Review of M. Simonton Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (original) (raw)

Simonton (M.) Classical Greek Oligarchy. A Political History. Pp. xviii + 355, map. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. Cased, £37.95, US$45. ISBN: 978-0-691-17497-6. Oligarchy has long been the odd-man-out in the study of ancient Greek constitutional history. Democracy, as the form of government of the city which produced the majority of extant Classical literature, comes with a plethora of evidence on which modern scholars can draw. Tyranny and kingship were objects of fascination for Classical writers, and have received major attention from historians of Greek politics and thought. Oligarchy, however, has received far less scholarly attention. The paucity of evidence for oligarchic politics, coupled with the fact that much of the evidence that does exist comes from hostile, pro-democratic writers make it difficult to create a coherent picture of how oligarchic states actually functioned. With this book, Matthew Simonton (henceforth 'S') sets out to remedy this ommission by providing a political history of Classical Greek oligarchy. By 'political history', S explains, is meant a focus on the institutions, both legal and extralegal, by which oligarchic poleis kept the governing minority in power and ensured that the poorer majority remained docile (p. 3). S's first thesis is that Classical oligarchy should not be seen simply as a continuation of Archaic elite rule; rather, it represented a new, more exclusive and more repressive type of regime, created in reaction to the threat posed by democracy to elite dominance. S's second contention comes as a result of this historical perspective: oligarchy should be seen as a form of authoritarianism, in which the governing wealthy minority relied heavily on force and the threat of force to check any aspirations by the majority for greater political access. Finally, S argues, oligarchy was a fundamentally unstable system. Not only did oligarchic regimes face threats from a discontented demos, but also from within their own ranks. Individual oligarchs, eager for status and mistrustful of each other, might well be tempted to abandon their comrades and champion the interests of the demos, perhaps with an eye to eventual tyranny. Individual oligarchs thus found themselves trapped in the the famous Prisoners' Dilemma, obliged to choose between the certain, but smaller, benefits brought by intra-elite cooperation , and the larger, but much more risky prizes that came from abandoning the regime in quest of personal power. As a result of this instability, S concludes, the period in which oligarchies flourished was actually very short: the fifth century BCE marked the high-water mark of oligarchy in Ancient Greece; the fourth century saw a steady decline in oligarchies, and by the high Hellenistic period, democracy, not oligarchy, was the standard form of government in the majority of poleis.