'So Mischievous a Beaste'? The Athenian 'Demos' and Its Treatment of Its Politicians Author(s): Ronald A.

Knox Source: Greece & Rome, Second Series, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Oct., 1985), pp. 132-161 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/642439 . Accessed: 03/06/2013 18:51
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Greece & Rome, Vol. XXXII No. 2, October 1985

'SO MISCHIEVOUS A BEASTE'? THE ATHENIAN DEMOS AND ITS TREATMENT POLITICIANS'
By RONALD A. KNOX

OF ITS

Introduction I take the question in my title from a memorably worded passage in Sir Thomas North's translation2 of Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes 26, where Plutarch is describing Demosthenes' exile in 323 B.C. Demosthenes was now 60 and after more than 30 years of active participation in Athenian political life, he had been condemned by an Athenian court for taking bribes from Harpalus, the late treasurer of Alexander the Great, who had fled to Athens with 700 talents. Demosthenes had been fined 50 talents by the court, and had been put in prison when unable to pay. But he had escaped from prison and now went into voluntary exile. North's Plutarch goes on:
So he took his banishment unmanly, and remained the most part of his banishment in the city of Aegina, or at the city of Troezen, where often-times he would cast his eyes towards the country of Attica, and weep bitterly. And some have written able to the noble things he was wont to persuade in his orations. For it is reported of him, that as he went out of Athens, he looked back again, and holding up his

certainwordshe spake,which shewedno mind of a man of courage,nor were answer-

Besides, he persuaded the young men that came to see him, and that were with him, never to meddle in matters of state, assuring them, that if they had offered

hands to the castle, said in this sort: 'O Lady Minerva, lady patronessof this city: why doest thou delight in three so mischievousbeasts:the owl, the dragon,and the people?'3

him two ways at the first, the one to go into the assemblyof the people, to make
orations in the pulpit,4 and the other to be put to death presently, and that he had known as he did then, the troubles a man is compelled to suffer that meddleth with

the affairsof the state, the fear, the envy, the accusations,and troublesin the same:s he would ratherhave chosen the way to have suffereddeath.

Whether or not Demosthenes ever really made these remarks, there can be little doubt that Plutarch endorsed them. There are many other passages of Plutarch in which the Athenian demos appears difficult or jealous or ungrateful or fractious.6 And few extant ancient writers would have disagreed with Plutarch's general approach. But there are plenty of modern scholars who would. In the last generation, at least in the English-speaking world, most treatments of Athenian democracy have sought to redress the balance of ancient criticism by emphasizing its positive achievements.7
There are indeed cogent general arguments for approaching

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Plutarch's characterization of the Athenian demoswith caution. Critics of Plutarch may say, with A. W. Gomme,8 that Plutarch, as a citizen of the Roman Empire under Trajan, had never seen a democracy at work and had no intuitive understanding of the vigorous political world of 5th and 4th century Greece. There is certainly truth in that. Or again, Plutarch's critics might say that, like nearly all ancient writers whose work has survived, he was of upper-class origin and that upperclass writers were naturally unsympathetic to the demos at Athens or elsewhere.9 This should put us certainly on our guard, but no more; it would be sad to fall into the opposite trap of thinking that because a criticism is made by an upper-class author, it therefore must be prejudiced and invalid. Thirdly, and more generally still, one may ask whether, if the Athenian demos had been the XaAEmr7TTaTov97)pLov of Plutarch's Demosthenes, Athenian democracy could have survived for some two centuries as it did. Although not written about Plutarch's view specifically, the following characteristically lively paragraph from Professor W. G. Forrest10can perhaps serve as an example of a general riposte in favour of the Athenian demos.
Athens failed too in the end but it must be clear by now where I would put the blame. Not with so many history books on the Athenian people, history books which, by an unhappy marriage of Thucydides and Plato, produce a story of democracy and corruption advancing hand in hand from the restrained dignity of the days of Perikles, through the first debauches introduced by Kleon to the hideous degeneracy of the wild-eyed monster Kleophon. The Athenian people was not free from corruption, selfishness, stupidity and cruelty; no people is. But for something like a hundred years it chose leaders, Themistokles, Aristeides, even Kimon in his limited way, Ephialtes, Perikles, Kleon; later a reformed Alkibiades, Thrasyboulos and a halfreformed Theramenes (for some of the oligarchs learned their lesson in 411); it chose leaders, some iK CjTV /EyLaoTWVOIKLtCV, some not, with whose help it directed its

conductedits warsandadministered its empirefairly,tolerantly,sensibly, government, justly and on the whole unselfishly.It did fail but it failed becauseit producedand on some occasions listened to a group of men who did not share its beliefs, whose own personalambition, whose lack of sophrosyne,if you like, destroyedwhat they were too clever to understand.

In at least one importantrespect, however, it seems to me that such modern reactionhas gone too far. Grantedthat the Athenian people chose its leaders,how did it treat them once chosen?Did the people, in this regard,act 'fairly, tolerantly, sensibly, justly' or more like a 'mischievous beaste' as Plutarch believed? This paper is written in the conviction that Plutarch'scriticism in this respect is on the whole merited and that modern defenders of democracy have been overreluctantto admitas much. I addressmyself in particular to the political casualty rate among Athenian politicians.

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The Political Casualty Rate: a crude survey" One cannot read far in Athenian history without coming across a politician whose career is interrupted or ended by disgrace, brought on by a penalty inflicted by the law-courts or the Assembly, whether a fine, or exile, or confiscation of property, or loss of civic rights, or execution, or penalty of some other kind. By the political casualty rate, I mean the number of such penalties in relation to the number of politicians, and I include ostracism among the political penalties, for reasons which will be argued later. Was this casualty rate notably high at Athens? It is not difficult to produce a wealth of examples of political casualties. What is harder is to determine the significance of these when weighed against the careers of politicians who escape disaster. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the following paragraphs aim to survey the casualties among the more prominent Athenian politicians under the democracy, while pointing also to those who never lost their footing in the political race. (It must be admitted at once that 'more prominent' has to mean 'more prominent as they emerge from the sources'. A contempofary Athenian might well have disagreed about the importance of some of the names that follow and suggested others in their place.) Ideally a survey of Athenian politicians under the democracy would start from Cleisthenes' reforms in 507 B.c. But so little detail is known of political careers at Athens in the first two decades after the reforms that it is best to pass at once to those known to have been political and military leaders in the Persian Wars. Four names stand out, those of Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristides and Xanthippus (father of Pericles). Of these Miltiades, the victor of Marathon, was fined 50 talents in 489 when his expedition to Paros was a failure (Hdt. 6.136); Themistocles, who had done the most to win the battle of Salamis, was ostracized in the late 470s and hunted out of Greece some time thereafter (Thuc. 1.135ff.). Aristides and Xanthippus had both been ostracized in the 480s ([Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 22.6-7), but were recalled to Athens in 481 and cannot be proved to have suffered any political disaster thereafter, although there is a decidedly weak tradition in Plutarch Aristides 26 that Aristides was fined for bribery and went into exile because he could not pay the fine. In the 470s and 460s, Athens' leading general was Cimon, Miltiades' son. He commanded all the successful campaigns of the early Delian League, but the Athenians ostracized him in 461 when popular opinion turned against his policy of alliance with Sparta and against his
constitutional conservatism (Plutarch, Cimon 15-17, Pericles 9.4). Of

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his opponents, Ephialtes was assassinated in mysterious circumstances ([Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 25.4), while the young Pericles lived on to become a leading politician in the 450s. In the 440s, after Cimon's death, Thucydides son of Melesias emerged as Pericles' principal opponent: he was in turn ostracized in 443 (Plut., Per. 14.2). Pericles himself had, as is well known, more influence with the Athenians than any other classical politician; but even he was deposed and fined when his war-policy became unpopular in 430 (although he was soon reinstated) (Thuc. 2.65). Before leaving the politicians of the Pentecontaetia, it is worth at least noticing an obscure miscarriage of justice recorded only in the orator Antiphon (Herodes 69, a speech written c. 415) where it is said that on an occasion which the older members of the jury would remember, a whole board of Hellenotamiae (the ten financial officials who received the imperial tribute) was wrongly condemned to death for embezzlement and the mistake only discovered when 9 of the 10 had been executed. (But if the circumstances were as sensational as this, it is surprising that no other source picked up the tradition.) During the Peloponnesian War, one might expect the political casualty rate to increase, owing to the strain of the war. But the two leading figures of the 420s, Cleon and Nicias, had triumphantly successful political careers, as far as relations with the Athenian people are concerned. The figures of the second rank were less fortunate: Pythodorus and Sophocles (the son of Sostratides, not the poet) were exiled, and Eurymedon fined, when they came home from Sicily with their mission unaccomplished in 424 (Thuc. 4.65); and Thucydides the historian was exiled after the loss of Amphipolis (Thuc. 5.26). These condemnations make one suspect that Cleon and Nicias would have suffered a like fate had they come back unsuccessful from Amphipolis and Syracuse respectively, instead of losing their lives there as they did in 422 and 413. In the decade after the Peace of Nicias (421), political turbulence at Athens increases, but not all of it can fairly be ascribed to the demos. Perhaps in 416, Hyperbolus was ostracized (in the last Athenian ostracism) (Plut., Nicias 11, Alcibiades 13). In 415 several almost certainly innocent men were arrested along with the guilty after the mutilation of the Hermae, in what emerges from Thucydides (6.27-29, 53, 60) as an atmosphere of hysteria (it is interesting to find Thucydides of the demos in this connection (6.60.1-2) using the word XaAEr7To and the Athenians as increasing in savagery (cf. 8.1.1) describing Es On the other hand, the people daily. (drrEi1T0aav tiAAov Tr dayptCrEpov) were not responsible for the backstreet reign of terror which preceded the overthrow of democracy in 411 (Thuc. 8.65-6), and after the

