i

Faculty of Arts & Philosophy

Thierry Oppeneer

Democratic Elements in the Greek cities of

the Roman Empire

An investigation into the politics of the post-Classical city

in the writings of Dio of Prusa and Plutarch of Chaeronea

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts in History

2012

Promoter Prof. dr. Arjan Zuiderhoek

Department of History

Copromoter Prof. dr. Kristoffel Demoen

Department of Literature

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank prof. dr. Arjan Zuiderhoek whose knowledge of ancient politics has been of great

help in writing this thesis and prof. dr. Kristoffel Demoen for his help in understanding the complex

literary context of the ancient texts that will serve as the primary sources of this thesis. The

responsibility for all remaining errors rests of course entirely with me.

I would also like to thank my parents for giving me the opportunity to study history at Ghent

University and for their support during my entire education.

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Preface

Why should we study ancient politics? A first reason is the influence of the Greeks and the Romans on

modern political ideas and vocabulary. Many terms and concepts of western politics were developed

in antiquity. The Greeks were the first to think systematically about different types of government,

such as democracy, monarchy and oligarchy, and about important political concepts, such as

citizenship. The political questions asked by Plato, Aristotle and Cicero are of almost universal value

and inspire political debates even today. Besides the influence of the Greeks and the Romans on

modern politics, antiquity can be useful as a source for political exempla. Together the Greeks and the

Romans theorized about and practiced politics for more than a thousand years.

A second reason is that the ancient Greek cities, in contrast with other societies, could conceive a

form of politics in which there was room for the political participation of the entire citizen body. As

the title of this thesis already suggests I will be focusing on the democratic aspects of ancient politics.

The twentieth century has seen an unprecedented and worldwide growth in the number of

democracies. Many people in the United States and Europe have no doubts about the moral and

political superiority of democracy1 and recently even Islamic governments have found it impossible to

ignore the call for democracy. Yet seen from a historical perspective the current popularity of

democracy can be called relatively new. During the last 2500 years democracy was often described as

an inferior form of government and even today there are many countries in which a different type of

government is adopted. Less than a century ago the future of democracy in Europe was very dark. The

democracies of Europa had become a minority that was threatened with extinction by the power of

totalitarian regimes. After the Second World War communism became the dominant type of

government for half of Europe. Only after the fall of the Iron curtain democracys triumph seemed

universal.2 Many eastern European countries, however, still struggle in their attempt to become more

democratic.

Democracy has become a popular term and most governments see themselves as democratic. Non-

democratic governments often claim to be in a transition towards democracy and even dictators say

that their countries are democracies. According to Robert Dahl this has made democracy a term that

1 L.J. Samons II, Whats Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004, p. 3. 2 K.A. Raaflaub, Einleitung und Bilanz: Kleisthenes, Ephialtes und die Begriindung der Demokratie, in: Demokratia: Der Weg zur

Demokratie bei den Griechen, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995, p. 3.

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can mean anything, and therefore a term that means nothing.3 Until the middle of the nineteenth

century democracy had a different meaning than today. Democracy was only used to describe a type of

government like that of classical Athens, in which the people could vote directly on all important

decisions of state.4 In a modern state the people had to vote on representatives to make the decisions

for them. Modern democracies, like the United States, were therefore called republics, democratic

republics or representative democracies.5 Nowadays all these different types are called democracy.

So we can conclude that there is still much to be said on the subject of democracy, but is the

ancient concept of democracy still relevant today? It must be said that the ancient form of democracy

did not play a role of significance in the development of modern democracy, not on an institutional

level and not on the level of concepts and ideas.6 Ancient democracy is not important because of a

direct historical link between now and then. It can, however, be useful to reflect on the value and

desirability of democratic institutions and ideas and help us to think out of the box.

Over the last decades there has been a real revival in studies on ancient democracy. Most studies,

however, concentrate on the period of the fifth and fourth century B.C. and are limited to the Athenian

democracy. Relatively little attention has been given to the other democracies of the ancient world,

both those in the Classical period and those of the post-Classical period. There is of course a good

reason for this. The fact is that classical Athens is overrepresented in the sources. We are therefore

relatively well informed about the politics of Athens.7 Yet this is only an explanation and certainly not

a justification for the neglectance of other ancient democracies in modern scholarship. Moreover, other

reasons that are less excusable might have been more decisive. Modern scholarship has often

consciously overlooked the politics of post-Classical cities, because of their supposed irrelevance. The

neglectance of the Hellenistic and Roman cities was based on the value judgement that the Athenian

democracy, like other components of the Athenian society, was worth studying, because of its

superiority over other and later societies.

