ANTI-IMPERIALISM, PART ONE: AGRARIAN SELF-SUFFICIENCY

Acharnians brings the paradox of selfish justice sharply into focus in the international relations context, appealing to the most traditional case in which self-centeredness comports to justice: the contrast between a quietist, inward-looking politics and a dynamic, foreign-policy orientation that seeks hegemony. Nations that keep to themselves cause less harm and are effectually more just than those which succumb to the imperial temptation. The drama associates quietism with farmers, conceived as individualists who rarely congregate for any collective action. By contrast, the interdependence of urban marketers, together with the Athenian marketplace's convenient proximity to the Assembly, are associated with activism and imperial dynamism in the play. The economic interests are only the first cut in what will prove to be a dialectical process of unveiling; Acharnians will later endorse interests beyond what are usually considered economic interests. Yet the first vocation that the play asks us to consider as an ideal vocation producing just outcomes automatically (i.e. without specific concern for justice), is that of the yeoman farmer. Aristophanes agrees with a tradition of political philosophy stretching from Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson: the agrarian way of life produces the most just citizens. The free-holding farmer, because his land makes him self-sufficient and because he is kept busy plowing it, was thought to be least likely to desire to take away the possessions of others. An electorate made up of individual small-holders is more likely to be just toward its neighbors or to be a “Just City” (dikaia polis).

The aged Athenian farmer Dikaiopolis agitates in the Assembly for peace in Greece. But the Assembly succumbs to the allure of empire (e.g., Acharnians, 61–90), seeking foreign money and mercenaries to continue fighting. Dikaiopolis has a selfish motive for wanting Athens to quit the war in defense of the empire. He desires to go back to his farmlands, which produced everything he needed, but the war with Sparta has forced him inside the city walls, where he is at the mercy of marketers selling basic necessities (Acharnians, 32–9). Dikaiopolis is a normative portrait of the Athenian farmer. His allergy to urban trade does not simply tally with historical evidence about farmers (Jones 2004, 95–96; Hanson 1995). Rather, the distinction between farming and marketing seems an idealized dichotomy that rests on a valuation, one which concurs with Aristotle's valuation in the Politics that “the best demos is the farming kind” and the “best…is also the earliest” of the four kinds of democracy.¹

Voting and sovereignty are at stake. The progress to an urban demos radicalizes the democracy, according to Aristotle. Because farmers are scattered over the countryside, they do not easily attend the Assembly and therefore cannot vote often. By contrast, an urban demos “on account of loitering about the marketplace and town” easily attends (and therefore dominates) the Assembly (Politics 1319a29–39). In Acharnians, we witness such loiterers being literally herded into the Assembly by the “red rope,” a democratic device by which people caught not availing themselves of the opportunity to vote were smeared with red paint and fined (Acharnians, 22). In Knights, the forgetful Demos has come to consider the place of Assembly (the Pnyx) his deme; that is, he votes a lot. In the happy ending, Demos is sent back to the country (Knights, 749–55, 1388–95). Both Aristophanes and Aristotle in these passages idealize a democracy in which the franchise is not de iure restricted but is restricted de facto by the difficulty of access to the Assembly experienced by an agrarian majority. In Acharnians, however, that restriction has been overcome by the influx of rural Athenians into the city to escape the war.

Although agrarian and urban voting patterns might seem primarily domestic issues, I will argue that Aristophanes has foreign (i.e., imperial) policy largely in mind. For reasons that will become apparent, the connection between urban marketing and empire is left implicit at this stage of Acharnians. Other plays view with deep ambivalence Athens' taste for consuming the foreign goods that come into her harbor at the hub of the empire (e.g., Wasps [422 B.C.], 1135–65). Access to foreign markets was a source of Athenian imperial pride (cf. Thucydides 2.38.2). Aristophanes also seems to have regarded an urban, activist demos as liable to unrealistic imperial expectations (Knights, 169–74, 1300–4). Although Aristophanes' worries about the size and permanence of the rural-to-urban transformation were probably exaggerated (Hanson 1998, 234), his concern is plausible. Evacuees from the Spartan invasions of the Attic countryside did periodically pack into the city where there were not enough places for them to live (Thucydides 2.16–17). Dikaiopolis beds down in refuse beside the battlements every night (Acharnians, 71–2). Such displaced persons had an incentive to accept new forms of income by drawing wages from the government's imperial coffers (cf. Jones 2004, 7–9), the poorest among them taking up naval rowing and jury-duty on mass juries. The rabid patriotism and inflated self-worth of the demagogued old men of Wasps derive in large part from their jury-pay and their imagined role in politics, both national and international, which that income seems to vouch for (Wasps, 698–727, 605–4). In contrast to the ideal of a rural demos that rarely voted, such an urban demos would be more likely to support fresh imperial acquisitions and to cling to older imperial possessions since part of the spoils accrued to the demos (e.g., Thucydides 6.24.3: an “eternal fund” of money imagined as the aim of the Sicilian expedition). By contrast, the farmer is thought to mind his own business and to wish only to be let alone. Because farmers are kept busy working, Aristotle says, they are too busy to “desire the things of others” (Politics 1318b12–18). On such a view, a farming demos would not have the same interest in extracting imperial tribute abroad nor, domestically, in being judicially active on the mass-jury prosecutions in which property confiscated from the wealthy also accrued to the demos (Politics 1320a5–35). Under such conditions, group cooperation leads to injustices, whereas individual selfishness leads to justice.

Yet Acharnians will quickly discard the connection between empire and the urban market. Agrarian self-sufficiency is soon revealed to be only one specific instance of a more general idea of justice: “minding one's own business” (apragmosune). Aristophanes will imply that marketers, too, can sometimes mind their own business and remain free of imperial involvement. The potential separability of marketing from empire sets the stage for the first dialectical advance in the play's argument.