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fall of the regimes of the Four Hundred and the Five Thousand, they behaved with considerable restraint in not instituting a witch-hunt against those who had browbeaten them into voting away the democracy.12 The most capable Athenian leader in the later years of the war was arguably Alcibiades, who went into voluntary exile twice to avoid trial, in 415 and 407, being on the first occasion condemned to death in his absence, with his property confiscated and publicly auctioned (Thuc. 6.15, 61, Xen., Hell. 1.5.11-17, Plut., Alc. 20-22, 35-6). In his stormy relationship with the demos there were certainly faults on both sides: against him it can be urged that he may well have been guilty of profaning the Mysteries in 415, and that since he on both occasions exiled himself to avoid trial, he, not the demos, was the author of his misfortunes; on the other hand the fact that with his political experience he had no confidence in his chances in an Athenian court could be argued to show that the juryman of the time was a XaAE7rrT(avov 89PLov.In 407, at least, the demos appears to act with petulance in either dismissing or failing to reappoint the generals of 407, despite their victories and services in 410-408, because of the comparatively small naval defeat at Notium, suffered by Alcibiades' second-in-command in his absence (Xen., Hell. 1.5.16); and after the battle of Arginusae in 406, it is notorious that the eight Athenian generals who had won the battle were condemned to death in an unconstitutional collective vote, and the six who returned to Athens executed, for not picking up shipwrecked men (Xen., Hell. 1.7). However, such irresponsibly hasty collective condemnation is unparalleled in Athenian democratic history (apart perhaps from the execution of the Hellenotamiae noticed earlier), and it can be argued that the strain of the last years of the Peloponnesian War distorted normal Athenian practice. In 404-3 B.C. the continuity of Athenian democracy was again temporarily broken, by the regimes of the Thirty and the Ten. When democracy was restored, much could be said in general praise of the Athenians' patience and courage in rebuilding their political strength at home and abroad in the first decades of the fourth century. There was no more stasis; the amnesty with the oligarchs in 403 was broadly honoured by the demos, even in the opinion of writers not otherwise inclined to praise it (Xen., Hell. 2.4.43, [Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 41.3, Plato, Seventh Letter 325B). Nevertheless in the restored democracy, politics continued to be hazardous for a high proportion of the prominent politicians of whom we hear. The author of the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia (6.2, 7.2)13 names five Athenians politically prominent in 396: Thrasybulus, Aisimus and Anytus, who favoured peaceful policies,
and Epicrates and Cephalus, who were prepared to risk renewed war

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with Sparta. The most eminent of these was Thrasybulus, who had helped to preserve Athenian democracy in the fleet in 411, and had led the democrats in exile in 404-3, services to democracy which did not save him from conviction in court for his proposal, judged unconstitutional, to give citizenship to the slaves who had joined the democratic exiles at Phyle ([Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 40.2); but his political career was not seriously damagedl4 and he remained highly influential at Athens until his death on campaign in 389. Of Aesimus's fortunes, the little that is recorded does not include any political disaster; but Anytus, one of the prosecutors of Socrates, is implied by Diogenes Laertius (2.43) to have been exiled when the Athenian repented of their condemnation of Socrates. Of the two more radical politicians whom Hellenica Oxyrhynchia mentions, Cephalus and Epicrates, Cephalus remained active in the 380s and passed through politics unscathed; but Epicrates, after serving on a peace embassy to Sparta in 392/1, was prosecuted along with his fellow ambassador Andocides the orator; both of them went into exile rather than face trial and both were condemned to death in their absence (Philochorus (F. Gr. Hist. 328) F 149, Demosthenes 19.277). Two other prominent Athenians in trouble in the 390s or 380s are known from Demosthenes (24.134-5): Thrasybylus of Collyte (to be distinguished from his betterknown namesake from Steiria mentioned above) was one of the exiles who fought for democracy in 403, but was later twice imprisoned and twice condemned in trials before the assembly; and Agyrrhius, uncle of Callistratus, who introduced pay for the assembly, and was referred to by Demosthenes as a good democrat, spent many years in gaol after a conviction for embezzlement. From the international point of view, the most distinguished Athenian in the 390s must have been Conon. One of the defeated generals at Aegospotami in 405, he had fled to Evagoras in Cyprus, 'fearing the anger of the people' (Diodorus 13.106, cf. Justin 5.6.10). In 397 his appointment as admiral of the Persian navy gave him the opportunity to help Athens, and after his defeat of the Spartan navy at Cnidus in 394, the Athenians showered honours upon him (Dem. 20.68-70, Tod G.H.I. 11.128 with references). But this happy relationship will have owed at least something to the fact that from 405 until his death he was hardly ever in Athens. In Persian service he was safely out of the Athenian political firing-line. Moving on to the 370s and 360s, one finds four men who tower above the rest in the sources: Callistratus, primarily an orator and financier; and Chabrias, Iphicrates and Timotheus, son of Conon, primarily generals. Chabrias and Iphicrates had long and distinguished careers, surviving attacks in the law courts. Timotheus's career was

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equally distinguished; but it came to a sad end in 354 when he was condemned for treason after Athenian naval defeat at Embata and withdrew into exile from inability to pay his fine of 100 talents (Isocrates 15.129; Nepos, Timotheus3.5). Likewise, Callistratus, after around 361 and went into exile; and when a few years later he ventured to come back from exile without permission, the Athenians put him to death (Lycurgus, Leocrates 93). From all this it emerges that Athenian political life in the first half of the 4th century, as in the 5th, was a minefield for the politician. The pattern in the late fourth century, when the democracy was struggling against the rising power of Macedon, was broadly similar. To avoid labouring this survey to the point of exhaustion, I shall say only that although there were men in the forefront of politics who lived through their careers without disgrace - notably Eubulus and Lycurgus, with less distinction Chares and Hegesippus - as many or more names suggest themselves of those whose careers ended in ruin by vote of the assembly or the lawcourts - Demosthenes, Aeschines, Philocrates, Timarchus, Hyperides, Demades.s1 (It is perhaps worth mentioning as a curiosity that if one examines the fortunes of the 'Ten Attic Orators', whose works became a canon of oratory on literary grounds long after their death, a bizarrely high casualty rate emerges. Of the ten, we have to exclude from consideration four who were either not Athenian citizens (Lysias and Dinarchus) or were citizens but took no active part in politics (Isocrates and Isaeus); but of the six who Athens in his bed. The other five - Antiphon, Andocides, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Hyperides - suffered either exile or death when they lost the confidence of the people.)16 Attempted Statistical Check The survey above shows, I hope, that if we look for what I have called political casualties under Athenian democracy, there are plenty of them to hand; and they are not confined to isolated periods of crisis but are a regular feature throughout the history of the democracy. Any survey of this kind is, however, bound to be highly subjective. It is not simply that one can argue about the quality of the evidence in individual cases (and every reader is likely to have found some piece of my phrasing tendentious or unfair); that does not matter particularly if it is the broad pattern of frequent condemnations which we are out to establish. More important, there is an obvious risk that in a
survey of this kind the enquirer registers the casualties because he did take an active part in politics, only one - Lycurgus - died in an able career in the 370s and 360s, was impeached by ElaayyEALa

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is looking for them, but fails to register enough of the politicians who quietly avoid political disgrace. It is very difficult to find an objective procedure by which to check one's own bias in selection. It is impossible to draw up a complete list of 'Athenian politicians'. For one thing, for no year do we have a complete list of Athenian magistrates17 and members of the boule of Five Hundred; and if we had, it would be of limited use, because many of the active politicians (the so-called p-4TopESor T0oAhLEdvEVOL)18 held no official position (naturally enough, when most magistrates as well as members of the boule were appointed by lot, not elected on merit or prominence, and when service on the boule was limited to two (probably not continuous) years). Conversely, in each year's boule, there were many who attended and voted but did not take a more active part, by speaking and making proposals (see Dem. 22.35-36 for the distinction between active and less active bouleutai). Moreover one could clearly debate where, in a democracy, the line could be drawn between an 'active politician' or 'leader' and an ordinary politically conscientious citizen exercising his right to speak in the Assembly. To try to circumvent these difficulties, I have had recourse to a rough and ready procedure, which would no doubt make a modern statistician blench, but which seems better than having no objective check at all. I have taken as a sample all those Athenian citizens about whom enough is known to fill at least a whole page in Kirchner's Prosopographia Attica. The advantage of this is that Kirchner's book is essentially a biographical dictionary of Athenian citizens, not a political study as such, and that citizens about whom enough is known to fill a page or more have not survived in the historical record (or been chosen by Kirchner) merely becauseof having been condemned in some political scandal. They are genuinely prominent citizens with whose selection no oligarchic force in my own sub-conscious could interfere. The 'at least a page' criterion yielded 57 of them. From the sample of 57, I then had to excise five men whose activities fell outside the period of classical democracy (Solon, Peisistratus and Hippias at one end, Demetrius of Phalerum and Demochares at the other), and a further eleven, mostly writers, who would not be regarded as politicians in any normal sense: Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Cratinus, Eupolis, Euripides, Isocrates, Mantitheos, Menander, Plato Comicus, Plato the Philosopher, and Socrates. (I excluded Socrates with only slight misgivings, in spite of his service on the boule in 406 (Xen., Hell. 1.7.15); on the other hand with greater misgivings, I did not exclude Sophocles the dramatist, in view of his generalship in 441/0 (Androtion (F. Gr. Hist. 324) F38) and perhaps c. 423 (Plut., Nicias 15.2) and probable service as Hellenotamias (443/2) and membership

