[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
In the introduction to A Cultural History of Democracy in Antiquity, Paul Cartledge and Carol Atack quickly establish that there’s more at stake in adopting a cultural approach to ancient democracy than effective marketing. Starting from the familiar disclaimer that we must be careful not to equate modern democracy with ancient dēmokratia, they set aside the typical and misleading contrast between “representative” and “direct” democratic models, arguing that we must think beyond formal political institutions to appreciate the difference. We must, they assert, recognize that the difference is “a matter of culture” (p. 3). The editors never work out the rich ambiguity of this formulation, and perhaps it is impossible to do so, but the ten essays that follow make evident the promise of this reorientation. These chapters are serious, stimulating, and of consistently high quality, and each contributes in some way to our historical understanding of early democratic practice and society in the ancient Mediterranean. As a collection, they effectively demonstrate the plurality of approaches that currently fall under the umbrella of “cultural history,” and most of the contributions show a laudable self-awareness of the evidentiary and methodological obstacles that make studying the ancient experience of democratic association at once so challenging and so rewarding.
This volume’s accomplishments are all the more impressive given the demands placed on it by the larger, six-volume A Cultural History of Democracy, published by Bloomsbury Academic, for which it serves as the initial offering. The motivating vision for this set, as described by the general editor, is to provide scholarship that advances the values of equality, empowerment, and accessibility. This vision shapes the specific contours of the volume in question in two substantive ways. First, in attempting to resist the parochialism that has long constrained the western study of democracy, it adopts a wider temporal, geographical, and thematic scope than one might traditionally expect. The result is a substantive horizon that extends far beyond Athens to include both democratic and proto-democratic societies around the eastern Mediterranean ranging from the Late Bronze Age to the late Roman Empire. Second, in an attempt to create a sense of continuity and provoke conversation between the six volumes, each is organized around the same ten thematic headings that serve as chapter titles. Many of these—such as “sovereignty,” “ethnicity, race, and nationalism,” and “international relations” —draw on distinctively post-antique vocabularies developed by jurists, political theorists, and social scientists to address the needs of nation-states, global empires, and post-colonial societies.
Both of these directives, though admirable in principle, prove to be sources of tension for a volume that seeks to study the cultural history of ancient democracy. The first asks each study to amalgamate the practices and beliefs of diverse cultures, some of which are only tenuously democratic, and establishes an impossibly large horizon for such a slim volume. The second demands that many of the contributors write a historical study of notions foreign to the cultures in question. These challenges understandably distract from the aims of the volume at various points; they do not, however, undermine its ability to achieve them in a meaningful way.
Classical Athens remains the undeniable focus of most of the studies, and so it must if democratic culture is to be presented in anything like its “thick” form. The Roman Republic places a distant second, though typically with a note of hesitation in calling its culture “democratic.” Several chapters manage to reach even further, making good on the opportunity provided by the volume’s expansive scope. Benjamin Gray’s “Beyond the Classical Polis,” for instance, surveys the evidence among Hellenistic poleis for various “experiments in expanding citizenship” that might act as intermediate alternatives to the models of Athenian exclusivity and Roman inclusivity. Discussing a range of cases, many of which come from Asia Minor, he demonstrates the diversity of approaches that ancient democracies took to the question of how to balance civic openness, solidarity, and trust. Atack and Cartledge, in their joint chapter on “International Relations,” also cast a wide net, complementing their account of Athenian imperialism with more inclusive discussions of proxenia, bi-lateral treaties, panhellenic games and festivals, and the relationship between democracy and migration. Other studies use extra-Athenian evidence in a more supplementary way, though often to great effect. Valentina Arena’s chapter on “Liberty and the Rule of Law” is of particular note. Her study begins with a Hurrian poem written in the wake of the destruction of Ebla (the “Song of Liberation,” c. 1400 BCE) to suggest that two moves strongly associated with archaic Athenian thought—the opposition of political liberty to the condition of the slave and the analogical extension of this binary to the city as a whole—can be found long before the poetry of Solon outside of Athens.
The problem of cross-cultural translation poses a more fundamental difficulty, though it is not a problem that all face equally. The concern doesn’t arise in Atack’s chapter on “Citizenship and Gender,” for instance, where the thematic concepts serve Atack as a meaningful guide for interrogating both the complex status of women in the democratic polis and the ways in which ancient democracies policed masculinity. Atack and Cartledge’s chapter on “International Relations” proceeds in similar fashion, omitting any reservations about using this term to describe the diplomatic and ritual practices that occurred between city-states. Arena, for her part, adds something of a twist to this approach. Accepting without comment the use of “liberty” as a conceptual heading, her discussion destabilizes the sense that there was any one ancient concept to be associated with the term, or that it might be thought of as a distinctly “political” concept, by focusing on the way that it was variously embodied in the cults of Zeus Eleutherios, Jupiter Libertas, Dionysus Lyaeus, and Liber.