ANTI-IMPERIALISM, PART TWO: COMMERCIALISM

Once his separate peace is secured, Dikaiopolis opens a marketplace. This is a major reversal. What has happened to the agrarian ideal? His marketing is totally unexpected. The contrast is not with what Athenian farmers actually did but with the idealized terms which the play itself has set out. Escape from the buyers and sellers in town was the precise motive for returning to farming. Now he welcomes buyers and sellers into his new city, and he buys and sells himself. Moreover, in the fantasy his rural market is somehow transformed into the urban “market in Athens” (Acharnians, 729; Compton-Engle 1999; Jones 2004, 197–200, 276). Although the agrarian Just City longed for its own local produce, the commercial Just City trades for foreign delicacies which the war has prevented Athenians from acquiring for six long years (Acharnians, 889–90). This interest in, and desire for, alien goods introduces a temptation for a marketing demos to involve itself in the political affairs of other countries. Will Dikaiopolis become the Unjust City, with the desire for foreign commodities and money fueling a new imperialism of his own? Instead of becoming imperial, Dikaiopolis demonstrates how a city can resist this temptation through a ferocious concentration on its own interests.

A series of encounters with foreign nationals illustrates the new city's total lack of desire to govern or to lead other nations. The first person to visit the new marketplace represents neighboring Megara. Caught between the two superpowers, Athens and Sparta, reduced to starvation by the Athenian invasions and by Pericles' economic embargo (Thucydides 1.139–140, 1.44.2, 2.31.3), Megarians would ordinarily sell salt and garlic, their local produce. Instead, in desperation the Megarian hopes to sell his own small daughters in order that he, and they, may not starve. Dikaiopolis turns a deaf ear to the famine and brutally points out the silver lining in the disastrous misrule by Megara's government, which the Megarian mentions, perhaps to hint at asking for military intervention: “you'll soon be free from your troubles” (i.e., because you will all be dead; Acharnians, 751–7 with Sommerstein's note). The strictness of Dikaiopolis' hands-off policy becomes clear when he considers it unwarranted interference to bid the Megarian “farewell” (as opposed to fare ill) since that innocuous imperative assumes Dikaiopolis bears some slight responsibility for the Megarian. “Am I officious?” (Literally, “is that polupragmosune?“) May it recoil upon my head!” (832–3). Polupragmosune was the disposition to mind other people's affairs for them at home and other nations' affairs for them abroad; its avoidance was a staple constituent in much Greek thought about justice (e.g., Plato, Republic, 433d–434a, 369b–370b; Ehrenberg 1947). Although its opposite, apragmosune, was not universally admired (Pericles denigrates it in Thucydides, 2.60.2, 2.63.2), the marketing Dikaiopolis exemplifies an unusual degree or intensity of apragmosune.

Minding one's own interests becomes the substitute for the actual Athenian policy of punitive sanctions against trade with Megarians. Dikaiopolis purchases the man's two little daughters, whom the Megarian maintains are piglets, a pathetic fiction to provide cover for the terrible transaction. The tacit understanding between seller and consumer is that the little girls will become sex slaves when they mature (785–96). Aristophanes has carefully exhibited conditions in which the ostensibly just response of disgust and indignant refusal to buy would accomplish nothing for the sufferers. The situation is so bad in Megara that the girls want to be sold (733–5, 778–80). By buying them, Dikaiopolis sees to it that they and their father do not starve while simply pursuing his own interest: willing slave girls at low cost. His economic exploitation of the situation is highlighted by the fact that in payment for the girls he merely allows the Megarian to buy back small quantities of his own country's salt and garlic. The maximum of selfishness here causes the minimum of harm, that is, selfishness yields a kind of justice. In this and the following episode, Aristophanes shows a nonimperial state reaping economic benefits that Athens desires but cannot acquire because of the war being fought to save her imperial status.

The just policy toward strong, potentially dangerous neighbors is illustrated in the next encounter. The next foreign national is a prosperous Boiotian from Thebes, who hopes to sell many delicacies at the new marketplace. The Boiotian, who wants to buy items not found in Boiotia, gullibly agrees to accept as payment one of the “informers,” that is, the native scourge of Periclean Athens, men who profit from Pericles' economic embargo by exposing enemy contraband and confiscating it. Fantastically, Dikaiopolis packs up an informer like a piece of pottery for the Boiotian, who anticipates that he will be able to sic this informer on whomever he chooses back home. The Boiotian does not realize how such a tool could turn in his hands. The Just City thus destabilizes its powerful neighbors by sowing discord within them. Edmunds (1980) cites the parallel of a similar sowing of discord by the nascent kallipolis in Plato's Republic (422d–423b). Aristophanes' Just City refrains from the alternative, a preemptive military strike, which could lead to the necessity of ruling its opponent and would not be in its interest when the same economic goods are available through trade. Instead, destabilization keeps the opponent too busy at home to desire to take over the Just City.

One explanation of this ancient “realism” appeals to a prominent conclusion usually associated with Sophistic thought, that is, that justice is relative to—and flows from—each regime. Justice, on this ancient view, was an intrapolis not interpolis virtue (Ste. Croix 1972). As Edmunds (1980) puts it, describing Dikaiopolis: “the just city is not necessarily just toward other cities.” Dikaiopolis and the Boiotian are not simply individuals but represent states dealing with one another. Yet states in Thucydides' history do at least pretend to demand justice from one another. Edmund's interpretation ignores this and perhaps underestimates how rigorously justice is being equated with self-interest in Acharnians. That no justice exists between regimes is only one possible implication of the premise that justice is relative to regimes. A more practical ethic drawn from the same premise is that a regime should treat other regimes in accordance with its own standards of justice. The Just City practices a just foreign policy, although its standards of justice—and its pretensions—have been drastically defined down.

