AMDG

5 Classical Studies 1

ἄριστος (áristos) = 'best' + -κρατια (-cratia) = 'rule'
δῆμος (démos) = 'people' + -αγωγ- (-agog-) ‘lead(-er)'

Aristocracy = \ 'rule by the best'. Since most ruling classes think of themselves as 'best' equipped to rule, or as the 'best' people, any ruling class might be described as an 'aristocracy'; but in the language of political theory it means rule by a hereditary clique, i.e. by a few families who over several generations have managed to monopolise power, wealth and privilege. More usually nowadays, it means those people who belong to such families as once held those privileges, whether or not they still hold political position or influence. There have been historically few societies in which wealth and political opportunities have been truly equal to all, and neither Athens nor Rome were in this respect exceptional. Both in fact incorporated strong class divisions, and in Rome these were legally built into the constitutional division of the citizen body into census-classes based on property-ownership and the way this worked politically to the advantage of the better-off.
In classical Athens the existence of an aristocracy may at first sight seem odd, since the democratic constitution of the Vth and IVth centuries enshrined the principle of ἰσονομία (isonomía), equality before the law for all citizens, but in one respect Athenian society in this period was not so very different from our own: while legally speaking we are all equal, there have been until relatively recently some aristocratic families around with traditions of political prominence (Churchills, Pyms and others), and there remain elements of privilege—most conspicuously these days stately homes and the constitutional privilege of those members of the House of Lords whose titles go back to the eighteenth century, or even to the Norman conquest of England—which have purely historical origins. To go back to Athens, despite the democratic constitution, there were still in the Vth and IVth centuries not only divisions of wealth, but individual families which regularly produced men who aspired to political leadership, and won public prominence thanks partly to their hereditary position.
By contrast demagogos = 'people-leader'. Both in Greek & in English the word is usually meant in a disapproving sense (especially by people hostile to democracy or to the commons, i.e. to ordinary folk), to mean someone who stirs up the baser emotions of a rabble, agitates them to riot or otherwise challenge the forces of law & order (who are usually conservatives).
The Athenian political system, however, was not only democratic & therefore prone in itself to attract hostile comment from conservatives. It also depended on the willingness of individuals who did not necessarily or even usually hold public office as magistrates (& so were, legally speaking, just private citizens) to get up in the Assembly, take the lead in debates, propose motions & prosecute others who failed to act in the perceived best interests of the community as a whole. In one sense therefore all Athenian politicians were demagogues in your period. It had not always been so. Most of the institutions of democracy as it functioned in the Vth & IVth centuries BC were only developed as recently as the late VIth century (Cleisthenes' reforms), & some were still being fashioned in your period (e.g. the laws of Ephialtes, 462/1, which put the finishing touches to the democratic system). Before this trend towards democracy began, Athens like other Greek cities was ruled by a few aristocratic families who monopolized wealth, privilege & political office. The aristocrats looked down on commoners, though if these commoners paid their rents & did what they were told, the nobles might view them (as Roman nobles regarded their clientes) with a measure of paternalistic protectiveness. Politics in this aristocratic society was a matter of alliances (especially through inter-marriage with each other) & feuds between different big family groups, each with their own hangers-on, supporters, dependants &c., & the peasantry were not expected to have any say in important political decisions. The transition to democracy was a gradual process, punctuated & boosted at intervals by particular reforms such as those of Solon, Cleisthenes & Ephialtes, rather than a single dramatic or revolutionary change. In each epoch of Athens' democratic development, therefore, there were still some older habits of mind & behaviour which tended to hang over from the previous period. It will be worth explaining therefore the extreme possibilities, at beginning & end of the period we are studying, for pursuing political careers & the relationships between leaders & the people. It must be emphasized that no one individual figure or group exactly represents either of these model types, any more than an orange or the earth's globe represents a geometrically exact mathematical sphere. Rather, these are 'templates', against which we can 'measure' how closely real-live known individuals resemble or conform to the ideal patterns.