In this thesis I will study the politics and especially the democratic elements of the Greek cities in

the Roman Empire in the first two centuries A.D. In doing this I also hope to contribute in some way to

the current debates concerning democracy in the post-Classical period. For a long time the dominant

perspective has been one of the decline of the post-Classical city and the disappearance of democracy.

Here I will adopt a different perspective and argue that there were still democratic aspects in the

Graeco-Roman city.

3 R.A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, New Haven-Londen, Yale University Press, 1989, p. 2. 4 P. Liddel, Democracy Ancient and Modern, in: A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, Malden, Wiley-Blackwall,

2009, p. 143. 5 L.J. Samons II, Op. Cit., p. 1. 6 M.H. Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and its Importance for Modern Democracy, Kopenhagen, The Royal

Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2005, pp. 27, 28. 7 S. Carlsson, Hellenistic Democracies: freedom, independence and political procedure in some east Greek city-states, Stuttgart,

Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010, p. 14.

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List of Abbreviations

Ancient Authors and Texts

Aristot. = Aristotle

Pol. = Politics

Cic. = Cicero

Dio = Dio of Prusa

Or. = Oratio

Philost. = Flavius Philostratus

VS = Vitae Sophistarum

Plin. = Pliny the Younger

Plut. = Plutarch of Chaeronea

An sen. = An Seni Respublica Gerenda sit

Praec. = Praecepta Gerendae Reipublicae

Modern Works and Collections

GRBS = Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies.

Jones, GCAJ = A.H.M. Jones, The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian, Oxford, Clarendon Press,

1940, 393 p.

JHS = Journal of Hellenic Studies

JRS = Journal of Roman Studies

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Ober, MEDA = J. Ober, Mass and Elite in democratic Athens; rhetoric, ideology, and the power of the

people, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989, p.

Qua, Die Honoratiorenschicht = F. Qua, Die Honoratiorenschicht in den Stdten des griechischen

Ostens: Untersuchungen zur politischen und sozialen Entwicklung in hellenistischer und

rmischer Zeit. Stuttgart, Steiner, 1993, 451 p.

Ste. Croix, CSAGW = G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, Ithaca,

Cornell University Press, 1981, 732 p.

Swain, Dio Chrysostom = S. Swain ed., Dio Chrysostom; Politics, Letters and Philosophy, Oxford,

Oxford University Press, 2000, 308 p.

Van Nijf and Alston, PCGC = O. Van Nijf and R. Alston eds. Political Culture in the Greek City after

the Classical Age. Leuven, Peeters, 2011, 349 p.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1.1 Research Question ................................................................................................................... 1 Dmokratia .............................................................................................................................. 2

1.2 Sources ..................................................................................................................................... 5 1.3 Methodology ............................................................................................................................ 6

1.3.1 Power .......................................................................................................................... 7 1.3.2 Literature ................................................................................................................... 10

1.4 Structure ................................................................................................................................. 13

Part 1 ..................................................................................................................................................... 15

The Decline of the Polis? ........................................................................................... 17 Chapter 1

1.1 Autonomy .............................................................................................................................. 19 1.1.1 The Impact of Roman Rule ....................................................................................... 20

1.2 Dmokratia ............................................................................................................................ 23 1.2.1 Magistrates and Liturgies .......................................................................................... 24 1.2.2 The Council ............................................................................................................... 27 1.2.3 The Assembly ........................................................................................................... 33

1.3 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 40

The Second Sophistic ................................................................................................. 41 Chapter 2

2.1 Second century literature: secondary literature? .................................................................... 42 2.2 The Concept of the Second Sophistic: origins and usefulness............................................... 43 2.3 Debate .................................................................................................................................... 45

2.3.1 The Second Sophistic: A Literary Phenomenon? ..................................................... 45 2.3.2 The Second Sophistic: A political phenomenon? ..................................................... 45 2.3.3 The Second Sophistic: A cultural phenomenon? ...................................................... 47 2.3.4 Towards a new perspective ....................................................................................... 48