Aristophanes' elevation of economic goods over the political “recognition goods” (e.g., Galston 1980) of holding office and ruling stands in stark contrast to much of ancient political philosophy. As we shall see later, economic goods do not exhaust the vision of the good in Acharnians; instead, the play elevates economic goods to form a contrast with political goods such as ruling, questioning the latter's status as a good. But if the initial agrarian portrait was idealized, the step to market neutrality in the play's argument seems at once closer to real, marketing Athens and further away into an idealistic fantasy. For one thing, the new justice-as-market-selfishness is parasitic on wars such as that against the Peloponnesians—conflicts created by cities that do not understand their own interest as thoroughly as the Just City does. Dikaiopolis could not have driven such hard bargains or as easily destabilized Thebes without the wartime situation. Even if we grant that such war situations will usually be plentiful (i.e., that cities ignorant of their interests are the norm), the ubiquitous ignorance of cities only raises the question: What real city could resist the temptation to use interstate political involvement and military force to back up such unshackled economic desires? A marketing demos can avoid polupragmosune, but the ferocious concentration needed to do so makes its avoidance seem difficult. What real city could so adequately understand and scrupulously follow what Aristophanes alleges is its true self-interest?

THE COMMON INTEREST, ALTRUISM, AND SELFISHNESS

The difficulties involved in collective right understanding of interest raise the question whether individuals can do better at understanding their interests than states can theirs. At the same time, the drastic defining-down of justice in the international arena raises the issue of whether and how such rigorous selfishness could have any application to domestic affairs. The first case of justice in domestic affairs examined by the play presupposes a common Greek premise roughly contemporary with Aristophanes: that justice means serving a (delimited) common interest. To the extent thinkers like Plato accurately reported ideas extant in Athens at the time, “Helping friends and harming enemies” is one formula for justice conceived as active loyalty toward group members and defense against outsiders who are perceived as setting themselves against the group (Republic 332d; cf. Ober 2005, 137–41). The group to which loyalty is owed may be the whole polity but may also represent subgroups within the polity such as aristocratic friends, the people (demos), smaller groups including family-based associations and, importantly, the “demes” or political districts of Attica (demoi; cf. Osborne 1985).

Before conceiving of the separate peace, Dikaiopolis begins the play as the quintessential concerned citizen. Only after his plea for peace is forcibly silenced, and after exhausting all public-spirited options, does Dikaiopolis commit the treason of making a separate peace. It should be noted, however, that Dikaiopolis' devotion to Athens is paradoxical from the beginning. His initial public-spiritedness, his activism in the Assembly, is rooted in solid self-interest. He wants to go home, implying that Athens is not his home. On the one hand, he feels love and concern for the city (polis; Acharnians, 27). On the other hand he hates the urban center, or town (astu, 33, as opposed to country). Thucydides makes the same distinction of terminology when arguing that Athens was scarcely one polis before Pericles' naval strategy called for periodically ceding the farmlands to Spartan devastation. Remnant-cities from a time before central government were spread out over Attica (and retained some political importance: Osborne 1985; Jones 2004, 85–89). Each person “left behind nothing less than his own city [polis],” even when he “arrived in town [astu]” (Thucydides 2.15–17; cf. Edmunds 1980, 27). Not the urban center of Athens, then, but the various districts of Attica are the true cities of the majority. Because “Just City” is the name of their representative, the implication is that the true or righteous cities of Athens are or ought to be dispersed in the country, among the demes. Deme-loyalty comes before the common interest, and this is somehow considered just.

Defenders of the common interest appear next in the drama. Retributive justice in the form of a posse from the deme of Acharnae, a group of warlike old men who constitute the drama's chorus, interrupts Dikaiopolis and his immediate family who, back on their lands, are celebrating a miniature Dionysiac festival. The Acharnians want to exact justice against the Spartans for their invasions and against Dikaiopolis for his betrayal of the common interest (223–33). Their justice is conventional albeit unconventionally expressed. They intend summarily to execute the traitor to the fatherland. But their defense of the common interest turns out to be motivated by economic deme-interest. Their local produce is charcoal made from timber, the revenues from which the Spartan invasions prevent them from acquiring. Dikaiopolis halts them in their tracks by showing off a lump of their charcoal and threatening to stab it. The vigilantes recognize this non-human hostage and immediately do an about-face, promising to give Dikaiopolis a fair hearing, even if he wishes to describe how he became a Spartan sympathizer. The Acharnians are willing to sacrifice (what they think is) Athens' interest to their group interest. Dikaopolis operates on the assumption that, if the impediment that obstructs the satisfaction of their economic interest (the war) could be removed, then the Acharnians' judgmental concern for justice would dissipate as well. The common good is merely a pretext for their deme interest.

The potential abuse of justice used as a pretext to impose a narrower group interest such as that of the Acharnians' deme at the expense of a larger group raises the possibility of continually subdividing the group interest into the interests of smaller and smaller groups, eventuating in the division between one's own interest and that of anyone else. I argue that Aristophanes' critique of justice here can be seen as a critical reworking of ideas from the broadly Sophistic genus of theories about justice. The subdividing action and justice-as-pretext in Acharnians are reminiscent of the way the Sophist Thrasymachus¹

Justice-as-altruism relinquishes the incentive to just behavior that justice-as-common-interest possessed, namely, the incentive of serving self at the same time as serving others. Like Thrasymachus' sarcastic version, serious justice-as-altruism seems to spring from an intensified awareness of how one's own interest diverges from other people's interests. If it is not possible to serve both fully, a choice must be made. Thrasymachus' ostensibly descriptive definition of justice carries the normative intimation: Why help others when you can help yourself? Aristophanes agrees with the spirit of such analyses but unlike Thrasymachus, he does not jettison justice, retaining the name only as a pretext. Nor, for Aristophanes, does the fragmentation of the common interest lead to a definition of justice as altruism. Thrasymachean-style fragmentation does lead him to abandon justice-as-the-common-good, however, and to choose the selfish side of the divide, defining justice as self-interest and preserving thereby the incentive to be “just.” Crucially, Dikaiopolis sympathizes with the Acharnians' deme-interest, implying that their interest would be just if pursued in another way. He chides the Acharnians only gently for their “being out of place” (atopia, 349). Like Dikaiopolis, who needed to go back to his true city, the old Acharnians need to go back to their deme. It is only in Athens, the urban center, that they are out of place. The Acharnians' pursuit of parochial interest is just, but their defense of the common interest leads them into injustice. By equating justice with (proper) pursuit of self-interest, Aristophanes implies that injustices arise only when people have mistaken understandings of their interest or of how to achieve it. Aristophanes thus turns the self-interested analysis back in favor of justice by asking what interests, vocations, and ways of life inculcate just behavior automatically, that is, as an unexpected byproduct with no specific concern for either the common interest or the well-being of others.