Two political models: (1) an aristocratic career
You are born into one of Athens' leading families. At your father's knee you hear tales of your ancestors' exploits in the Trojan War, & from your grandfather you learn how he had been a leader of his men in battle. You also inherit ties of guest-friendship with aristocrats in other states. In late boyhood you learn the traditional aristocratic pursuits of hunting on your family estate, heavy drinking & buggery; & you get to know & be known by the tenants & retainers on your lands, whom you can expect to turn out under your command in military levies, or support you in other ways in public debate (they turn up to meetings and vote in accordance with your instructions). As a young man you are fixed up with an equally aristocratic bride by your parents; the match will be arranged as a kind of political contract (in which property will change hands, in the shape of her dowry), to the mutual benefit of both families. When you embark on a political career—in which your aim is to win fame and personal distinction as a leader—you will do so as the protégé of some established political figure, for whom you will do some ground work & from whom you will learn the tricks of the trade; he in turn will rally his own existing support behind you in elections & debates. When these are to take place, you will go round your own neighbourhood reminding your supporters of their ancestral loyalty to your House, of your & your ancestors' benefactions to them, & of the favours you can continue to perform for them if they do what you want, ask them to turn out, & tell them what to expect & what, or whom, to vote for. You will expect them to co-operate, & the speeches you make will stress your own legitimate claims to political leadership against those of your rivals, your ancestral honour &c.; you will then hope to use the power you gain through this support to repay your sponsors for the investment of money & political effort they have made on your behalf; & you will invest your own profits from your career in conspicuous public building projects to stress your importance & win a certain immortality. You may be satirised by comic poets as toffee-nosed or stupid or drunken or sexually immoral.

(2) A 'demagogic' career
You are still born into a wealthy family, but the family home may lie outside of Athens itself in one of the outlying demes, & your wealth may come from 'commercial' or other investments rather than from ancestral estates; you have no named ancestors who fought in the Trojan War, nor do you seek the favour & sponsorship of an existing family faction to make your way, for you have native ability and a persuasive manner in debate. Like the aristocrat, your aim is personal success & public distinction. But you rely more on your own skills as a politician and speaker to impress the people, stressing that what you are concerned about, & what you offer, is in the interests of the people rather than of your self or your aristocratic faction. Rather than relying on your ancestors and inherited family ties, or your own family money, to gain popular support, you use emotional & flattering rhetoric to arouse the people's feelings, & offer them 'goodies' out of public funds, such as jury-pay (or in Rome, cheap corn) or the prospects of easy loot from military campaigns to win popularity, & having done so you use the personal following you have gained to further your own ambitions; and in foreign policy, you think that Athens should aim to be powerful and secure enough not to have to worry about what Sparta or other states think or you, or her; and you treat the financial contributions to the joint funds of the Delian League allies as if they were Athens' own money. If successful, you can safely ignore the criticisms & hostility of your aristocratic rivals, because you have built up your own political standing at their expense; it does not depend on them, nor do you owe them any favours once you have acquired influence with the people at large. Instead of spending your own money on building projects for the enhancement of the city's facilities or beauty, you will persuade the commons to devote public money to such things. You are pilloried by comic dramatists as being of low birth, banausic occupation (i.e. a manual worker such as a blacksmith or musical instrument-maker) with a loud mouth, advocating aggressive policies, and behaving rudely to others.
Now, how does the historical and social reality match these models? No individual politician exactly matches either of these models, which are deliberately extreme. But some specific points will help to flesh the picture out:

(1) The man in our period whose career comes closest to our aristocratic model is Kimon. He was born, about 500 BC, into the old family of the Philaids, who claimed descent from the Trojan War hero Ajax & which had ancient links with aristocrats in Thrace—indeed his mother Hegesipyle was daughter of the Thracian King Oloros (Plut. Cim. 4)—& Sparta (Plut. Cim. 16); the family home was the city deme of Lakia, & he was the son of Militiades (the general who won the battle of Marathon, 490 BC). Like many an English public schoolboy he acquired a reputation for heavy drinking, before settling down ca. 480 BC in an arranged marriage with Isodike, from the equally aristocratic family of the Alcmaeonids (Plut. Cim. 4). At the outset of his career he was ambitious to match the glory his father had won, & gained the political sponsorship of the elder statesman Aristides (Plut. Cim. 5), with whom he went out as general in his commands in the early 470s (Plut. Arist. 23). In domestic affairs, he was generous to his hangers-on, providing free meals for them & having the fences on his lands pulled down to enable all-comers to help themselves to the produce of his estates (Ar. Ath. Pol. 26; Plut. Per. 9), i.e. he used the old aristocratic technique of patronage to win popular support. From the spoils he won from the Eurymedon campaign he invested in public parks (Plut. Cim. 13), not only to enhance his own popularity but also to perpetuate his name and fame to posterity. Although he was chiefly responsible for the growth of Athens' naval hegemony in the Aegean between 478 and 463, he did not intend Athens' growing power to be won or exercised at the expense of (oligarchically governed) Sparta, for he regarded Sparta and Athens as 'yokefellows' (i.e. like a pair of oxen yoked together to a wagon or plough), as joint leaders within the community of Greek states, with equal status and each their own proper sphere of influence, Sparta on the mainland and Athens in the islands and Asia Minor. This led to his fall from popular favour in the late 460s, when there was a marked swing away from alliance with Sparta in Athens' foreign policy, along with the emergence of more fiercely democratic politics at home.