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of the ten Trpo'/ovAoL in 413 (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.141.9 a 2619); nor did I exclude Xenophon, who was exiled by the people of Athens for a political offence, even if not exactly an offence committed in the course of democratic politics (Xen., Anab. 3.1.5, Pausanias 5.6.4, Diogenes Laertius 2.51).) This left 41 prominent and politically active Athenians, who are listed in the table below, arranged in broad chronological order according to date of disgrace, or date of principal political activity, or a mixture of the two. Although this is a Procrustean procedure in the case of (e.g.) Aristophon, who probably suffered no penalty, and lived to be about a hundred (schol. to Aesch. 1.64), with a public career stretching from 403 to the 330s, the attempted chronological order is intended to reveal the extent to which penalties appear regularly or irregularly throughout the period of Athenian democracy. For the same reason dates (some of them disputed but unlikely to be wrong by more than a year) have been inserted beside the penalties where possible. The seven columns of penalties are in roughly ascending order of severity from fines and ostracism to exile, confiscation of property and death. Ostracism, in the second column, is different from the rest in not being a penalty for a specific and criminal offence, but in as much as it removed an Athenian from Athens for ten years, it seems reasonable to treat it as a political penalty in the broader sense (this point is argued further below in Appendix 1). Columns three, four, and five cover three distinguishable types of exile: I call it voluntary exile when a man went into exile to avoid being condemned by courts or assembly, either because he was guilty, or because he had no faith in the jury's ability to see his innocence; such action was normally construed at Athens as an admission of guilt, and he was normally (but not invariably, as we see with Alcibiades (no. 18) in 407) condemned in his absence. 'Exile resulting from a fine' took place when a fine was imposed which was too heavy for the condemned man to pay, and he chose to avoid imprisonment (which would otherwise result until he had paid his fine) by going into exile. This was clearly a less voluntary form of exile than the first. In column five are exiles which were specifically imposed as a sentence by courts or assembly. (In a few cases (cf. notes to 19, 36, and 41 in Appendix 2) it is difficult to be sure whether a man was condemned to exile, or to death in his absence, since the practical result was identical: an exile would normally be put to death if he returned to Athens without permission (like Callistratus, no. 24) and a man condemned to death in his absence was in effect made an exile if he wished to remain alive.) Confiscation of property, in column six, was frequently
(and perhaps normally) imposed along with sentences of death or

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exile;20 it is extremely likely that in some instances where the sources give us only brief allusions to a sentence of death or exile, confiscation also took place although they do not mention it. If so, the number of confiscations in the table should be higher. I have not included a column for imprisonment, since it was not a recognized penalty for an offence, but a temporary condition while a man awaited trial, or the payment of his fine or execution; nor have I included atimia (disfranchisement) which is more rarely attested than the other penalties21 and which tends to raise severe problems of interpretation when it does. Where a penalty suffered by one of the 41 is well attested, I mark it with an 'x'; 'xx' consequently means that the penalty was incurred twice. In the death column, however, since death sentences were often not executed because the condemned man had escaped into exile before sentence, an 'x' indicates merely that the sentence was passed; where it was also executed I append a dagger 't'. A question mark '?' means that there is evidence for the item in question, but also a substantial degree of doubt, owing to the weakness of the source, or to obscurity of language, or to disagreement among sources. For example, the fine of Cleon (no. 9) appearing as a ? only is based on an obscure joke in Aristophanes, Acharnians 6 about Cleon's having vomited up five talents, which can (but need not) be interpreted as a fine.22
TABLE: Athenian Politicians active 490-322 B.C. (The principal sources on which the table is based will be found in Appendix 2) Exile Vol. OstraConfisafter Fine Exile cation Death Fine cism Exile 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Miltiades Aristides Themistocles Cimon Thucydides x ? ?? x482 x472 x461 x443

x ?

x ?

(son of Melesias) 6. Pericles (son of Olorus) 9. Cleon 10. Nicias 11. Demosthenes (general)
12. Hyperbolus 13. Alcibiades 7. Sophocles 8. Thucydides

x430
x

x416 xx415,407 x415 x415

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TABLE (cont) Exile

Fine
14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. Antiphon Peisander Theramenes Cleophon Critias Andocides Thrasybulus Conon Callias Xenophon Callistratus Iphicrates Chabrias Timotheus Aristophon Androtion Apollodorus (son of Pasion) Eubulus Chares Charidemus Aeschines Hegesippus Demosthenes (orator) Lycurgus Hyperides Aristogeiton Demades Phocion

cism

Exile
(x411)

Fine Exile cation Death

xx415,391 x403

x391

x x ? x?354 xx350,348 x354

x394 ?

?xt355

(?)335 x xx360,324 ? xx x 13-20 5 (x) (x) 6-10 (?) 6-10 (x)322 (x) (xt)318 2-7 4-10 Totals 39-66 (x) x330 x324 (x)

3-4

In a few instances only I have bracketed an entry '(x)'. This means not that there is any doubt about the event as such, but that it took place when circumstances were so abnormal that one can question whether the event illustrated the workings of Athenian democracy. I have confined these brackets to penalties inflicted in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of the Four Hundred (nos. 14 and 15, cf. note 16 above), to those occurring under the influence of Macedonian threats (nos. 33, 36, 38, 40), where it might be argued that the demos was not wholly a free agent and hence only technically responsible for the penalty, and to the case of Phocion (41) where

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the assembly that condemned him is said to have been irregularly swollen by non-citizens, and the penalties occur at the end of his career when the continuity of fourth-century democracy had already been broken. (Penalties inflicted by the Four Hundred or the Thirty are not included in the Table.) The figures at the foot of each column give the total numbers of penalties; where there is a range, the lower figure represents the total when the question-marked and bracketed cases are excluded, while the higher includes them. From this it will be seen that our 41 politicians between them incur 39 penalties on a conservative estimate and 66 on a more credulous one. (The figures are 33 and 56 if one excludes voluntary exile as a penalty self-inflicted). The true figures are likely to be in between the lower and higher totals, because although some of the question-marked cases are likely to be spurious, we have to allow for condemnations which have not survived in the sources: it is probable a priori that one or two of these politicians were fined without this being recorded in our sources, and that (as I have suggested above, and see note 18) the total of confiscations should be higher; it is also likely that I have failed to note one or two penalties which are in the sources. If so, the penalties probably average out at more than one per politician. More strikingly perhaps, the table also shows that of our 41 politicians only 19, less than half, avoid some kind of political catastrophe at the hands of (or, in the case of voluntary exile, because of fear of) their fellow citizens; and that figure is the conservative one; if the question-marked and bracketed cases are accepted as genuine and relevant, the number of politicians who survive the system unscathed sinks to eleven, barely over a quarter of the sample. (Again, the true figure is likely to be in between the two.) Interpretation and Comment A rate of political fall-out of more than 50% seems remarkable and at first sight it seems to give strong support to a Plutarchan and conservative view of Athenian democracy as unreasonably turbulent. But need it be interpreted this way? Let us consider what a democratic apologist might say against such a Plutarchan view. First then our apologist (whom for convenience I shall call Philodemus) might suggest that the statistics in the Table are unrepresentative and give undue prominence to political casualties, because of anti-democratic bias in the ancient sources. But which sources? Appendix 2 contains the more important passages only (not a complete list) on which the Table is based, and even this limited list comes from a wide variety of authors: contemporary historians and orators,

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later historians and lexicographers, biographers and the occasional comic poet or philosopher. Not one of these, as far as I am aware, was writing a work which was intended to be, or was principally, a collection of the misdeeds of the Athenian demos. Admittedly there may have been such books: a tantalizing passage in Plutarch, Aristides 26, where Plutarch is arguing, against Craterus, that Aristides was never fined and exiled, reads as follows:
Virtually all the others who narrate the sins of the people against the generals collect and say much of 7TEP 0TVs arTpaT'ryobS (90aoL rArATZh/LEAThVra 8J) rep 8&Et'aau) -T(

the exile of Themistoclesand the imprisonment of Miltiadesand the finingof Pericles and the death in court of Paches, who killed himself on the rostrumwhen he was convicted,andmanyothersuch incidents,but while they set the ostracismof Aristides alongsidethe rest, they make no mention of such a condemnation[sc. a fine].

But no systematictreatiseof this kind has survived,and it is unlikely that any which has not has unfairlypoisonedthe whole historiographic tradition. (Plutarch does not in any case suggest that the compilers falsified the evidence or invented instances.) I remain confident that our evidence for a high political casualty rate comes from a broad enough range of sources not to be fundamentallymisleading. A second rejoinderwhich Philodemusmight makeis this. 'You have been implying all along,' he might say, 'althoughyou have been too mealy-mouthedto state it, that all or most of these condemnedmen were innocent victims: on the contrary,they were a parcel of rogues, who met their deserts.What righthave you to assumetheir innocence? Some of them condemnedthemselves by going into exile ratherthan face a trial. Doesn't that indicate a guilty man just as probably as it indicates a man who doesn't believe that he will get a fair trial? It is a virtueof a politicalsystem,not a vice, when criminalor treacherous politiciansare rigorouslyrooted out.' Certainlywe should admit that some of these men deserved their condemnation.But how many? Here we can surely pose a dilemma for Philodemus.23 If all or most of these men were justly condemned, is not that itself a criticism of Athenian democracy as it worked? Because if the demoschose its leaders, it obtained the leaders which it deserved,and if an unusuallyhigh proportionof these leaderswere criminally untrustworthy,that in itself reflects upon the judgement of the demos.If on the other hand rather fewer of these men were justly punished, Plutarch's characterization of the demos as a
Is there any evidence which allows us to choose between these two possibilities? From a strict point of view, it is impossible for us to
prove the guilt or innocence of these men, after all the centuries which have passed and without the evidence which the lawcourts and the
XaAE-rT`rarov Srporv looks like being close to the mark.