Yet if every group or individual took such a self-interested view, how could a common national policy such as defense be carried out? What, if self-interest is exclusively pursued, would prevent a deme from free-riding in national defense? The Spartan strategy of ravaging lands at the beginning of the Archidamian phase of the war relied precisely on splintering Athens along deme-lines, actually singling out Acharnae (according to Thucydides) as a deme whose interests were in principle separable from Athens'. The Spartans hoped that the Acharnians, seeing their own land ravaged, would force the whole of Athens into an unwise land battle. But if Athens failed to come out and protect the Acharnians' land, the Acharnians would be less likely to help other demes in future (Thucydides 2.19–20). Even if we were to assume that Aristophanes' pacifism led him to favor fragmentation among demes because it sabotaged the war policy, this same problem of free-riding, broadly construed, would attend peacetime attempts at action in concert. How can he be sure that Athens, if it took his advice, would not end up with a disadvantageous peace, or even cease to exist?

The answer is that—like many of the proponents of self-interest who were to come after him—Aristophanes relies on principles other than individual self-interest. Punitive anger, in particular, though apparently rooted in selfish interest, will be shown to serve the group interest and to cause individuals to become forgetful of their separate interests. The action of the play eventually illustrates a grudging compromise between self-interest and the conventional, punitive justice which self-interest was supposed to replace. To support his theoretical vision, Aristophanes will later exhibit special conditions under which the whole-hearted pursuit of interest replaces conventional justice entirely. But the practical outcome is very different: although Dikaiopolis himself acts wholly out of self-interest, he is unable to sell his vision in its totality to the Acharnians. At most he moderates their conventional punitive justice by mixing it with heightened awareness of self-interest. The practical upshot of his experiment is that paying more attention to interest can ameliorate pathologies caused by the self-righteous indignation to which conventional punitive justice is prone. This becomes clear when we consider the Acharnians' primary character traits. In describing their temperament, the dramatic potential of smoldering charcoal that flares up occasionally was probably one reason Aristophanes chose Acharnae (e.g., Acharnians, 321). Anger and moral indignation are what bind these patriotic, conservative Athenians to their conventional vision of justice. Giving up that conventional view entirely would require that they first let go of their habitual propensity to get angry at what they see as violations of it. Moral indignation also maintains the solidarity of their group by policing the loyalties of each member, enabling action in concert. Members make common cause against free-riders (like Dikaiopolis), and their punitive actions create an incentive structure in which an indirect form of self-interest prevails. Avoiding the harm of punishment becomes an incentive to obey the conventional rules. While acknowledging in this way the practical use of punishment for redirecting interests, the play will attempt to counterbalance punishment with a purer conception of interest.

ANGER AND INTEREST

The role of anger in conventional or legal justice is one place where Aristophanes would take issue with public choice theory and related modern theories deriving rules for collective action from individual interest (e.g., Mueller 2003). A fundamental insight of the public choice literature is that rational individuals would willingly choose to impose punitive sanctions on themselves when too many defections in pursuit of individual interest risk damaging all concerned. Anger, like other factors not strictly identified with rational self-interest, can be ignored insofar as empirical people approximate rational actors. By contrast, Aristophanes will show Dikaiopolis reluctantly incorporating this obvious factor of the everyday experience of justice into his practical compromise. Public choice idealizes away the anger that people usually feel toward defectors, for example, free-riders. Aristophanes handles the ideal and the practical in a different way: he fantasizes away the distorting influence which anger, punishment and justice itself wield on our conception of interest. To judge by Dikaiopolis' defection, Aristophanes would doubt whether sanctions freely chosen can strictly be called rational interest because, as the public choice literature admits, individuals request punitive sanctions against the very defections they themselves would otherwise choose. The bare hypothetical potential for escaping sanction—even when unfeasible—serves to highlight that the ideal interest is usually to exploit others' cooperation while not cooperating oneself, for example, free-riding. Public choice seeks to make free-riding impractical by tightening the net of sanction, using iterated games, and finding other ways in which noncooperation can be revealed. However, none of these changes the fact that the free-rider who cheats without crashing the system actually does achieve the highest payoff of self-interest. This divergence between interest and cooperation is one reason why other, rival justice theories claim that justice requires more than enlightened interest, that is, requires fellow-feeling, a higher good, or altruism. Aristophanes will take a very different tack, emphasizing the use and abuse of anger in justice. The theoretical upshot of this part of Acharnians is that the desire to escape punishment—like the desire to punish—is secondary to a direct interest like economic interest; from certain perspectives it might not even appear to be a true interest. That is, if everyone could have his or her true needs satisfied, each would suddenly cease to be concerned with whether other people obeyed the rules. No one would need to be punished. Legal sanctions only help to apportion more direct interests. Justice itself, on this analysis, is secondary to the interests it apportions. Though each individual has an interest in justice's being served, he or she has a more direct interest in the scarce resources which justice apportions. Relative to these ends, justice appears as a means. But where such apportionment is necessary, apportioning takes on a life of its own. A secondary, indirect interest in apportioning—perhaps even a desire to be the champion of apportionment—arises. The Acharnians' vigilantism exemplifies such championing.

