David M. Pritchard (Strasbourg 2018), 'The Standing of Sailors in Democratic Athens', Audio Recording with Slides, The Athenian Funeral Oration: 40 Years after Nicole Loraux: 9-11 July 2018: An International Conference at the University of Strasbourg (France): Convened by David M. Pritchard. (original) (raw)
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Ancient historians regularly argue that the Athenian dēmos (‘people’) held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly this famous speech said a lot about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In 431 Pericles decided to skip such an account because of the difficult politics that he faced. In rehearsing military history funeral speeches always mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted sailors in the same positive terms. Their sailors displayed no less courage than hoplites and both groups equally benefitted the state. All these non-elite genres assumed that a citizen equally fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They used a new definition of courage that both groups of combatants could easily meet. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In epic poetry heroes spoke in the same hoplitic idiom. By copying this idiom the tragic poets were setting their plays more convincingly in the distant heroic age. In spite of this, tragedy still recognised Athens as a major seapower and could depict sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their works put beyond doubt that the dēmos esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.
Ancient historians regularly argue that the Athenian people held sailors in much lower esteem than hoplites. They cite in support of this the extant funeral speech of Pericles. Certainly, this famous speech said a great deal about courageous hoplites but next to nothing about sailors. Yet, it is also clear that this was not a typical example of the epitaphic genre. Funeral speeches usually gave a fulsome account of Athenian military history. In 431/0, Pericles decided to skip such an account because of the difficult politics that he faced. In rehearsing military history, other funeral speeches mentioned naval battles and recognised sailors as courageous. The casualty lists on the public tombs for the war dead more or less did the same: they commemorated dead sailors no less than hoplites and gave courage to both groups of combatants. Old comedy and the other genres of public oratory depicted naval personnel just as positively. Their sailors displayed no less courage than hoplites, with both groups equally benefitting the state. Public speakers and comic poets always gave sailors the full credit for the security that the navy gave Athens. All of these non-elite literary genres assumed that a citizen equally fulfilled his martial duty by serving as either a sailor or a hoplite. They now defined courage as the bearing of dangers in battle in spite of the personal risk. As this new definition was no longer tied to the hoplite, sailors could meet it as easily as hoplites. In tragedy, by contrast, characters and choruses used the hoplite extensively as a norm. In epic poetry, heroes spoke in the same hoplitic idiom. By replicating this idiom, the tragic poets were thus setting their plays more convincingly in the distant heroic age. In spite of this, tragedy, like old comedy, still recognised Athens as a major seapower and quite regularly depicted sailors as courageous. In Athenian democracy, speakers and playwrights had to articulate the viewpoint of non-elite citizens. Their speeches and plays leave us in no doubt that the Athenian people esteemed sailors as highly as hoplites.
Sailors were praised as much as hoplites in democratic Athens. In the eyes of the dēmos fighting at sea was no less of a benefit than doing so on land. They believed that a citizen equally met his martial duty by serving as a sailor or a hoplite. Non-elite citizens insisted that Athenians fighting sea battles be equally recognised for their courage. All this differed from the negative view of sailors that elite citizens had held in archaic times. In the military realm the dēmos had thus successfully redefined traditional aristocratic values. Résumé: Dans l'Athènes démocratique, les marins étaient tout aussi importants culturellement que les hoplites. En effet, il était clair pour le dēmos que son État était une importante puissance maritime. Athènes était consciente qu'il était crucial de préserver ses forces navales, puisqu'elle menait avant tout ses combats en mer. Pour le peuple, combattre en tant que marin profitait autant à l'État que le faire en tant qu'hoplite, et les Athéniens n'appartenant pas à l'élite étaient convaincus qu'un citoyen honorait de la même manière ses devoirs en servant dans la marine ou dans l'armée de terre. Il leur tenait donc à coeur que les Athéniens combattant en mer obtiennent la même reconnaissance de leur bravoure. Traditionnellement, l'aretē était définie en fonction de ce que les hoplites devaient accomplir en se battant sur terre. Cependant, la manière de combattre des marins était nettement différente. Par conséquent, les reconnaître comme courageux posait un problème, puisqu'ils ne répondaient pas strictement à la définition de l'aretē telle qu'elle était appliquée aux hoplites. Les orateurs publics et les dramaturges identifièrent deux manières de contourner ce problème: parfois, ils mettaient en exergue les aspects des combats en mer par lesquels les marins répondaient aux critères traditionnels du courage, ou tout au moins s'en approchaient. Plus souvent encore, ils utilisaient tout simplement une nouvelle définition de l'aretē, considérant que le courage consistait à braver les dangers du champ de bataille malgré les risques. Puisque cette nouvelle définition n'était plus liée aux hoplites, elle pouvait facilement s'appliquer aux marins. Tout cela différait grandement de la vision négative des marins que les Athéniens classiques avaient héritée de leurs ancêtres, et c'est ainsi que le dēmos est parvenu à redéfinir les valeurs aristocratiques traditionnelles dans le domaine militaire.
