The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [36]
Athenians were used to bellowing. Every month the frowsty roar of the democratic Assembly up on the Pnyx rang through the city-state: 6,000 men together in one place. Shoemakers next to aristocrats, fullers alongside perfumiers, harbourmasters by slave merchants; all debating issues that directly affected their lives. The Assembly was the living incarnation of the democratic ideology. All here were equal under the law, each had the right to rule and be ruled in turn. Heralds tried to keep order, but we’re told that at times the babble of these new democrats would reach to the skies.
The Pnyx was the name given to the natural rock auditorium just to the west of the Acropolis and perched above the Agora. Men would congregate here in the fresh dawn light to debate Athens’ business: themes, topics were selected by a rotating council of 500 men. The Council Chamber – the bouleuterion – back down in the Agora was where the issues of the day were selected; dinner was provided for fifty of the administrators in a strict rota system. Once the subject had been argued and counter-argued back up on the Pnyx, vote was by show of hands. Forensic research by one scholar has shown the exact square meterage (0.65m2) on which each ancient Athenian could plant his feet or backside on that acoustically exciting hillside (and with 6,000 men there, the fit would have been snug) – contemporary Athens a panorama beneath him – to make his voice heard.2
Attendance at Assembly operated on a first-come, first-served basis. It was those men who decided to submit their names, locally or in the Agora itself, to put themselves forward for democratic duty, who made judgements on Athens’ democratic life. Officials for particular jobs – and we are talking high office, not just clerical duties – were predominantly chosen by lot: the equivalent of having your head of state randomly selected for the duration of one year, and then the secretary of state picked afresh each twenty-four hours. All were working together, to ensure the eudaimonia – the blessedness, the health – of the city-state. All officials were (in theory at any rate) there to facilitate the popular will. The name for a citizen at this time was simply polites: city-person. Athens had delivered a social and political system that was exciting, empowering and head-spinningly radical. Policy was not in the gift of one king, it was dreamed up and enacted by ‘the plebs’.
Gaining purchase here required a new kind of politician. In the past, the premier men of Greece spoke out to their community, but they were remembered, and lionised, for their heroic deeds. Now it was a way with words that counted. Arguments had to play to a mongrel audience. Although agricultural work would have kept many of the lower classes at home, there would have been lean, toothless men here, many battle-scarred or deformed by disease and malnutrition; but their vote still counted. In democratic Athens every citizen was a politician.
Yet many Athenians were, in fact, troubled by articulate people-power.3 In a full democracy, citizen status and influence are not dependent upon social or economic standing or education or talent or virtue; the bigoted, the mildly crazed, the vindictive also have their say. A direct democracy is ideologically perfect and, in practice, flawed. Why believe that the outcome of a political process will be communal order and justice? Socrates had the kind of questing intelligence that challenged the value of absolute democracy. He was the child of a child-like political system. No one knew yet where this democratic experiment would lead. He was not complacent about the potential power of the emerging concept, not tired of it, not petrified of it. But he did what intelligent children do – he interrogated the situation he found himself in. Although some have, as a result, labelled Socrates an anti-democrat, he was in truth