For most of the volume’s studies, however, the problem of cross-cultural translation requires more direct confrontation. Several authors meet this challenge by simply noting the incongruence between respective vocabularies and adjusting the terms of their study accordingly. In “Democratic Crises, Revolutions, and Civil Resistance,” Paul Cartledge sidelines the modern concept of “revolution” and proceeds to offer an illuminating discussion of the far more historically relevant, though certainly not equivalent, idea of stasis. Emily Mackil, in her chapter on “Economic and Social Democracy,” begins by drawing a clear distinction between ancient democratic practices of redistribution and those of modern “social democracy.” The latter, she notes, are guided by a principled commitment to rectifying inequalities and upholding human rights, while the former sought the more pragmatic end of continued popular rule. Once established, this distinction clears space for Mackil to provide a synopsis of what we might call the political economy of ancient democracy, detailing the ways in which the resources of elites and imperial dependents were used to enable and reinforce the capacity of the dēmos to govern. Georgia Petridou adopts a comparable approach in her chapter, “Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation.” In noting that modern understandings of “religion” and its appropriate relationship to state power were foreign to ancient Greek democracy, she demonstrates that the contrast may nevertheless be useful for its ability to throw the politically embedded nature of ancient practices and beliefs related to the divine into sharp relief. Her subsequent study serves at once to demonstrate the various facets of the reciprocal relationship between democratic politics and Greek “religion” and to qualify the idea (considered in Atack’s chapter on “Citizenship and Gender”) that the latter might be construed as a social sphere distinct from more formal “political” settings in which members of a polis might associate on a more egalitarian basis.
Other studies choose to embrace the conceptual friction provided by inter-cultural translation and to make it a central part of their argument. Andrew Monson and Atack, for instance, take up the familiar question of whether we can find the concept of “sovereignty” in ancient democratic discussions of legitimate political authority. They conclude that we cannot. Far from seeing this as a critical limitation of ancient political thought, however, they suggest that it might serve to help us better understand the pitfalls of thinking about modern democratic authority in terms of “sovereignty” as well. Denise Eileen McCoskey takes the opposite tack in “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism.” She argues that the category of “race,” though not itself found in ancient thought, helps us to identify certain strategies used by the Athenian democracy to exclude and subjugate peoples based on the naturalization of various contingent identity categories. Drawing on Malcolm X and Michel Foucault, she finds the modern category useful in understanding Athenian practices related to slavery and the exclusion of metics from certain political spaces. Dhananjay Jagannathan, in “The Common Good,” also argues for the utility of using modern theory as a starting point for interpreting ancient political culture. He argues that John Rawls’s theory of the common good as non-instrumental sociality can facilitate understanding of what popular democratic orators meant by koinon agathon, koinon sumpheron, and to koinon, as well as how this democratic notion was appropriated by philosophers who favored other forms of rule, namely, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.
In the face of such a diverse set of essays, it is tempting to attribute the radical openness of Cartledge and Arack’s introduction to the exigencies of editorship. Yet there is more to it than this. Culture is a fundamentally ambiguous concept. It can be used to describe what is commonplace and quotidian among a particular social group or that which is extraordinary within the realm of aesthetic achievement—“the best which has been thought and said,” in Matthew Arnold’s often quoted formulation. It can be used to refer to something static and essentializable—a core set of beliefs and practices—or as a space of meaningful contestation and disagreement. It can be approached as a realm of symbolic representations, of relationships with the material environment, of shared institutions, of overlapping identities. Any attempt to offer a clean definition of “culture” is bound to feel reductive, and any attempt to use such a definition to anchor the study of cultural history will seem to place artificial limitations on it. In a set of volumes devised in part to promote inclusive scholarship, there seems to be very credible intellectual reasons for Cartledge and Atack to let their authors demonstrate the range of meanings that “culture” might bear rather than try, and fail, to define it for them.
This light touch nevertheless comes at some cost. The absolute inclusiveness of the editors’ introductory characterizations is dizzying for anyone trying to pin down what exactly the cultural history of democracy is—and, perhaps more to the point, what it is not—as a historiographical mode. The task of the volume, as the editors describe it, is to explore “the experience of living in democratic or proto-democratic communities in antiquity, from the early societies of the Middle East to the developed governmental structures of the Roman world, and of participation in democratic elements of societies with mixed forms of government, as well as limits to participation, exclusion of non-citizens, and negotiation of relationships beyond the democratic city” (p. 1). If the initial focus on “experience” does not exclude the use of external analytical and even anachronistic categories to focalize the studies in question, it can be hard to see what falls outside this substantive purview. How is it that “cultural history”, so defined, does not encompass all traditional philosophical, historical, and textual approaches or accounts? To put it more pointedly, we might ask, what work is “cultural” actually doing as a modifier here? Has “cultural history” become so inclusive as to simply become “history”? The editors were perhaps wise to leave these questions open for the readers to puzzle through themselves. Nevertheless, it is hard not to sense a missed opportunity to characterize the identity and promise of the cultural turn in ancient history in an impactful way.
Authors and Titles
Carol Atack and Paul Cartledge – “Introduction”
Andrew Monson and Carol Atack – “Sovereignty”
Valentina Arena – “Liberty and the Rule of Law”
Dhananjay Jagannathan – “The Common Good”
Emily Mackil – “Economic and Social Democracy”
Georgia Petridou – “Religion and the Principles of Political Obligation”
Carol Atack – “Citizenship and Gender”
Denise Eileen McCoskey – “Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism”
Paul Cartledge – “Democratic Crises, Revolutions, and Civil Resistance”
Carol Atack and Paul Cartledge – “International Relations”
Benjamin Gray – “Beyond the Classical Polis”