Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-npj9w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-07T08:37:08.725Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Idea of Accountable Office in Ancient Greece and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 November 2019

Melissa Lane
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While leaders in many times and places from ancient Greece to today have been called to account, it has been claimed that leaders in ancient Athens were called to account more than any other group in history. This paper surveys the distinctive ways in which Athenian accountability procedures gave the democratic people as a whole a meaningful voice in defining, revealing, and judging the misuse of office, and in holding every single official regularly and personally accountable for their use of their powers. By then assessing a drastic case of unaccountability in a certain moment of Athenian history – the rule of the Thirty in 404–403 BCE – and how accountability was ultimately imposed on them, the paper concludes with thoughts about what might deepen and restore trust in the accountability of public officials today.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 95 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 19 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2019 

1. Introduction: The Idea of Accountable Public Office

‘Athenian leaders were called to account more than any other such group in history’.Footnote 1 With this claim, historian Mogens Herman Hansen identifies a common idea of ‘calling to account’ that echoes across many places and times. Indeed, we may posit a fundamental relationship between office and accountability, considered as a form of controlling and delimiting rule, that is common to the ancient Greeks and to most other forms of constitutional rule, including the Scottish civil law and the common law of England and Wales and of the United States As two scholars have put it in a recent American law review article, ‘The concept of accountability serves as administrative law's organizing principle’,Footnote 2 and looking back to older English common law principles, another scholar explains that ‘the concept of office’ was defined ‘by the accountability regime which attaches to it’.Footnote 3 A recent Institute for Government report explains that ‘at heart’, still today in the United Kingdom, ‘accountability is about a relationship – between those responsible for something and those who have a role in passing judgement on how well that responsibility was discharged’,Footnote 4 and I'll return to the four forms that report identifies that such a relationship might take: oversight, regulation, inspection, and scrutiny.Footnote 5

But the other side of Hansen's assertion is that, while leaders in many times and places from ancient Greece to today have been called to account, there is something distinctive about ancient Athens, in that leaders there were called to account more than any other group in history. In Athens, accountability procedures and the control of public office more generally gave the people as a whole a meaningful voice in defining, revealing, and judging the misuse of office, and in holding every single official regularly and personally accountable for their use of their powers. And this is suggestive for thinking in our own time about how and why to maintain the meaningfulness of accountability, rather than letting it devolve into a matter of tick boxes or shadow play.

Just as an Annual General Meeting must establish offices, fill them, and hold their exercise accountable, so too did any classical Greek constitutional form of rule: in them hierarchical subordination intersected with limits and accountability precisely in turning rule into constrained and specified offices. Officeholders in essence dispose of initiative while at the same time being subject to control. Or to put it another way, office lies at the intersection of discretionary command and accountability. (In contrast, ordinary Athenians, whether acting as voters in the Assembly or as jurors in the courts, were not themselves held to account for the ways in which their own powers were used, though the jurors’ oath may have attempted to impose some form of normative control.)Footnote 6 And this was true across the range of classical Greek constitutional regimes from at least the sixth into the fourth centuries, from its origins in ‘Archaic, elite-led regimes’ to the development of oligarchy and democracy in particular.Footnote 7

A model for the general notion of a Greek constitution (politeia) as a formal structure of offices that could be realised in varying specific regimes is that of symphonic form, which is articulated by an expected set of movements, but which may vary both in the movements included and in the internal sub-forms they contain. So as Pierre Fröhlich emphasizes in his comprehensive study of the control of magistrates across the Greek world (in my translation from his French), ‘the control of magistrates is one of the characteristic features of Greek cities, in the classical and Hellenistic eras alike…One must speak of Greek cities, and not only of democracies. For, even if the evidence is not very rich on this point, the control of magistrates is found equally in oligarchies’.Footnote 8 And this point goes back to the beginning of the classical Greek period: in Cretan city-states, which provide the earliest evidence for classical Greek laws, we find the kosmoi or officeholders (the very word means order: they were each literally an embodiment of order) of seventh-century Cretan Dreros already subjected to limits on their powers in the form of required rotation of office,Footnote 9 and the kosmoi of Gortyn in the early fifth century being held accountable for any violation of property law committed during their term on pain of being fined by another body of officeholders, the titai. Footnote 10

To be sure, for the Greeks, as for the early modern period of the common law say around 1780, ‘there was no clear distinction between political and administrative office holding’, to use Janet McLean's terms for the beginning of the period from 1780-1850.Footnote 11 Instead what we find is a basic sense, almost primitive, of an officeholder as someone to whom a certain set of powers is entrusted and who will be in various ways held to account for how they are used. These officeholders all had certain powers of discretionary command, whether for very minor administrative tasks (overseeing the roads) or for much more significant decision-making (acting as generals or treasurers). In Athens, for example, the general powers of Athenian magistracies or archai comprised: ‘(1) The right of acting on their own initiative in accordance with the laws which qualified them, or of consulting the Assembly or the Council with regard to new decisions (βουλεύσασθαι); (2) the fundamental right of giving orders and of passing obligatory measures (ἐπιτάξαι), which implied the right of punishing the delinquent (ἐπιβολὰς ἐπιβάλλειν)…Footnote 12 (3) judicial competence in specified cases (κρῖναι), a competence which no longer carried the right of decision, but only that of receiving pleas, of making investigation and of presiding over the tribunal (ἡγεμονία)’.Footnote 13 While certain key political powers that we think of as political – such as whether to declare war or peace – were reserved to an Assembly or Council (as indeed they are reserved to a parliament or congress in contemporary parliamentary democracies), the Assembly, Council, and courts played as important a role in holding officeholders to account as they did in making their own decisions.

