Athens’s success

Danielle Allen has a fascinating review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge in the TNR (3/18). Allen notes that eighteenth century thinkers, including the American founders, considered Athenian democracy a failure, and concluded that “pure democracy devolved into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite.”

Ober’s volume, the capstone of a trilogy on Athenian democracy, argues otherwise, and asks why made Athens a success. One question Allen raises is why the American Founders seem to have gotten Athens so badly wrong. Her answer is that “the entire evidential base for this discussion has changed in the last two hundred years.” We simply know a lot more about Athens than they did, and that’s because of sustained classical study on a number of fronts:

“Only in the late nineteenth century did scholars discover a document called the Constitution of Athens , which summarizes the growth of Athenian democracy from the sixth to the fourth century B.C.E . . . . Whole poems are still being unearthed, as are political treatises; much of Antiphon’s ‘On Truth’ was first published only in the early twentieth century. Similarly, a major law concerning coinage, dating to 375-374 B.C.E. and discussed at length by Ober, was unknown until 1970. Even the archeological remains of the theaters in the Attic countryside are relatively recent discoveries.”

Which suggests two conclusions: First, this is testimony, as Allen says, to the utility of “the slow, hard work of humanistic research.” Second, it is evidence that classical studies is perhaps not quite so dead as some have suggested.