This is a lively and engaging book that provides a competent and often insightful overview of a number of Greek democracies. G.’s decision to focus on only five city-states, however, means that his conclusions lack the kind of support that might have made them fully persuasive.
For G., Greek democracy is worth thinking about not because we can trace our own political systems directly back to it, but because it raises questions about our political practices. In particular, it raises questions about the relationship between social and economic equality on the one hand, and political equality on the other.
For G., this relationship is a close one. For him, democracy is more ‘un potere sociale’ than ‘un'ordine istituzionale’ (p. 10). What follows is a series of case studies, with most of the first three chapters focusing on Athens, and the last four examining Syracuse, Croton, Thurii and Taras.
Chapter 1 opens with a quick survey of the scholarship on Athenian democracy from the eighteenth century onwards. G. is critical of those who think that the archaic polis enjoyed a natural egalitarianism; in his view, the road to full democracy was long and tortuous, and only a few cities made it to the end. Indeed, for G. there are no certain instances of democracy in the full sense before Athens in the 460s. In this case, as in others, the transition to democracy featured a violent rupture with the past, followed by a significant expansion of the citizenry.
Chapter 2 opens with the startling victory of an alliance of Greek poleis over the Persians. We then get a vivid and detailed picture of the development of the Piraeus, with all that it entailed in terms of migration, specialisation and trade. Next, we go back in time again to the reforms of Cleisthenes, which for G. had more to do with Athens becoming a political community than with its transition to democracy. This transition to democracy will come with Ephialtes; in the meantime we are given a glimpse of some of the developments (military and ideological) which lay behind it.
By the beginning of Chapter 3, we are ready for the reforms of Ephialtes, the true ‘rivoluzione’ (p. 49). This is followed by a whistle-stop tour of Athenian democratic institutions, and a debunking of Thucydides' claim that Athens was a democracy in name, but was in fact ruled by its first citizen (2.65.9). The sections on political sociology that come next contain the important admission that political equality and economic inequality co-existed in Athens; indeed, Athens' ability to manage this co-existence was, for G., a crucial element in its success, allowing it to deal with its many ‘paradoxes’ (unequal participation in politics, slavery).
At this point G. finally takes leave of Athens. In Chapter 4 he treats the indications of democracy in Syracuse from the 460s onwards with scepticism, preferring to emphasise Aristotle's statement that the city went from politeia to democracy only in 412 (Pol. 1304a27–9). G. highlights the unique character of democracy in Syracuse, a city that had long been dominated by a powerful landowning elite. The argument of Athenagoras in Thucydides – that the rich are better at giving advice, but the many are better at judging it (6.38.2) – G. treats not as a piece of evidence about Greek democratic ideology in general, but about the peculiarly elitist nature of the Syracusan regime (pp. 92–4). It is no surprise, in the end, that Syracusan democracy eventually reverts to tyranny under Dionysius.
The first transition to democracy at Croton, treated in Chapter 5, is hard to pin down. Was it around 510 or 450? The sources are confused, but for G. it was around the middle of the fifth century that the masses overthrew an elite group of Pythagoreans known as ‘The Thousand’ and enacted a series of reforms. Some of these, such as the land-redistribution reported by Iamblichus (p. 257), went far beyond anything the Athenians attempted. This may explain, if we follow G., the lack of any evidence for Crotonian democracy after around 417 (p. 114).
Two things are important for G. when it comes to Thurii, the subject of Chapter 6: that it was a democracy of the Athenian type (pp. 117, 124) and that it was an instance of democracy by design, with a constitution drawn up by Protagoras. In some ways, it too was more radical than Athens: there was a ban, for example, on a man being re-elected as a general before four years had passed. This was an attempt to stop the elite from monopolising power; it failed, following a concentration of landed wealth in the hands of the upper classes.
G. brings us finally (in Chapter 7) to Taras, which we know survived until the Roman conquest in 272 – a winner, then, at the game of creating an enduring system of popular rule. Initial signs were hardly promising, since Taras had a powerful aristocracy of horse-breeders; but much of this class was wiped out in a defeat by the native Iapygians sometime around 467. A peculiarity of Taras' democracy is its domination by the philosopher Archytas. G.’s book ends with a full-throated defence of this ‘mixed’ or ‘guided’ form of democracy (pp. 129, 143).
This is an enjoyable book, but it has its idiosyncrasies. The first is G.’s insistence that Athenian democracy begins with Ephialtes rather than Cleisthenes. The point has of course been argued extensively (see e.g. J. Ober, K. Raaflaub and R. Wallace [edd.], Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece [2007]). But for me, it has always seemed difficult to say what exactly was going on between 508/7 and 462/1 if it was not some sort of democracy, and what exactly happened in 508/7 itself if it was not a revolution.
On the first point, G. cannot deny that all citizens were allowed to participate in the Assembly, and so he is reduced to the unusual claim that the Areopagus and the archons were more powerful than the Assembly in the early decades of the fifth century (p. 42). As for the revolution, while Ephialtes' reforms certainly instantiate his picture of democratic transitions as violent ruptures, so do the events leading to the introduction of Cleisthenes' constitution (Herodotus 5.72.2).
This minor issue is part of a more serious one because G. also makes the broader claim that there were no true democracies in the Greek world until well into the fifth century. Without going into the evidence itself, we should notice how extreme this position is. E. Robinson (The First Democracies [1997]) concludes that there were at least eleven democracies by the first decade of the fifth century. G.’s figure for the period before the 460s seems to be zero.
How many democracies G. thinks there were in the Classical period is less clear, but of the 54 certain instances identified by E. Robinson (Democracy beyond Athens [2011]) for the Classical period, G. discusses no more than six (if we include Argos, pp. 29–31). G. must believe that there were more than six democratic regimes in the Classical period, so I can only conclude that he has simply chosen not to discuss any of the others.
This is a shame. One of the arguments of G.’s book is that violent ruptures tend to be a factor in Greek transitions to democracy. Another is that socio-economic equality – or, at least, stability – helps democracy endure. These are interesting and even plausible hypotheses, but it is not possible to arrive at a reliable verdict on them by looking at only six poleis. Presenting them as case studies does not help much, since there will always be a worry that G. has chosen his examples to suit his hypotheses. Proper testing of G.’s thought-provoking suggestions will have to await future work.
