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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520262027 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2010 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
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Civic Rites
DEMOCRACY AND RELIGION IN ANCIENT ATHENSBy Nancy Evans
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26203-4
Chapter One
CleisthenesThe Family Curse behind Athenian Democracy
THE ATHENIANS WHO TRIED SOCRATES for impiety in 399 BCE and found him guilty were heirs to a set of democratic practices that had been in existence for a little over a century. The breakthrough to what we would recognize today as a democratic form of government had come around the year 507, when an Athenian aristocrat named Cleisthenes suddenly emerged as a leader and guided the Athenians through a series of reforms. But Cleisthenes was not the first democratic reformer; he was building upon foundations laid by generations of Greeks before him.
As is the case with most figures in Greek history, especially Greek history before the wars with Persia in the first half of the fifth century, we can know very little about Cleisthenes as an individual, just as we know little about how he persuaded the Athenians to implement the changes he proposed. The limited knowledge we do have about Cleisthenes stems from what is probably best considered an oral tradition of Athenian history that encompasses both fact and fiction. It was fifth-century Greek historians such as Hecataeus and Herodotus who first recorded the oral traditions about the more distant Athenian past; the historical genre was further developed by Thucydides, who mainly reported contemporary events but sometimes paused to digress about well-known stories from the past that illuminated the present. The main story connected to Cleisthenes preserved in Thucydides and Herodotus concerns his lineage, an aristocratic family that had long been accursed. Cleisthenes and his family—the Alcmaeonidae—lived under a shadow of suspicion because of an act of impiety committed by a distant ancestor. The tradition related how, at a pivotal moment in the history of Athens, two opposing political groups came face to face at a shrine sacred to the city's gods. In the ensuing clash, members of one faction killed some men who had taken refuge at a public altar. The egregious act of impiety had serious political repercussions, and it resulted in what came to be known as the "curse of the Alcmaeonidae" (Herodotus 5.70–72; Thucydides 1.126).
The details of this episode as reported by Herodotus and Thucydides may not be entirely trustworthy, and we will never know for certain what exactly happened in the middle of the seventh century, the traditional date for when the curse was initially called down. But the larger story behind this curse and the way the curse reportedly came about does reveal a good deal about the world the Greeks inhabited, and their assumptions about this world. An analysis of these assumptions can then uncover the very human hopes and fears of the Athenians who over time fashioned what later generations would come to know as democracy. This chapter provides a first glimpse into that ancient world.
THE LAY OF THE LAND
The Athens that we are familiar with today is the sprawling, sunny Mediterranean metropolis near the Aegean. It spreads itself out below the remains of temples perched high atop the Acropolis. The city recently remade itself into a cosmopolitan international destination as it prepared for the twenty-eighth modern Olympic games in 2004. But this modern urban center has a continuous history of human settlement that stretches back without break for at least 3,500 years, as construction projects for the new underground subway revealed. The period that brought democracy to the world occurred more than 2,500 years ago, in the fifth century. The emergence of democracy in Athens was not an inevitable outcome but rather the result of countless decisions made over many generations—the responses of real people to real and pressing situations. The all-too-human impulses of fear and sometimes greed motivated them to make the decisions they did, as did the wish to enjoy life in the present while ensuring that their families and descendants would thrive in generations yet to come.
But in the changeable environment of the ancient Mediterranean it was not easy to establish a stable government. A traveler to Athens and its neighbors in the fifth century would have seen a landscape dominated by mountains, islands, and the sea, looking much as it does today. Isolated harbors and valleys sheltered small villages and encouraged the development of localized dialects and customs. Mountains made regular travel over land difficult, or at least inefficient and time-consuming, while the jagged coastline of islands, gulfs, and harbors offered safe anchorage for ships that regularly sailed the surrounding waters. The Athenians, like many other Greek-speaking peoples, relied on the sea for their livelihood. As much as the political and social circumstances changed during the course of the fifth century, the connection to the sea remained essential for Athenians.
Patterns of settlement and land use on the mainland and the islands of Greece were dictated by the landscape and its relationship to climate. Mainland Greece and the islands received little rainfall, and Attica, the name for the countryside surrounding the city of Athens, was among the driest areas, with as little annual rain as falls in some of the drier regions of the U.S. desert Southwest. The prevailing Mediterranean wind came in from the west, and Attica, being on the east side of a mountain range, received even less rainfall than some of its immediate neighbors. The arable land in the plains of Attica stretched between the mountains and the sea, and it was highly valued for the cultivation of grains—primarily barley, but wheat and rye were also grown. Wheat was the preferred cereal because it was a finer grain when milled, but barley was the preferred crop because it was more drought tolerant. When the rains did arrive, they came in November or December and fell until early March. During these wet winter months farmers planted and cultivated the grain crops, and sailors stayed off the stormy seas. During the long, windy, and dry summers the sailors, traders, and itinerant craftsmen turned to their ships, while farmers tended their principal warm weather crops: figs, olives, and grapes.
