were typically at least 30 and
usually over it when they
married.
So, women were always in a
relationship like that of a
daughter to a father when you
think about the realities of
life.
Marriages, furthermore,
were arranged.
By the way, as in other
societies, the higher you get in
society the more likely it is
that these marriages will be
arranged with economic
considerations,
social considerations
predominating.
As you get lower in
society, I can only suspect,
because we don't really have
evidence that it was far more
informal and maybe that
marriages may have been as a
consequence of mutual desire
than was true of the upper
classes.
Normally these--I'm shifting
again to where we have evidence,
and that means probably not the
poorest women in the city,
the women normally had no
choice of their husband.
The woman's dowry,
and dowries were required,
was controlled by a male
relative.
Divorce was very difficult for
a woman to obtain,
for she needed the approval of
a male relative,
who if he gave that approval
had then to be willing to serve
as her guardian after the
dissolution of her marriage.
In case of divorce the
dowry would be returned with the
woman, but it was still to be
controlled in that case by her
father,
or the appropriate male
relative.
The main function and
responsibility of a respectable
Athenian woman,
of a citizen family,
was to produce male heirs for
the household of her husband.
If, however,
her father's household lacked a
male heir, the daughter became
what the Greeks called an
epikleros,
the heiress to the family
property.
In that case,
she was required by law to
marry the man who was the next
of kin on her father's side,
in order to produce the desired
male offspring.
In the Athenian way of
thinking, women were lent by one
household to another for
purposes of bearing and raising
a male heir to continue the
existence of the oikos,
the family establishment.
Because the pure and
legitimate lineage of the
offspring was important women
were carefully segregated from
men outside the family and were
confined to the women's quarters
even in the house.
Men might seek sexual
gratification in several ways
outside the house with
prostitutes of high or low
style,
prostitutes frequently
recruited from abroad,
but respectable women stayed
home to raise the children,
cook, weave cloth,
and oversee the management of
the household.
The only public function of
women was an important one in
the various rituals and
festivals of the state religion.
There is a very new book by a
professor at NYU by the name of
Connelly, which studies very
carefully all the information
that we know about ancient Greek
priestesses which reveals,
I think, something that we
haven't known enough about
before, that women in that realm
at least had an enormously
important and I would say sort
of glorious role in that way.
It doesn't change any of
the things I've said about the
other aspects of life but we've
really not paid enough attention
to this religious side of things
and we should remember that
religion was very important for
these people even though to us
it looks as though they were
very secular in the way they
lived.
Religion in their way of
thinking was very important.
So anyway, apart from these
religious things,
Athenian women were expected to
remain home, quiet,
and unnoticed.
Pericles told the widows and
mothers of the Athenian men who
died in the first year of the
Peloponnesian War only this.
You will either have read or
you will read the Pericles
famous funeral oration,
and he has all these things to
say, and at the very end he
addresses the widows and the
mothers of the men,
who have died in a way that
puzzles me beyond belief and I
still don't understand why he
chose to say what he did.
But what he said,
I think, was the common wisdom
about what the situation was.
He said, "your great glory is
not to fall short of your
natural character and the
greatest glory of women is to be
least talked about by men,
whether for good or ill."
Okay, that's what they thought.
Why the hell did he say it at
the end of that funeral oration?
If anybody has any insight on
that, I would be very grateful
if you would tell me about it;
now or at any time in the
future.
The picture derived from these
sources is largely accurate,
but I would argue that it does
not fit in well with what we
learn from the evidence of a
wholly different set of sources.
First of all,
what we see in the pictorial
art chiefly in vase paintings,
and even more strikingly I
think,
in what we learned from the
tragedies, and the comedies that
were performed every year at two
great festivals in Athens.
Finally,
these things derive very much
from the mythology,
which is after all their
religious tradition of the
Athenians.
Now these sources often show
women as central characters and
powerful figures in both the
public and the private spheres.
The Clytemnestra,
who shows up in Aeschylus'
tragedy Agamemnon,
she arranges the murder of her
royal husband and establishes
the tyranny of her lover whom
she dominates.
