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Athens The city as university The citizens of ancient Athens were directly responsible for the development and power of its democracy; but how did they learn about politics and what their roles were within it? In this volume, Livingstone argues that learning about political praxis (how to be a citizen) was an integral part of the everyday life of ancient Athenians. In the streets, shops and other meeting-places of the city, people from all levels of society, from slaves to the very wealthy, exchanged knowledge and competed for power and status. Athens: The City as University explores the spaces and occasions where Athenians practised the arts of citizenship for which they and their city became famous. In the agora and on the pnyx, Athenian democracy was about performance and oratory, but the written word opened the way to ever-increasing sophistication in both the practice and theory of politics. As the arts of spin proliferated, spontane- ous live debate in which the speaker’s authority came from being one of the many remained a core democratic value. Livingstone explores how ideas of democratic leadership evolved from the poetry of the legendary law-giver Solon to the writ- ings of the sophist Alcidamas of Elaia. The volume offers a new approach to the study of ancient education and will be an invaluable tool to students of ancient politics and culture, and to all those studying the history of democracy. Niall Livingstone is a Senior Lecturer in Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies Rome in the Pyrenees Consumerism in the Ancient World: Simon Esmonde-Cleary Imports and Identity Construction Justin St. P. Walsh Virgil’s Homeric Lens Edan Dekel Lucian and His Roman Voices: Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in Plato’s Dialectic on Woman: Equal, the Late Roman Empire Therefore Inferior Eleni Bozia Elena Blair Theology and Existentialism in Roman Literature, Gender, and Aeschylus: Written in the Cosmos Reception: Domina Illustris Richard Rader Edited by Donald Lateiner, Barbara K. Gold and Rome and Provincial Resistance Judith Perkins Gil Gambash Roman Theories of Translation: The Origins of Ancient Greek Science Surpassing the Source Michael Boylan Siobhán McElduff Athens Transformed, 404–262 BC: Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: From Popular Sovereignty to the The Petrified Gaze Dominion of the Elite Johannes Siapkas and Phillip Harding Lena Sjögren Translating Classical Plays: The Menander in Contexts Collected Papers Edited by Alan H. Sommerstein J. Michael Walton Forthcoming: Resemblance and Reality in Greek Childhood in Antiquity Thought Lesley Beaumont, Nicola Harrington, Arum Park and Matthew Dillon Athens The city as university Niall Livingstone First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Niall Livingstone The right of Niall Livingstone to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Livingstone, Niall. Title: Athens: the city as university / Niall Livingstone. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2016. Series: Routledge monographs in classical studies | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2015044494| ISBN 9780415212960 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781315646084 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Athens (Greece)—Intellectual life. | Education, Higher— Greece—Athens—History—To 1500. | Learning and scholarship— Greece—Athens—History—To 1500. | Greek literature—History and criticism. | Citizenship—Greece—Athens—History—To 1500. | Democracy—Greece—Athens—History—To 1500. | Political culture— Greece—Athens—History—To 1500. | Athens (Greece)—Politics and government. | Athens (Greece)—Social life and customs. | Greece— History—To 146 B.C. Classification: LCC DF275.L58 2016 | DDC 938/.5—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044494 ISBN: 978-0-415-21296-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64608-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK Contents About this book vii Acknowledgements x 1 Setting the stage for citizens 1 Introduction: Democratic knowledge 1 Citizens modern and ancient 3 Democracies 6 Intellectual attainment and democratic ideals 7 Myth and mousikē 9 Heroic politics 11 Hesiod’s poetics of struggle 15 Solon: Accommodating Athens to the muse 20 Notes 26 2 Citizen spaces 35 Knowing where it happens 35 Democratic citizenship: Staging and rehearsal 40 What did citizens learn? 40 Learning at home 44 Places of learning 46 The agora 46 The view beyond the city 54 In and out of the barber’s shop 56 Notes 60 3 The citizen performer 70 Writing the city 71 Suspicion of writing in Athens 71 vi Contents On Writers 73 The argument of On Writers 77 A misdirected attack on writing? 83 The two faces of the writer 86 Stylish spontaneity 88 Notes 94 Conclusion: The city as university 100 Notes 101 Bibliography 102 Index of passages 113 Index 117 About this book The City as University asks how citizens learned to play their roles in the democratic government of the ancient city of Athens. It shows that the answer to this question is not to be found in any systematic course of learning to which citizens had varying levels of access, or in ‘education’ understood as something compart- mentalised, a preparation for life ritually and institutionally set apart from life itself. Learning in Athens was pervasive and immersive. Athenian citizens were able to make participatory democracy work because learning political praxis, learning to act as citizens, was woven into the daily practice of citizen life itself. Citizen involvement in government in ancient Athens was on an overwhelming scale. It was extraordinary in terms of the numbers of people participating in decision-making bodies such as the assembly, the council and the courts; the number of public bodies demanding such participation; the range and