War, democracy and culture in classical Athens

Classical Athens is famous for what is arguably the most fully developed democracy of premodern times and for its cultural revolution, which helped lay the foundations for the arts, literature and sciences of the ancient and modern worlds.

In 508BC the Athenian dēmos (“people”) rose up against a leader who was once again aiming for tyranny, expelled him and the foreign troops backing his attempt, and arrested and executed his upper-class supporters. They could no longer tolerate the internecine struggles of the elite and demanded an active role in the decision-making of the city.

This was quickly realised by the reforms of Cleisthenes, which made the assembly and a new popular council of 500 members the final arbiters of public actions and laws. By the early 450s the people had consolidated their new dēmokratia (“democracy”) by making decisions on an increasing range of public affairs and by taking over entirely the administration of justice and the oversight of magistrates.

Admittedly, Athenian leaders were still members of the upper class, struggling for pre-eminence with each other. Now, however, their rivalries were played out in agēnes or political debates, with the final decision to support this or that politician resting with predominantly non-elite assembly goers and councillors.

To win over such notoriously boisterous and censorious audiences, politicians were forced to negotiate and articulate the self-perceptions, norms and perceived interests of lower-class Athenians. Out of this dynamic of mass adjudicators and elite performers in competition with each other emerged a strong popular culture, which supported the liberty and political capability of every citizen, the rule of law and the open debating of policies and ideas.

Classical Athens was also the leading cultural centre of the Greek world. The disciplines of the visual arts, oratory, drama and literature were developed to a far higher level of quality in this city than any other, with many of the works produced there becoming canonical for Graeco-Roman antiquity.

Ever since Johann Winckelmann this cultural revolution has been interpreted primarily as the product of Athenian democracy. Certainly the new requirement for elite poets, politicians and litigants to compete for the favour of mass audiences drove rapid innovations in oratory and drama.

For example, the celebrated plays of Athens were performed in front of thousands of citizens at festival-based contests. While the eponymous archon selected and paid the poets, the training and costuming of the performers were the responsibility of chorus sponsors. These elite citizens had a great deal riding on the performance of their choruses. Victory translated into political influence and support, while the generous financing of choruses could be canvassed during trials to help win over lower-class jurors. For the sake of their careers poets too wanted to be victorious. Although the judging of choral contests was formally in the hands of magistrates, they were guided by the vocal and physically active responses of the largely lower-class theatre goers.

Since the regular attendance of ordinary citizens at dramatic and choral agēnes or contests continually enhanced their appreciation of the different forms of performance, sponsors and poets found a competitive advantage by pushing the boundaries of the genre, whether it be tragedy, comedy, satyric drama or dithyramb.

Athens is rightly revered for such achievements; by contrast, its contemporaneous military revolution is never praised and is not widely known. During the fifth century Athens widened, amplified and intensified the waging of war, regularly attacked other democracies, and was a constant source of death and destruction among the Greeks. More than any other polis this city invented or perfected new forms of combat, strategy and military organisation and was directly responsible for raising the scale and destructiveness of Greek warfare to a different order of magnitude.

In so doing the Athenian dēmos overcame popular prejudices which elsewhere tended to stifle military innovations. By the time its dēmokratia was consolidated, Athens was the dominant military power in the eastern Mediterranean. War now dominated the politics of the city and the lives of thousands of upper- and lower-class citizens. Foreign policy was the mainstay of political debate. Fifth century Athenians waged war more frequently than ever before: they launched one or more campaigns in two out of three years on average and never enjoyed peace for more than a decade. They also directed more public money to war than to all other polis-activities combined, considered military service the duty of every Athenian and accepted extraordinarily high losses of fellow citizens on military campaigns.

A striking feature of the history of fifth-century Athens is the timing of this so military revolution. The intensification and transformation of war by the Athenians directly follow the popular uprising of 508 and coincide with the flowering of Athenian culture, which was in large part brought about by democracy.

The contemporaneity of these developments opens up some challenging possibilities. The military hyperactivity of fifth-century Athens may be another product of popular government and hence the dark side of its cultural revolution. Among contemporary witnesses of Athenian war-making, perceptions of the positive impact of democracy on military performance were more widespread than is usually assumed. Demosthenes, Isocrates, Herodotus and especially Thucydides canvassed how the democratic political practices of the Athenians underwrote their exemplary record of military success.

That democracy itself may be a major cause of the Athenian revolution in military affairs finds support in a number of groundbreaking political-science studies, which have appeared in the last several years. For example, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam have put beyond doubt the general superiority of democracy in waging war. Drawing on the database of all modern wars compiled by the US Army, they demonstrate statistically that modern democracies have enjoyed far greater military success than other types of regime, winning over 90 per cent of the wars that they have initiated and around 80 per cent of all wars which they have fought. In addition a series of recent studies show that while modern democracies may rarely fight each other, they have frequently fought colonial wars or attacked weaker non-democratic neighbours.

This research challenges the so-called Realist School which has dominated the theory of international relations since World War II and whose antecedents can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes’ interpretation of Thucydides. Proponents of this school assume that every state rationally calculates its foreign policy on the basis of what will maximise its security, power and economic wellbeing, regardless of the type of political regime it may have.

In addition these recent studies confound two pieces of popular wisdom about democracy.

The first of these is that democracies are particularly bad at prosecuting wars. Expressed most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville, this assumes that the liberty of a democracy undercuts military discipline, while the fear its leaders have of the voters and the complexity of its decision-making mean that the tough policies which are necessary for security are not always introduced quickly enough or at all.