2.4 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 51

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Part 2 ..................................................................................................................................................... 53

Dio, Plutarch and their Works ................................................................................. 55 Chapter 3

3.1 Dio of Prusa ........................................................................................................................... 55 3.1.1 Themes ...................................................................................................................... 56 3.1.2 Genre ......................................................................................................................... 57

3.2 Plutarch of Chaeronea ............................................................................................................ 59 3.2.1 Plutarchs Works ....................................................................................................... 60

Mass and Elite ............................................................................................................ 61 Chapter 4

4.1 The Institutional Perspective .................................................................................................. 61 4.1.1 The Magistrates ......................................................................................................... 62 4.1.2 The Assembly ............................................................................................................ 67

4.2 The Discourse Paradigm ........................................................................................................ 73 4.2.1 The Dmos from an Elite Perspective ....................................................................... 73 4.2.2 The Communication between Mass and Elite ........................................................... 85

4.3 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 92

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 93

Bibliography 95

Appendix ............................................................................................................................................. 103

Correspondence between Pliny and Trajan. ................................................................................... 103 Cicero Pro Flacco ........................................................................................................................... 106

IG XII,9 11 ..................................................................................................................................... 108

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Introduction

In this introduction I will introduce and clarify the subject of my thesis and the way in which I will be

approaching it. First I will describe and explain the research question this thesis tries to answer. Here I

will also say a few words on the terminology that will be used. After a short paragraph on the primary

sources of this thesis, follows a substantial paragraph on methodology. In it the most important

theories and paradigms that I have made use of in trying to answer the research question will be

summarized. The final part of this introduction will give an overview of the structure of this thesis.

1.1 Research Question

The subject of this thesis is the political life of the Greek cities, or poleis, of the Roman Empire from

around 50 to 150 A.D. The cities of this period are particularly known for the vast amount of

architectural remains and inscriptions. Because there were many poleis in the eastern part of the

empire, it is necessary to limit the scope of this thesis. I will be focusing on the cities that are

mentioned in the works of Plutarch of Chaeronea and Dio of Prusa. These cities are mostly located in

the Roman provinces of Asia and Bithynia-Pontus. The cities of the Roman East had a constitution

that was often highly similar. The political system consisted of magistrates (archontes), a council

(boul), and a popular assembly (ekklsia). The general view in modern scholarship is that by the

Roman imperial period the boul had become by far the most important institution of the city which

indicates that these cities had shifted to a more oligarchic and non-democratic society.1

The research question that forms the starting point for this thesis is as follows: Was there still any

room left for democratic elements in civic politics in the first two centuries A.D.?

1 F. Millar, The Greek City in the Roman Period, in: F. Millar, H.M. Cotton and G.M. Rogers eds. Rome, the Greek World and the

East, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002, III + pp. 106, 118.

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Were the people of the post-Classical city still a force that should be taken into account by others, for

example members of the elite? In order to figure out whether this was the case or not, we will first

examine the functioning of the political institutions of the Graeco-Roman city. Were popular

assemblies still convened, did they possess real powers, and what was their relation with the council?

The other political institutions of the polis, such as the council and the magistrates, will also be taken

into consideration, but they will receive slightly less attention in this thesis. The next step in answering

the research question is an investigation of the relationship between mass and elite. Who was

dominant in the politics of the city? Before going into more detail on the methods I will be using to

find some answers to these questions, I will first say a few words on the important terms polis and

dmokratia.

The polis is an important concept that will appear frequently throughout this thesis and is therefore

in need of a definition. The Greek poleis of the Roman period cannot be called city-states, I will often

use city as a translation, but this does not fully cover the meaning of the word. Although he only based

it on archaic and classical evidence, M. H. Hansen has provided a useful definition for this thesis with

his Lex Hafniensis de Civitate: Polis used in the sense of town to denote a named urban centre is

applied not just to any urban centre but only to a town which was also the centre of a polis in the sense

of political community. Thus, the term polis has two different meanings: town and state; but even

when it is used in the sense of town its reference, its denotation, seems almost invariably to be what

the Greeks called polis in the sense of a koinonia politon politeias and what we call a city-state.

