War, democracy and culture in classical Athens

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.