In this book P. analyses the military organisation of Athens and a number of related social, economic and cultural issues. As pointed out in the preface, each chapter (except Chapter 3) expands, updates or summarises earlier publications from the author. In Chapter 1 P. convincingly locates the main reasons for Athens' fifth-century military 'revolution' in her large population, economic advantage and democratic constitution. In regard to the latter, P.'s intelligent and stimulating approach is based on recent statistical findings by political analysts, which show how modern democracies, while generally avoiding fighting each other, tend to wage wars as frequently as other forms of government and to perform better: in turn, ancient Athens provides solid comparative ground to test modern theorisations of democracy and its war-making policies. P. rejects the long-settled idea that democracy emerged from military participation, although he acknowledges that social reforms tied to (esp. naval) warfare facilitated the process. Chapter 2 analyses in detail Athens' four military 'corps' (Thuc. 2.13). P. explains how hoplites were recruited and organised by tribal affiliation, but only briefly addresses the presence of metics among their ranks (p. 52), as attested by Thuc. 2.13.7 and possibly by the non-citizens recorded on tribal casualty lists. Archers are treated as the only regular (non-tribal) light corps: P.'s analysis would have been further enriched by a proper account of the role of other light troops (whose importance is acknowledged, pp. 78-81), which were clearly distinguished from the archers (e.g. Thuc. 8.71.2). The interesting case of the cavalry, which was often regarded by ancient literature as a safer service and concerningly attached to anti-democratic sentiments, would have benefited from a more extensive discussion of the evidence provided, for example, by dedicated casualty lists (SEG 48.83, IG II 2 5221-2: see P. Low, 'The Monuments to the War Dead in Classical Athens', in P. Low, G. Oliver, P.J. Rhodes [edd.], Cultures of Commemoration [2012], pp. 13-39, at 18-19) and public dedications (IG I 3 511-12) on the peculiar status and identity of the corps. The fourth-century decline of the archers and the cavalry is addressed mainly in terms of economic and political issues: these were certainly relevant, but there were also other detrimental factors, such as poor leadership, motivation, training and physical shape (e.g. Xen. Mem. 3.3.3-4, 3.5.5-7; Hipp. 1.13-14; B. Keim, 'Xenophon's Hipparchikos and the Athenian Embrace of Citizen philotimia', Polis 35 [2018], 499-522). Lastly we find the 'sailors' or, more correctly, the navy, for which P. highlights the interactions of different roles and social classes. His argument about the navy being an unappealing corps for farmers (pp. 45-6) does not seem to consider that the fleet regularly used to embark plenty of infantry, which means that infantrymen too, not just rowers, were often destined on overseas campaigns. This chapter, the longest in the book and one of the most engaging, convincingly dismisses assumptions about Solonian classes rigidly regulating access to Classical Athens' armed forces. Chapter 3 discusses ancient comedy and the navy. P. adopts a comparative approach with tragedy, historiography and especially forensic oratory, as a reflection of widespread popular views. The chapter explains why hoplite-centred warfare figures only as a part of Aristophanes' depictions and that his positive acknowledgement of the navy is consistent with the arguments of the orators.
