In an influential essay Isaiah Berlin made a distinction between positive freedom and negative freedom. Positive freedom is the right to participate in public life (voting for officials and referenda, serving in public office etc.). Negative freedom is the protection of individual rights against government interference. According to Berlin, the ancient Greeks had a concept of positive freedom but not negative freedom. In the book under review C. argues that, because there was no meaningful distinction between state and citizens, the concept of negative freedom was irrelevant. Freedom for the Athenians was not so much a right but the power to do ‘whatever one wishes’ (pp. 5, 14–17). For C., ‘Democratic freedom was more than just freedom from restriction; it placed the impetus of action and power squarely on the individual.’ As a result, ‘The central concern of positive freedom is “who is the source of control?” or, in other words, “who is in power?”’ (p. 166).
Chapter 2, ‘Democratic Eleutheria as Positive Freedom’, asserts that ‘Democratic freedom aimed at each citizen achieving “whatever he wished” or, similarly, living “however he wished”’ (p. 19). C. notes that liberty is often viewed in contrast to slavery, which is the absence of negative freedom and positive freedom (pp. 21–6), but there is nothing especially democratic about the contrast, which was also found at Sparta (Critias 88B F 37 D-K = Libanius, Or. 25.63) and can be found as early as Iliad 6.447–65. C. repeats the problematic view of K. Raaflaub that ‘the lowest rung of the free was not substantially superior to the enslaved’ (p. 21) and misses the important book of M. Ndoye, Groupes sociaux et idéologies de travail dans les mondes homériques et hésiodiques (2010), who shows that the opposite is the case. C. finds more evidence for democratic notions of freedom in the conversation between Xerxes and Demaratus in Herodotus (7.102–3), but misrepresents the passage by claiming ‘Herodotus associates the ability to act upon one's desires, or positive freedom, with the development of democracy in Athens’ (p. 32). First, Demaratus is speaking about Sparta, not Athens. Second, C. omits what Demaratus says about the fear of the law as a despotes. Third, Demaratus says nothing about ‘acting upon one's desires’. C. misreads Thuc. 3.27.2 by asserting that the passage indicates that ‘acting freely … is specified as doing what one wishes in peace’ (p. 36). C. does not observe that the adverb ἐλευθέρως is linked to a lack of anger at those doing what is pleasurable and avoiding harmful looks, not with doing what one wishes. C. also mistranslates the phrase τῆς ἐν αὐτῇ ἀνεπιτάκτου πᾶσιν ἐς τὴν δίαιταν ἐξουσίας at Thuc. 7.69.2 as ‘the unfettered discretion allowed to all in it to live as they please’. Nicias only refers only to the right (ἐξουσίας) to choose one's way of life (δίαιταν), a more limited concept. C. then observes that the phrase ‘the people should be allowed to do whatever it wishes’ (X. Hell. 1.7.12) is invoked to justify one of the worst miscarriages of justice in democratic Athens, but unsuccessfully attempts to argue away its implications, which seriously undermine her thesis. C. claims ‘ho boulomenos language had become institutionalized and synonymous with democracy’ (p. 40), but looks only at Attic inscriptions and fails to note that the phrase and its equivalents also occur in non-democratic regimes, as L. Rubinstein (‘Volunteer Prosecutors in the Greek World’, Dike 6 [2007], 87–113) has observed. Contrary to C.'s assertion (p. 41, cf. 44) that ‘ho boulomenos did not literally apply to everyone who wished to do something, but only to fully enfranchised citizens’, the phrase ho boulomenos might also include foreigners and metics – see Dem. 19.80–2; 21.175–6; [Dem.] 59.66. C. claims that this reviewer sees voluntarism as opposed to the rule of law (p. 45). In fact, my point is that those who brought public suits were not pursuing feuds, but enforcing the law, the opposite of what C. claims. And it is untrue that ‘self-help has been used in scholarship to describe Athens as a feudal society’ (p. 45). Here C. misrepresents the views of D. Cohen (cited in n. 100), who holds that Athens was a feuding society, not a feudal society. C. claims that accountability of officials was a democratic institution (pp. 44–8), but, as P. Fröhlich (Les cités grecques et le contrôle des magistrats [2004]; not to be found in the bibliography) has shown, the practice is also attested in non-democratic regimes. C. rightly sees that Herodotus 1.120.2–3 equates the liberty of the Persians with ‘external freedom of the state rather than internal individual freedom or political freedom’ (p. 50), but misinterprets Herodotus 7.104.4 to mean that Spartans had less freedom than Athenians because they had the law as their master (p. 52); the Athenians were also ruled by law (Hyperides, Epitaphios 25, a passage not included in C.'s index locorum). The chapter as a whole does not prove the claim of C. that the phrase ‘whatever one wishes’ sums up the Athenian concept of democratic freedom (p. 55).