Because the availability of good, arable land was so limited, the plains were not used for pasture. Consequently, there were precious few herds of cattle, an important fact with implications for both diet and religious life that will be discussed in more detail in chapter 2. Only the richest aristocrats kept and bred horses. Sheep and goats were much more common, and these herds were pastured above the plains in the uplands, and even further up in the mountains during the warm summer months. Herd animals were bred and maintained primarily for the goods they produced year-round—wool and milk—and only secondarily for their meat. The demands of animal sacrifice were stipulated in the traditional civic calendar of religious festivals, and they were based on the implicit recognition that resources were scarce.
The deities in the polytheistic system of the ancient Greeks ranged from the most powerful and widely recognized gods to lesser known, local spirits. The gods and goddesses of ancient Greece mirrored both the natural environment that the people relied on to make their living and the social world that governed the daily lives of real men and women. Some were gods whose power over the natural world lay in those agricultural resources that the Greek diet so heavily depended on—for example, Demeter, the goddess of cereal crops; Athena, who oversaw the cultivation of the olive; and Dionysus, the god of the vine and the production of wine. There were also lesser deities like Pan, who oversaw the work of shepherds, and the innumerable nymphs who imbued the springs that streamed from the hills and snowy mountaintops.
While the gods that the Greeks worshipped can reveal to us the resources that they valued, at the same time we can today discern a good deal about human social relations in ancient Greece by analyzing the interactions among these gods. A whole panoply of deities was arranged into an elaborate and interconnected family headed by the supreme patriarch Zeus, "father of gods and men" as he was called by the traditional poets Homer and Hesiod. Zeus the divine patriarch had authority over all the immortals (with the notable exception of three ancient goddesses called the Fates) and over all the earthly mortals. Zeus ruled the other deities not because he was the oldest, or the wisest, and not because he had a special connection to the land and the natural environment of Greece. Zeus ruled because he had successfully wrenched power from his father, Cronus. Cronus had once done the very same thing when he became ruler over his father, Uranus. This mythic pattern of an intergenerational power struggle between male deities and their fathers occurs in neighboring eastern Mediterranean cultures; contemporary scholars call it the Succession Myth. As heir to the Succession Myth, which required the son to dethrone his father (often with the duplicitous assistance of his mother), Zeus modeled a pattern of behavior that was unconsciously and consciously imitated by generations of Greek men. Certainly mortals did not kill their fathers (or even wish to), but in the natural order of things the son grows up and takes the father's place in the world and thus symbolically defeats him.
This mythic social order that Zeus modeled placed power in the hands of a few who needed the obedience and labor of many others to maintain the status quo and keep the world from returning to a primeval state of chaos. Viewed within the economies of archaic and classical Athens, the pattern manifested itself in the small fraction of men—those of a hereditary, aristocratic class—who governed everybody else. The category "everybody else" embraced many different subcategories, including less well-to-do ordinary citizens, some of whom were small landholders and in de pen dent farmers, while others worked as sharecroppers in a semifeudal system, cultivating land belonging to a wealthier class. The most unfortunate became debt bondsmen, who lost their liberty and citizen privileges until they could repay their debt. "Everybody else" also meant noncitizen but free resident aliens called metics, many of whom were specialized and professional craftsmen who worked in Athens or its port. Finally, all the slaves, regardless of where they labored, all the women, and all children counted as "everybody else," too. There were far more people in this category of "everybody else" than there were actual citizens. At best only 25 percent of the total population of classical Athens were citizens with full political privileges.
Because running farms was labor-intensive, many people lived in the countryside villages of Attica; but by the end of the sixth century, Athens was a small urban center that existed in a mutually dependent and beneficial relationship with the outlying rural districts, called demes. Athens was the recognized name for the larger autonomous civic entity called the polis (city-state), and it was a large town that contained the seat of centralized government for that polis. The surrounding countryside of Attica encompassed hills and mountains as well as the broad plains with their scattered districts, villages, and towns extending from the Aegean Sea in the south and east to the mountains in the north and west. When scholars speak of Athenian democracy, Athenian citizens, or the Athenian empire, they are referring both to the urban center of Athens and to the rural districts of Attica. Neither could exist without the other.
