A warm May evening at Athens in (perhaps) 411 BCE. It is the night of the festival of the goddess Bendis in the Piraeus, and a dozen men have gathered for dinner at the house of Polemarchus of Syracuse, a rich shield manufacturer. The party is a cosmopolitan one: resident foreigners (“metics”) such as Polemarchus, his brother Lysias, the famous speechwriter, and their elderly father, Cephalus; blue-blooded Athenians like Niceratus, son of the famous general Nicias, the rising politician Clitophon and the philosopher Socrates. Socrates and Cephalus fall to discussing Cephalus’ immense riches, and Cephalus boasts that his wealth enables him to live a just life by never being forced into cheating or deceiving others. “But are we really to claim”, says Socrates, “that justice is simply this, truthfulness and repaying what we have borrowed?” Everyone settles down for what will turn out to be – to judge from Plato’s retelling in Republic – a memorable night’s conversation.
Jump forward eight years, to early spring 403 BCE. Athens has recently been defeated by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. The democracy has been abolished and the city is ruled by a Spartan-backed junta of thirty oligarchs, with a programme of “purging the city of unjust men and turning the citizens to virtue and justice”. The Athenian masses have been stripped of the franchise and the citizen body limited to 3,000 men of property (“the Three Thousand”). Niceratus is dead, executed by the Thirty for refusing to join the new regime. Clitophon – whom Plato had presented making the sinister argument that the interest of the stronger is whatever the stronger believes his interest to be – is a leading light of the oligarchic faction. Polemarchus is dead, murdered by the Thirty for his wealth; his brother Lysias is in exile in Megara after a daring night-time escape from the Piraeus. Socrates, notoriously, is living quietly at home in the city, neither opposing nor collaborating with the oligarchs, many of whom were his former pupils; four years later, he would be put to death by the restored democracy.
Few episodes in ancient Greek history generated more papyrus inches in antiquity than the short-lived and brutal rule of the Thirty in 404/3 BCE. Despite (or perhaps because of) the blanket amnesty granted in late 403 to all but a handful of the leading figures in the regime, the Athenians spent the following decades obsessively justifying and rewriting their actions during those few months. What did you do under the Thirty, daddy? Top prize for slipperiness goes to Xenophon’s heroically dishonest narrative in his Hellenica, which pins all the blame on the (now dead) radical oligarch Critias, lavishes praise on the democratic general Thrasybulus for his leadership of the counter-revolution of 403, and mysteriously fails to mention Xenophon’s loyal service in the Thirty’s cavalry corps (and subsequent exile from Athens). Not much better is Lysias’ prosecution speech against Eratosthenes, his brother’s murderer, which manages to stop marginally short of claiming that the Thirty ate babies.
As a result, the social history of the civil war remains desperately obscure. In particular, it is hard to judge whether the Thirty and their supporters formed a distinctive oligarchic “faction” unified by radically anti-democratic political convictions. An alarming number of the men of 404/3 (including the two most sulphurous oligarchs, Critias and Charicles) had pursued successful careers under the democracy; Rhinon, a leading member of the oligarchic regime in its dying days in late summer 403, managed to get himself immediately reappointed as general under the restored democracy. Even Lysias, despite his traumatic experiences at the hands of the Thirty, was happy to compose defence speeches for numerous shady members of the Three Thousand.
In his Politics, Aristotle uses the image of the classical Greek chorus – a group of up to fifty male or female citizens, temporarily coming together to sing and dance together in unison in honour of the gods – to capture the relation between the city and its constitution:
The city is a kind of association – an association of citizens in a constitution; so when the constitution changes and becomes different in kind, the city also would seem necessarily not to be the same. We may use the analogy of a chorus, which may at one time perform in a tragedy and at another in a comedy, so that we say it is different – yet often enough it is composed of the same persons.
This analogy is at the heart of Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard’s dazzling new history of the Athenian civil war of 404–3 BCE. Rather than trying to identify coherent ideological groups of “oligarchs” and “democrats”, they argue that Athenian society was made up of temporary, overlapping “choruses”, with “no existence or duration other than the activity of the collective”. A given group of dancers might choose to act in unison for a few weeks or months, without ever crystallizing into a hard-edged faction:
Speaking of an “oligarchic chorus” distances us from the idea of an aristocratic “party” endowed with a structured ideology and faithful adherents … in order to conceive of forms of affiliation that are both ephemeral and dynamic, enlisting bodies and mobilizing emotions.
These ephemeral choruses cut sharply across legal and economic status groups. As the dinner party in Plato’s Republic shows, rich metics such as Lysias and Polemarchus were enthusiastically welcomed by their aristocratic Athenian peers as part of an elite in-group; but, once the Thirty were in the saddle, those same metics could find themselves hounded into exile or death by their former drinking companions.
One of the great strengths of this choral approach to Athenian political life is that it allows Azoulay and Ismard to integrate marginalized groups back into the mainstream of Athenian political history. It is all too easy to take the 30,000 adult citizen males of Athens as synonymous with “Athenian society”, omitting the (roughly) 85 per cent of the population excluded from citizen rights. Athens, 403 BC includes two sparkling chapters on the women of Athens, as well as vivid evocations of the key roles played in the democratic counter-revolution by metics, poor wage labourers and, above all, enslaved people (the subject of two magnificent earlier monographs by Ismard). The most contentious issue for the restored democracy of 403 was how to recognize the hundreds of non-citizens who, under Thrasybulus, took up arms against the Thirty. That army had included almost 1,000 metics and enslaved people (movingly represented in Athens, 403 BC by the Thracian greengrocer Gerys). A few months after the restoration, we find an ad hoc chorus of Athenian “moderates” closing ranks against Thrasybulus to block the likes of Gerys from being admitted to Athenian citizenship. As Azoulay and Ismard show, these “moderates” included both former oligarchs and radical democrats, briefly united in their attachment to a closed and exclusive version of citizen equality.
Athens, 403 BC is, in the nicest possible way, an extremely French kind of project. Few anglophone scholars would have the gumption to frame Athenian society in terms of dancing choruses; round our way, messieurs, funding bodies prefer us to engage in social network analysis. The difference isn’t just a matter of semantics: what’s at stake is whether we approach the ancient Athenians using their own categories of thought, or ours. The result is an anatomy of political commitment that feels very distant from our modern thought-world (there are no lessons here for dealing with lepénisme), but remarkably true to the lived experience of the Athenian demos. The translation, alas, is not a vast success: the orator Aelius Aristides is split into two men, Aelius and Aristides; Andocides turns into Androcles; and false translations abound (“statute” for “status”, “treaty” for “treatise”, etc). But this is the most exhilarating book about classical Athens in years; it’s hard to imagine a historian of the ancient world who wouldn’t read it with excitement and admiration.
Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman history at Wadham College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Lives of Ancient Villages, 2022.
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