Then there is the terrifying
and powerful Medea of Euripides,
who negotiates with kings and
can commit horrible deeds in her
fury,
which I think Euripides
suggests is very justified fury,
even if the deed is not.
And these are just two examples
of which there are many,
in which women are central and
important,
and powerful,
and active, and not passive,
and it's all about them.
We are left with an
apparent contradiction,
clearly revealed by a famous
speech in Euripides tragedy
Medea and I'd like to read you
that.
He presented his play at the
Dionysiac festival in Athens.
His heroine Medea is a foreign
woman who has unusual powers.
I mean she is practically
something like a witch,
a sorceress;
don't imagine these Halloween
kind of witches,
a proper witch is so beautiful
that she can bewitch you;
think of that.
So she's a foreign woman with
these powers,
but in the speech that follows
she describes the fate of women
in terms that appear to give an
accurate account of the
condition of women in fifth
century B.C.
Athens.
Here's what she says,
"Of all things which are living
and can form a judgment,
we women are the most
unfortunate creatures.
Firstly, with an excess of
wealth, it is required for us to
buy a husband and take for our
bodies a master.
For not to take one is even
worse, and now the question is
serious, whether we take a good
or bad one,
for there is no easy escape for
a woman, nor can she say no to
her marriage.
She arrives among new modes of
behavior and manners,
and she needs prophetic power,
unless she has learned at home
how best to manage him who
shares the bed with her.
If we work out all this well
and carefully,
and the husband lives with us
and likely bears his yoke,
this life is enviable,
if not I'd rather die."
"A man when he's tired of
the company in his home goes out
of the house and puts and end to
his boredom and turns to a
friend or companion of his own
age,
but we are forced to keep our
eyes on one alone.
What they say of us is that we
have a peaceful time living at
home, while they do the fighting
in war.
How wrong they are!
I would very much rather stand
three times in the front of
battle than to bear one child."
I wonder what the Athenian
men in that audience thought
about all of that.
The picture that Medea paints
that women subjected to men
accords well of course with much
of the evidence,
but we have to take note of the
fact that the woman who
complains of women's lot is the
powerful central figure in a
tragedy that is named after her.
By the way, it's not the only
case, another of the great
tragedies of Attic drama is
Sophocles' Antigone,
and Antigone is another heroic
woman who defies kings and
everybody else in order to do
the right thing and who accepts
death rather than to give way in
her principles.
This is not the kind of a woman
that Pericles had in mind when
he said, just shut up and be
sure nobody's talking about you.
Now, this tragedy was produced,
we need to remember,
at state expense before most of
the Athenian population,
and was written by a man,
who was one of the Athens
greatest poets and dramatists.
Medea is a cause of terror
to the audience,
and at the same time,
and object of their pity and
sympathy as a victim of
injustice.
She is anything but the
creature least talked about by
men whether for good or for bad.
When those men walked out of
that theatre they would be
talking about Medea for the next
week.
There is reason to believe that
the role played by Athenian
women may have been more complex
than their legal status might
suggest.
That's all I feel I can say
about that subject because I
haven't been able to resolve the
contradiction.
Well I won't go into modern
scholarly arguments but let me
just say that no matter what
they all say,
no matter how they come out,
this dichotomy is there,
it's in the sources.
We need to do something and
some supplying for things that
are missing if we are to
comprehend how both halves of
this can be true as I'm sure
they both are somehow.
Let's turn next to the
question of slavery.
In Greece, chattel slavery
proper began to increase about
five hundred B.C.
and it remained an important
element in society.
The main sources of slaves were
war captives and the captives of
pirates, who made a living in
large part by catching people
and selling them as slaves,
and of course those people at
first enslaved through war
piracy or other means,
who were sold by slave traders.
They did not,
unlike in the American south
were they successful,
nor necessarily did they try,
to breed slaves themselves.
They were typically bought from
slave traders.
Like the Chinese,
the Egyptians,
and almost every other
civilized people in the ancient
world the Greeks regarded
foreigners as inferiors.
They called them
barbarians, because they uttered
words that sounded to the Greeks
like bar, bar,
bar, bar, bar.