Second, this evidence of democratic bellicosity contradicts a cherished view of our post-war era that democracies are intrinsically peace-seeking: they abhor violence in international relations, prefer nonviolent forms of conflict resolution and fight wars reluctantly, doing so only in self defence. In recent decades political scientists have developed this second popular belief into a general theory, which postulates that democracies rarely fight each other and hence should be promoted on a regional basis for the sake of peace and security. These popular beliefs and the dominance of the Realist School help explain why so little research has been done by ancient historians and political scientists on democracy’s impact on foreign policy in any period of world history.

This lack of scholarly attention is a cause of some concern. The end of the Cold War has presented established democracies with a range of new security challenges, which have become more complex since the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Today governments are under strong public pressure to intervene in civil wars or failing states and are wrestling with how to reconcile open government, due legal process and personal liberty with the perceived demands of counterterrorism.

In addition, the United States and some of its allies are promoting democracy militarily in the Middle East and further afield. These deployments are exposing our soldiers to the risks of death, injury and post-traumatic stress, costing enormous sums but reaping mixed results. In these circumstances we should understand better than we do whether our democratic institutions are properly designed for the optimal development and execution of foreign policy and whether our democracy-promotion efforts are well conceived.

The impact of democracy on Athenian war-making appears then to be an important problem for ancient historians: it concerns a striking feature of Athenian history and its investigation would fill a gaping hole in our knowledge base and potentially stimulate critical thinking about issues of real contemporary relevancy.

To begin exploring this important problem I have invited ancient historians, archaeologists and classicists from around the world to contribute to an edited collection on the impact of democracy on Athenian war-making (see above). Our chapters have now been peer-reviewed and fully revised and will be published by Cambridge University Press this year. Taken together they suggest that the political regime of classical Athens affected its war-making in two general but quite divergent ways. The democracy’s common dynamic of lower-class audiences and upper-class performers competing with each other led to a pronounced cultural militarism which encouraged the dēmos to become hoplites or sailors in ever larger numbers and to initiate wars very frequently. This was partly counterbalanced by the regime’s highly competitive and public debating of war and peace, which normally reduced the foreign-policy risks of this militarism, facilitated military innovations and efficiency, and helped develop the initiative of the Athenians on the battlefield.

Significantly the political debates, legal trials and dramatic competitions of classical Athens were the main forums for systematising and broadcasting the agreed communal identities and shared culture of its citizens. As lower-class citizens had the strongest influence on the democracy’s speeches and plays, this so-called civic ideology reflected their evaluations of themselves and others, particular points of view and perceived self-interests.

Poor Athenian audiences understandably had a generally positive view of the military contributions of their own social class and hence showed preference for those public speakers and playwrights who employed the epic values and terminology of soldiering, which had been the preserve of Athenian aristocrats before the democracy, to describe the soldiering of rich and poor alike. Because lower-class citizens continued to be ashamed of their poverty, which rendered them prone to behave immorally, this extension of traditional military ideology down the social scale made military participation particularly attractive to them as a source of public recognition and praise.

But this ascription of aretē or courage to non-elite Athenians serving as hoplites or sailors put them under new social pressure to initiate and join military campaigns. Like other behavioural norms of the ancient Greeks, courage had to be regularly proven by actions and recognised by others, while those who perceived themselves as agathoi or courageous felt aiskhunē or a sense of shame to be accused of cowardice. A classical Athenian could be derided as a coward not only if he fled a battle in fear but also if he failed to endorse a war which seemed to be a necessity. As a consequence politicians regularly exploited ordinary citizens’ fear of shame to build popular support for their campaigns, even if this risked pressuring the dēmos into voting for foreign-policy options which were ill-conceived and potentially disastrous for the city.

In addition, this extension of aretē distorted the Athenians’ judgment of their own military record. Since military defeats were widely thought to be due to cowardliness, the military setbacks of the Athenians tended to be slowly forgotten or, if rhetorically necessary, actively falsified. The result was that the Athenian dēmos viewed their military history as an almost unbroken series of victories, which caused them to overestimate the likely success of proposed wars and to downplay their potential human-costs.

The open debating of foreign policy in the democracy may not have tempered the willingness of the Athenian dēmos to be soldiers and to start wars but it did normally reduce the risk that they would endorse poorly conceived foreign-policy proposals. In the assembly politicians were free to make contentious arguments and their intense rivalries with each other ensured that any proposal for war met opposing arguments and alternative options. This performance dynamic also promoted the efficient prosecution of ongoing campaigns, as politicians closely scrutinised the military expeditions which their rivals had successfully proposed and volunteered suggestions for their improvement.

Lower-class Athenians welcomed this intense rivalry between politicians, because they remained suspicious of the motives of their political and military leaders and would personally be in harm’s way if a campaign which they were serving on proved to be poorly conceived. This adjudication of the frequent debates of foreign policy by the Athenian dēmos constantly consolidated their general knowledge of foreign affairs, developed their ability to weigh up their sense of shame against practical considerations and hence improved the overall quality of the decisions which they made between different foreign-policy proposals.

In addition, this high-order deliberative capacity of ordinary Athenians enabled them to see the merit of innovative solutions to military problems which strictly contradicted traditional morality or popular prejudices and to take more initiative as combatants than their non-democratic rivals.

Admittedly the chapters of this edited collection are far from the final word on this important problem. But together they provide what is a strong case that democracy was a major cause of the intensification and transformation of Athenian war-making in the fifth century. In addition, they go a reasonably long way to illuminating the substance of this causal relationship and the utility of this historical case-study for stimulating critical thinking on democratic war-making today.