Athens: The City as University

135 Pages·2017·1.161 MB·English

by  Niall Livingstone

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.
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Athens
The city as university

Niall Livingstone
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Niall Livingstone
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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 demo-
cratic 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 num-
ber 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 scholar-
ship 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 transliter-
ated 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 demo-
cratic 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.