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assembly had before them. But two general considerations make it at least likely that many of them did not deserve their fate: (1) any reader of ancient prosecution speeches will agree that the standards of evidence required fall far short of what would be acceptable in a modern court. We meet with tissues of allegations supported by arguments from probability ('K TOt) EL'KTO') and character assassination; matters irrelevant to the charge, such as the past life and career of the defendant and even of his relatives, can be adduced; there is frequently an absence of good eye-witness evidence. When such methods of prosecution appear to have been standard, there can be no confidence that the politicians in our sample were fairly convicted. (The False Embassy case of 343, where (as is very rare) we possess both the prosecution speech (Demosth. 19) and the defence speech (Aeschines 2) on both sides is particularly interesting in this regard. Aeschines was indeed acquitted, but, according to Idomeneus,24 by the narrow margin of 30 votes out of at least 501, and yet Demosthenes' 'evidence' that Aeschines had been bribed by Philip into betraying Athenian interests to him would be unlikely to be taken seriously by a modern procurator fiscal or public prosecutor, let alone convince a modern court.) (2) Many of the instances of exiles and fines in the sample occur when generals have lost a battle or failed to prevent the revolt of a city; but in most of these cases, when there is enough evidence of the circumstances in the sources to allow a judgement, the modern historian tends to diagnose nothing more than bad luck or inexperience or, at the worst, innocent incompetence. Is it necessary or plausible to say with the Athenian juries that there had been as work?Yet they must have asserted this in every case, for incompetence in itself was not a crime. For example, take the generals who came home from Sicily in 424. The Athenians had sent out 20 ships to Sicily in 427 to assist the Ionians in Sicily against the Dorians and to interfere with corn exports from Sicily to the Peloponnese; not surprisingly the 20 ships had only mixed fortunes, so the Athenians decided in 426/5 to send another 40 ships; they sent general Pythodorus on in advance, and Eurymedon and Sophocles (not the poet) were to follow with the main fleet. But this fleet was first diverted to Pylos and then held up at Corcyra and it did not leave for Sicily until the end of the summer 425, too late to take part in that campaigning season. In 424, representatives of the Sicilian states met and decided that it was in their interests to settle their own differences rather than to have them exploited by external, Athenian, interference; so they agreed to make peace with each other on terms of preserving the status quo and told the Athenians that they could join in if they liked. The
bribery (~wpoSoKLta)or treason (rrpoSoa0a) or some other criminal activity

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Athenians had no option but to join in, and it is difficult to see what they could have done with their limited forces to disrupt a resolute Sicilian desire for peace: after all, when the Athenians intervened in Sicily in 415-13, they had in the end a force of nearly 200 ships, three times as great as their forces in the 420s, and they experienced utter disaster. So the generals of the 420s seem innocent of incompetence even, let alone treachery; they just hadn't enough ships; but when the generals got home, the Athenians in their disappointment exiled two of them and fined the third, in the belief that they had been bribed to leave Sicily.25 Another example of this kind which repays study is that of the historian Thucydides (Thuc. 4.102-8). Thucydides lost Amphipolis because he was too slow for the Spartan Brasidas: Amphipolis fell without resistance on the very day that Brasidas arrived outside its walls; Thucydides arrived at Eion (only three miles away) in the evening, only a few hours after the fall of Amphipolis; he could reasonably have expected Amphipolis to hold out for those few hours, especially since there was another Athenian general, Eucles, inside the town; but his reasonable expectation was wrong. Whether this constitutes incompetence can be and has been debated26; but it was surely fantastic in the circumstances to suggest that Thucydides, a rich man of noble Athenian family with no reason to be a traitor, was bribed into letting the Spartans capture Amphipolis; yet if Thucydides was exiled for the loss of Amphipolis, as he was, the jury must have condemned him for rrpoSo0'a or 3wpoSoKla or some such criminal act. Such examples, where there is plenty of detail in the sources, give grounds for confidence that in many other instances of our sample, where we have less detail, generals and politicians were condemned for criminal conduct when their real 'crime' was simply that their campaigns and policies had failed. An unfortunate corollary of Athenian readiness to treat failure as a sign of criminal behaviour was that the more successful (and valuable) the general was normally, the less liable was the demos to understand or pardon it when he did eventually fail, because if he was normally successful, failure appeared to prove not incapacity but criminal conduct. Plutarch notices this as a crucial factor in Alcibiades' disgrace and flight in 407 (Alcib. 35.2-3): 'If ever anybody was overthrown by his own reputation, Alcibiades seems to have been. Since his reputation was great, treating him as full of daring and intelligence, because of his successes, it made any failure on his part the subject of the suspicion that he was not exerting himself seriously, because people did not believe that he might be unable to do something; for they thought that nothing could escape him once he had exerted himself
seriously.'

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At this stage, Philodemus might launch a counter-attack: 'So far', he might say, 'you have mentioned nothing but the thorns of an Athenian politician's life. What about the roses? Had their path been all thorns, who would have aspired to political leadership at all?' This is true: there were roses. There was for example, ULT7UqLS 9v rrpvwiavEW, free meals in the Prytaneum, presumably a substantial economic and liturgies, of which the same could be said; there was rpoESpta, a front seat at the festivals; there were honorific ar-gpavoL, gold wreaths or wreaths of olive or ivy, and there were occasionally in the 4th century bronze statues. Less definably, political prominence brought ample opportunities for self-enrichment in the form of 'presents' from selfinterested well-wishers, or in the form of unofficial pay for the writing of speeches." In short, political prominence might bring real wealth and glory, neither to be despised; while for more altruistic and patriotic Athenians the deeper satisfaction of serving Athens would count for much.28And although we may think that the rewards were not commensurate with the penalties - crippling fines, exile, confiscation of property, a possible death sentence - many talented Athenians obviously did think that the game was worth the risks (among them, of course, Demosthenes himself, even if he did say what Plutarch makes him say, in a moment of despair as he set out on his exile from his beloved city). Furthermore, Philodemus might challenge us to state the alternatives to Athenian democracy. Granted even that the demos was everything Plutarch thought, should it not be judged, not against ideal democracy, but against other polities of classical Greece? Which of them is to be judged superior to Athenian democracy? It is tempting to guess that it may have been pleasanter to live in 5th century Chios, to the cautious sobriety and prosperity of which Thucydides paid tribute (8.24.4), or in 4th century Rhodes or Byzantium. But we know little enough about the internal affairs of these places. One thing however is well attested: the prevalence of stasis, of bitter faction and civil strife in so many classical states - Corcyra in 427 (Thuc. 3.70-82), Megara in 424 (Thuc. 4.61-74), Corinth in 392 (Xen., Hell. 4.4.1-13) and in a multitude of other places on many occasions" (Thucydides assures us in 3.82.1 of the near ubiquity of stasis in the Greek cities during the Peloponnesian War). Now from this stasis Athens, like Sparta, was for nearly all the classical period blessedly free. And if a ferocious constitutional life, with penalties dealt out through legal institutions, was the price of not having the still more violent animosities of bloodshed and civil war, we should be glad that Athens paid that
price. freedom from taxation benefit as well as an honour; there was &-EAE~La,

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Finally, Philodemus might demand to know what I mean when I ask whether the Athenian demos was so mischievous a beaste. Who are the demos?Were the politicians themselves not included in it? Was it not the politicians who took the lead in accusing each other in the
law-courts,

admitted that they did; they cannot be exempted from blame, if blame is to be administered, even if some of their activities stemmed from fear, and from a desire to strike before they themselves were stricken. The politicians, in as much as they voted with the majority, were members of the demos. (Perhaps I should emphasize, to avoid misunderstanding, that I am using demos to mean the voting majority of Athenian citizens on any occasion. It is true that ancient democratic apologists seem to have liked to consider that the demos comprised all the citizens of a city (cf. Thuc. 6.39), and the regular introductory ? formula of Athenian decrees, E'8OE T7 PfovA-Kat' T7 7jELp 'Resolution of the Council and Demos' may have implied to a democrat that the citizens as a whole, meeting in the assembly, had approved the resolution in question; and according to the laws of a democracy (then as now) what had been constitutionally decided by the majority was regarded as legally binding upon the rest. However, in practical terms
- and in moral ones - the decisions were decisions by the majority

or, by ElcaayyEAla, in boule and Assembly?

It must be

of those present and voting (who might be only a minority of the adult male citizen population). Democracy was thus the rule of the majority (or of those who were conceived to be the majority) and the demoswhich voted the decisions was the majority, not the whole people. On the other hand no assumptions are being made in this article about the geographical and social composition of that majority; criticism put forward here of the demos's treatment of its politicians should not be automatically translated into criticism of the lower classes, or the 'naval mob', or the urban inhabitants of Athens or Piraeus as opposed to those who lived in the country.30 If the casualty rate was unfairly and unreasonably high, that is a criticism of how the Athenians - or rather
a majority of them - tended to act en masse; it tells us about crowd

voting, not about any particular class of Athenian, because we hardly ever know the social and geographical composition of those voters who happened to form the majority in any one vote on any one occasion.) So far, the remonstrances of Philodemus have had to be met with a number of concessions. But when all the concessions have been made, concessions which tone down the Plutarchan position from which we started, I still believe that, without becoming utopian, we can and should make substantial criticisms of the way in which Athenian
democracy treated its politicians. A political casualty rate of over 50%

