Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

humanity are the various human arts, from agriculture and navigation to speech and statecraft. In this poetic interlude, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus, human society is founded on the practical arts; and Sophocles here sums up the central values of the democracy: not only the centrality of human action and responsibility, but also the importance of a lawful civic order and the value of the arts, from the most elevated literary inventions to the most arduous manual labour. In the interweaving of these themes – the centrality of human action, the importance of the civic principle and the value of the arts – we can find the essence of Greek political theory, the terrain of struggle between democrats and those who seek to challenge them by overturning democratic principles.

      Democracy and Philosophy: The Sophists

      The plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles bespeak the rise of the civic community, citizenship and the rule of law, as against traditional principles of social organization. They reflect the evolution of the democracy with its new conceptions of law, equality and justice, a new confidence in human powers and creativity, and a celebration of practical arts, techniques and crafts, including the political art. But their tragedies also manifest the tensions of the democratic polis, the questions it inevitably raises about the nature and origin of political norms, moral values, and conceptions of good and evil.

      The dramatists speak for a society which has certainly not rejected the notion of unwritten and eternal laws, universal principles of behaviour, or obligations to family, friends and gods. But it is also a society in which the very idea of universal and eternal values is open to question and nothing can be taken for granted. The experience of the democracy makes certain questions inescapable: what is the relation between eternal laws and man-made laws, between natural and positive law? It is all very well to connect the two by invoking some divinely inspired lawgiver (as the Spartans did, while the Athenians did not); but how do we account for the differences among various communities, which all have their own specific laws? And what happens when democratic politics encourages the view that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s? What happens then to universal and eternal laws or conceptions of justice? Are these just man-made conventions, based simply on expediency, human convenience, agreement among ordinary mortals and the arts of persuasion? If so, why can we not change them at will, or, for that matter, disobey them?

      From the middle of the fifth century BC, these questions were increasingly raised in more systematic form, first by the so-called sophists and then by the self-styled philosophers. There already existed a tradition of natural philosophy, systematic reflection on nature and the material world; and among the natural philosophers, some had begun to extend their reflections to humankind and society – such as the great atomist Democritus, who devoted his life to both science and moral reflection. But the sophists can claim credit for making human nature, society and political arrangements primary subjects of philosophical enquiry.

      The sophists were paid teachers and writers who travelled from polis to polis to teach the youth of prosperous families. They flourished in Athens thanks to a keen and growing interest in education, especially in the skills required in the courts and assemblies of the democracy, the arts of rhetoric and oratory. Athens, with its cultural and political vitality, attracted distinguished teachers from other parts of Greece: Prodicus of Ceos, a student of language; Hippias of Elis, whose interests were encyclopedic; the brilliant rhetorician, Gorgias of Leontini, who came to Athens not as a professional teacher but a diplomat; and above all, the earliest and greatest of the sophists, Protagoras of Abdera, friend and adviser to Pericles, about whom more in a moment. Among the other sophists were Thrasymachus, whom we shall encounter in our consideration of Plato’s Republic; and the second-generation sophists, such as Lycophron, who is credited with formulating an idea of the social contract; Critias, the uncle of Plato, who also appears in his nephew’s dialogues; the possibly fictional Callicles, whom Plato uses to represent the radical sophists’ idea that justice is the right of the strongest; the so-called ‘Anonymous Iamblichi’, who countered the radical sophists by arguing that the source of power is in community consensus; Antiphon, perhaps the first thinker to argue for the natural equality of all men, whether Greek or ‘barbarian’; and, much later, Alcidamas, who insisted on the natural freedom of humanity.

      We should not be misled by the unflattering portraits of these intellectuals painted in particular by Aristophanes and Plato, for whom they represented the decline and corruption of Athens. It is impossible to judge the portrayal of the sophists by these critics without knowing something about the historical moment in which they were writing. During this phase of the democracy, even democratic aristocrats like Pericles were being displaced by new men such as the wealthy but ‘common’ Cleon. In Plato’s aristocratic circles, there was, not surprisingly, an atmosphere of disaffection and nostalgia for the good old days. Unfortunately, the aristocratic grumbles of a small minority have tended to colour views of Athenian democracy ever since, creating a myth of Athens in decline which has been very hard to shift.

      Aristocratic disaffection did have more serious consequences, which left a deep mark on the democracy. There were two oligarchic revolutions: a brief episode in 411 but more particularly the coup in 404 which, with the help of Sparta, established the bloody rule of the Thirty (the Thirty Tyrants). With the support of a 700–man Spartan garrison on the Acropolis, the Thirty murdered and expelled large numbers of Athenians. Thousands fled the city, and only 3,000 Athenians – perhaps 10 per cent of the citizenry – retained full rights of citizenship. Yet, when the democracy was restored in the following year, it displayed remarkable restraint in dealing with the oligarchic opposition, instituting, at Sparta’s behest, an amnesty which ruled out the political persecution of the oligarchs and their supporters; and despite the catastrophes that brought the golden age to a close, the fourth century was to be the most stable period of the democracy, which enjoyed widespread support among the poor and even the rich. This was also a period in which the culture of Athens flourished and when it truly became what Pericles had earlier called ‘an education to Greece’. There was no further serious internal threat to the democratic regime, and it came to an end only when Athens effectively lost its independence altogether to the Macedonians in the last quarter of the century.

      The notion that the late democracy was a period of moral decay is largely a product of class prejudice. To be sure, there were serious problems, especially economic ones; and the Athenians had paid a heavy price in the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of the plague. But the myth of democratic decadence has more to do with the social changes that marked the decline of the old aristocracy, which were accompanied by political changes in both leadership and style, a new kind of popular politics that brought to maturity the strategy adopted by Cleisthenes at the beginning of the democracy, when he made the people his hetairoi. Critics described these changes as the triumph of vulgarity, materialism, amoral egoism, and ‘demagogic’ trickery designed to lead the ignorant demos astray. What is most striking about the attacks on a leader like Cleon – by figures as diverse as Thucydides, Aristophanes and Aristotle – is that they invariably suggest objections of style more than substance. Aristotle, for instance, can think of nothing worse to complain about than Cleon’s vulgar manner, the way he shouted in the Assembly and spoke with his cloak not girt about him, when others conducted themselves with proper decorum.

      For critics like Aristophanes and Plato, the sophists became the intellectual expression of this alleged moral decadence and were made to stand for the decline of traditional values. They were portrayed as representing a polis where even young aristocrats had given up the high moral standards of their ancestors, a polis in which all standards of right and wrong had been abandoned, and even those who knew the difference were likely to prefer wrong to right. The rhetorical strategies perfected by the sophists, and the lawyer’s adversarial principle that there are two sides to every question, were interpreted by critics as simply a way of ‘making the worse cause seem the better’. But, while some sophists may indeed have been unprincipled opportunists, among them were thinkers who made substantial and innovative contributions to Greek culture and the traditions emanating from it. Even while their ideas have come down to us only in fragments or in second-hand accounts, especially in the dialogues of a generally hostile Plato, enough remains to justify the claim that the sophists, and Protagoras in particular, effectively invented political theory and set the agenda of Western philosophy in general.

      The sophists