Most slaves,
working for the Greeks,
were foreigners.
Greeks sometimes enslaved
Greeks, but typically not to
serve in the Greek home as a
servant--really not so much at
home.
They did use slaves,
as I've told you earlier,
to work on the farms alongside
the farmers.
The chief occupation,
as always before the twentieth
century, was agriculture.
The great majority of Greek
farmers worked these small
holdings to poor to support even
one slave.
Some would be so fortunate as
to have as many as one or two
slaves to work alongside them.
I think, as I said earlier,
I think probably most of the
hoplites could manage that but I
think we really don't know the
answer to that.
I'm sure they range from zero
to more than two,
but if you're thinking one or
two you're probably right.
The upper classes had
larger farms,
of course, that would be led
out to free tenant farmers or
worked by slaves,
generally under an overseer,
who was himself a slave.
Large landowners generally did
not have one single great
estate.
In every way I want you to try
to get out of your head the
picture of slavery in the
American South with its
plantations and great squads of
slaves in one place,
under one master.
That was not the typical way
for the Greeks,
but rather the wealthy would
have several smaller farms
scattered about the polis.
Well that arrangement did not
encourage the amassing of these
great hordes of agricultural
slaves who would later work the
cotton and sugar plantations of
the new world.
Slaves were used in larger
numbers in what I laughingly
call industry in the ancient
world,
I mean handicrafts,
but one exception to that
typical system was mining.
We know something about the
mines in southern Athens,
where the silver was found and
that reveals a different
picture.
Nicias, a wealthy Athenian of
fifth century B.C.,
owned a thousand slaves,
whom he rented to a mining
contractor for a profit.
But this is unique;
we don't know of anything like
this besides this situation,
and it's by far the largest
number of slaves that we know
any individual held.
In another instance of large
slave holdings in Athens,
a family of resident aliens
employed about a hundred and
twenty slaves in their shield
factory that was the military
industrial complex in Athens.
Most manufacturing,
however, was at very small
scale with shops using one or
two, or a handful of slaves.
Slaves worked as craftsmen in
almost every trade,
and it was true for the
agricultural slaves on small
farms, they worked alongside
their masters.
If you took these slaves that I
regard as taking care of the
majority of the work in Athens,
if you translated them into
being handymen or regular
workers who worked at jobs
regularly who were free,
if you went in you went into
these shops that's what you
would think, because you didn't
have somebody lashing anybody
over great numbers of people.
You would have two or three
guys working there.
One would be the guy who owns
it, and maybe the other two guys
would be slaves.
A significant proportion of
slaves of course were domestic
servants and many were
shepherds.
Publicly held slaves also
served as policemen;
don't get carried away there
were very, very few policemen.
They were also prison
attendants;
there were very,
very few prisons and very few
prisoners.
There were clerks,
and there were secretaries and
some of them worked their way up
because of their natural skills,
if they worked--this was
usually the case,
if you found such people in
commerce,
and most especially in banking.
We hear that one of the richest
men in Athens in the fourth
century was a man called Pazian
who had been a slave,
and by his talents had bought
his own freedom,
and then had become one of the
richest men in Athens.
That's an oddball story;
don't take that as being very
widespread, but it shows you one
element in the system.
The number of slaves in
ancient Greece is a subject of
continuing controversy and
that's because we don't have the
kind of evidence to come to a
conclusive answer.
There are no useful figures for
the absolute number of slaves,
or for their percentage of the
free population,
in any city except Athens.
There the evidence permits
estimates for the slave
population in the classical
period,
by which I mean the fifth and
the fourth centuries that range
from a low of twenty thousand
slaves to a high of about a
hundred thousand slaves.
If we accept the meaning
between these extremes,
I love to do that when I don't
have any better thing to do,
you come up with sixty thousand
slaves.
Now, the estimates that are
made about the free population
of Athens in the same period at
this height,
some people would say as low
as--nobody gets much below forty
thousand households,
some want to move it up towards
about sixty thousand households.
What do I come up with?
Right fifty thousand - that
would yield a figure of fewer
than two slaves per family.
It has been estimated that only
a quarter to a third of free
Athenians owned any slaves at
all.