Throughout this thesis it is important to keep in mind that being a political community was one of the

most defining features of the polis even in Roman times. Although the Greek city in the Roman period

also became defined by its public buildings and architecture, it remained a political community. Much

more than the cities of today the post-Classical polis retained genuine value, juridically, politically

and psychologically for its citizens.2

1.1.1 Dmokratia

In order to answer the research question it is important to know what exactly is meant with democracy

or dmokratia. Most of the time I will be using the transliterations dmokratia and polis instead of

the modern words democracy and city-state. Leaving these concepts untranslated is meant to

prevent the easy pitfall of associating these concepts with their English equivalents which can be

anachronistic and misleading. Avoiding translation, however, would be concealing the problem of

what these concepts really mean under a mask of authenticity, if I did not specifically state what these

concepts did or did not mean.3 Therefore I will give a short introduction into the most important

concept of this thesis, democracy or dmokratia.

Dmokratia, literally meaning rule by the people, is the Greek concept for a form of state, in which

the power is in the hands of the dmos, the whole of the citizenry, and not in the hands of the few,

oligarchia, or in the hands of one person, monarchia. A democracy differs from oligarchy on two

2 M.I. Finley, The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and beyond, in: Comparative Studies in Society and

History, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Jul., 1977), p. 307. 3 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient History Through Ancient Literature, in: A, Erskine (ed). A Companion to Ancient History. Blackwell

Publishing, 2009, p. 80.

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important points. First, in a democracy all the men, who were born there, were citizens with rights,

who could take part in the popular assembly, the juries, and, sometimes with exception of the poorest,

the offices. Second, most of the power of state resided with the popular assembly, and not with any

other council, or the magistrates.4 This definition is fine as a short indication of the most important

elements of ancient democracy. There were, however, many different types of democracy in antiquity

and each of them had elements that were more or less democratic according to different criteria. In the

first chapter we will consider Aristotles definitions of the formation and functioning of democratic

institutions.

Here we will first look at a modern definition of democracy given by Robert Dahl and apply it to

ancient democracy. According to him the most important aspect of a democratic state is that the

citizens of that state view one another as basically equal in their competence to participate in

governing, or in other words, the members of a democratic state must consider themselves to be

political equals. Dahl distinguishes five criteria for judging whether a specific process is democratic or

not.5 Here I will take four of these criteria for democracy, apply them to the state and describe in what

way ancient dmokratia could have fulfilled them. In the following chapters I will then use these

modified criteria in assessing whether the Graeco-Roman cities were in fact democratic.

Each citizen of a democratic state must have the ability to participate actively in the decision

making process. This means that each citizen has an equal and effective opportunity to advocate his

opinion about the best policy to be adopted and that he can make his opinion known to the other

citizens.6 In the Athenian dmokratia the concepts of isegoria (the right to speak) and parrhesia

(freedom of speech) can be linked to this first criterion. Isegoria, found its most explicit application in

the ekklsia. After a specific measure was proposed the herald asked the question: Who wishes to

speak? It is at this moment each Athenian citizen could step unto the bema (speakers platform) to

make use of his right to speak. He could try to persuade the assembly to amend the proposal, in one

way or another, or to introduce a whole new proposal on the subject. In this way every man could have

a say in the policy of the polis.7 In order to fulfil this first criterion for democracy the Greek cities in

the Roman imperial period should still have fully functioning popular assemblies. Normal citizens

should have the opportunity to speak and the dmos should be able to amend or reject propositions

made by the council.

The second criterion of Dahl is that each citizen should have an equal and effective opportunity to

vote on the final decisions of the state, and that the vote of every citizen should be counted as equal.8

In Classical Athens the equal and effective opportunity to vote for each citizen meant that there was

state pay for attending the assembly or popular courts. In this way also the poorer citizens could

participate. Outside Athens, however, state pay for attendance of the political institutions seems rarely

to have existed. In order to fulfil this second criterion the poleis of the Roman Empire should have

popular courts and assemblies in which the citizens could still vote.

The third criterion states that each citizen should have an equal and effective opportunity for

exploring the issues that will be voted on. This means that they have access to information on the

4 H. Cancik and H. Schneider eds., Der Neue Pauly : Enzyklopdie der Antike, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1996-2007, pp. 452, 453. 5 R. A. Dahl, On Democracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 37, 38. 6 Ibidem, p. 37. 7 A. G. Woodhead, " and the Council of 500" in: Historia Zeitschrift fr Alte Geschichte, Franz Steiner Verlag, 16 (1967),

2, pp. 129,130. 8 R. A. Dahl, On Democracy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998, p. 37.