The Acharnians' indignation makes their secondary interest (forcing Spartan compliance) appear more important than their primary interest (revenues). The wish to punish Sparta makes the Acharnians forgetful that a peace-treaty would secure their economic interest far more quickly. This indignation associated with concern about other people's obedience is a persistent theme in the Aristophanic corpus. Although Acharnians portrays the Acharnians' conversion from public animus to private interest (e.g., 990–99, 1008–10), the apparent conclusion that private interest can simply defuse or supplant moral indignation is belied by factors within and outside the play. First, as we shall see, the Acharnians at the play's end remain dispirited, unable fully to appreciate the goods which the comic artist procures for them and for himself. In practice, they would be likely to rekindle their anger and rebel against such powerlessness. Second, the appearance of ease in the conversion which the Acharnians undergo is corrected by a similar attempt at conversion in Wasps (cf. Allen 2000, 128–33). In Wasps, the integrity of the Athenian criminal justice system is at stake: a chorus of patriotic, warlike old Athenian jurymen, the “Wasps,” indulges in self-righteous anger and the desire to punish defendants. They are not vigilantes but publicly funded jurymen. Once again, the assumption is made that their public anger is the result of thwarted private interest. Satisfying those lacks—in the form of luxurious food, clothing, sex, wine, and conviviality—should on the basis of that assumption remove their wish to punish (Wasps, 319–22, 340, 1450–61). The chief wasp Philocleon, however, continues in his punitiveness even while enjoying these satisfactions (Wasps, 1292–1449). Philocleon swings pendulum-wise from archjuryman to a scofflaw who creates enemies and imaginary resistance to his satisfactions in order to justify assaulting people. He can no longer police himself after he stops policing others. Where public choice would presume on interest-only reasoning such as “I will behave in the common interest but only if others are forced to behave so, too,” Aristophanes substitutes—at least for a non-negligible minority of people—the sentiment that “I will behave in the common interest but only if I have the privilege of forcing others to behave so, too.” The formulas are similar, but a great gulf of punitive and ultimately self-regarding concern about other people's obedience divides them.

Self-righteous anger's forgetfulness of primary interest could make it a formidable opponent of injustices wherever they are found—not excluding even injustices directed against other people's interests—if such anger could become teamed up with other-regarding passions such as compassion. Indeed, one of the blindnesses of moral indignation, from the purely self-interested point of view, is that it wishes to mind other people's business (whether to aid or to punish) when it could be seeing to its own. Modern attempts to replace the angry or indignant component of conventional justice with interest alone now begin to look impractical. As Tocqueville ([1840] 2000, 504) points out, modern philosophers up to his time took emotions into account, as formidable obstacles that needed to be overcome in order to isolate rational interest. And as Frank (1988) shows, only in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries did economic theorists, in particular, begin the tendency to ignore emotion as if rational interest were all that needed to be taken into account.¹

We can begin to see this new balance in the arguments Dikaopolis uses to persuade the Acharnians that abandoning the effort to punish Sparta does not itself merit punishment. Dikaiopolis initially wishes to argue wholly on the grounds of self-interest, that is, to defend the justice of his peace treaty with the enemy without reference to the enemy: “Leave the Spartans out of it: hear about my treaty, whether I made it well” (305–306; emphasis added). Dikaiopolis seeks his own interest even if it is also in the interest of his enemies. The most famous instance of this argument—by which self-interest removes the grounds for punishing—occurs in Thucydides' debate between Diodotus and Cleon over the genocide of Mitylene (Thucydides 3.44.1–3.44.4). Even if the Mitylenians were totally unjust, Diodotus says, he would not order them killed unless killing them was advantageous for Athens. Cleon's argument that all male Mitylenians must die is “more just” (dikaioteros), he says, but the debate is about how to make the Mitylenians useful, and they are more useful alive. The unexpected twist on self-interest shows that superpatriots like Cleon (and like the Acharnians) do not know their own interest. They desire more to hurt others than to help themselves. Diodotus does not advise giving up all punitive deterrents, but he does advise giving up deterrents so draconian they create incentives to persevere in rebellion once detected. The Acharnians, however, are not ready for such an interest-heavy approach. They believe no treaty can be signed with Sparta because Spartans wholly lack morality (Acharnians, 307–308); that is, they understand nothing but punitive deterrent. Dikaiopolis therefore takes a different tack, using justice as an avenue back to Acharnian self-interest. Before they can embrace their own self-interest, the aggrieved Acharnians need to hear a demonstration that Sparta is not to blame for quite all of Athenian troubles and that Spartans have themselves suffered injustice at the hands of Athens (309–14). As we shall see, the version of justice to which Dikaiopolis will appeal is unconventional—a Sophistic moral critique in which the enemy's pursuit of self-interest is excusable. Aristophanes seems to hold out hope that his audience might be capable of stopping the war if they can find this new balance between punitive justice and interest in which the latter predominates.

Searching for a general formula for this new practical balance brings us within hailing distance of the classic modern formula of “self-interest well understood.” Tocqueville's Americans explain their own other-regarding, virtuous behavior as an expanded awareness of their self-interest (Tocqueville [1840] 2000, 500–506). Tocqueville doubts whether his Americans are correct about why they help their neighbor: he strongly implies that their helping is often not really in their particular interests; rather, each helps due to “disinterested and unreflective sparks that are natural to man,” sparks which their own philosophy scarcely acknowledges. Tocqueville may well have compassion in mind, but we have already seen another such interest-forgetting and unreflective natural spark in Acharnians: moral indignation. A general formula for Aristophanes' practical balance might thus be “allowing self-interest a role in the production of just behavior generates fewer pathologies than relying only on natural sparks and conventional justice to overwhelm self-interest.” The self-interestedness of Tocqueville's Americans does not prevent the natural sparks associated with conventional justice from taking a role in moderating and supplementing their self-interest. But relying on conventional justice and its sparks alone does often force self-interest into a subterranean role where it undermines justice and uses it as a pretext. The latter was the case with the Acharnians in Aristophanes' presentation.