So, the distribution was
unequal, with most families
having no slaves and some
families having many.
Some historians have noted that
in the American south,
in the period before the Civil
War,
where slaves also made up less
than a third of the total
population and three quarters of
free southerners had no slaves.
The proportion of slaves to
free citizens was similar to
that in ancient Athens.
Because slavery was so
important to the economy of the
south, these historians
suggested it may have been
equally important and similarly
oppressive in ancient Athens.
I find several problems with
this analogy.
For one thing it's important to
make a distinction between a
world such as the cotton states
of the American south before the
Civil War,
where a single cash crop well
suited for exploitation by large
groups of slaves,
dominates the economy,
and a society like the one in
Athens, where the economy was
mixed,
the crops varied,
the land and its distribution
very poorly suited to massive
slavery.
Another major difference is in
the likelihood of a slave
achieving freedom.
The freeing of American slaves,
although it happened,
was comparatively rare,
but in Greece it was very
common.
The most famous example
I've told you already about,
Pasion who began as a bank
clerk,
earned his freedom,
became Athens richest banker,
and then was even rewarded with
Athenian citizenship but that's
very rare.
On the other hand,
the acquisition of freedom by
slaves was not.
People frequently free their
slaves on their own death and
often before that for various
reasons.
It's also important to
distinguish the American south
where the slaves were
distinguished from their masters
by skin color,
where the masters were
increasingly hostile to the idea
of freeing slaves,
and in terror of slave
rebellions with a very different
society of classical Athens.
There slaves walked the streets
with such ease as to offend
noblemen, who were class
conscious.
Plato complained about the
Athenian democracy,
that men and women who have
been sold are no less free than
their purchasers.
An anonymous writer of the
fifth century was appalled by
the behavior of slaves in
Athens.
He says, "One may not strike
them there, nor will a slave
step aside for you,
and if it were legal for a free
man to strike a slave an
Athenian would often have been
struck under the mistaken
impression that he was a slave.
For the clothing of the common
people there is no way superior
to that of the slaves and the
resident aliens,
nor is their appearance.
They allow slaves there to live
in luxury and some of them in
considerable magnificence."
An estate relying on naval
power, it is inevitable that
slaves must work for hire so
that we may take profits from
what they earn.
While there are rich slaves,
it is no longer profitable for
my slave to be afraid of you.
In Sparta, my slave would be
afraid of you but there in
Athens, if your slave is afraid
of me,
he will probably spend some of
his own to free himself from
danger."
This, then,
is why in the matter of free
speech we have put slaves and
free men on equal terms.
Now a lot of this is absolute
baloney;
this is some right wing
character who is just so annoyed
with Athenian democracy that he
is making over the top
statements,
but it cannot be so far removed
from reality as to be ridiculous
or else it wouldn't be in any
persuasive.
So, I think we have to imagine
slaves moved about Athens with a
degree of ease and security and
as must rightly be saying you
really couldn't tell a slave
from a free man very readily in
ancient Athens.
All of this is meant to be by
contrast with the picture of the
south.
Even more remarkable,
the Athenians were on occasion
willing to contemplate the
liberation of all their slaves.
In 406, their city facing
defeat in the Peloponnesian War,
they freed all slaves of
military age and granted
citizenship to those who rode
the ships that won the Battle of
Arginusae.
Twice more, at crucial moments,
similar proposals were made
although without success.
Now during the Civil War people
did suggest to the South that
they liberate their slaves and
enroll them in the Southern army
and such ideas were always
quashed,
and I think we can read
something very important into
the difference between the two
situations.
The southerners were afraid to
do it because they didn't trust
the slaves not to turn on them
and kill them if they were
armed.
The Athenians just didn't
have that fear at all and I
think that's a big story about
the difference between the two
systems.
Okay, that's all I have to say
about these subjects.
We do have six,
seven, eight minutes I'd be
delighted to respond to any
comments or questions any of you
would like to put about any of
these topics.
Yes sir?Student: Why
do you think the Athenians did
not fear their
slaves?Professor Donald
Kagan: They did not fear
their slaves,
because I think in the first
place they did not treat them so
harshly as to create that kind
of absolute hatred that nothing
could take care of.