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is not to be brushed off lightly. The last part of this paper will be devoted to pressing some of the criticisms. In his perceptive article The Athenian Demogogues,3' Sir Moses Finley wrote that if he had to choose one word which best characterized the condition of being a political leader in Athens, that word would be 'tension'.32 The Athenian leader had no respite, not simply because of the ever-present threat of politically inspired lawsuits but because a leader had no official status and his standing depended on his performance week in week out in an Assembly the composition and views of which shifted from meeting to meeting; he might have personal contacts and political friendships but there was no cushioning effect provided by an organized political party which could be relied on to support a leader for a few weeks if he was off form. He could not plan in the long term with any confidence, unlike a modern prime minister, because there was no political machinery to allow him to translate a majority in the boule or Assembly this prytany into one next prytany. Even if a political leader happened, say, to be one of the ten generals, all that this would ensure him was priority of access to boule and Assembly if a majority of the other nine generals agreed;33 it did not give him any more power to secure votes; rather it laid him open to attack for any military failures. Any sign of weakness could lead his opponents to attack him in the courts.34 Some of this tension was probably, as Finley claims, inherent in the system itself. Where there is direct democracy, there must be a primary assembly of citizens, with full powers; where there is such an Assembly, the membership from meeting to meeting will shift; that would make the whipping apparatus of a modern political party inoperable: two more things making it inoperable were that most political offices in ancient democracies were awarded by lot and that boule and Assembly, not magistrates, took the major political decisions: put these together and we see that a party hierarchy (unlike modern ones) had nothing worthwhile to offer, in return for loyalty: it could not use the offer of positions of influence to bribe party members into supporting it regularly, because no such positions were in its gift; nor could it attract loyalty by publishing an attractive political manifesto, since it had no power to carry the manifesto through the Assembly, and if a majority of citizens wanted to pass certain measures, they could do so in the Assembly without joining a party. Formal and stable political parties were therefore unworkable. In such circumstances politics were bound to be fluid and the tension great.
However those specific tensions which arose from political trials and ostracisms do not seem to me to have been necessary to the system.35 The Athenians did not need to exile a man or confiscate his property

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or ostracize him in order to show that they disapproved of his policies; they did not even need to dismiss him from any office he might hold. All that they needed to do was to vote against him consistently in boule or Assembly and politically he was nothing, a man of straw. If so, to criticize the political casualty rate is to criticize not an essential part of the system, something which had to be accepted if direct democracy, with its real advantages, was to work at all. It is to criticize a pernicious and chronic excrescence. Those are strong words, and the cynic might ask whether the extra tension may not have been a good thing, something which kept politicians up to the mark, even if the innocent suffered in the process. Members of universities in Britain in the 1980s, who may see little to admire or trust in many of our own politicians, may feel that it is impossible to treat a politician with too much wariness and vigilance. But just because our own interests may drive us to this conclusion, it is all the more important to remain open to the conviction that to harry politicians with constant hazards is (like harrying academics with constant hazards) a counter-productive policy. Admittedly generalization is difficult when some people work better under the challenge of tension, others better under more relaxed conditions. But setting general psychology aside, one can point to two specific kinds of political behaviour, both detrimental to Athens and liable to appear in any political society, which would be excessively stimulated by Athenian conditions: let me call them the Nicias tendency and the Theramenes tendency. Nicias was naturally a cautious man, no doubt; and his caution gave him consistent but modest success in the field in the 420s,36 and endeared him to the demos as a safe reliable man; he was one of those in the sample of 41 who avoided any disgrace. Then came Syracuse, where Nicias was ruined by slowness and caution; he neither pressed on with the siege vigorously enough in 414,37 nor could he bring himself to take and implement a decision to call off the expedition in 413 until the Athenians were trapped in the Great Harbour and a secure escape impossible.38 It is true that no blame should be attached to Nicias personally; it is not for those of us who have not had kidney diseases to say confidently that he ought to have been capable of x or y; and in 413, he was in Sicily against his will, his resignation having been refused by the Athenian Assembly (Thuc. 7.15-16). But we can surely believe Thucydides when in 7.48 he reports that a major factor in Nicias's determination to hang on too long in Syracuse was his fear of Athenian rejection if he brought back the
army unsuccessful:

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But in addressing the council he positively refused to withdraw the army; he knew, he said, that the Athenian people would not forgive their departure if they left without an order from home. The men upon whose votes their fate would depend would not, like themselves, have seen with their own eyes the state of affairs; they would only have heard the criticisms of others, and would be convinced by any accusations which a clever speaker might bring forward. Indeed many or most of the very soldiers who were now crying out that their case was desperate would raise the opposite cry when they reached home, and would say that the generals were traitors, and had been bribed to depart; and therefore he, knowing the tempers of the Athenians, would for his own part rather take his chance and fall, if he must, alone by the hands of the enemy, than die unjustly on a dishonourable charge at the hands of the Athenians.39 (Jowett's translation)

And so he stayed, and his great army was destroyed, and the dice loaded against Athenian victory in the rest of the war. And parallels less disastrous in their outcome are not wanting: Demosthenes the general afraid to return to Athens after his defeat in Aetolia in 426 (Thuc. 3.98); Conon afraid to return to Athens after Aegospotami (Diod. 13.106.6).40 So much for the Nicias tendency. As for Theramenes, I mean him to stand for the policy of quickreturns, of safety at all costs, but a safety secured not by Nicias' caution, but by quick-wittedness, which allows you to jump upon and eliminate your opponent before he can jump upon and eliminate you. These qualities were no doubt less than the whole Theramenes: however ambiguous and controversial his character, his friends can make out a case for him as a man with some principles, a serious interest in a mixed constitution and a sincere dislike of the extremer forms of oligarchy.41 But not for nothing was he called the Slipper (6 K90opvoS, Xen. Hell. 2.3.31, 47),42 and his agility could be used ruthlessly to make scapegoats of others: the man who prosecuted his erstwhile colleague Antiphon in 411 and had him condemned to death, the man who in a tight situation so adroitly turned the tables on the generals of Arginusae, so that they were presently condemned to death,43may serve as an example of a tendency which was surely exacerbated by the insecurity of Athenian political life. (Another example of this tendency may be Demosthenes' decision to prosecute Aeschines over the Peace of Philocrates, as a way of severing his own connection with an unpopular peace.) Finally it is worth considering how many men of ability were deterred by the dangers from entering Athenian political life at all. It may seem paradoxical to talk of Athenian democracy as hindering participation when the Athenian constitution is justly celebrated as having encouraged and elicited more popular participation than any other before or since. But I am not talking about that participation which involved attending the Assembly regularly, sitting on juries, being a member

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of the boule in two years of one's life and thus, possibly, chairman of the Assembly on two days of one's life.44 I mean participation as an aspiring political leader, an adviser, a drafter of decrees, a frequent a 7TOALTEVodCLEvox. speaker in the Assembly or courts - in short a Tjrwp, Of course in all societies there have been men of potential political ability who have chosen not to enter politics. The same phenomenon at Athens need not call for a special explanation. Admittedly, too, it is hard to produce an impressive list of individuals who constituted a great loss to democratic politics: Plato (cf. Seventh Letter 324-5)? (Or was he too intellectually aristocratic to be useful in the politics of any democracy?). Isocrates? (Would he have been capable of keeping speeches in the Assembly both vigorous and to the point?). Antiphon, perhaps, of whose wisdom and ability Thucydides had a high opinion, but who chose not to speak in public (Thuc. 8.68)? Few democrats will find such a list seductive, but it is natural that a substantial list of 'deterred politicians' can hardly be constructed when our sources for Greek history are primarily sources for political history. Professor W. R. Connor, in an interesting discussion,45 has been able to detect a preoccupation with the ideal of withdrawal from politics in some of the literature of the late fifth century. The question remains open. At any rate it can be said that Athenian politics was not wanting in hazards of a potentially deterring kind. Envoi So to our last. Did the demostreat its politicians unfairly and unwisely? Reservations have been made and must be made: not all condemnations were unjust; the political life had its compensations; Athenian democracy was preferable to Corcyraean stasis. But in the end, if we are forced to stand with Plutarch or against him on this issue, we should have no hesitation. Even if he said it for the wrong reason, Plutarch said the right thing: the demos was indeed a most mischievous beaste. May Zeus preserve us from the like!

APPENDIX

Ostracism46:did it confer dishonour? In the Table (above, pp. 141-2) ostracism was ranked as a political penalty alongside such punishments for stated offences as fines, exiles,
confiscations, and death sentences. Yet it could be argued that ostracism

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belongs in a separate political category: it did not follow a trial, or imply a named offence; it did not harm either a man's citizenship or his property; all it did was to remove his person physically from Attica47 for a decade, with his rights uncompromised on return. Perhaps it should be regarded not as a political punishment of any sort, but as analogous rather to the modern process of excluding a political leader from office - or even from Parliament - for, say, five years, by not re-electing him or her in a General Election?48 The last analogy is at best a limited one, since in modern democracies politicians are not removed from their country when voted out of office; but it raises the substantial question whether ostracism was felt to be a political disaster, a misfortune comparable to legal condemnation. If I seem to labour discussion of this below, it is because it has received almost no space in modern treatments of ostracism, which have preferred to concentrate on the problems of the origins and purpose of ostracism, and because I suspect that many of us work with the presupposition that ostracism was 'an honourable banishment', a phrase perhaps more common in the lecture-room than in print, but in print in very reputable places nonetheless.49 'Honourable banishment' is, on inspection, a curious oxymoron. How could any sort of banishment bring honour in any practical political sense? Probably those scholars who have used this or similar phrases have done so as a convenient shorthand, meaning only that ostracism was relatively honourable compared with other forms of banishment. But shorthand can mislead, and certainly the resonance of the phrase underlay my own initial qualms about treating ostracism as a political penalty on all fours with the rest. Furthermore, the possibility that ostracism did confer a sort of honour is raised by some passages of Plutarch. Plutarch discusses the nature of ostracism, in very similar terms, in 4 passages (Themistocles22.3, Aristides 7, Nicias 11, Alcibiades 13.3-5, henceforth A, B, C, D). In A and B he insists that ostracism was
not a punishment for wickedness (Ko'AauLs A, ?poXlpl'as a concession to popular envy, -rapa?vO'a p9o'vov (cf. also
rTO 919dvov D), KdoAaLs