The remaining difference between Acharnians and this modern way of making interested behavior converge with just behavior is more speculative than practical. Aristophanes' purer conception of self-interest must regard modern enlightened self-interest as an accommodation between true self-interest and conventional justice. Such accommodation is fine, indeed to be hoped for in practice, but the contrast with Aristophanes' pure and direct self-interest helps us see that the engineering of incentives by modern liberal societies promotes an indirect self-interest, at best. As Tocqueville also implied, his Americans could sometimes get better payoffs through defection if they only knew it. To take an up-to-date example, many individuals strongly believe that free-riding on systems of public goods, such as public transportation, is not in their interest because it could crash the system (thereby harming their individual interests in the general crash). Aristophanes' purer concept of interest argues that they overstate the general harm coming from the small input of one free-rider. The modern reply might be: What if everyone free-rode? But the logical leap from one person free-riding to many free-riders more closely resembles the categorical imperative than it does a rational analysis of interest. Such individuals rationalize what is actually a commitment to justice, calling it self-interest. On the other hand, the mere appearance of self-serving in enlightened self-interest—that is, in the belief that justice so easily converges with interest—may have provoked an idealistic reaction that ultimately drove justice and self-interest further apart. Other modern justice theories such as justice-as-altruism find the purity of justice to be tainted by considerations of self-interest. For such theorists, justice and interest diverge widely and must be treated separately. But if self-interest and justice are actually conjoined—and the modern formula of “self-interest well understood” was mistaken only about the way they are conjoined—, then separating the two will show neither in its true light. Acharnians will go on to make a claim about how they are conjoined.

The thought-experiment of Acharnians clearly wishes its audience to follow its logic further than any bright-line, practical recommendations such as making peace. The argument of the play invites us to conceive of an individual who is a city unto himself and whose pursuit of self-interest constitutes a new vision of justice. This ability to define justice emerges as the highest form of self-sufficiency in the play. As we have seen, the dialectical argument of Acharnians begins with agrarian self-sufficiency but then abandons the agrarian requirement to show the more rarefied political self-sufficiency of a neutral marketing demos. As the focus of the play shifts away from goods such as wealth and security, toward the goods of art and free speech, Dikaiopolis will seem once more to be an individual addressing individuals. The obvious dependence of individuals on the polis for their defense and economic well-being implies that a new sense of self-sufficiency is now intended. The new concept of self-sufficiency follows logically from the assumption that strands of pre-Platonic thought shared with Aristotle: viz. that the polity largely constitutes its members, i.e. forms them morally. A vision of justice is inculcated into the very being of citizens by their membership; Aristotle does not dispute but rather begins from the fact that different regimes, such as oligarchies and democracies, inculcate very different visions of justice (Politics 1280a7–15; cf. the Antiphon fragment in Gagarin and Woodruff 1995, 244–45). For Aristotle, the smaller fellowships grow into larger ones because of their drive for self-sufficiency, and the polis achieves full self-sufficiency because it can survive on its own as well as cultivate humane attainments of living well, such as justice (Politics 1252b28–31; Nicomachean Ethics 1134a25–28). But within pre-Platonic thought, the opinion that justice is relative to the regime that defines it, actually stems from similar considerations: among the various groups, the polis is the smallest (perhaps the only) group that can provide justice. The polis' ability to define and promulgate its vision of justice is the capstone of its edifice of self-sufficiency. If, per impossibile, an individual could become self-constituting or morally self-forming, then the individual would have taken over the constitutive, formative function of the polis. According to the logic that the polis is the only self-sufficient entity, the self-sufficient individual (if such an individual exists) must be a kind of polis. The play has not yet specified the vocation of the self-sufficient individual; Dikaiopolis qua yeoman farmer, for example, does not fit the given criteria. The play would also have to substantiate the implication that such a vocation does make an individual morally self-sufficient. These difficulties set the stage for the final dialectical advance in the play's argument.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: THE ARTIST APPEARS

In the domestic affairs context, the second and culminating case in which justice is examined focuses on the unusual vocation of the artist and on relations between artist and polity, especially on the problem of dissenting speech. Speech is critical because the enduring problem of self-interest rightly understood is how to educate people to understand their own interest. Speech is the medium of education, but not all speech obeys the moral code. Greek justice often presented a closed loop: justice could not easily be influenced by disloyal speech because justice punished disloyal speech. The notion of unjust speech (e.g., Clouds 99, 884–85) and of the injustice of ideas runs deeply counter to modern liberal assumptions about rights and about the distinction between state and society. Even Athens, famous in the Greek world for relative freedom of speech (parrhesia; Halliwell 1991; Saxonhouse 2006), did not recognize in law and in theory the concept of an Athenian “society” that existed exempt from state control. Aristophanes' logic—according to which individuals who define justice for themselves are regimes in their own right—enables him to base the defense of his freedom of expression on the otherwise strange premise that regimes inevitably govern artistic expression.

Dikaiopolis must defend Athens' enemy in front of the most warlike and allegedly loyal Athenians, who prefer to hear Athens eulogized even when the eulogy is false (Acharnians, 370–6). At this critical juncture, Dikaiopolis is suddenly transformed into Aristophanes himself, stating “I remember how I suffered at the hands of Cleon on account of last year's comedy.” That comedy was Babylonians, in which the subject cities of the Athenian empire were parodied as slaves with Athens as their master. Babylonians was produced at the City Dionysia, where representatives of the subject cities of the empire came to offer their tribute and stayed to watch the dramas. The presence of foreigners opened Aristophanes to the legal charge that he slandered Athens in presence of foreigners (502–503), a charge that Cleon brought against him (Foley 1988; for other interpretations, see, e.g., Slater 1989; Storey 1993). Aristophanes' art was accused of literally being “unjust speech.” The rhetorical-judicial predicament that Aristophanes faced as an artist was thus analogous to the rhetorical-judicial predicament in which he enmeshes his fictional alter ego Dikaiopolis one year later.