Each year the classical Athenians held a public funeral for fellow citizens who had died in war. On the first two days they displayed the war dead's coffins in the centre of Athens. On the third day they carried them in a grand procession to the public cemetery. There they placed the coffins in a funeral monument that the democracy had built at great expense. Beside it a leading politician delivered an oration ostensibly in the war dead's honour. In 1981 N. Loraux published a transformational study of this funeral oration. Before her The Invention of Athens ancient historians had considered this speech of little importance. But Loraux proved that it played an absolutely central role in the self-perception of the Athenian people. Each funeral oration rehearsed the same image of them: the Athenians were always victorious and capable of repelling foreign invaders, because they were braver than the other Greeks, while their wars only brought benefits and were always just. The Invention of Athens proved that the funeral oration typically created this image by narrating Athens's military history in mythical and historical times. Her study also made bold claims about the genre. For Loraux it was the most important one for the maintenance of Athenian self-identity, whose content, she asserted, was confined to what the funeral oration rehearsed. The Invention of Athens claimed that this self-identity adversely affected how the dēmos ('people') conducted foreign affairs. Yet her study did not systematically compare the funeral oration and the other genres of Athens's popular literature. Consequently Loraux was unable to prove these bold claims. The Athenian Funeral Oration builds on Loraux's rightly famous study by making this comparison. The first way that this new book does so is by exploring the extent to which the other genres reproduced the funeral oration's commonplaces. In dramatising the genre's mythical military exploits tragedy certainly rehearsed its image of the Athenians, while comedy regularly parodied it. All this shows the funeral oration's importance. At other times, however, these two genres contradicted its commonplaces, depicting, for example, not just the benefits but also the huge human costs of war. If Loraux's claim about the funeral oration's adverse impact is correct, its image of the Athenians must have had a big part in the assembly's debates about war. The political speeches that survive partially support her claim; for they do show how proposals for war often were couched in terms of justice. But, it appears, again, that this genre's treatment of war also went well beyond the funeral oration. The second way that the book makes this comparison is by studying how these different genres depicted the state's military history, democracy and sailors. This, too, will force us to modify Loraux's claims. There is no doubt that the funeral oration set the pattern for the depiction of Athens's wars. But this, apparently, was not the case with the other common topics; for tragedy, it seems, took the lead with democracy, while all genres equally reflected the dēmos's positive view of sailors.
The sociology of Athenian tragedy
The Cambridge Companion to Greek …, 1997
The sociology of Athenian tragedy and resolution of a crisis caused by imminent or actual death, adultery, exile, pleas for asylum, war, or the infringement of what Antigone calls the 'unwritten and unshakeable laws' of the gods (Ant. 454-5); these were traditional taboos proscribing kin-killing, incest, violation of oaths or the host-guest relationship, and disrespect towards parents, suppliants, and the dead. 7 Within this framework crises caused by the Athenian male's 'others', especially women and non-Athenian agents, insistently recur. Indeed, the world represented in the tragic theatre of Athens is marked by extreme social heterogeneity and conflict. Some scholars now argue that it is the encounter with difference, with 'otherness', which constituted the Dionysiac dimension of the genre. 8 Tragedy offers a range of characters of all statuses from gods and kings to citizens and to slaves, all ethnicities from Athenian, Theban, and Argive Greeks to 'barbarians' (the generic term for non-Greeks) such as Persians and Egyptians, all age groups from babies to the very old, and an overwhelming insistence on the troubled relationships between women and men. Any sociological reading of an artwork must address the relationship between its maker and its consumers. The relationship between the Athenian tragic poet and his audience was, formally, that of political equals. Tragedy is not the production of a hired poet for social superiors, like the songs of the bard Demodocus in the Homeric Odyssey; nor, however, is it the composition of an aristocratic leader talking down to his populace, like Solon's Athenian elegies. The three great Athenian tragedians were all Athenian citizens, albeit well-born ones (and in Sophocles' case prominent in political life); they composed their plays for an audience largely consisting of citizens, and the plays were performed at festivals defined by their nature as celebrations of Athenian citizenship (see Ch. 1). The texts were mediated through performance by agents likewise sharing Athenian citizenship: the chorus-members, actors, and sponsors. 9 Tragedy consequently defines the male citizen self, 10 and both produces and reproduces the ideology of the civic community. 11 Aristophanes' Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria features an instructive central relationship between a maker and a consumer of tragedy. The heroes, both citizens, are Euripides and his kinsman by marriage. During their burlesques of Euripides' own tragedies they outwit both the women of 12 Hall (1989b) 38-54.