(2) Unlike most politicians of the Vth or early Vth centuries, Kimon's chief rival Themistocles' family came not from Athens itself but from Sounion, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, about as far from Athens as it is possible to go within Attica; & Herodotos says that at the time of the Persian Wars (490-478 BC) his father Neocles had 'only recently emerged to prominence'—i.e. he was not of the old aristocratic stock. When he grew up, Themistocles' own political & military successes seem to have been due to his own talent rather than to any aristocratic sponsorship (the historian Thucydides, whose opinion in this must be respected, several times comments on Themistocles' unusual personal talent and intelligence). On his recommendation, the public profits from the silver found at Laurion in the 480s were devoted to the ship-building programme which made the decisive naval victory at Salamis (479 BC) possible. During the Salamis campaign and after he was consistently on poor terms with the Spartan leadership, and after the war was over it was he who did most to get Athens to construct the Long Walls to the Piraeus which, in the event of any future Persian invasion, would free her of any need to be dependent on Sparta for survival; and the Spartans resented this, since they grudgingly realised that if Athens could stand alone, she would have no incentive to defend them in future. In other words, Themistocles did not care whether Athens' relations with Sparta were harmonious or not. He also foresaw and worked for the development of Athens' naval hegemony in the Aegean (he and Kimon did not disagree about this—rather they competed with each other for the glory of bringing it about). When he was ostracized ca. 471, he was the victim of an organised cabal, which mass-produced ostraka for distribution at the meeting (190 ostraka found in a dump, written in only fourteen different hands). This was probably organised by an aristocratic cabal (a behind-the-scenes political grouping), mainly consisting of supporters of Kimon, who despite the secret ballot had enough private influence to tell their own hangers-on which way to vote.

(3) Cleon is made out by hostile sources, especially Aristophanes, to have been a common leather-tanner (i.e. a manual worker—rather than an aristocrat, who would never have to work to earn a living), & has a reputation (evidence in Aristophanes' plays from the 420s, especially Knights & Wasps) as a vulgar & violent speaker who flatters the demos, i.e. who sucks up to the commons, rather than authoritatively telling them what to do. And when he speaks in the debates over Mytilene & Pylos (Thuc. 3.37ff.; 4.28), the only question before the Assembly is that of the expediency (or otherwise) of their decisions in Athens' interests—i.e. whether those decisions are in their own selfish best interests, regardless of others'. In the Mytilene debate in particular, he recommends the harsh policy of executing all adult Mytileneans, on the grounds that 'your [the Athenians'] empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and are always plotting against you... Your leadership depends on strength and not on any goodwill of theirs'. Cleon was probably the author of the Athenian decision in 425 to double the tribute payments from the Delian League states to help pay Athens' own escalating costs in the Peloponnesian War.

(4) When Hyperbolos (who was called a cheap 'lyre-maker' by hostile satirists, and described as 'a disgraceful fellow' even by the usually cool Thucydides, among other enemies) tries to have an ostracism held in order to get either one of the other two leading politicians of the day (417 BC) out of the way, Nikias & Alcibiades are able to bury their differences temporarily, & get their own supporters to turn out & vote en masse, as bidden, for Hyperbolos himself (Plut. Alc. 11).

(5) In political & law-court speeches from the late Vth & the IVth centuries, the pattern of argument is almost always 'Listen, men of Athens: this is what it is in your interests to vote for...'. The appeal to the self-interest of the commons has become the golden rule to persuasive speaking, observed by all politicians (but not by Socrates).

Problems
Some important refinements have to be made, however, to the stark picture of 'respectable aristocrats' & undesirable 'demagogues' that our sources for the period present.

(1) Cleon's father, Cleobulus, was elected general in 459/8. That implies that while Cleon may have owned a tanning factory (among other sources of wealth), he certainly came from an upper-crust family—of the minor gentry, maybe, but certainly not from the gutter.

(2) Nikias, who is sometimes thought of as a 'conservative', was far from that—his family was more obscure than Cleon's; & his wealth was to a large extent based on commercial rather than landed investments (cf. his 1,000 slaves out to rent).

(3) As the episode of Hyperbolos' ostracism (in 417 BC) shows, even as late as 417, prominent politicians could still expect large enough numbers of ordinary citizens to turn out & do as they asked, like Caesar & the elections (cf. Suet. Jul. 41)—that is, some not so few Athenian citizens were still expected by the remaining aristocrats to do politically what they were told.