Second of all,
I think because the prospect of
their liberation being not an
out of the question idea
softened the edge between master
and slave to a degree where the
Athenians didn't have that sense
these people are waiting to kill
me.
I guess another thing is since
so many of them--first of all
you start with household slaves,
well even in the south there
were very, very few household
slaves, who did not develop
friendly and warm feelings
towards the people in the house.
So, that takes care of another
situation and than there are all
these slaves who worked side by
side with their master,
not as part of a gang under an
overseer, but as a fellow worker
with their farmers.
So, the whole way of thinking
about it I think was so
different that--and here's
another thing,
we never hear of a slave
rebellion among the polis of
Athens.
We do hear of helot rebellions,
of course.
It doesn't fit the mold in
Sparta, but we never hear of a
slave rebellion in spite of all
the troubles these towns have.
So, I think those would be the
reasons.
Anything else?
Yes.Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Donald Kagan: Well when they
had skills,
and this happened in the south
too, by the way,
just not to the same extent.
When they had skills it was in
the master's interest to
encourage them to do their work
to the best of their ability,
and so they rewarded them by
letting them keep part of the
profits of what they produced
and it was that of course which
allowed some of these people to
buy their own freedom.
It is true that that happened
in the south as well.
Anything else,
yes ma'am?Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Donald Kagan: The answer is
I'm sure there must have been
runaway slaves,
but it's just a non-issue so
far as we can see.
It's the big deal in the south
and the north when fugitive
slave laws become a great source
of trouble,
but I think there was not too
much running away of slaves,
because there really wasn't any
place to run to.
There was no place where there
wasn't slavery.
So if an Athenian slave runs to
the Boeotia, he's going to be a
Boeotian slave,
I think that was one of the
reasons and put that together
with a rather gentle
arrangements I've described,
the combination I think reduced
the problem of runaway slaves.
Anything else?
Yes?Student: Could
you address the Athenian slavery
compared to
Sparta?Professor Donald
Kagan: The Spartan situation
as compared to the Athenian
situation,
night and day.
The helots, I've told you all
about it;
you've read all about it,
and as a man leading the
rebellion in Sparta at the
beginning of the fourth century
said about helots and other
people who were not Spartiates
in Lacedaemon,
they would have gladly eaten
the Spartans raw.
So, that's all you need to know
about the difference.
Yes.Student:
According to the discussion
about the judicial system and
the fact the plaintiffs were
fined if they lost
[inaudible]Professor
Donald Kagan: Too
badly.Student:
[inaudible]Professor
Donald Kagan: Yeah.
I don't know,
how does the British system
work?
Do they do that?
I've told this story to various
American lawyers and law
professors, and I've been struck
by their absolute lack of
imagination,
but when I finally get them to
think about these things they
tell me that some of them tell
me very happily that in some
areas we are moving towards that
or we have some of that.
They tell me that in civil
cases, very often,
the arrangement that they agree
to is that one side will make
one proposal,
one side will make another
proposal, and some arbiter will
choose between the two.
But mostly if I speak to,
especially law professors,
I've tried to get them to think
about the advantages and
disadvantages of the Athenian
system with some objectivity,
and I say to them put aside for
the moment the question of
whether you think justice is
more likely to be arrived at
through the Anglo-Saxon system
of law or the Athenian system of
law,
because the truth is we don't
know one way or the other,
and I found that they can't do
it.
They're so committed to the
conviction that justice is only
possible under the Anglo-Saxon
system of advocacy and
competition,
and all of those things that
they just won't think about it.
But, you of course,
although three quarters of you
are going to become lawyers
anyway,
you're above that you'll be
much more judicious in thinking
about that.
Do I have to make an
announcement?
Yeah, those of you who were
good enough to serve as hoplites
in our demonstration,
it turns out we need for you to
say it's okay for your pictures
to appear on these deathless
productions that we're engaged
in now.
So, would you if you could
please come up forward and speak
with John Lee and he'll talk to
about what has to happen.
Thanks very much. 
