Democracy’s Slaves: A Political History of Ancient Greece

201 Pages·2017·6.664 MB·English

by  Paulin Ismard

DEMOCRACY’S SLAVES

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Démocratie contre les experts: Les esclaves
publics en Grèce ancienne, © Éditions du Seuil, 2015.
First printing
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ismard, Paulin, author.
Title: Democracy’s slaves : a political history of ancient Greece / Paulin Ismard ; translated
by Jane Marie Todd.
Other titles: La démocratie contre les experts. English
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | “Originally
published as Démocratie contre les experts: Les esclaves publics en Grèce ancienne, Éditions
du Seuil, 2015.”—Title page verso | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2016021053 | ISBN 9780674660076
Subjects: LCSH: Slavery—Greece—History. | Public administration—Greece—
History. | Slavery—Philosophy. | Greece—Social conditions—To 146 B.C.
Classifi cation: LCC HT863 .I8513 2017 | DDC 306.3/620938—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016021053
For Lucie D.

Contents
Preface · ix
INTRODUCTION · 1
1. GENESIS · 14
2. SERVANTS OF THE CITY · 35
3. STRANGE SLAVES · 57
4. THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER OF KNOWLEDGE · 80
5. THE MYSTERIES OF THE GREEK STATE · 103
CONCLUSION · 127
Notes · 137
Bibliography · 175
Acknowledgments · 181
Index · 183

Preface
Could the experience of long-ago Athens help us deal with our political
misfortunes here and now?
If you were born in the late 1970s, it is unlikely that politics has been
the site of the great accomplishments of your personal life. Your elders
taught you that politics was an affair of the imaginary, a matter of desire,
and that there were few other activities that could lead to an authentic life.
For you, however, the words and beliefs they used to transmit their own
experiences seem at best to paint a Shangri-la, at worst to pose a series of
indecipherable riddles. And just as the political arena ceased long ago to
interest you, you have gradually come to dispute the traditional form of
political participation, even to reject the principle of representation per se.
Nevertheless, in the daunting crisis of political language you are wit-
nessing, there is one big word, only vaguely defi ned, that serves as both a
principle of action and a perennial aspiration. That word is “democracy.”
Granted, it is invoked in the most multifarious aims. But provided you re-
fuse to recognize it—as you are invited to do—as the sole promise for civil
peace and liberty for all, provided you understand it instead as a radical
word designating the principle of the equal distribution of power and the
community’s effective control over its own destiny, then you will still be
inclined to see it as the only worthy political project still in existence. Is
it not that imperative, as yet imprecise, that assembled the demonstrators
on Puerta del Sol Square in Madrid, on Syntagma Square in Athens, and
in Zuccotti Park in New York City?
It seems to you, however, that one of the daily manifestations of the
denial of the democratic idea is the pulsing refrain that exalts the reign of
expertise and repeats over and over again that public affairs can be con-
ducted only on the basis of a body of knowledge whose nature requires