(4) Pericles is in any case an equivocal figure (i.e. he can be regarded both ways), as Plutarch's Life (among other sources) shows. He was of highly aristocratic birth & had extensive landed estates & links with aristocratic families elsewhere (cf. Thuc. 2.13, 2.65); he did not make a habit of appearing before the Assembly at too regular intervals, but kept a bit aloof (Plut. Per. 7); when he did appear, however, he could lead, rather than follow, popular feeling in his speeches (cf. Thuc. 2.65; Plut. Per. 5); &, most significantly, the speeches he gives according to Thuc. are never (unlike most speeches in Thuc.) part of a debate, but simply Pericles informing the people about the state of affairs, or recommending what they should do in contexts where they do in fact follow his advice (e.g. 1.140ff.; 2.13). Finally, Thucydides distinguishes Pericles radically from the next generation of political leaders (Cleon, obviously, but he is probably thinking in part of Alcibiades, Nicias & others as well), whom he regards as of inferior intelligence & as too inclined to put their own rivalries & personal interests before the counsels of sensible policy (2.65).
On the other hand, Pericles could be regarded as a demagogue. For example:

(a) he allegedly supported Ephialtes vs. the Areopagites (Athens' hittherto presitigious & influential aristocratic Council of Elders) in the campaign for the democratic reforms of 462/1 (Plut. Per. 10);

(b) he 'could not compete with the wealth or the display of which Kimon captured the affections of the poor... so finding himself outmatched... Pericles turned… to the distribution of public wealth... and before long, what with their allowances for public festivals, fees for jury service, and other grants and gratuities, he succeeded in bribing the masses wholesale' (Plut. Per. 9), thus using public money to buy support, for which he was criticized by (among others, presumably) the conservative Plato (Gorg. 515c-e: 'Was it not Pericles who made the Athenians lazy, chattery & greedy?'), to supply public banquets, shows &c. (Plut. Per. 11)—things of which the Old Oligarch disapproved—& to fund, at the Delain allies' expense, the building programme, for which he was criticized both at home & abroad (Plut. Per. 12-13);

(c) like Hyperbolos he used ostracism to disembarrass himself of an aristocratic political opponent—Kimon's friend & supporter Thucydides, son of Melesias—but unlike Hyperbolos, successfully (Plut. Per. 11);

(d) it is clear from Plutarch (Per. 5 & other passages) that he was often mocked or implicitly criticized by comic poets of the generation immediately before Aristophanes, as Cleon was by Aristoph. himself;

(e) Pericles consistently resisted Spartan demands and claims in the period leading up to the Pelopnnesian War: he did not care, and did not think that Athenians should care, what Sparta thought of them.(Thuc. 1.140ff.);

(f) The comic dramatist Aristophanes himself blames Pericles for the Peloponnesian War (Acharnians, 515ff.), & it is pretty safe to assume that Pericles only escaped further Aristophanic jibes by dying in 429 before the comedian's most active period. It is appropriate that Pericles should have this ambiguous reputation, for he represents in some ways the half-way point in the general change that the style of political leadership underwent during the fifth century—though it is likely that, had we not had the evidence of Thucydides to act as a counterweight, Pericles would have gone down in history as a demagogue of the bad sort. In fact, Pericles was probably resented even more by the likes of Thucydides, son of Melesias, than a Cleon would have been, since, as a true aristocrat, he 'ought to have known better'—like Julius Caesar, the typical popularis at Rome, who was after all a patrician noble. In sum, whether or not a politician was, in the bad sense, a demagogue depended largely on your point of view. If you were a would-be aristocratic politician, a demagogue was anyone you disliked who used popular techniques for acquiring political influence, techniques which you yourself would not or could not 'lower yourself' to using. If you approved of him—as Thucydides did of Pericles, then you were simply a 'man of great influence & authority'.

(5) Alcibiades is, like Pericles, an equivocal case. Equally aristocratic as Kimon or Pericles, and probably the cleverest commanding officer Athens had in the later stages of the Peloponnesian War (his intellectual talents earn nearly as much credit from Thuc. as those of Themistocles), he had little time for democracy ('an acknowledged folly', he described the system as being, Thuc. 6.89) but at the same time could play it like a violin, with a talent for bold and brash oratory of the most demagogic kind—his speeches in the debate over Sicily are among the liveliest and most forceful in Thucydides, tempting the populace with the prospect of rich loot, yet permeated with aristocratic self-confidence ('I have a right [my emphasis] to the command...', he says at one point, referring to his past public services and achievements, including his victories for chariot-races he had sponsored at the Olympic Games, surely irrelevant to his claims or entitlements as a politician or general). He was also the architect of the demolition of Hyperbolos' attempts to ostracize either himself or Nikias (Plut. Nic. 11, Alcib. 13), by using his own, and Nicias' pledged supporters as 'lobby-fodder' in the vote (i.e. he could command, and expect Nic. to command, votes).