The point is summed up by Aristotle in one of his accounts of a constitution, or politeia, in Politics Book III, in which he defines a constitution as an ‘order’ (taxis) of ‘offices’.Footnote 14 So a constitution arises when the hierarchical power of command is transmuted into the lineaments of officesFootnote 15 defined by their ordering and limiting features: their legal capacities, their terms, their mode of selection, and the controls exercised over them. Indeed there is an important linguistic and conceptual interplay in Attic Greek between the noun for office (hē archē), and the verb for ‘to rule’ (archein) which can also become, especially in participial constructions, a way to refer to ‘officeholders’.Footnote 16 Yet even within such constitutional forms of office, the basic interpersonal structure of rule as hierarchical subjection to commands still persists. Officeholders were subject to constitutional control through mechanisms that included accountability procedures; but they remained rulers in the sense that they gave discretionary commands with the normative expectation of their being obeyed.Footnote 17

2. Elements of Athenian Accountability for Public Officeholders

Now I noted earlier that accountability was not confined to democracies, let alone to Athens. Yet as I signalled at the beginning – with the sweeping statement from Hansen about Athenian leaders being called to account more than any others in history – it is nevertheless the case that both the nature and extent of accountability mechanisms in Athens were extreme,Footnote 18 and they will be my main focus in what follows.

How then were Athenian officeholders controlled and held to account? Let me start by fleshing out the four possible forms of accountability relationships laid out in the recent Institute of Government report that I mentioned earlier. Those relationships involve:

  • • Oversight: one side overseeing the other through direct reporting lines for performance.

  • • Regulation: one side regulating the other through the setting and enforcement of rules about how certain things should be done.

  • • Inspection: one side inspecting the other through assessments of how well responsibilities have been discharged.

  • • Scrutiny: one side scrutinising the other through the ability to question and report on what has happened.Footnote 19

In pre-bureaucratic ancient Greece, there was relatively little regulation or oversight: offices were defined with very few rules or regulations, and officeholders were expected to simply get on with the job, with no overarching civil service bureaucratic management structure to oversee them. But what we do find is a tremendous amount of inspection and scrutiny, carried out with some remarkably intensive mechanisms that made these relationships of accountability meaningful through active public engagement.Footnote 20 And before explaining these in more detail, it's worth noting that the Athenians also imposed a pre-tenure qualification test, a dokimasia, to make sure that anyone chosen for office whether by lottery or election was a citizen in good standing: someone who had paid their taxes and carried out basic civic rites and duties (which included religious ones). Indeed this should give pause to enthusiastic proponents of citizens’ juries and the like: the Athenians never assumed that anyone selected by lottery should automatically be deemed suitable to serve.Footnote 21

But back to inspection and scrutiny. Uniquely even among the ancient Greeks, the Athenians didn't wait for the end of tenure to make inspection or scrutiny possible: as Fröhlich notes, ‘Athens is the only city in which we know anything of procedures enabling sanctioning of a magistrate while in the course of his tenure’.Footnote 22 There, as Jennifer Tolbert Roberts writes, ‘Ten times during the official year he [an office holder] might be deposed from his office by a vote of ἀποχειροτονία…’ within each κυρία εκκλησία, followed by a jury trial to determine whether or not the magistrate was guilty or should be allowed to resume his office.Footnote 23 There was also the possibility for any citizen to accuse a magistrate of malfeasance before the Council (εἰσαγγελία εἰς τὴν βουλὴν), which might be tried by the Council itself or referred by it to the Assembly or to a jury court.Footnote 24 Citizens could also bring lawsuits of various kinds against magistrates for specific failings or misdeeds. With all that, however, as Frances Pownall observes, we have evidence of ‘very few complaints of administrative incompetence or cases of magistrates being dismissed from their office in mid-stream’.Footnote 25

And then, crucially, at the end of every single officeholder's term in Athens (and also in Greek democracies and oligarchies generally), they were subjected to a combination of inspection of performance and scrutiny of reasons that the Greeks referred to as εὔθυναι, or euthunai (most often used in the plural; singular euthuna) which literally means the rendering of accounts.Footnote 26 Even for officeholders who served on collective boards, each was subjected to this procedure individually, and generally speaking any citizen was able to bring a complaint forward to be investigated. So the accountability relationship was personal on both sides: individuals were held personally accountable for their performance, never shielded by collective responsibility or bureaucratic hierarchy; and anyone in the citizen body could draw on their own experience or knowledge to lodge a complaint. This is part of what made Athenian accountability unusually effective and meaningful. And the stakes were high: Jennifer Tolbert Roberts observes that, in Athens, ‘Only when his ἔυθυναι were complete…was it legal for a man to set out on a journey, transfer his property to anyone else, be adopted into a different family, or even make a votive offering to a god. In other words, the state had a lien on the property and civic freedom of all officials until their accounts were settled’.Footnote 27

Athens uniquely had a two-stage procedure for euthunai, with two different boards involved – officeholders appointed precisely to check other officeholders. Here I follow M. H. Hansen closely. In the first stage, a board of logistai audited the financial accounts submitted by the magistrate under review, and considered accusations made either by appointed sunegoroi (probably) or by any citizen, during and even after the audit of the financial accounts, accusations that at this stage were strictly financial: ‘An accusation had to be either of embezzlement (klopes) or of bribery (doron) or of some lesser financial offence (adikiou)’.Footnote 28 Then at the second stage another board was constituted, consisting of ten euthunoi, one per tribe, each with two assessors, ready to receive and consider whether to forward to a court or another board written accusations for magistrates belonging to their tribe that were lodged within three days of the magistrate's accounts having been examined; at this latter stage ‘[a] magistrate could, it seems, be accused of any conceivable offence’, and Hansen goes on to explain that whereas at the first stage the penalties allowed were monetary fines only, at this stage it seems that death may have been a permissible penalty, the penalty being (as in many Athenian judicial procedures) at the discretion of the court to decide,Footnote 29 and of course, most Athenian courts were composed of randomly selected citizen jurors who had sworn an oath to judge fairly.