The Athenian Navy and Democracy: Top-Down, Bottom Up, or Topsy-Turvy Organization?
Over the last two decades, a consensus has emerged around the proposition that naval power played no causal role in the formation of democracy at Athens (Ceccarelli 1993; van Wees 1995; 2004) or indeed, anywhere in the Greek world (Robinson 2011: 230-37). Perhaps the most powerful assault on the entire tradition—ancient and modern—of linking social class, military service, and constitutional form is Vincent Gabrielsen's (2002) " SocioEconomic Classes and Greek Warfare. " Viewing the connection between thetes, naval power, and democracy as the fantasy of elite theorists and ideologues—the primary transmitters of this connection are Pseudo-Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and later writers such as Plutarch—he severs ties among them, arguing that the link between fleets and thetes has no historical basis as a matter of class duty; the association of the poor with the fleet is an elite ideological construct; the navy was not a lynch-pin of class identity. I want begin with a response to this point, for the reference to " bottom-up " organization in the rationale for our panel may be a something of a misnomer (agency is typically shared along a spectrum and it is often difficult to determine which end of the spectrum is the source of the agency); even so, the effect of Gabrielsen's argument is to make the bottom vanish, and as tempting as that may be, the evidence is insufficient to permit it. After a brief discussion of the top-down nature of the Athenian navy, I will discuss an example of bottom-up agency involving the fleet, the undoing of the recently formed oligarchy 300 on Samos and creation of a parallel Athenian democratic government on the island dedicated to restoring the ancestral laws—fully democratic government instead of moderate oligarchy—at Athens. Finally, I briefly examine the trial and execution of the six generals held responsible for failing to recover wrecks, corpses, and survivors after the battle of Arginousai as a possible example of bottom-up agency, but end up suggesting the opposite: the fact that hippeis uniquely served in the fleet on that occasion might explain (in addition to vicious political enmities) the drive to kill the generals rather than demotic outrage over the failure to recover corpses.
The present paper addresses Aeschylus, and the way he wanted to be remembered by his fellow Athenians and the other Greeks. Living from 525/524 until 456/455 BCE 1 , Aeschylus experiences the quick transition of his polis from a small city-state to a leading political and military force to be reckoned with throughout the Greek world. The inscription on his gravestone at Gela, Italy, commemorates his military achievements against the Persians, but makes no mention of his enormous theatrical renown. His plays were so respected by the Athenians that after his death, his were the only tragedies allowed to be restaged in subsequent competitions. And yet Aeschylus, when time came to describe himself and the work of his lifetime, mentioned exclusively his contribution to the fight against the Persian Empire as an Athenian. Triggered by the poet' s narrative on the most memorable moment of his life, the present paper seeks to shed some light on the Athenian political identity, emerged during and soon after the Persian Wars, which not only derived from the newly-established democratic constitution of the late sixth century, but also supported it. Aeschylus' epigram as well as some particular plays of his (the Persae, the Eumenides, and the Suppliants), narrates the confidence, the solidarity and the feeling of equality the Athenian citizens shared with regard to the defence of freedom of their polis as well as of all Greece, which came before anything else in their life, that is above noble descent and wealth. The gravestone of the poet stresses, in other words, how it felt for an Athenian to live during the emergence of the very first Democracy that supported the claim of Athens to become the ruler in the Aegean by establishing its naval "Empire" ideologically upon the commemoration of the victory of the Athenian Democracy against the "tyranny" of Persia at Marathon and Salamis.