G.’s book is an investigation of the ‘extra-institutional’ public sphere of Athenian democracy, and of its interconnectedness with, and opposition to, the ‘institutional’ sphere (G. has more to say about the opposition than the interconnectedness). G. tries very hard to identify what is distinctive about politics practised in the ‘street’ as opposed to the ‘institutional’ public sphere, but the nature and the substance of the evidence he enlists for this purpose often gets in the way.
This is apparent already in the introduction, where G. assumes (rather than proves) that gossip must be typical of the ‘street’, and therefore discusses it as evidence of the extra-institutional dimension of political discourse. Yet all his examples (by necessity) come from sources typical of performative contexts that are fully ‘institutional’: law court speeches, comedy, ostraca cast for ostracism. G. tries to get around this difficulty by observing that although ‘we cannot access the Street directly … slanderous anecdotes did not exist in a literary vacuum’ (p. 15). This is correct, and it is methodologically sound to look at this evidence to get a sense of what was said in the ‘street’. But, at the same time, what this evidence shows is that there was remarkable continuity between ‘extra-institutional’ and ‘institutional’ contexts. Even in the case of the ostraca for ostracism, what is remarkable is that casting an ostracon against Themistocles that called him a katapygon (T1/150) did not disqualify it – if a large enough number of Athenians cast their ostraca in the same way (and for the same reason), Themistocles would be ostracised. And, likewise, the slanderous gossip about Timarchus’ sexual exploits as a young male prostitute in Aeschines 1 is not irrelevant in the context of the dokimasia rhetoron – it was the law that stated that such a person could not be a rhetor, and Aeschines makes the case that pheme in this case is evidence (Timarchus was convicted).
These difficulties affect much of the work: while G. is right that the ‘street’ should be more heavily brought into the study of Athenian politics, his concern with identifying ‘extra-institutional’ as opposed to ‘institutional’ contexts leads him to see differences and breaks where there are none, and to underplay the striking continuities between the forums of political discourse in Athens. In Chapter 1, a discussion of the Agora, the ‘flimsy and porous’ (p. 23) barriers between ‘institutional and extra-institutional space’ are striking only because G. assumes that there are discrete ‘institutional’ and ‘extra-institutional’ spheres, and that they should therefore be clearly marked. The fact that they are not should rather lead him to question this a priori distinction, and appreciate how integrated that public space was, to the extent that the monument of the Eponymous Heroes served as an ‘institutional’ noticeboard of the democracy that actively encouraged, for instance, discussion on law proposals outside of Council, Assembly, law courts and nomothetai, as necessary preparation for the formal procedures (Dem. 20.94; 24.25). In Chapter 2, G. provides an account of ‘free spaces’ and networks of socialisation and political discussion outside the ‘institutions’ (Assembly, Council and law courts). While the case for taking into account these spaces more fully is well taken (although G. acknowledges that ‘mixed spaces’ are unattested in inscriptions before the third century), and there is no question that discussion and debate in these contexts was at the basis of political discourse as it manifested itself in the Council and the Assembly, it is less clear in which sense some of the associations discussed were ‘extra-institutional’ (unless, that is, we narrow the meaning of ‘institutional’ to the extreme, see below) – G.’s Athens is a polis strangely without officials, and this deep network of associations seems to exist in a legal vacuum (yet we know that it did not).
Chapter 3 examines the challenge posed by non-institutional politics to institutional procedure. After a discussion of logopoiein in ‘extra-institutional spaces’, G. focuses on supplication and ‘pitiable theatrics’ (p. 94). G. argues that supplication introduced an irrational, emotional and ‘extra-institutional’ element that destabilised ‘institutional politics’, and so did appeals to pity in the law courts. But the discussion ignores the highly procedural, formalised and ritualised nature of supplication, constrained by the law (see F.S. Naiden, Ancient Supplication [2006]), and the rational dimension of appeals to pity in law court speeches – pity is always enlisted to reinforce the legal and rational case for innocence and never used to convince judges to turn a blind eye (see D. Konstan, ‘Pity and the Law in Greek Theory and Practice’, Dike 4 [2000], 124–45). Chapter 4 argues that the Athenians in the fourth century incorporated supplication and theatricality into their political institutions, despite previously seeing them as antithetical. Because the eight fragmentary fourth-century inscriptions attesting supplications in the Assembly are concerned with honours to foreigners, G. speculates that sponsoring such supplications was seen by leading politicians as a chance for publicity.
Chapter 5 investigates ‘publicity stunts’, concentrating on the stories of Peisistratus and Phye, of Ephialtes ‘naked’ at the altar, of the mutilation of Herms in 415 b.c., and of Theramenes and the Apaturia in the context of the Arginousae Trial. The topic is worth investigating, but the fact that G. has mostly to rely on stories of very dubious historicity casts doubts on his conclusions (and on the narrative of development that he paints). Chapter 6 plausibly reads supplications by slaves at the Theseion as publicity stunts aimed at bettering their circumstances, but there is no evidence that aphairesis eis eleutherian had anything to do with this (and therefore the core of the chapter, dedicated to a confused analysis of this procedure, is entirely speculative). It is also unclear in what sense such phenomena are to be understood as ‘political’. Chapter 7 studies Plato's Laws as an extended reflection on (and rethinking of) the Athenian distinction between ‘institutional’ and ‘extra-institutional’ public spheres.
Ultimately, apart from the disagreements about particular historical reconstructions, what I found unsatisfactory in this study is the undertheorised and unduly narrow concept of ‘institutions’ employed. In current political science, institutions are understood as ‘stable, valued and recurrent patterns of behaviour’, as ‘patterned interactions that are predictable’ (see e.g. V. Lowndes and M. Roberts, Why Institutions Matter: the New Institutionalism in Political Science [2010]), and that coalesce into a context-specific normative order that works according to a ‘logic of appropriateness’ (J.G. March and J.P. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions [1989]). They are characterised by formal rules, of course, but also by ‘informal’ yet equally binding practices, as well as by ideas, narratives, discursive parameters. Within such a framework, one can study the political sphere as the sphere of the interaction of a variety of institutional spaces, discrete and overlapping, all influencing each other, creating tensions as well as continuities.
Within G.’s framework, we are left with an artificial distinction between ‘institutional’ and ‘extra-institutional’ as two (allegedly) discrete public spheres, and the ‘institutions’ seem to be identified exclusively with a handful of formal political bodies and spaces – the Council, the Assembly, the law courts – as characterised by formal legal rules and dominated by an unidentified ‘elite’. Everything else becomes ‘extra-institutional’ and therefore relevant somehow to the ‘street’, even (at times) the discursive practices of these very political bodies and spaces, inasmuch as they are not fully formalised in actual legal rules. Thus, private and public associations are ‘extra-institutional’, despite being often run in a way that resembles polis practice, and having their legal status formally protected and recognised by the laws and the officials of the polis. Phratries are extra-institutional, despite being fundamental to identifying someone as a citizen of the polis. Sanctuaries, gymnasia, even the Agora itself are somehow (at least partially) extra-institutional. As a result, G. sees stark differences and breaks where there are none, and the continuities and interdependences of these spaces and, yes, institutions are overshadowed. Despite my perplexities (and precisely for these reasons), what I do take away from this book is the need (stressed in a lot of recent work, see e.g. R. Sobak, ‘Sokrates among the Shoemakers’, Hesperia 84 [2015], 669–712) to look at the spaces and institutions of Athenian political life beyond the usual suspects (the Council, the law courts, the Assembly) and to investigate the Athenian political system at all levels, and in the interaction of all its institutional components and of the individuals (including foreigners, women and slaves) that acted within them.