What is striking in these procedures is the openness to considering accusations made by any citizen, against any officeholder, about ‘any conceivable offence’ that might have been committed as an abuse of power – and then the willingness to submit those accusations to a popular court of ordinary citizens to decide about, on pain of fines, exile, or even death for an officeholder convicted. This might at first strike us as dangerously risky in a system where the ‘overall objectives’ of government, as the Institute for Government report phrases the purposes of rule,Footnote 30 were scarcely ever defined in explicit terms. Greek laws notoriously focused on setting out procedure, for example, for how a crime such as impiety should be punished, without offering substantive definitions of those crimes or offences themselves. It was up to the assembled people in the roles of councilors or jurors or scrutineers or auditors (some of those roles counting as offices in their own right) to determine what counted as the good use of discretionary command by particular officials, and what as the bad or illegitimate, during or, most often, after the fact. But it was also what made accountability especially meaningful precisely as a form of relationship. Officeholders were persons entrusted with certain powers by other persons, the collective demos, and they were very literally liable to those persons whom they were meant to serve, subject at any moment in their tenure and always upon its expiry to being held to account.

The importance of these ideas and practices is summed up in the adjectives hupeuthunos (ὑπεύθυνος), or accountable, and its negation anupeuthunos (ἀνυπεύθυνος), or unaccountable, which could both be used in a broad sense referring to responsibility in general as well as to the rendering of accounts in a narrow sense in particular, as Kinch Hoekstra and Matthew Landauer have each recently emphasized.Footnote 31 We find the symbolic importance of this process already underscored in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, where Hades is described by the chorus of Furies as the εὔθυνος of mortals (l.273), a god holding humans to account in the underworld, in an image seemingly modeled on Athenian institutions at the time.Footnote 32 Thus, the procedures of euthunai were and are emblematic of the idea that the uses of powers (even merely mortal powers) must in essence be made accountable and subject to control.

To be sure, attacks made on officeholders in their official capacity were treated differently from attacks made on them as individuals, and there were protections and forms of respect accorded to those officeholders bearing the ‘crown’ of office, as Demosthenes insisted in his own right in prosecuting one Meidias for having disrespected him (Demosthenes) in his role as official in charge of organising a festival chorus (an official known as a chorēgos).Footnote 33 But the system of accountability was personal in the sense that officeholders could not be shielded from accusations of wrong-doing by holding a bureaucratic superior, or an impersonal bureaucracy itself, accountable instead. Moreover, even though virtually all officeholders in Greek cities served as members of boards or colleges, each one was held individually liable to render his own accounts: each officeholder as a ruler was able to command and take initiative, but was also liable to be controlled by those over whom he had the power of command (all Greek officeholders in this strict sense being male, though some important civic roles in religious ceremonies were assigned to women). Officeholding was an interpersonal relationship of rule even though, and indeed precisely through being, a role that was constitutionally, institutionally, and legally defined.

So Greek officeholders were never shielded by the hierarchy of a strict Weberian-style impersonal bureaucracy, in which it is only the chain of command as a whole that is generally held accountable from the outside, with internal accountability being limited to one's bureaucratic superior. While the hierarchical Weberian model is clearly an oversimplification of modern practices of bureaucracy, it can still serve as an illuminating ideal type, especially in Britain, where, as Dennis Thompson has observed, ‘in the form of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility the model has probably come closer to realization than anywhere else’.Footnote 34 As Thompson further observes, ‘Because the hierarchical model directs our criticism upward and away from many of the actual decision makers [such as individual officeholders] in government, it encourages a ritualistic taking of responsibility’ but one in which, especially as it risks dissipating, ‘genuine accountability of lower-level officials rarely takes its place’.Footnote 35 (Thompson illustrates this latter point with reference to Canada, but in the recent Institute for Government report, the same point is made with reference to the UK today: ministers rarely take real responsibility for all the acts of their subordinates, yet those subordinates are shielded from full parliamentary scrutiny because it is their ministers who are held to be responsible.)Footnote 36 In contrast, in Athens, each and every official – even though they were often chosen as one among several members of a board – would be held individually accountable, subjected to individual rendering of accounts and liable to individual punishment if the accounts were judged to be unacceptable.

Indeed, even compared to the English common law system, in which at least some civil servants, namely ‘permanent secretaries (as accounting officers) are personally responsible for their departments’ money’,Footnote 37 Greek forms of accountability were remarkably personally stringent in the individualizing of responsibility. Consider the fact that the Athenians restricted certain treasury offices to the wealthy alone, precisely (it seems) in order to be able to hold them personally responsible for paying back any misused public funds. And as we have seen, accountability procedures defined and concluded every single officeholder's term, whereas the auditing in the historical common law practices studied by McLean were far less frequent and regularised: audit was possible but not routine.Footnote 38

To be sure, none of the Athenian accountability procedures was quite so dramatic as the one that still takes place in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, each spring: the annual weigh-in of the mayor, charter trustees, honorary burgesses, and officers, to test whether they have gained weight during their tenure of office, as a warning sign that they may have fattened themselves unduly on ill-gotten gains.Footnote 39 Nevertheless, Athenian democracy made accountability meaningful by making it personal and inevitable. Inevitable at least so long as the democracy persisted. And so the question is, what happened when accountability vanished? How could a meaningful relationship of accountability for those who had exercised power outside its bounds be restored? I turn to those questions now by reflecting on a drastic case of unaccountability in a certain moment of Athenian history, and how accountability was restored, in order to conclude with some thoughts about deepening and restoring trust in accountability of public officials today.

3. A Moment of Unaccountability in Athens: The ‘Thirty Tyrants’

The case comes from an extreme moment of unaccountability in Athens, from the brief reign of the Thirty, best known in later centuries as the ‘Thirty Tyrants’, who held power for a period of nine months in the year 404 into 403 BCE, after which a form of democratic government was restored. And we can begin by asking: Why were the Thirty later known as the ‘Thirty Tyrants’? Or, to put it another way, what was it that was so deeply illegitimate about their regime, such that after their overthrow ‘the dispositions of the Thirty were now [after 403] judged illegal’?Footnote 40 Two answers intuitively suggest themselves: that they came to power wrongfully, or that they used it in wrongful way; as we might say, either wrongful procedure, or wrongful substance.Footnote 41 But there is a third question about the nature of power that is less often asked, yet is the deeper issue in this case: the question of how power is constitutionally structured, a question answered in democratic Athens and in classical Greek city-states more widely in terms of accountability as central to the meaning of political office. In my view, which I lack space to argue in detail here, the Thirty actually came to power without gross procedural impropriety. But the role that they were assigned was nevertheless a role that lacked the limits and controls of an accountable office proper, and their exercise of power made a mockery of the accountability purportedly built in to the offices that remained in their regime – such that we find the Athenians recognizing this deep lack of accountability in the way that they responded to the Thirty after their fall.