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proposals under consideration, the possible alternatives, and their likely consequences.9 Again this

would require a fully functioning popular assembly in which the citizens could hear about different

proposals and the dmos as a whole should be able to amend or reject a proposal of the boul. Citizens

could also learn about proposals by debates in the other public arenas of the polis, such as the theatre

and agora (marketplace).

The final criterion is that citizens should decide on how a proposal is to be placed on the agenda. In

this way the decision making process is open to change.10 In a Classical dmokratia the agenda for the

popular assembly was usually decided by the council at least in part because of practical reasons. In

Athens the boul decided which proposals were placed on the agenda and were later to be voted on by

the ekklsia. These proposals were called probouleumata. The men who served on the council were

selected by lot from the whole citizen body. This process was repeated each year. In the Roman

period, however, the councils of the Greek cities had undergone some changes. Whether this fourth

criterion was fulfilled for these cities will be assessed below.

According to Dahl these four criteria are very demanding. A state in which all four of these criteria

were implemented to the fullest has therefore never existed in reality. Dahl sees his four criteria more

as tools for judging the democratic level of a particular political system and for improving democratic

governments. In the following chapters I will also use these criteria in this way. In the conclusion

these tools will be used to answer the question whether dmokratia in the Graeco-Roman polis still

existed or not.

Before going to the paragraph on methodology, however, one last aspect of dmokratia must be

taken into account. Since the middle of the last century a fifth criterion for democracy has been widely

accepted. The citizens or citizen body that I referred to in the four criteria above should include all

adult subjects of the state.11 This is a relatively new idea that was entirely absent from ancient politics.

A central feature of Greek politics was its severe restriction of access to citizenship. In the ancient

society women, slaves and outsiders were excluded from the citizen body and had no say in politics.

When talking about the power of the people or dmos, we must never forget that this was already an

exclusive part of the entire population. On the one hand this should prevent us from idealizing the

Greek dmokratia and confusing our modern ideas of democracy with those of the Greeks. This is one

of the examples why it is justified to use the transliteration dmokratia instead of the English

equivalent democracy. On the other hand this should not mean that every comparison between

ancient and modern democracy is impossible. Other political institutions or practices can still be

examples for modern times. After all it is not the task of historians to award or subtract credits

according to our own value-systems.12 The Greeks did not think of an inclusive vision on citizenship as

a precondition for the name dmokratia. It is for this reason that the fifth criterion for democracy will

not be applied in this thesis for an assessment of the democratic elements of the Greek cities in the

Roman Empire.

9 Ibidem, p. 37. 10 Ibidem, p. 38. 11 Ibidem, p. 38. 12 M.I. Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 9.

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1.2 Sources

The goal of this thesis is not only to give a status quaestionis on democratic elements in the politics of

the Graeco-Roman cities, but also to contribute in a small way to the existing research on the subject. I

will try to do this by analysing some literary sources. The works of two authors will be discussed after

the historical and literary context of the first chapters. The first author is Dio of Prusa, who lived from

ca. 45 to 115 A.D. Dio of Prusa is also known as Dio Chrysostom meaning Golden Mouthed, because

of the style and quality of his speeches. This is also the reason why his works were used as a model for

later generations and therefore the reason why his texts have survived the ages. He came from the

Bithynic town Prusa nowadays known as Bursa. His literary works consist of some eighty orations of

which at least two were spuria that are now attributed to Favorinus. His work contains valuable

information for historians specialized in the socio-political aspects of civic life in the cities of Asia

Minor. Besides that his orations can also be used to study Stoic and Cynic philosophies.13 The texts

that are most useful for our current purposes are the Orationes 7, and 31 50.

The second author under consideration is Plutarch of Chaeronea, who lived from ca. 45 to 120 A.D.

He spent most of his life in the relatively small city of Chaeronea situated in Boeotia at the centre of

Greece and comparatively close to Delphi.14 He is mostly known for his Parallel Lives in which he

compares a famous Greek with a famous Roman. The many other works of Plutarch are combined in

his Moralia. From these two will be discussed here, namely his Praecepta gerendae reipublicae

(Precepts of Statecraft) and his An seni respublica gerenda sit (Whether an old man should engage in

public affairs). In his Precepts of Statecraft Plutarch writes in reaction to a request for advice on

politics from Menemachus, a young politician who probably lived in Sardis. In his Old Men in Public

Affairs Plutarch tries to convince a certain Euphanes to stay engaged in public affairs in spite of his

old age.