Chapter 3, ‘Oratorical Ambiguity’, attempts to show that the phrase ‘whatever one wishes’ was ‘a democratic value rooted in citizenship’ (p. 56). C. notes the view of P. Liddel (Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens [2007], p. 23) that ‘the liberty of doing whatever one likes was, within the discourse of the Attic orators, a concept too extreme to be applied to any human being, dead or alive’; then, however, ignores his point in what follows. Yet the passages C. examines show that the phrase either refers to the exercise of a specific right ([Dem.] 59.66) or has negative connotations (Dem. 15.19; Lys. 12.43–5), but never refers to a general power to do anything granted to citizens. C. mistakenly believes that the nomothetai were ‘drawn from the jury pool’ (p. 127); they were a special meeting of the Assembly convened to pass laws (see E.M. Harris and A. Esu, ‘Policing Major Crimes in Classical Athens: Eisangelia and Other Public Procedures’, RDE 11 [2021], 95–100).
Chapter 4, ‘Power and the Citizen’, claims that ‘Athenian democracy's radical conception of freedom entailed a redefinition of power among individuals’ (p. 88). C. pursues this aim with a study of the word kyrios translated as ‘powerful’ or ‘empowered’ (p. 134), which is misleading because the adjective often refers to legitimate authority or rights conferred by law. It is disappointing to see C. following S. Forsdyke's flawed analysis of the rule of law (p. 131), which omits several key features of the concept such as fairness in procedure and consistency.
Chapter 5, ‘The Powerless and Unfree: A Case Study’, is a tendentious reading of Apollodorus’ speech Against Neaira ([Dem.] 59), which C. analyses in terms of freedom and power. This misrepresents the legal issue in the speech, which is less about the people's power than Neaira's violation of the law about foreigners marrying Athenian citizens ([Dem.] 59.16–17). C. does not see the relevance of her daughter Phano and the attempt of Stephanos to marry her to Phrastor (50–63) and claims that the accuser's aim is to demonstrate ‘Neaira's lack of power’ (p. 156); what Apollodorus shows is her lack of a right to marry an Athenian. Pace C., the speech has nothing to do with ‘the role of the empowered citizen as kyrios in his household as well as the public sphere’ (p. 165). In general, there is hardly any discussion of the facts in the case and their relevance to the legal charge. C. wrongly claims that the law mentioned at [Dem.] 59.4–5 ‘required any surplus to automatically go to the theoric fund’ (p. 141), but it only allowed a vote on the matter, and this law was not the reason for the conviction of Apollodorus, rather his status as a public debtor ([Dem.] 59.6).
The bibliography has only four items written in languages other than English.
C.'s attempt to prove that the Athenian view of freedom was rooted in the concept of ‘doing whatever one wishes’ is not successful. For a more convincing analysis of the phrase, one should read J. Filonik, ‘“Living as One Wishes” in Classical Athens: The (Anti-)Democratic Polemics’, Classical Philology 114 (2019), 1–24, who shows that the phrase was used by Plato and Aristotle to attack Athenian democracy and that Athenians themselves used the phrase to denounce illegal activity. For the Athenians, freedom meant living under the rule of law, which protected specific rights and imposed duties to protect the community. Among these duties was the requirement not to live as a slave to one's desires (Aeschin. 1.42). It also meant the ability to seek redress when one's rights were violated by others (Dem. 21.124). Neither passage can be found in the book.