The key fact is that some time after the Thirty had been ousted and a form of democracy restored, a reconciliation agreement was reached that included a demand for rendering accounts through euthunai. This was part of an overall amnesty between the victorious democrats and the oligarchic sympathizers whom they had ousted (only some of whom remained in Athens proper). That amnesty applied to individuals, including, at least in the descriptions of the amnesty given by the Athenian Constitution and by Andocides, potentially even the members of the Thirty and their henchmen and transitional successors – but only so long as each of them submitted accounts that were approved (and such approval, according to the amnesty agreement, was to be withheld from the accounts of anyone found to have committed homicide with his own hands).Footnote 42

Now some scholars have read this requirement for euthunai as a condition of amnesty for the Thirty and their key henchmen, whether in or after 403, as if it were merely carrying out the standard accounts required of officeholders under the democratic constitution.Footnote 43 But I think that this is a mistake. Rather, we should see them as an inventively affirmative extension (at least in principle: we have no certain evidence that any of the Thirty accepted the offer)Footnote 44 of the basic democratic, and more broadly, constitutional principle of the accountability of officials, to cover men who had been in power but precisely not properly in office.Footnote 45 The exercise of interpersonal command without the counterpart of interpersonal accountability could not be tolerated. The principle of accountability had to be reasserted even though, and because, it had been temporarily abolished, both in the formal powers accorded to the Thirty (in a vacuum of other meaningful accountable institutions) and in the normative evisceration of whatever remnants of office seemed to persist procedurally under them.

For office seems indeed to have been normatively eviscerated under and by the Thirty in a range of ways, of which I shall identify three. The first is that the only specific role that we know that they held in the city was their original appointment by the democratic Assembly as a board of suggrapheis (συγγραφεῖς), a group appointed to draw up and codify a set of constitutional laws, yet this was precisely not a role bound by the traditional limits of accountability that defined offices proper. To be sure, the role of suggrapheis did have an episodic constitutional history in Athens and other Greek cities. But their role never constituted the kind of office proper that would be regularly subject to the limitations defining office, such as term limits or accountability procedures.Footnote 46 As a French scholar wrote in the nineteenth century citing a number of fifth-century Greek cases, the positions held by suggrapheis might best be called positions ‘extraordinaires’.Footnote 47 And crucially, as another scholar explains about the nature of such extraordinary posts in Athens: ‘[w]e have no evidence … that an extra-ordinary [sic] official appointed without fixed terms of office was liable to render monthly or even annual accounts during the course of his term’.Footnote 48

Insofar as they came to power through collective appointment to extraordinary roles that had no term limits and were not subject to euthunai, then, the Thirty were no proper officeholders because they were not strictly speaking officeholders at all. Indeed it may be no accident that the name suggrapheis – the name, or title, under which the Thirty came to power – is never found (‘später bedeutungslos’) attached to any role in Athens after the ‘Usurpationen 411 und 404’ (the year 411 having seen an earlier overthrow of the democracy by a group called the Four Hundred, which was likewise ultimately reversed; as Meiggs and Lewis remark, ‘the best-known ξυγγραφεῖς [an alternative Greek spelling for the name of suggrapheis] are those of 411’,Footnote 49 and in fact we have no solid evidence of any use of suggrapheis between the oligarchic bodies of 411 and 404).Footnote 50 The very name, or title, of suggrapheis became toxic precisely, I think, because of the lack of accountability that it had both permitted and betokened.

The second way in which their power can be understood as unaccountable attaches to the officeholders whom they appointed to serve under them. Here the thought is that such mechanisms of accountability as did remain in relation to those subordinate offices would have been mere shadow play. For while Xenophon tells us that they filled all the offices of the constitution (and perhaps did so precisely to avoid the shocking suspension of most offices that the Four Hundred had perpetrated), it seems that they did so by hand-picking their favored candidates, thus undermining the independence normally conferred on such officials by lottery or election. And even if, the course of filling all the offices of the constitution, they appointed euthunoi and logistai, those hand-picked groups would have been charged with holding to account others who had likewise been hand-picked by the Thirty themselves. From what we know of the Thirty's modus operandi as their time in power went on, there is little reason to expect that a hand-picked group of such people who happened to have developed a conscience would have been able to succeed in holding to account any other person backed by the Thirty, let alone a member of the Thirty themselves. So to the extent that the Thirty might have preserved any of the mechanisms of accountability (which we have no specific record of their having done, other than having filled all the offices of the preexisting democratic constitution), it would seem very likely that this was a matter of pure form rather than substance, a shadow-play of accountability in lieu of the real thing. It is perhaps an early example of what scholars of contemporary comparative politics call ‘autocratic legalism’, in which autocrats mimic legal forms while eviscerating their normative substance.Footnote 51

That brings me to the third and final way in which the Thirty may have been free of accountability expectations during their period in power, which is more speculative: deriving from the fact that in naming people to fill the various roles of the previous constitution, they never, in the surviving evidence (admittedly very scanty and patchy), named themselves.Footnote 52 We do know the names of all of the Thirty, from Anaetius to Theramenes, speaking alphabetically (Xen. Hell. 2.3.2).Footnote 53 And we know the names of at least some of the people whom they appointed to the offices – people such as Pythodorus and Patrocles. Yet we have no record of any overlap. Historians assumeFootnote 54 that the Thirty must have served on the Council of five hundred that they hand-picked (so far as the evidence goes, we have a record of only three known names of the members in 404/03 (Epichares, Evandrus, and Teisias), and none of these were numbered among the Thirty themselves).Footnote 55 But even if they did serve on their own Council, I have already suggested that they most likely would have dispensed with any meaningful expectation of euthunai for councilors of the kind that the democracy had previously enforced.Footnote 56 Without a functioning Assembly or popular courts, with a hand-picked Council, whatever procedural legitimacy the Thirty could have had as part of an overall constitutional regime would have been fatally undermined.