These two ancient authors and their works are very different from each other. The Discourses of

Dio Chrysostom are sophistic speeches mostly on political related subjects, whereas the texts of his

contemporary Plutarch are essays of a more philosophical nature. Together these writers will be able, I

hope, to give a new perspective on the politics of the Greek cities of the Roman East. In Part two of

this thesis I will be giving more information about these authors and the specific nature of their works.

The translations of all the ancient writers I will be using throughout this thesis are those of the Loeb

Classical Library, unless stated otherwise. Before going to the explanation of the methodology of this

thesis, a final thing regarding the choice for source material must be said.

An important source of information for the Roman imperial period is epigraphy. According to

Fergus Millar it is in this period that the Greek cities provided the fullest expression of their own

communal identity, through the medium of inscriptions which made them more visible than ever

before.15 Although epigraphy as a source will not be entirely absent from this thesis, most attention will

be given to literary sources. Assessing both literary and epigraphic sources would be a too ambitious

project. I have therefore chosen not to use inscriptions as a source for my own investigation. Both

13 Swain, Dio Chrysostom, pp. 1-10. 14 C.P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, pp. 3, 4. 15 F. Millar, The Greek City in the Roman Period, in: F. Millar, H.M. Cotton and G.M. Rogers eds. Rome, the Greek World and the

East, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002, III + p. 106.

6

inscriptions and ancient texts have their own interpretational problems. In the last decades historians

have become aware of the fact that inscriptions are not undistorted reflections of the political and

social institutions of antiquity.16 Ramsay MacMullen has made some important remarks about the use

of epigraphy for studying the history of the Roman Empire. Historians tend to say that this or that

activity or behaviour was prominent, vital, declining or the like according to the frequency of

epigraphic attestation. That assumes, however, that the body of all inscriptions against which

attestation is measured does not itself rise or fall - a false assumption.17 So a rise in the number of

honorary inscriptions would not necessarily mean that there was also a growing tendency to honour

elite members of the city. This first problem, however, is not problematic if one is cautious about it.

What is more problematic is that inscriptions tend to give a static and stereotype image of the

internal relations of the polis. The image of the city we get from epigraphic sources is an idealized one

in which there is little or no room for conflict or discord.18 According to Simon Swain this is a

consequence of the heavily contextualized and public nature of epigraphy.19 For Giovanni Salmeri it is

all rather a matter of length. Whatever the reason for it may be, the static image inscriptions evoke is

not very useful for a study concentrating on the citys internal structures of power. The advantage of

using literature is that it gives more information about the functioning of the political institutions and

about the cooperation between them. Literary sources are more likely to reflect or give indications for

conflicts in and between these political bodies.20

1.3 Methodology

Without a theoretical frame any study of the politics and literature of the Greek cities in the Roman

imperial period would only be a summary of some common sense statements. When studying ancient

society or ancient literature a scholar inevitably brings his own prejudices, presuppositions and

opinions to the table. We always use modern conceptions in our interpretation of ancient texts and

society. The choice we have is not whether we want to hold certain opinions and presuppositions or

not whether we like it or not, we have already answered certain questions and thus accepted certain

prejudices before we read the first word on the page. The choice we do have is whether we want to be

aware of these prejudices, whether we want to be able to consciously examine the arguments for and

against a certain position. Political and literary methodologies help us to be conscious of our modern

conceptions about literature and politics. Keeping our own conceptions and perspectives in mind we

16 O. Van Nijf, The Civic World of Professional Associations in the Roman East, Amsterdam, Gieben, 1997, p. 23. 17 R. MacMullen, The Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire, in: The American Journal of Philology, 103, (1982), 3, p. 244. 18 G. Salmeri, Reconstructing the political life and culture of the Greek cities of the Roman Empire, in: Van Nijf and Alston,

PCGC, pp. 200, 201. 19 S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire: language, classicism, and power in the Greek world AD 50-250, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1996, p. 71. 20 G. Salmeri, Reconstructing the political life and culture of the Greek cities of the Roman Empire, in: Van Nijf and Alston,

PCGC, p. 202.