complexity of the social networks underpinning these institutions, and the degree of responsi- bility which often rested either on a single majority vote or on small numbers of democratically appointed, and democratically accountable, office holders.1 Wealth remained a major factor in political influence, and rich and poor were not equally able to take up its opportunities, but the fact remains that democracy required and relied on the shared efforts of a very large number of people.2 At one extreme, there was the brutal physical labour routinely exacted from slaves of both sexes. At the other, there was the exceptional leisured freedom of a small number of elite male citizens. In between these extremes, though, there was a long continuum, which is only beginning to be understood in all its complexity, consisting not only of the rest of the enfranchised citizen men but also of Athenian women, free non-Athenians both male and female, and those slaves whose work was such as to give them some limited measure of independence from their own- ers. Along this continuum were many who could have very little experience if any of ‘formal’ education, but whose learning and expertise was crucial to the democracy. This book seeks to contribute to our understanding of the context and spaces in which this know-how was acquired and exercised. Chapter 1, ‘Setting the stage for citizens’, examines how the ideals of Athenian democracy, especially as embodied in the legendary figure of Solon the lawgiver, provide a conceptual paradigm for citizen learning and political engagement. Chapter 2, ‘Citizen spaces’, makes particular use of an irregular and unruly viii About this book form of evidence – the fragments of the highly characteristic comic drama of the democratic city – to explore some of the gaps and interstices between the official institutions of the democratic city and the official categories of modern scholarship to trace promiscuous and unregulated dissemination and reinterpretation of knowledge. Chapter 3, ‘The citizen performer’, focuses on Alcidamas of Elaia’s On Writers – an important text often neglected by modern scholarship – to show how it provides both a populist critique of elite formal education and a practical demonstration of how citizen expertise can be realised in political practice. The three chapters of the book are drawn together, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, by structural analysis of the performance world of Athenian democracy in terms of space and time, each viewed from two perspectives: space as an open space of potentiality (χώρα, khōra) which offers limitless creation and recreation of specific venues or loci of action (τόποι, topoi), and time as the extended and quantifiable expanse of time (χρόνος, khronos), capable of being institutionally managed and commodified and constituting the raw material of memory, punctuated and vitalised by time as the moment of intervention, oppor- tunity and personal agency (καιρός, kairos).3 The ‘democratic Athens’ to which this book sometimes makes shorthand reference is an abstraction: the period roughly from the beginning of the fifth century to the late fourth century bc in which Athens was (with brief interrup- tions) under democratic government spanned many generations and was marked by profound changes, social, economic and political; Athens in the 380s would not have felt very familiar to someone who had known the city in the 480s, or vice versa, and literary sources testify to long-lived Athenians’ strong sense of a world transformed in their own time. It is a useful abstraction because the uneven chronological distribution and fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence makes a high-resolution focus on individual years or even decades impractical, and also because there are significant cultural continuities as well as breaks; phenomena which belong distinctively to a particular period are identified as such. There is no entirely satisfactory system for writing ancient Greek names in English. I have used Latinised or Anglicised versions of Greek names when these are current and familiar; for more obscure names I have used transliterated Greek. In borderline cases, I have made decisions which are necessarily arbitrary, writing for instance Peisistratos (not Pisistratus) and Kleisthenes (not Cl(e)isthenes); I have not striven for complete consistency, and have for instance chosen Alcidamas (not Alkidamas) because I personally find the ‘soft c’ pro- nunciation more readable. I have tried as far as possible not to interrupt English sentences (except translations from Greek) with too many transliterated Greek terms. I therefore often use ‘city’ to mean polis, hoping that this will not obscure the differences (in classical Greece a polis is defined more by political auton- omy than by, say, the size of the settlement or of its population). Similarly I use ‘democracy’ both for ancient Greek forms of ‘popular’ government (such as that in Athens) and for modern systems which go by that name, without wishing to obscure the diversity within both groups, the fundamental differences between About this book ix the two groups, or the fact that ancient democracies would not count as democratic by modern standards – and vice versa. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. Notes 1 See especially Ober 2008, Ismard 2010. 2 See, for example, Robertson 1990:61 on the measures required to keep restored democratic government ticking over in the dire economic circumstances following the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War. 3 On Athenian time, see especially Allen 1996; also Trédé 1992 on kairos, and on ancient time and ancient historiography more generally, Feeney 2007. On the ‘spatial turn’ in current educational theory, influenced in particular by the Bakhtinian concept of the ‘chronotope’, see, for example, Charlton et al. 2011.