Whether or not this third supposition holds water, we have seen broader reason to believe that the accountability of office was not a principle that the Thirty would likely ever have sought or expected to apply meaningfully to themselves. Rather it was applied to them only ex post facto, as a principle of their reduction to citizens of a properly constitutional regime once again. Insofar as accountability was lacking from the institutional mechanisms in place during their sway, it seems that the deep expectation of interpersonal accountability for officeholders as a fundamental element in the grammar of constitutional rule persisted underground to an extent that ultimately required new institutional form. In sum, the constitutionalist Athenian expectation was that those exercising power must be held accountable, even – indeed especially – where they had held power in modes designed to escape that expectation.

4. Ancient Lessons on Accountability for Today

How might this understanding of the constitutive constitutional interplay between office and accountability generally, as well as of the especially demanding form that it took in ancient Athens, inform expectations and practices of accountability today? Contemporary democratic regimes are marked by a sharp divide between elected officials and appointed civil servants, with sharply different expectations of accountability for each: the former in some sense answerable directly to the people, with proxy mechanisms of political and legal investigation and sanction; the latter answerable (in broad terms) through the bureaucratic hierarchy whose superior answers directly to an elected official. This divide is one that the ancient Athenians and other Greeks lacked, their practice of choosing some officials by election and others by lottery not tracking any systematic difference in normative function or expectation. Nevertheless, the Greek expectation that officials should be ultimately answerable to the people through a system of political and legal investigation and sanction does broadly correspond to modern democratic expectations for elected officials.

Or at least, it does in principle. In practice, however, modern democratic accountability practices for elected officials look much more Roman than Athenian in certain key respects.Footnote 57 While Roman magistrates did have to lodge financial accounts, there was no built-in mechanism for regular scrutiny of these financial statements, let alone for any more thoroughgoing form of inspection or scrutiny of their conduct in office. Instead, it was left to enterprising individuals, such as Cicero in his prosecution of the governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, to look into the accounts and publicize any malfeasance – as Cicero did in bringing a prosecution of Verres based on what he called ‘the abominable and scandalous worthlessness of the accounts’Footnote 58 – just as today, it is generally left to journalists and self-appointed watchdog organisations to dig up and publicise evidence of official malfeasance.

To be sure, private prosecution did also play an important role in the Athenian system of judicial process, which was part of the workings of the accountability mechanisms described above. But such prosecutions were integrated in democratic Athens into a complex ritual of annual interpersonal exchanges in which each and every officeholder had to face groups of duly appointed scrutineers and answer, in person, to any accusations of malfeasance either financial or more general that were brought there against them – to which there is nothing comparable either in ancient Rome or in, say, the United States or United Kingdom today. Cicero himself acknowledged the superiority of such Athenian and Greek institutions of accountability in his dialogue On the Laws (De Legibus), in which he proposes in his own character that Roman practices of accountability should be reformed precisely along the lines of Greek institutions of euthunai (Leg. III.46-47).

It is this focus on Greek office-holding being organized on lines of personal responsibility and identifiability that made it what Alex McAuley has called a ‘more intimate culture’ of public administration than our own professionalized system which is ‘at once more monolithic and distant’.Footnote 59 Could anything parallel in function to such intimacy be achieved today? The political theorist John P. McCormick has proposed taking a leaf from Rome by establishing a modern American equivalent of the Roman tribunes (who were elected each year from among the non-elite plebeian citizens only), proposing to give a group of ‘lottery-selected, nonwealthy citizens’ a set of powers to intervene in and check federal proceedings, for example by casting a certain number of legislative vetoes each year (modeled on the power of the Roman tribunes to veto Senate votes).Footnote 60 Yet such an innovation would still furnish only relatively episodic and isolated points of intervention, and would focus on defensive vetoes of legislation rather than on holding executive power accountable. Cicero's own admiration for Greek accountability procedures of euthunai would suggest a more thoroughgoing reform: panels of citizens chosen through a mixture of application, vetting, and lottery, assigned to interview every outgoing elected officeholder and to preserve those interviews on video, providing a systematic record of accountability while furnishing evidence for further investigation and prosecution where warranted. Even at the scale of modern democracies, so much greater in population than that of ancient Athens, a culture and practice of individual and interpersonal accountability can be envisaged and perhaps achieved.

To conclude by returning to the Greek case, with focus on Athenian democracy and on the violation of its norms of office by the Thirty: If office was the grammar of Greek constitutionalism, accountability was in turn a constitutive element of Greek office. Or to put it the other way round: power without accountability violated the basic norms of the constitutional order, which were articulated in terms of the accountability that defined the offices thereof, and which had to be asserted once again after having been variously ignored, erased, or mocked. It was the normative invalidity of the Thirty as (not being) proper officeholders – because their appointed roles were unaccountable, because they made mock of such offices as were still purportedly accountable, and perhaps because they themselves eschewed holding such accountable offices – that at root had caused the rot.

At the same time, we must not underestimate the extent of the violence to which unaccountable power can lead – including power that may appear constitutionally ordered at first (as in the procedural legitimacy, arguable if flawed, of the Thirty's original appointment as suggrapheis). Let me close with another scene from Xenophon's history of the Thirty, describing how their leader Critias addressed their handpicked Council – having first arranged for young men holding daggers ominously to line the railings. Here are his words, according to Xenophon:

‘Among the new laws is one that says no one in the Three Thousand may be killed without your vote, but that the Thirty are empowered to execute those not on the list. I therefore’, he said, ‘erase this man Theramenes [an erstwhile member of the Thirty turned resister to them] from the list, with the approval of us all. And’, he said, ‘we condemn him to death’ (Hell. 2.3.51).