B) but

which channelled the jealousy of the people towards the great by allowing it to inflict the limited damage of a ten-year removal. In B, C, and D Plutarch discusses the ostracism of Hyperbolus, seeing the institution as itself treated with contumely B, C) and (Ka9vfLptaLuvov to a man not trampled upon (-po-ErAaKLUcazvovB) by its application worthy of the institution (rrp C). In C and D Plutarch avc6LOv Nglv9pwoTov in three lines from Plato quotes support Comicusso (potentially valuable C he and in applies the proverb 'When contemporary evidence), there is civil dissension, even the utter villain obtains honour' ('Ev S8

rapa?uvLodV?'Evot

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in such a way as to imply that KaL 0 SLXoram'cL7 d7T7LyKaK0o 'E/L/OpE 7rL1tSq) Hyperbolus obtained honour by his ostracism. The last part of C (Nicias 11.5-6) is worth quoting (notice that Plutarch here refines upon his statements about KodAaLsa in A and B):
7T) ~ ~ Kat 7apaVUTKa CV v180ovV TOUTOKGL C7Jwa TapaxEv, E7yavaKTov U-UTEpOV WC9 Ka9gvgptLtLE'vov OT7rpOiy/a 7pOS aVi9pWmOVcVcLOV yEOVEvaL VO[IuIOVTES~, EvatL "TOUTO O Ov yCp TL Kat KoAauEW awwta, t AAov S fyOV/1EVOL OUVKVS8L, 8 KdoAaUtv TOtV OUtTpaKLra KaL 'ApLt9 TE1S Ka TOl i Ka rr7po7Trro7autw El Std aaovcasg, otlOlS, 'Y7rEpdfl'Ap 7reT/Iv 7TO KaL 17ATWV 0 70 /Lox879pIav ETaS9E Ta Ta TOL pa'prot0L, KWtLLKOS pELp'KE 7TEpL rcv 7rrpoTpWV5' ytLeta, TE~npaxE L aVTO6 S eKaL T6JV vaT ta" Ovyap TOLOUTWV9TTtLY/doWV ELVEICEvpEI97l.
KatoL

And at the time this [the ostracismof the villain Hyperbolus]pleasedand amused the people,but laterthey wereindignant,thinkingthatthe institutionhad been treated with contumelyby its application to anunworthyman;for therewasa dignityconferred even by punishment,they thought, or ratherthey believed that ostracismcut down to size Thucydides and Aristidesand the like, but was an honour and an excuse for boastingto Hyperbolus,if becauseof his villainyhe sufferedthe samefate as the best men - as, I suppose, Plato the comic poet has also said abouthim: And yet he suffereda fate worthyof the men of old, But better than he and his marksas a brandedculprit deserved: For ostracismwas not devised for the likes of him!

Whatever the correct reading in the first line of the quotation from Plato Comicus, lines two and three leave the general sense beyond doubt. Ostracismis a fate too good for Hyperbolus. Yet this hardly implies that ostracismwas honourableas such.In Tudor Englandand Stuart Britain, when beheadingwas reservedfor men of rankjudged guilty of greatoffences againstthe state, while commoncriminalswere hanged by a rope, might one not similarly have observed of one of the latterthat the axe was an honourto such an one, without implying that beheading was anything other than a disaster for the person beheaded? Common sense indeed suggests that ostracismmust normallyhave been dishonourable as such. In a society which valued success, no politicalleadercan have wantedto be excludedfromAthenianpolitical life for ten years. Yet modern scholars have been remarkablychary of assertingthat ostracismbrought dishonour.52 Part of the problem is that there is so little fifth- and early fourth-centuryevidence on how it was regarded. Ostracism is mentioned only once (without political comment) in Herodotus (8.79.1), twice (very briefly) in Thucydides (1.135.3, 8.73.3), and it gives rise to only one joke (not informative for our purposes) in the extant plays of Aristophanes
(Knights 855). Eight out of the ten Attic Orators never mention it

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155

(presumably because it was of antiquarian interest only when they were writing). Of the two orators in the corpus of the Ten who do mention it, one is the author of Andocides 4, Against Alcibiades. He treats ostracism
(avtLapopJ, as an argument fact that two of Alcibiades' relatives had been ostracized for ostracizing Alcibiades as a man still more lawless than they and he says that Cimon had (rrapavotx~'raroL though they were, 34), been ostracized for rrapavoti'a (his relationship with his sister, 33). But the value of this as evidence is severely undermined by the spurious53 features of Andocides 4 which professes to be a speech delivered in advance of an ostracism in spite of the fact that speeches were not permitted at ostracisms (a fact which the author, absurdly, more or less admits, 3), and which attacks the legislator who introduced ostracism (ibid.), in a manner uncharacteristic of genuinely delivered speeches, which generally show great defence to Athenian laws and institutions. If the speech is a literary exercise, we have no guarantee that it belongs early enough to be reliable as evidence of attitudes to ostracism. No such doubt attaches to the other oratorical passage, Lysias 14.39-40. The speaker is attacking the younger Alcibiades by blackening the character of his famous father:
So, if any of you pities those who died in the sea-battle, or feels shame on behalf of those who were enslaved by the enemy, or indignant because the walls have been demolished, or hates the Spartans, or is angry with the Thirty, he should consider the defendant's father responsible, and reflect that your ancestors twice ostracized both Alcibiades his great-grandfather and Megacles his father's maternal grandfather, and that the older ones among you condemned his father to death, so that you should
consider him to be the hereditary enemy

as a punishment

(tLEpwpl'a,

4) and a disaster

2), he uses the

condemn him, treating neither pity nor pardon nor any favour as more important than the laws laid down and the oaths which you have sworn.

(7raptLK1V

XE9plv) of the city and should

Here the speaker uses ostracism side by side with a death penalty as something which should make the jury think ill of these men, and even of their descendants. This is our best, but also our only, direct evidence that ostracism brought discredit on the ostracized. There are however two further indirect pieces of evidence which seem to me extremely strong: (1) Ancient commentators - that is Aristotle (Politics 1284a, 1302b 15-21), the author of the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. 22.3-4, 6, Androtion (F. Gr. Hist. 324F6), Philochorus (F. Gr. Hist. 328F30), Diodorus 11.55.1-3 (and so perhaps Ephorus), and Plutarch (Themistocles 22.3,
Aristides 7.2)an overweening all believed that ostracism was a device to prevent stateman from endangering the constitution and per-

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haps setting himself up as tyrant.54 Now Thucydides encourages us to believe that this was the fifth-century view also, for at 8.73.3 he finds it necessary to comment that Hyperbolus was ostracized o' SL&a as if men were normally ostracized because their power and reputation', LwdLaaOTOS was feared. But to seek to make oneself a tyrant was not an admirable thing, in the eyes of respectable men, democrats or oligarchs alike. It seems to follow that ostracism would inflict a stigma. (2) Finally there is the evidence of the ostraca themselves. Admittedly, the vast majority of the ones discovered carry no more than the name and patronymic or deme of the man whom the voter wished to ostracize. But when descriptive epithets are added, they are not complimentary,
including such terms
KaL SvvOdk4EwE (po'flov, 'not on account of fear of his power

6 Mi~8os (the Mede), and perhaps in one instance a plea for r'LLS (vengeance).58 Admittedly again any picture of the evidence of the ostraca has to remain provisional while the vast bulk of the 9,000 or so ostraca from the Kerameikos await final publication.57 But as things
stand, the evidence of extant ostraca and of the Lysias passage, together

as 7rpo087lq (traitor),

JAdELT'p(accursed),55

with the implications of Thucydides, should convince us that ostracism had dishonourable connotations and that it is fitly regarded as a political
penalty along with sentences imposed by the courts or the assembly.

APPENDIX

II

Evidencefor the Table on pp. 141-2

The numbers refer to those of the politicians in the Table. Fuller references may be found in Kirchner, op. cit.
1. Hdt. 6.136, cf. Hansen Eisangelia 69.

2. Ostracism, Hdt. 8.79, [Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 22.7, Plut., Arist. 7; a real fine may lie behind the not very plausible anecdote in Plut.,
Arist. 4; exile after fine attested, doubtfully, only by Plutarch, Arist. 26

(= Craterus F. Gr. Hist. 342 F 12). 3. Ostracism, Thuc. 1.135, Plut., Them. 22; voluntary exile, Thuc.
1.136, Plut., Them. 23-4, confirmed by sentence of exile Thuc. 1.138.6,

Plato Gorgias 516D, schol. Aristoph. Knights 84, Nepos, Them. 8.2; confiscationPlut., Them. 25.3 (from Theopompus (F. Gr. Hist. 115 F86) and Theophrastus) with the notes ofF. J. Frost Plutarch's Themistocles: A Historical Commentary (Princeton, 1980), Aelian, V.H. 10.17
(=Critias, Diels-Kranz F. d. Vorsokr. 88 B45), cf. Thuc. 1.137.3. Hansen, op. cit. 70, infers death sentence from Thuc. 1.138.6.

