The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [42]
When Socrates lived, Athens was still a tribal city, and, as discussed in previous chapters, society was ordered, emotionally and with a kind of loose apartheid system, into tribes. Each district, or deme, was assigned to a tribal group. Socrates was born as a man of the deme of Alopeke.5 Demes were once villages, typically under the thumb of a local tribal warlord. But the reformer Kleisthenes recognised that tribal culture and democracy are inimical. If you owe loyalty to your tribe, you cannot owe it to your wider community. And so, in 508/7 BC, Kleisthenes introduced one of his most radical and sweeping initiatives. He smashed the old tribal system. No fool, he recognised that change is accepted most happily when it seems familiar. And so, in clusters or singly, villages were rebranded ‘denies’. ‘Tribes’ stayed; they were just renamed and utterly reconfigured.
As cogent men have done through history, Kleisthenes ignored organic divisions in the demographic landscape and started to draw straight lines. On the face of it, to strengthen the army, he invented new teams of Athenians. Now the ‘Ten Tribes of Athens’ were drawn from across the Attic landscape.6 At a stroke, nepotism, dynastic cliquery, the age-old superiority of age-old families were massively diminished. Of course, some tribal leaders must have been extremely disgruntled, but they would have been shouted down – these were exciting times, and suddenly so many more were empowered.
Fifty men from each tribe could come to represent their tribesmen’s interests at a central council. And within those tribes each deme (in effect, a village government) could decide, by vote, who qualified as an Athenian citizen. Aristocratic and dynastic ties were immediately fractured. Now the demes – the name of course gives way to ‘demos’, the people – are compact units of grass-roots potency. All Athenian citizens feel empowered, and yet all citizens are umbilically linked to the mother-city, to Athena’s city, Athens. Local festivals such as (to take just one example) the Rural Dionysia compound a sense of belonging. During the Rural Dionysia, which was held in the second half of the midwinter month of Poseideon, a large, stylised wooden phallus, garlanded with lilies and ivy, was paraded through the streets, a billy-goat was sacrificed, and locals competed in a dramatic contest (the level of contention at these drama contests is indicated by the fact that they could be represented pictorially as two fighting cocks). Aristophanes captures the sense of belonging that such deme-centred festivals fostered:
O Lord Dionysos, may my performance of this procession and this sacrifice be pleasing to you, and may I and my household with good fortune celebrate the Rural Dionysia, now that I’m released from campaigning;
Revel mate, nocturnal rambler,
Fornicator, pederast:
After six years I greet you,
As gladly I return to my deme,
With a peace I made for myself,
Released from bothers and battles …7
The city-wide festivals – such as the City Dionysia (where again a billy-goat, a tragos, was sacrificed, his name probably giving rise to the ‘tragedies’ that were performed during the drama competitions in honour of Dionysos) – ensured that one knew, ultimately, to whom one belonged: to the deme and to the democracy. In the Republic, Plato paints a busy picture of Athenians dashing about from one festival to another, drawn by the craic, by the crowd, by the knowledge that this behaviour would please the gods and their comrade-citizens.8 The ten Eponymous Heroes – the ten ‘team-leaders’ who incarnated the brave new world