Unaccountability – whether through rejecting the limits of office, or mocking them – can underwrite the most heinous of crimes. What we learn from the Athenians’ response to the crimes of the Thirty is the need to recognize unprecedented violations of the constitutional order of office, and the urgency of reestablishing meaningful procedures of accountability in their wake.Footnote 61

References

1 Hansen, Mogens Herman, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, trans. Crook, J.A. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 310Google Scholar.

2 Gasaway, Robert R. and Parrish, Ashley C., ‘Administrative Law in Flux: An Opportunity for Constitutional Reassessment’, George Mason Law Review 24 (2017) 361–416Google Scholar, at 361, emphasis original.

3 Janet McLean, ‘Constitutional Boundaries: Public Office and Public Law’, 2017 MSS on file with the author, 18, citing a case reported variously in R v Mersham (Inhabitants) 7 East 167, 103 Eng Rep 64 (1806), and John Prince Smith Reports (1807).

4 Guerin, Benoit, McCrae, Julian, and Shepheard, Marcus, Accountability in modern government: what are the issues? A discussion paper (London: Institute for Government, 2018), 7Google Scholar.

5 Op. cit. note 4, 7.

6 Landauer, Matthew, ‘The Idiōtēs and the Tyrant: Two Faces of Unaccountability in Democratic Athens’, Political Theory 42 (2014), 139–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 153, citing Aristophanes’ Wasps 587 (in Landauer's translation, modifying Sommerstein's: ‘“And doing all these things we cannot be called to account—a power not given to anyone else”’), and 156, citing Aeschines 3.232-3, which includes the observation (again in Landauer's translation) that ‘in a democratic city the private citizen rules as king through the law and his vote’. See also Hoekstra, Kinch, ‘Athenian democracy and popular tyranny’, in Bourke, Richard and Skinner, Quentin (eds) Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 15–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 ‘Archaic elite-led regimes’: Matthew Simonton, W., Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017)Google Scholar, 5 n.17 and passim. Simonton argues more broadly that oligarchy should not be confused with these earlier regimes, but should instead be understood as emerging in the mid fifth century, in reaction to the crystallization of democracy.

8 Fröhlich, Pierre, Les cités grecques et le contrôle des magistrats (IVe-Ier siècle avant J.-C.) (Genève: Droz, 2004), 529Google Scholar: ‘Le contrôle des magistrats est un des traits caractéristiques des cités grecques, à la époque classique et à l’époque hellénistiques…Il faut parler des cités grecques, et non des seules démocraties. Car, même si la documentation n'est pas très riche sur ce point, le contrôle des magistrats se retrouve également dans les oligarchies’.

9 Willetts, R.F., The Law Code of Gortyn (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 I. Cret. IV, 181-183 no. 79.

11 McLean, ‘Constitutional Boundaries’, 7. Of course, the English system involved property and patronage in ways distinct from that of classical Athens or other Greek poleis.

12 (2) continues: ‘by the imposition of a fine whose maximum varied, according to the magistrature, from fifty to five hundred drachmas, or else of sending him before the courts for severer punishment’; see Glotz, Gustave, The Greek City and its Institutions, trans. Mallinson, N. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929, rpt. 1965), 204Google Scholar.

13 Op. cit. note 12,204. It should be noted that other Athenian administrative functions were carried out by public slaves (dēmosioi), who did not occupy an archē but often worked closely to assist those who did. See Ismard, Paulin, Democracy's Slaves: A Political History of Ancient Greece, trans. Todd, Janet Marie (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2017), 12, 52–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar (this is a translation of Ismard, La démocratie contre les experts: les esclaves publics en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2015)).

14 The full sentence in Greek, citing from the Oxford Classical Text, is ἔστι δὲ πολιτεία πόλεως τάξις τῶν τε ἄλλῶν ἀρχῶν καὶ μάλιστα τῆς κυρίας πάντων (1278b8-10). I discuss its complications in Lane, Melissa, ‘Popular Sovereignty as Control of Officeholders: Aristotle on Greek Democracy’, in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, edited by Bourke, Richard and Skinner, Quentin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 52-72, at 65-7Google Scholar.

15 Aristotle in the Politics describes the constitution of Megara as a dēmokratia led by demagogues that was destroyed because of its ataxia (lack of order) and anarchia (1302b30, 1304b34–40; see also 1300a16–19).

16 So as one scholar has explained: ‘magistrates [meaning public officials generally, not judges specifically] were referred to as hai archai [plural of the noun] or hoi archontes [plural of the participle of the verb], terms which relate interchangeably to both the office itself and the person who held that office (singular: archē). But hoi archontes does not refer simply to any group of people in public service; rather, it connotes a defined set of responsibilities and expectations as prescribed by law’. See McAuley, Alex, ‘Officials and Office-Holding’, in Beck, Hans (ed.) A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 176–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 179.

17 I believe that this fact is important, and is overlooked by Jochen Bleicken's overly reductive approach to offices in his magisterial work on Athenian democracy. While the tasks of the officeholders may have been restricted and the authority of the ‘Volk’ in controlling them significant, their very role was to command and indeed to take executive (if not legislative) initiative: contra Bleicken, Jochen, Die athenische Demokratie (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna and Zurich: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1985), 153Google Scholar (‘es konnte nicht einmal Initiative von ihnen ausgehen: Die Beamten waren reine Verwaltungsträger’), and more generally 145-58 and passim. I am grateful to Benjamin Straumann for calling the importance of Bleicken's interpretation on this point to my attention, though I disagree with it as he does not.

18 As summarily stated by Matthew Landauer, op. cit. note 6, 140: ‘Athenian accountability institutions were remarkable, both in scope and in the intensity of their practice’.

19 Guerin et al., op. cit. note 4, 7.

20 On all these mechanisms, see inter alia as a standard study, Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert, Accountability in Athenian Government (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

21 For an exhaustive study of dokimasia in and also beyond Athens, see Feyel, Christophe, Dokimasia: la place et le rôle de l'examen préliminaire dans les institutions des cités grecques (Nancy: Association pour la diffusion de la recherche sur l'antiquité, 2009)Google Scholar. Athens also deployed a procedure called dokimasia in a different (but related) context, that of scrutinizing eighteen-year-olds’ qualifications to be entered on the citizen rolls in their respective demes.