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157

4. Plut., Cimon 17.2, Per. 9.4. 5. Ostracism, Plut., Per. 14.2, 16.3, Anon. Vita Thuc. 7; ?fine c. 443, Anon., Vita Thuc. 7, also schol. Aristoph. Wasps 947 if sequence correct; fine or more serious penalty c. 425, Aristoph. Acharn. 703
(esp.

confiscation schol. Aristoph. Wasps 947 (= Idomeneus F. Gr. Hist. 338 Fl) probably mistaken owing to confusion with Themistocles. 6. Thuc. 2.65.3, Plato, Gorgias516A, Plut., Per. 32.2, 35.4, Diodorus 12.45. cf. Hansen, op. cit. 71. 8. Thuc. 5.26.5; Marcellinus, Vita Thuc. 23-6, 46. Hansen, op. cit. 74, infers death sentence. 9. Aristoph., Acharnians 6 with schol., cf. schol. Knights 226 and n. 22 below. 12. Thuc. 8.73.3, with Andrewes' notes on dating, Plut., Nicias 11, Alcib. 13, Arist. 7, Theopompus F. Gr. Hist. 115 F96. 13. Events of 415, Thuc. 6.61, Plut., Alcib. 22, Meiggs and Lewis, Greek Historical Inscriptions 79, cf. Thuc. 8.81, 97, Plut., Alcib. 26-7; Hansen, op. cit. 76. Events of 407, Xen., Hell. 1.4.10-20, 5.16-17, Plut., Alcib. 32-3, 36, Nepos, Alcib. 7, Justin 5.5. 14. Thuc. 8.68.2, Lysias 12.67, [Plut.,] 10 orators 833a, e-834b, and cf. n. 16 below. Hansen, op. cit. 113. 15. Voluntary exile, Thuc. 8.98; confiscation, Lysias 7.4; sentence of death or exile extremely likely to have accompanied confiscation after Peisander's flight to the enemy, cf. Lycurgus, Leocrates 121 with A. G. Woodhead AJPh 75 (1954), 145. 17. Lysias 30.10-13, 13.12, Xen., Hell. 1.7.35. Hansen, op. cit. 96. 18. Xen., Hell. 2.3.15, 36; Ar., Rhet. 1.15.1375b 32. 19. Voluntary exile in 415, Andoc. 1.71, 2.10; confirmed by vote of assembly c. 410 (occasion of Andoc. 2), Lysias 6.29; voluntary exile in 392/1 Philochorus F. Gr. Hist. 328 F149, followed by sentences of either exile (loc. cit.) or death, Demosth. 19.276ff. at trial in absence, cf. [Plut.,] 10 Orators 835A; ? confiscation c. 415, Andoc. 1.144, 147 with Davies, Athenian Propertied Families 31. Hansen, op. cit. 87. 20. Aeschines 3.195 with schol. (fine of 1 drachma only!), [Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 40.2, with P. J. Rhodes's note, [Plut.,] 10 Orators 835 F. 23. Xen., Anab. 5.3.7, 3.1.5; Paus. 5.6.4; Diog. Laert. 2.51. 24. Voluntary exile, Hyperides, Euxenippus 1-2; Demosth. 50.48 speaks as if exile had been confirmedby vote and refers to death sentence as passed twice; for C.'s return and execution, see Lycurgus, Leocrates 93. Hansen op. cit. 94. 27. Isoc. 15.129, Dinarchus 1.14, Nepos, Tim. 3.5. Hansen op. cit. 101.
28. Fine attested only in schol. to Aeschines 1.64, to which

foAaE'uaL, 704) with schol., cf. Wasps 947 with schol.:? exile and

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'SO MISCHIEVOUS

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Hyperides, Euxenippus 28 is to be preferred if both refer to same trial. The scholium to Aeschines is probably corrupt here if rrapavdwCov is intended (as normally) to apply to a conviction under ypap997 since that charge would not have been appropriate to the rrapavdotwv, offence of embezzlement, and Aeschines 3.139, written after Aristophon's death, implies that he had never been convicted under ypaw(p? pace Hansen, op. cit. first below n. 11., p. 31. rrapavdwtwv, 29. Exile, Plut., Moralia 605C;fine on failing to obtain fifth share of votes in prosecution Demosth. 24.7; further fine may lurk in the confusingly reported legal decisions and payments in Demosth. 24.9ff., 11ff., 82ff., 115ff., 117. 30. Demosth. 45.6, 59.4-8. 33. Arrian, Anabasis 1.10.4-6 with A. B. Bosworth's notes ad loc. (Oxford, 1980), [Dem.,] Epistle 3.31, Justin 11.4.11 as against Dinarchus 1.32. The assembly presumably voted to acquiesce in Charidemus's extradition but did so under Macedonian pressure. 34. Plut., Dem. 24, [Plut.,] 10 Orators 840C. 36. Fine for not following up prosecution Aesch. 2.93 (cf. 3.51) with schol. (not denied by Demosth.); fine in Harpalus affair and resulting exile, Plut., Demosth. 26, [Plut.,] 10 Orators 846C; voluntary exile under Macedonian pressure followed closely by Assembly passing sentence of death, Plut., Demosth. 28 or exile, Nepos, Phocion 2.2, [Plut.,] 10 Orators 846 E-F. 37. Fine weakly attested only in Aelian, V.H. 13.24, but cf. [Plut.,] Moralia 842 A for different version of incident, and 842 F for statement that Lycurgus was acquitted in all cases brought against him. 38. Plut., Demosth. 28, Phoc. 26, [Plut.,] 10 Orators 849A-B, Suda s.v. Antipater b. 39. Fine of 5 talents, [Demosth.] 25.67 and hypoth 768.2, Dinarchus 2.12-13; fine of 1,000 drachmae [Demosth.] 25 hypoth 768.2. Hansen, Apagoge (Odense, 1976), p. 141. 40. Dinarchus 2.15, 1.104, Plut., Phocion 26, Diodorus 18.18. Hansen, op. cit. first below n. 11, p. 41. 41. Diodorus 18.65.4-67, Nepos, Phocion 3-4, Plut., Phocion 33-36. Voluntary exile followed by sentence of confiscation (Diod., Nepos) and either exile (Diodorus) or death (Nepos), followed by final death sentence in tumultuous assembly (Diodorus, Nepos) including noncitizens (Plutarch).
NOTES 1. I have benefited from the comments of colleagues and students in the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and St. Andrews, who heard in 1978 and 1980 the lecture from which this paper originated. I am particularly grateful to Professor D. M. MacDowell for subsequent encouragement and advice.

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'SO MISCHIEVOUS A BEASTE'? 159 2. (London, 1579). On North's and Amyot's translations of Plutarch see D. A. Russell, Plutarch (London, 1973), pp. 150ff. LS, KaL' 3. TrL XS~ L 89p' ito( a &1(qLq; XaAE7T&L)aTOL 'PEL9yPLoLAaVKL 8paKovrLKaL 4. i-o fl a, the speakers' platform. i 'contests', where Plutarch is no doubt thinking of political litigation. (North was translating Amyot's French version of 1559 which has here 'les peines et travaux'.) 6. Among other passages cf. Themistocles 18.3, 22.1, Aristides 7.1-2, 26.3, Cimon 15.1-2, Pericles 15, 33.5, 34.3, 37.2, Nicias 6.1-2, 22.2-3, Alcibiades 13.3, 35-6, 38.1-2. N.B. Here and subsequently I cite subsections in Plutarch's Lives according to the Loeb, not the Teubner, edition. 7. Classic sympathetic treatments are those of A. W. Gomme, History, N.S. 36 (1951), 12ff., esp. 25ff. (=More Essays in Greek History and Literature, pp. 177ff., esp. pp. 189ff.) and A. H. M. Jones, Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1957), Ch. 3. W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy (London, 1966), Chs. 1 and 10, and G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (London, 1972) are conspicuously inclined to rebut criticisms of Athenian democracy; cf. also J. T. Roberts, Accountability in Athenian Government(Wisconsin, 1982) for a broadly sympathetic treatment of Athenian severity to officials. For a more critical view v. M. H. Hansen, Eisangelia (Odense, 1975), esp. pp. 11, 58-65. 8. A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford, 1944), i.59ff., henceforth referred to as H.C.T. 9. Cf. Forrest, op. cit., pp. 12-16. 10. YCS 24 (1975), Studies in the Greek Historians, 51-2. 11. In this section I give only minimal references where the events are well attested. Fuller ones may be found in I. Kirchner, ProsopographiaAttica (Berlin, 1901). In the case of propertied individuals see also J. K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families (Oxford, 1971). J. H. Hansen has useful lists of cases (with citation of sources and discussion) of those accused by ypaTcp 7rapavdtowvin The Sovereignty of the People's Court in Athens in the Fourth Century B.C. and the Public Action Against Unconstitutional Proposals (Odense, 1974), pp. 28-43, and of those accused by ElaayyEAla in Eisangelia, pp. 69-120. Many cases including officials are studied also in Roberts, op. cit. supra, n. 7. 12. Some trials there were (Lysias 25.25-6), and some of those who served in the army under the Four Hundred suffered partial d'Ir-lta (Andoc. 1.75-6, cf. Aristoph., Frogs 686-705). But such evidence as we have suggests limited and legal reprisals only. Cf. also n. 16. 13. As renumbered in Bartoletti's Teubner edition (1959). 14. He was fined only a drachma, according to schol. Aeschines 3.195. 15. Philocrates was condemned to death in absentia, Aeschines 2.6, cf. Hansen, Eisangelia, p. 102; Timarchus was disfranchised, Demosth. 19.257, 284, Hypotheses to Aesch. 1 and 2. For the fates of the other four, see Appendix 2.34, 36, 38, 40. 16. Arguably Antiphon should be excluded from the six active in democratic politics, since he avoided speaking in public (Thuc. 8.68) and his principal attested political activity was to scheme for democracy's overthrow, not to work with it. Moreover, he was condemned under the Five Thousand, not under full democracy (pace Thuc. 8.68.2, on which see Andrewes' note in H.C. T. The prescript of the document quoted in [Plutarch,] Lives of the Ten Orators 833D-E shows, if genuine, that Antiphon was indicted before full democracy was restored; and the movements of Theramenes abroad (Diod. 13.47, 49, Xen., Hell. 1.1.12) would have made it impossible for him to be an accuser at the trial (as he was, Lysias 12.67), had it been postponed until the first weeks of full democracy in summer 410 (cf. Hansen, Eisangelia, pp. 113-15). It is disputed how closely the regime of the Five Thousand resembled full democracy (see G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Historia 5 (1956), 1-23; contra P. J. Rhodes, JHS 92 (1972), 115-27, Andrewes H.C. T., v.323ff.). If Antiphon is excluded from our tally, the casualty rate among active politicians among the Ten Orators under the democracy becomes four out of five. 17. Even for generals our information is severely limited. Hansen (op. cit., pp. 60ff.) has calculated that we know of 160 generals covering some 300 of the 770 generalships of the period 432-355; of the 160, 33 were impeached by eisangelia (and more may have fallen victim to other processes).
E'iTyXavE Ka-aiv Kat dycwvas. North's translation does not bring out the full force of the manuscripts' reading dydjvas 5. E ... 7rpoEtLJS r& T-v KaKa, 9do'ol9 7TOAL-El'aV
99d'voVS