Athens as a city looked like many other cities in archaic and classical Greece. It lay in a broad plain between two ranges of hills. The plain was no more than 10 miles wide, and in the middle of the plain stood a small cluster of hills. An outcropping of bedrock, the Acropolis, towered above the hills and the plain (figure 1). An acropolis, literally the "peak of the city," had the obvious advantage of being an easily defensible height and a natural fortress; acropolises were sites of palace complexes as far back as Mycenaean times, before the thirteenth century. Other major urban centers in Greece had this same topographical feature—cities such as Corinth to the south of Athens, and Thebes to the north. Athens and the Acropolis had the further natural advantage of being situated only 4 miles due north of the harbor of Phaleron, and only 5 miles from a complex of three natural harbors to the southwest, collectively called the Piraeus. In the fifth century, Athens and its harbors were physically linked by the construction of defensive walls. These walls would play an important role in the course of the Peloponnesian War later in the fifth century.
The overall picture, then, might well resemble a walled city in medieval Europe. Classical Athens was a well-fortified but small (by our standards) urban center with temples, markets, and the seat of the democratic institutions alongside urban neighborhoods with their homes, businesses, and workshops. Further suburban neighborhoods and businesses developed outside the fortifications. Cemeteries and other sacred precincts were also traditionally found outside the city walls. Farms and villages in the outlying districts of Attica were all interconnected, but these villages maintained direct contact primarily with Athens, since the city housed the central markets, the assemblies, and the law courts that formed the backbone of Athenian democracy. The most important public shrines of the gods were also located in the center of Athens. This relationship between one city and the surrounding countryside created a type of centripetal energy that moved toward Athens. Such an arrangement was unusual among Greek cities, which more often organized themselves along an axis with two or more public centers—one center for cultic activity and another for commercial and political activity.
RESOURCES, COLONIES, AND CULTURAL CONTACTS
For all the natural advantages enjoyed by Athens, life in the archaic and classical city still entailed hard work. More often than not the majority of residents were familiar with poverty, privation, and the ever-present threat of hunger. Starting with Hesiod's seventh-century poem Works and Days, Greek literature explored the themes of man's never-ceasing labor and the suffering that accompanies human existence. Alongside the toil Hesiod also presented traditional tales of the Olympian gods and goddesses, and the very different sort of existence that they led. Hesiod remained a favorite poet of the Athenians throughout the fifth century; along with Homer, Hesiod was often quoted by Socrates.
But the Greeks were well aware that human life need not always be so tough. While the farmers throughout Attica maintained their rough, traditional way of life for many generations, by the late sixth century the commercial center of Athens had developed a thriving import and export economy, and a merchant class became acquainted with new prosperity. Athens' chief export products were wine, the finest olive oil, and exquisitely rendered ceramic ware, the famous black-figure and red-figure vases that were so prized during antiquity throughout the Mediterranean basin. Athens was also fully exploiting natural resources from its silver mines at Laurium, in the southern hills in the direction of Cape Sounion. With this silver the polis minted hard currency (a relatively recent innovation) and used that money in foreign trade.
Even with all the wealth generated by these various resources, famine remained a continual threat. Although the plains of Attica were fertile enough when the rains fell, some years brought drought, and there simply was not enough consistently arable acreage to feed a burgeoning population. The Athenians were faced with constant pressure to import grain, and to export residents to colonies around the Mediterranean basin. The need to colonize and expand had been a factor in the larger Greek world since at least the tenth century. At that time Greeks began to settle other lands around the Mediterranean, founding cities such as Corcyra (modern Corfu), Cyrene on the North Africa coast (today's Libya), Syracuse in Sicily, and Naples in Italy. Even a city as far west as Marseilles on the coast of France started out as a Greek colony. To the east, Greek settlements spanned the entire coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey) around to Byzantium (Istanbul), famously situated along the trade route to the Black Sea. Athens was not prominent among the colonizers of the Archaic period; Corinth and the Euboean cities of Chalcis and Eretria took that honor. But colonization of a new sort would become an Athenian focus later in the fifth century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Civic Rites by Nancy Evans Copyright © 2010 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
ContentsList of Illustrations Preface Introduction / The City of Pericles and Socrates One / Cleisthenes: The Family Curse behind Athenian Democracy Two / Athena: Religion and the Democratic Polis Three / Pericles: Empire and War in the City of Athena Four / Demeter: Civic Worship, Women’s Rites, and the Eleusinian Mysteries Five / Alcibiades: Politics, Religion, and the Cult of Personality Six / Dionysus: Civic Rituals of Wine, Theater, and Transformation Seven / Socrates: Impiety Trials in the Restored Democracy Epilogue / The City after Socrates Glossary of Terms Suggested Further Readings by Chapter Bibliography IndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Highly recommended . . . provides a compelling narrative ... would be useful in any course on ancient Greece."—Canadian Journal of History
"Undergraduate students of ancient Athens can profit from this book."—Choice