22 Fröhlich, op. cit. note 8, 323.

23 Tolbert Roberts, op. cit. n.20, 6.

24 Tolbert Roberts, op. cit. n.20, 15-17.

25 Pownall, Frances, ‘Public Administration’, in Beck, Hans (ed.) A Companion to Ancient Greek Government (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 287–301Google Scholar, at 299.

26 Again, the general practice of requiring the rendering of accounts at the end of a magistrate's term in office was widespread, although the word εὔθυνα was infrequently used outside Athens and the expression τὰς εὐθύνας διδόναι was characteristically tied to Athenian procedures as well, where the euthunai took place in two stages.

27 Tolbert Roberts, op. cit. note 8, 18.

28 Hansen, op. cit. note 1, 222.

29 Hansen, op. cit. note 1, 223.

30 Guerin et al., op. cit. note 4, 29 and passim.

31 Fröhlich, op. cit. note 8, 57, 58, 60, 64.

32 As translated in The Oresteia, trans Grene and Doniger O'Flaherty; Greek from Teubner (West). Alan H. Sommerstein, in the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series, Aeschylus. Eumenides (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ad loc., remarks that this ‘may allude to a procedure of Athenian law’, and points out that in Aeschylus’ Persians (l. 828) ‘Zeus as chastiser of the arrogant is called εὔθυνος βαρύς’.

33 See Demosthenes, Against Meidias (21.31-34). A dramatic example of Athenian councilors removing their crowns of office before stoning a traitor (Lycidas) to death is provided by Lyc. 1.22 (cf. Hdt. 9.5). I owe these references to Owen Phillips.

34 Thompson, Dennis F., ‘Bureaucracy and Democracy’, in his Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business, and Healthcare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50–70Google Scholar, at 53.

35 Thompson, ‘Bureaucracy and Democracy’, 56.

36 Guerin et al., op. cit. note 4, 14-15.

37 Guerin et al., op. cit. note 4, 9.

38 McLean, ‘Constitutional Boundaries’, 6-7, notes that there was recourse (on the basis of a warrant) to practices of auditing within the English administration in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: ‘the process distringas ad computandum…could force the delivery of accounts and be used to determine whether more money was taken than had been accounted for. In theory at least, there could be recourse to an office holder personally for arrears’.

39 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/world/what-in-the-world/high-wycombe-england-annual-weigh-in.html?_r=1; www.mayorofwycombe.com

40 Carawan, Edwin, The Athenian Amnesty and Reconstructing the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 I am grateful to Victoria McGeer, whose question about what made their regime problematic made me realize that I needed to address these two standard views directly, as well as to Danielle Allen for help in formulating my preferred view.

42 No one accused of having ‘himself performed the act of killing or wounding’ was to be exempted by any of the provisions of amnesty from a homicide trial (Ath. Pol. 39.5-6). See also Andoc. 1.90.

43 Among scholars who make what I take to be this interpretative mistake are Edwin Carawan and Adriaan Lanni. Carawan, Athenian Amnesty, 76, discusses ‘those who held office during the period of civil conflict’ – as including ‘the incumbent Ten who continued in office through the transition, and any officers from the previous regime (the Thirty et al.) who might now present themselves for accounting’, as well as ‘the democratic officers who had governed Peiraeus since the spring’ – saying that all of these were simply being covered by ‘the basic rule that officers must face accountings was nothing new’ (ibid.). But this wrongly or at best incautiously assumes that the Thirty simply had been, or were to be considered to have been, officeholders in the normal sense. Even more starkly, Adriaan Lanni remarks that the requirement of euthuna imposed as part of the amnesty agreement ‘was not an extraordinary transitional justice institution but the standard procedure faced by all outgoing officials under the democracy both before and after the [oligarchical] revolution’, in Law and Order in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 181.

44 Lysias’ speech Against Eratosthenes is the sole candidate surviving text to be a prosecution at a euthuna of a member of the Thirty, though scholars contest whether it was rather ‘a subsequent prosecution for homicide, or indeed whether the speech was actually delivered’: Lysias, trans. S.C. Todd, The Oratory of Classical Greece, vol. 2 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), ‘Introduction’ to Against Eratosthenes (Lys. 12), 113-16, at 113; he himself dismisses the cogency of the homicide prosecution theory, 113-14. He adds that ‘We have…no evidence for the result of the trial (if, that is, the speech was actually delivered)’ (115). More broadly, three of the Thirty had been killed in the fighting of 403, and most, perhaps all, of the others seem to have availed themselves of the provision in the agreement allowing their faction to withdraw from Athenian citizenship and establish their own self-governing enclave instead in Eleusis. (Here too there was careful provision made as to the future allocation of offices, with the stipulation that ‘No one living at Eleusis should be entitled to hold any office in the city, without cancelling his registration and returning to live in the city’ (AP 39.6).

It must also be acknowledged that Lysias does in ‘Against Eratosthenes’ describe the actions of Eratosthenes ‘once [he had been] established in office’ (εἰς τὴν ἀρχὴν καταστὰς, 12.48), and again refers to the Ten who supplanted the Thirty with the language of office (12.57); the latter is more understandable as an effort was being made to rectify the constitutional nature of rule, while the former may be explained as a willingness to use everyday imprecise language. Lysias elsewhere describes the Thirty as being ‘established’ (κατεστάθησαν), using a form of the same verb (καθίστημι) at 13.35, but adds no noun for office there: despite the fact that Todd translates as ‘took office’ (Lysias, ad loc., 146), the meaning in this context could be simply ‘established in power’.

45 We do have five full or fragmentary speeches by Lysias challenging various candidates for office at their dokimasia. Four of them do so on the grounds of their having been among the Three Thousand (Lys. 31; 24; fragment on P. Ryl.), and in one case also having been a member of the cavalry (hippeis) who were especially supportive of them (Lys. 16) – the outcomes of all of which dokimasiai are unknown (Krentz, The Thirty, 117-18). A fifth dokimasia speech was made by Lysias at the dokimasia of Evandrus (Lys. 26), who had been selected for the position of archon (Pythodorus’ position) in 382/1, and whom the orator charged ‘with membership in the boule and service in the cavalry under the Thirty’ – despite which charges we know that ‘Evandrus passed his dokimasia’ (Krentz, The Thirty, 118). On these speeches, see also Loening, Thomas Clark, The Reconciliation Agreement of 403/402 B.C. in Athens (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GMBH, 1987), 103–117Google Scholar.