KaLt tafoA

KaL

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18. For discussion of the terminology see Hansen, op. cit. first sup. n. 11. pp. 22ff., W. R. Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth Century Athens (Princeton, 1971), pp. 116ff. 19. Only his generalship in 441/0 is undisputed. Sophocles' political life is discussed by H. D. Westlake, Hermes 84 (1956), 110ff., L. Woodbury, Phoenix 24 (1970), 209ff., M. H. Jameson, Historia 20 (1971), 541ff., H. C. Avery, Historia 22 (1973), 510ff. 20. Confiscation of property was normal for those sentenced to exile, according to Schol. Aristoph. Wasps 947; for its accompaniment to (at least some) death sentences see A. R. W. Harrison, The Law of Athens (Oxford, 1971), ii.178, n. 3. 21. Among the 41, I have noticed it explicitly attested as a separate penalty only in 3 cases: Antiphon, [Plut.,] Ten Orators 834A; Aristogiton [Dem.] 25.42; Demades, Plut., Phocion 26. For the complexities of atimia see D. M. MacDowell, The Law in Classical Athens (London, 1978), pp. 73-5, with further references. 22. The scholiast ad loc. first glosses the incident as a fine of five talents, but his fuller explanation, that Cleon was forced to disgorge a bribe, leaves it unclear whether any formal penalty was in question. Some scholars have even argued that Aristophanes is alluding to a scene in a recently produced comedy, rather than to a real life political reverse suffered by Cleon (see most recently D. M. MacDowell, G & R 30 (1983), 145, n. 13). 23. Well put by Hansen, Eisangelia, p. 65, on the number of generals found guilty in ElaayyEAlaL. 24. F. G. Hist. 338 F10 = Plut., Demosth. 15.3, cf. [Plut.,] Ten Orators 840C. Pace Plutarch, the circumspection of both orators in 330 in referring to the case in 343 does not indicate that the latter never came to trial: Aeschines preferred not to remind the jury that he had stood trial once for treasonable conduct; Demosthenes preferred not to remind them that he had failed to win that case against Aeschines. 25. Thuc. 3.86, 88, 90, 99, 103, 115, 4.1, 3-5, 8, 13ff., 24-5, 46-8, 58-65, cf. H. D. Westlake, Historia 9 (1960), 385ff. (= Essays on the Greek Historians and Greek History (Manchester, 1969) pp. 101ff.). J. T. Roberts (op. cit. sup., n. 7), pp. 115-17, 127-8 argues that the generals may have been culpably responsible for their own delay in reaching Sicily, but even if this were so (which is unclear), it would not have justified their conviction on the charge which Thucydides gives. 26. Cf. Gomme, H.C.T., iii.584-8, still the fairest analysis. For more sceptical treatments of Thucydides' objectivity on the Amphipolis episode see H. D. Westlake, Hermes 90 (1962), 276ff. = Essays (op. cit. sup., n. 25), pp. 123ff., J. T. Roberts, op. cit., pp. 128ff. 27. Cf. J. K. Davies, op. cit. sup., n. 11, pp. 133-5, 518-19, on the contrasting incomes of Demosthenes and Hyperides derived from these channels. 28. Cf. the ideals of Pericles' Faneral Speech in Thuc. 2.35ff., esp. 40.2, and also 2.60.5-7. 29. See on the whole subject A. W. Lintott, Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City (London, 1982). 30. W. G. Forrest, op. cit. sup., n. 7, pp. 21-36 convincingly demonstrates the implausibility of simple equations of the demos with any particular social or regional section of the citizen population of Attica. 31. Past and Present 21 (1962), 3-24 = Studies in Ancient Society (London, 1974), pp. 1-25. 32. Op. cit. 15. 33. On generals' rights of access to boule and Assembly see P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), pp. 43-6. 34. It is worth remembering that the cases resulting in the convictions in the Table were the tip of the iceberg where our 41 politicians are concerned. Their arraignments were not confined to cases in which they were condemned. An extreme case is that of Aristophon (n. 28), represented only by a debatable fine in the Table, but, according to Aeschines 3.195, prosecuted 75 times by ypaqg) (on average about once a year, since he lived to be 100, see Appendix 7rapavdo'lwv 2.28; though pace Aeschiries, it is to be suspected that Aristophon was boasting, and that some of the cases never came to court). Cf. also Lycurgus, prosecuted many times, though never convicted ([Plut.,] Ten Orators 842F). Cephalus, never prosecuted under ypal rr7apavdowv (Aeschines, loc. cit.) was clearly exceptional cf. Hansen, op. cit. first sup., n. 11, pp. 25-6. 35. Pace Finley, op. cit. 15. 36. At Minoa in 427 (Thuc. 3.51); Tanagra 426 (3.91); in the Corinthiad and at Methone in 425 (4.42-5); Cythera 424 (4.53-6); Mende 423 (4.129-30).

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161

37. Cf. esp. his failure to complete the wall of investment in time to stop Gylippus from getting in and checkmating it with the third cross-wall (Thuc. 7.1-6, cf. also 42). 38. More specifically he acquiesced in it in time (Thuc. 7.50.3), though after prolonged resistance to it (7.48-9), but insisted on further (calamitous) delay after the eclipse of the moon (7.50). 39. Plutarch also, while regarding Nicias as cautious by nature (Nicias 2.3-4), saw his caution as exacerbated by fear of the demos, ibid. 6.1-2, cf. also 4 (with quotations from comedy), 14.2-4, 16.8, 21.4, 22.3, Comparisonof Nicias and Crassus 5.2, Aristoph., Birds 640, Thuc. 5.16.1. 40. Cf. Justin 5.6.10. Isocrates (5.62), less plausibly, attributes his failure to return to shame. 41. Provided that one is prepared to take seriously Theramenes' professions at Xen., Hell. 2.3.48, cf. 2.3.15-22, 35-49, [Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 28.5, 34.3 (with Rhodes's notes ad loc.); see Andrewes H.C. T., v.298-300 for the interesting suggestion that Thucydides' less favourable judgement at 8.89.2-3 did not represent his final opinion. 42. Cf. for his agility Aristoph., Frogs 534-41, 967-70; see Lysias 12.62-78 for a more sinister interpretation of his cleverness. 43. Xen., Hell. 1.7.4, 8, 2.3.32, 35, Diod. 13.101. Andrewes in Phoenix 28 (1974) argues persuasively that he acted in part in self-defence in 406. 44. The argument (for which see Rhodes ad loc.) that the language of Ath. Pol. 44.1, taken with 44.3, shows that a man could be only once in his life, not once arardrq TWv 7rrpvTrvEwv in each of the two years in which he might serve on the boule, seems less than conclusive. 45. Op. cit. sup., n. 18, pp. 175-94. Notice Connor's amusing if unverifiable suggestion (p. 189 n. 80) that Theagenes of Acharnae (Kirchner, op. cit. 6703) who named his son Idiotes ('private citizen') may have been 'an embittered politician turning his back on public life'. 46. The most useful ancient accounts of ostracism are [Ar.,] Ath. Pol. 22, 43.5, Plutarch, Aristides 7, Androtion F. Gr. Hist. 324 F5, and Philochorus F. Gr. Hist. 328 F30. For modern discussion and bibliography see Meiggs and Lewis, A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions (Oxford, 1969), pp. 40-47; R. Thomsen The Origins of Ostracism(Copenhagen, 1972); E. Vanderpool in University of Cincinnati Classical Studies, Lectures in Memory of L. T. Semple II (Cincinnati, 1973), 215-70; P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981), pp. 267-71. 47. The exact territorial limits prescribed for the ostracized are uncertain (see Rhodes, op. cit., p. 282) but eviction from Attica was certainly included. 48. A suggestion made by a student when this paper was read in Edinburgh. 49. Gomme, H.C. T. i.437, Vanderpool, op. cit., 215 'an honourable exile'. 50. F.187 = Kock, Com. Graec. Fr. (Leipzig, 1880), i.654. 51. Kock's emendation of rpdOrwv (itself a correction in the manuscripts). 52. Exceptionally Mrs. J. T. Roberts, op. cit. sup., n. 7., p. 143 calls it 'a severe sentence' and 'a serious penalty'. 53. On the status of [Andocides] 4 see A. E. Raubitschek, TAPhA 79 (1948), 191ff., A. R. Burn, CQ N.S. 4 (1954), 138ff., K. J. Dover, Lysias and the Corpus Lysiacum (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 191-2. 54. Even if J. J. Keaney is correct (Historia 19 (1970), 1-11) in arguing for two separate ancient theories of ostracism, one concerned with tyranny, the other with more general undemocratic inequality, on either theory ostracism is designed to prevent something undesirable and discreditable. 55. Meiggs and Lewis, op. cit., p. 42. 56. Vanderpool, op. cit., p. 223. 57. Some advance consideration of these is contained in Thomsen and Vanderpool (both op. cit., n. 46) and most recently D. M. Lewis's additional chapter in A. R. Burn, Persia and the Greeks (2nd ed. London, 1984).

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