Athenian Unity?

This paper explores Greek cities’ particular form of territoriality—the widely acknowledged but under-explored fact that each Greek city was a community constituted in relationship to a territory within which only its members were allowed to own land—as a factor shaping Greek archaic history. Scholars working on the “rise of the polis”, whether from a “state” or a “society” perspective (cf. most recently van Wees 2013 and Duplouy 2014), take the existence of fixed civic identities that everyone accepted for granted.

Voting in the Oresteia offers fertile ground for reexamining the trilogy’s political themes. The staged instances of voting (Eu. 674-753) and of group deliberation (Ag. 1344-71) display debate and division of opinion. This paper will demonstrate, however, that verbal representations of group decisions consistently revert to the need for unanimity (Ag. 813-17, Eu. 985-6), among both mortals and gods. It will further argue that the trilogy closely connects unanimity with unchecked political violence.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides connects the massacre at the river in Sicily (7.84) and the subsequent imprisonment of the Athenians in the quarry (7.87) to his description of the plague in Book II. Both linguistic ties and imagery link all three passages. Unifying threads of these episodes include the totality of suffering (where all of Athens is affected), overwhelming crowding, and a lack of basic necessities. Moreover, Thucydides links the passages with the imagery of descent, namely a καταβασις.

In Against Timocrates (139), Demosthenes praises the system for proposing laws in the western Greek city of Locris: a speaker proposing a law was required to stand with a noose around his neck. If the speaker failed to persuade the voters to pass the law he was hanged on the spot.

In recent years, scholars have frequently discussed the egalitarian nature of the Greek polis, trying to define the real breadth of the phenomenon. Among them, Josiah Ober (Ober 2010) has devoted particular attention to the theme. He argues that the polis was characterized by a set of rules and conventions that enabled citizens to have equal opportunities in the political life of the community. This “rule egalitarianism” did not apply to economic or social life, but was limited to the political sphere.