46 Hansen, Mogens Herman, ‘Seven Hundred Archai in Classical Athens’, GRBS 21 (1980) 151–73Google Scholar, makes no mention of any suggrapheus in his list of Athenian offices, though he does list the anagrapheus among those offices not mentioned in the AP (156 with n.12, though he later (at 162) concedes that ‘it cannot be precluded that one or two of the magistrates listed above may have been councillors serving on a committee’ rather than constituting an office proper – and names the anagrapheus as one of the two possible examples of this caveat). Allen, Danielle S., ‘Appendix A: The Number of Magistrates in Athens’, in her The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, disagrees with Hansen on some points, but like him makes no mention of suggrapheis as established magistrates.

47 Foucart, Paul-François, ‘Inscription d’Éleusis du Ve siècle’, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 4 (1880) 225–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 252-3. He also remarks, 252, on the precedents for συγγραφεῖς in the fifth century: ‘A proprement parler, les συγγραφείς n'avaient aucun pouvoir. Ils étaient chargés d'une mission qui consistait à rédiger une ordonnance sur un point désigné’.

48 Todd, Stephen, ‘Lysias against Nikomachos: The Fate of the Expert in Athenian Law’, in Foxhall, L. and Lewis, A.D.E. (eds) Greek Law in its Political Setting: Justifications not Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 101–31Google Scholar, at 111. Todd notes that this remark excludes a passage in Lysias (30.5) about the role of an anagrapheus (a passage which is itself controversial), itself a role whose subjection to euthuna is debated.

49 Meiggs, Russell and Lewis, David M. (eds) A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century B.C., rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)Google Scholar, no. 73, in discussion ad loc. at 220, of two inscriptions. See also Ostwald, Martin, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986), 416Google Scholar.

50 I cannot review here all the debate in the scholarship about evidence claimed for and against the existence of individual suggrapheus or collective suggrapheis between these years, or for the nature of the Four Hundred compared to the Thirty. Suffice it to say that the Four Hundred had come to power in fact in a markedly more irregular assembly meeting in 411 (held at Colonus rather than in Athens), on the basis of a resolution that had initially banned anyone from holding office under the preexisting democratic constitution. So the Four Hundred had acted as suggrapheis in a highly irregular way and at least for the most part without making use of subordinate preexisting offices.

51 I owe this phrase to Scheppele, Kim Lane, ‘Autocratic Legalism’, The University of Chicago Law Review 85 (2018), 545–584Google Scholar.

52 If I am right in hypothesizing that they eschewed holding proper offices, from the absence of evidence to the contrary, this would contrast with the practice of the Four Hundred as described at one point by Thucydides, at least one of whom (Theramenes) was ‘in office’ (ἐν ἀρχαῖς) in their oligarchy (8.89.2) and would become a member of the Thirty as well. It is striking that in this episode, Theramenes and some others fall out with the broader oligarchical group (just as Theramenes would do again with the others of the Thirty, to fatal results, as I remark in my conclusion below). Perhaps this taught the recidivist oligarchs the danger of giving the tools of office to some of their number but not others, making them sensitive to the expectations of accountability that holding office might engender (for good or ill) among the dēmos.

53 See discussion in Krentz, op. cit. note 53, 51-6.

54 As does Shear, Julia L., Polis and Revolution: responding to oligarchy in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 171Google Scholar.

55 Krentz, op. cit. note 53, 57 with n. 3, naming Epichares (from Andoc. 1.95), Evandrus (Lys. 26.10), and Teisias (Isoc. 16.43), none of whom figure in the complete list of the names of the Thirty that he gives elsewhere in the work (at 51).

56 Here I correct a mistake on this point in earlier unpublished lecture versions of this paper. While the liability of councilors to euthunai is not discussed at any length by Hansen, op. cit. note 1, it is mentioned in passing on 222; see also S.C. Todd, The Shape of Athenian Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 112 n.17.

57 To be sure, there are other respects in which contemporary procedures are generally more Athenian than Roman, namely in allowing prosecution during one's term of office, even there may be some forms of immunity from prosecution for certain officeholders during their tenure. Alex McCauley notes that ‘While in the Roman republic magistrates enjoyed immunity from prosecution and sacrosanctity of their persons for their entire term of office, Greek office-holders never had such institutional protection’; modern procedures are also more akin to Greek ones in that, in the latter, according to McCauley, ‘It was not as if a magistrate were untouchable during his term of office; if anything as soon as one assumed authority one automatically became vulnerable to more vectors of accusation and oversight than any average citizen’: McAuley, op. cit. note 16,185,187 respectively.

58 In Verrem II. 76. Translation from Cicero's Orations, trans. Charles Duke Yonge (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2018).

59 Both short quotations are from McAuley, op. cit. note 16, 177 and 176 respectively.

60 McCormick, John P., Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 The research in this paper on office and accountability in ancient Greece was presented first in the 2017 Philip Hallie Lecture at Wesleyan University and discussed as part of a manuscript workshop at Princeton University in the same year. It was presented in revised form in the second of the six Carlyle Lectures which I delivered at Oxford University in the Hilary Term of 2018, and then further revised for delivery as the 2018 Royal Institute of Philosophy / Royal Society of Edinburgh Lecture that same year. It was also discussed in 2018 seminars in London, at the Institute for Historical Research and the Civil Service Leadership Academy, and in Cambridge and Oxford. I am most grateful to all who convened and commented on each of those occasions and in subsequent interchanges, and especially to John Haldane for convening the congenial occasion in Edinburgh on behalf of the Royal Institute of Philosophy together with the officers of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and to Anthony O'Hear as editor of this journal.