The rhetorical predicament of using speech governed by codes of just speech to criticize justice is explicitly solved by appropriating elements from the substance and the rhetoric of Euripides' critiques of conventional justice. Euripidean critique is probably most accurately viewed as making up part of a Sophistic stream of thought which considered ethnocentric divisions and social stratification to be unnatural (e.g., Guthrie 1971, 152–63; Kerferd 1981, 154–62). Thus unlike Thrasymachus, Euripides criticizes conventional justice from the standpoint of a higher justice. Euripides seems to question whether the common interest served by Athenian justice was truly common. His criticism calls upon Athenians to see their own injustices practiced against excluded others: women, barbarians, and the poor. Euripides also famously airs arguments using desire (a selfish factor like self-interest) to excuse women and other groups from the allegations of immorality upon which their exclusion was predicated (e.g., Trojan Women, 946–62, Hippolytus, 433–81). Euripidean justice thus took into account factors which a more conventional justice would discount. Like Euripides, Aristophanes will exemplify a more inclusive justice and maintain that ostensibly selfish factors cannot be discounted. Although he makes fun of Euripides' ideas and techniques, Aristophanes also shows their success in converting half the Acharnians. By clothing his authorial persona in the guise of Sophistic critique, Aristophanes acknowledges that such ideas make up an (at least superficial) element of his art.

Prior to delivering his defense speech Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes gets permission from the Acharnians, who are overconfident that he will never persuade them, to dress himself in a sympathy-creating disguise (383–92). In the fantasy, he is able to run to Euripides' house, where the tragedian offers him costumes and sympathy-creating devices from a legion of pathetic, destitute characters. These costumes and devices are equated with rhetorical phrases (447). For his beggarly disguise, Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes chooses the hero of Euripides' tragedy Telephus (438 B.C), the fragments of which appear to criticize Greek justice (cf. Collard 1995). Telephus, born a Greek, rules a barbarian kingdom in Asia Minor which the Greeks invade, mistaking it for Troy. Telephus counterattacks and drives them out, but is wounded and can only get the cure from Achilles. Telephus goes to Greece disguised as a beggar and enters the Greeks' halls. When Telephus attempts to speak, the Greek heroes protest that, as a beggar, he has no right to address decent people. But this beggar is a nobleman in disguise as, for all we know, any poor man might be (cf. Electra, 34–38, 367–90; Alexander fragment in Gagarin and Woodruff 1995, 70). They protest that Greeks should rule barbarians. But this barbarian was Greek by birth. Perhaps all people share a common birth (cf. Trojan Women, 764, 993–97, 1022–28; Orestes, 1484–89; Croally 1994, 110–11). The Telephus thus apparently used mistaken identity to make humanistic and egalitarian points. Crucially, the Telephus impugns the justice of the Trojan War: Telephus (like all the Asians) was only defending himself when he counterattacked the Greeks. One Greek insists that by impugning the war, Telephus is slandering the Greeks' polis—a charge analogous to that leveled by Cleon against Aristophanes. But Telephus argues that if the Greeks would put themselves in his place, that is, put themselves in the place of a barbarian and a beggar, they would see that they would have done exactly as he did. Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes proceeds to appropriate Telephus' speech for his own defense speech. He claims that Athenians (particularly Pericles with his economic embargo) started the Peloponnesian War. The Spartans, like Telephus and the Asians, only defended themselves and their allies. He encourages the Acharnians and the whole theater audience of Athenians to put themselves in the place of the Spartans: we would have reacted exactly as they did (530–43).

Rhetorically, Euripidean justice is only partly successful. The Acharnians are divided into two factions, hemi-choruses, one of which defends the speech on the grounds that everything said was true and just. The other hemi-chorus admits its truth and justice but nevertheless attacks Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes on the grounds that “even if it was just, ought he to say it?” (561). Their irrational resistance to the moral critique leads them to attack ad hominem: they protest again that a beggar has no right to say such things about Athenians. Euripides' teaching that the destitute are really our equals has now run its course, or even back-fired, with half of its audience. The action of the play indicates the limits of compassion and of righteous exhortations to recognize collective guilt. Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes therefore tries a different kind of morality and rhetoric: a highly demagogic speech appealing to apparent interest as well as punitive scape-goating (575–619). These demagogic arguments are entirely successful: the recalcitrant half of the chorus is converted and, in fact, the Athenian people (demos) as a whole is said to be converted (626–27). Self-interest is needed to finish what Euripidean justice started, even when the Euripidean justice is technically correct and the self-interest is merely apparent. Despite this circuitous rhetorical route, the Acharnians ultimately do embrace at least stunted versions of what Aristophanes considers their true self-interest, for example, peace, eros, food (979–99).

Having begun to exemplify justice in the relations between the artist and the polity, the play now turns to discursive communication about what it has exemplified. After being (illegitimately) persuaded, the reunified chorus of Acharnians throw off their costumes and come forward as mere hired actors to lecture the audience on what the point of the play is. This stage convention, the parabasis, enables them to speak on behalf of the artist (or on behalf of the persona the artist wishes to create). The artist, they say, wishes to answer the charge that he “satirizes the city” and treats the demos with hubris. Such satire serves a public good, they say, because satire disabuses the citizens of delusions of grandeur. Additionally, the artist dares to tell what is just, speaking justice to a citizen-body that does not want to hear it (633–45). In the subsequent lines, these two public purposes of speaking justice and satirizing public vanity merge into a single, unified public purpose. Aristophanes' art will “satirize justice,” teaching “many good things“—in fact, teaching “the best” (655–58). Satirizing public vanity entails satirizing justice because belief in their own justice is the Athenians' greatest public vanity.

Satirizing justice but teaching the good suggests that conventional justice dissolves under the solvent of satire, reducing to the good. The good would be identical to the Sophistic notion of interest or the advantageous.¹

ARTISTIC SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND THE GOOD

To substantiate its implications, the play exhibits a little-acknowledged aspect of certain goods. Instead of focusing on goods which apparently get used up when one person or group appropriates them, the play turns to goods which are multiplied and made more widely or intensely enjoyable by just such appropriation. Although scarce and in competition, the artistic goods that the comedian traffics in—such as ideas and humor—can only be created for the public if the artist makes them his own and enjoys or exploits them fully. In economic terms, Aristophanes considers positive externalities of consumption, but his emphasis ceases to be narrowly economic. Peace and other goods which transcend the focus on farming and trade in the earlier stages of the argument turn out to share, from one perspective, this same aspect. The play thus seems to aim at shifting its audience's perspective on the good.

Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes' marketplace is the “forum” (agora) not only for economic produce but also for a traffic in fashion and ideas. The chorus lists purveyors of culture who would ordinarily frequent the marketplace: politicians, a painter, and a rival comic poet (842–59). By starting his own market, Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes is free from artistic and cultural competition. During the play's final section, Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes cooks, acting as both gourmet chef and gourmand. He stage-manages a large production: an entire team of servants are preparing a feast—all for his own consumption. The chorus point out how artistically he cooks (1015–17). The items being cooked are all the foreign delicacies he obtained through trafficking in the marketplace (i.e. goods with fashionable as well as material values). Watching Dikaiopolis cook is analogous to watching Aristophanes compose and stage a comic drama: watching is all that the Acharnians are permitted to do. They begin to grow very hungry, but Dikaiopolis does not invite them to the feast. Instead, he tantalizes them (1011–12). They ruefully note that he has found pleasure in his peace and seems unlikely to share with anyone (1037–9). The drama is not for the theater audience but for the artist's own enjoyment. But unlike with food, Attic drama is also a public good that everyone can enjoy.

After the foreign nationals, a succession of (former) fellow citizens visit the new marketplace, illustrating the artist's relations to the polity. The issue is now public service or charity (cf. 1030). These citizens mistakenly think that Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes is still a member of their city and that justice entails that he recognize their claims. They fail to understand fully what it means to be a city apart. The hands-off or passive justice that prevailed in international affairs now converges with the active public benefaction claimed in the parabasis. With certain types of goods, helping others and helping oneself become one. The citizens believe that Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes can and must actively share with them his “peace” with Sparta, figured as a magical wine he keeps in a flask. They are confused—as the audience should not be—by the symbolism of an exhaustible good (wine) symbolizing an “inexhaustible” good (peace). Peace is not used up if someone appropriates some: on the contrary, no matter how much one person “takes,” he or she leaves the same amount for others. Taking even creates more peace for certain others, namely for the former enemies. But the others must want it badly enough to take it for themselves. Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes adamantly refuses to extend his personal peace to other citizens or to the city as a whole. He freezes out two claimants and makes an exception which proves the rule for a third claimant (1018–68). The unique (1061) exception for whom he divagates from a passive to an active policy of sharing is a bride-to-be who wants to keep her husband out of the army. He grants her some peace on two grounds, the first explicit and the second implicit. First, she is a woman and not responsible for the war (1062). Athenian women are forced to remain private and they, like the non-imperial city, do not exercise office or rule over others. Second, Dikaiopolis-Aristophanes appreciates the bawdy joke the bride communicates to him about keeping her husband's member home from the war (1051–60). The comic artist finds in this woman a kindred spirit because her irreverence, her forced lack of public responsibility, and her selfish sexual interest in keeping her husband out of the army conspire to enable her to be at peace with Sparta already. The exception proves the rule: everyone must make peace for herself or himself. In doing so, they can imitate the example of the artist's making a separate peace for himself. The artist is at peace with Sparta because he does not hate Sparta and can therefore perceive why Spartans act the way they do. This is a peace that could not be shared with Athens as a whole however much the artist might wish to do so. The public's education through art, like their enjoyment of art, is only a byproduct of the artist's true vocation, which is between himself and his art. Simply by pursuing his own selfish interest, the comic artist produces great goods for the polity—if anyone wishes to make his ideas their own.

This new aspect of the good—intrinsic to artistic invention—sheds a wider light on various goods. For example, in the good of sex which the bride is about to enjoy, the other is arguably benefited by the self's appropriation of pleasure. The other enjoys it less if the self performs the act out of self-sacrifice. Far beyond merely leaving as much and as good for others, art requires to be fully enjoyed by the artist before anything can be created for others in the first place. Conventional justice cannot apportion this initial appropriation; real art cannot simply be legislated or adjudicated into existence. Under certain conditions, this enhancement via appropriation found in art, peace and sex also has analogs in exhaustible goods, i.e. the goods enjoyed in the other vocations examined in the play's previous stages of argument. The yeoman farmer and the politically neutral marketer represent very different appropriations, but each contributes to the freedom of others because their single-minded consumption of direct goods diminishes their stake in judicial and imperial activism. Conventional, sanction-based justice tends to skew perspective on the good toward appropriation-depleted rather than appropriation-enhanced because the former category is where conventional justice is most needed.

It might be objected that, in the case of all the goods mentioned, only larger spheres of conventional justice such as contracts and treaties enable the appropriations in the first place, and that good-creation is often relative to the expectations set by conventions that are fair or unfair (e.g. Attic drama is a public good only because Attic law makes it so). Aristophanes would probably agree,¹

Aristophanes would disagree with modern liberalism over what freedom of thought entails. Not being constituted by the regime means being disloyal and unjust to the regime, a regime apart, with all that apartness entails—indifference to certain appeals, a potential enemy, relations only by treaty. In other words, freedom of thought means that the free thinker enters what would later come to be called the state of nature in relation to his or her regime. If, as per Sophistic assumptions, the only morality is the morality that flows from the regime, then modern liberal dissenters cannot truly think independently of their regime because they do not acknowledge the “injustice” of their dissent. Aristophanes would thus agree with critics of liberalism—whether Marxist, communitarian or postmodern—who contend that regimes necessarily govern morality, art and thought. Yet he would also agree with liberals who contend that art must be autonomous or else lose its vitality. Neither liberals nor their critics conceive of artistic freedom as the possibility of a self-constituting artist qua regime, the artist who becomes his or her own “regimen.” The prospect of artistic freedom which liberal theory holds out as the birthright of every artist, Aristophanes holds out as possible only for artists who have thought their way out of their regimes. By figuring the artist outside, rather than in, the regime, Aristophanes combines strengths from these opposed prevailing conceptions of the artist in politics.