7

can then turn to the sources for ancient society.21 The theories that will be described and explained in

this paragraph are influenced by notions on power that can be associated with postmodernism and

New Historicism. First I will introduce the specific perspective on politics I will be using. After this I

will describe my approach to ancient literature.

1.3.1 Power

Central to any study of politics is the concept of power. A first intuitive idea of power is something

like A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise

do.22 In a dmokratia this would ideally mean that the dmos as a whole could get some parts of it, for

example a group of elite citizens, to do things they would not have done otherwise. This is of course

only a first idea of how power works. I will be using a more elaborate idea of power that is sometimes

called the discourse paradigm. This is an approach that has been developed as a response to the

dominance of the so-called coercion paradigm and its definition of power. The coercion paradigm

sees power as basically deriving from physical force. The state is the primary locus of power, because

it has, as the sovereign authority, the monopoly on both the internal and the external use of force.

Power is held by the sovereign state and can be studied by looking at its constitution and its political

institutions.23 This perspective on power has inspired many studies that have contributed a great deal

to our understanding of ancient politics. In this thesis, however, I will not be taking a constitutional or

institutional approach. The coercion paradigm is too restrictive in its notion of power, because it sees

power as repressive of and exterior to people.24 According to Moses Finley this leads to falling into the

constitutional-law trap25 Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality puts it this way It is this image

we must break free of, that is, of the theoretical privilege of law and sovereignty, if we wish to analyse

power within the concrete and historical framework of its operation. We must construct an analytics of

power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.26

The Discourse Paradigm

An analytics of power is essential for every study on political systems. This power exists in the sense

of potestas and in the sense of auctoritas.27 As Josiah Ober in his study on the Athenian democracy

said it: Power is not simple; a proper explanation of the demos kratos will have to embrace not only

the more obvious elements of the franchise and the reality and threat of physical force but also

authority and legitimacy, ideology and communication,...28 It is this notion of power that will be the

starting point for my approach to politics.

21 T.A. Schmitz, Modern Literary Theory and Ancient Texts: an introduction, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 6-9. Citation

from p. 9. 22 R.A. Dahl, The Concept of Power, in: Behavioural Science, 2 (1957), 3, pp. 202, 203. 23 J. Ober, The Athenian Revolution; essays on ancient Greek democracy and political theory, Princeton, Princeton University Press,

1996, pp. 88, 89. 24 Ober, MEDA, p. 22. 25 M. I. Finley, Op. Cit., p. 56. 26 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. I: An Introduction, Translated by R. Hurley. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1998. p. 90. 27 M.I. Finley, Op. Cit., p. 8. 28 Ober, MEDA, p. 19.

8

The discourse paradigm is based on Michel Foucaults view on power. Power is ubiquitous in all

human relationships, or in other words: power is everywhere.29 This means that power is not

centralized in a sovereign state, its constitution, or its institutions. Power is also productive, rather than

repressive, meaning that it is not a one-dimensional relationship of repression between the rulers and

the ruled. Central to Foucaults concept of power is discourse. Power is a complex matrix of

relations disseminated and indeed contested, through linguistic and symbolic relationships.30

Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders

it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it.31

When the concept of power of the discourse paradigm is combined with the concept of political

ideology it becomes clear in what way it influences the daily practices of politics. According to the

Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, political ideology is a set of ideas, beliefs, values, and opinions,

exhibiting a recurring pattern, that competes deliberately as well as unintentionally over providing

plans of action for public policy making, in an attempt to justify, explain, contest, or change the social

and political arrangements and processes of a political community.32 There are various and

contradictory ways to interpret political ideology. I will follow a non-Marxist semantic approach. In

this view ideologies are inevitable as ubiquitous mapping devices of cultural symbols and political

concepts that constitute a crucial resource for understanding sociopolitical life and enable collective

choices to be made concerning the shaping of that life. The semantic perspective of this approach can

be made clear by the following example: the concept of liberty may be present in most ideologies, but

its meaning is determined from case to case by the proximate concepts that surround it, private

property or social welfare pulling it in different directions. In this way ideologies shape the

competition over the control of the correct and legitimate meanings of political words and ideas,

and by means of that control, over the high ground of politics.33

It is now clearer what power means in the discourse paradigm and what role discourse plays in it,

but can it also be used when studying antiquity? Josiah Ober makes use of the discourse paradigm

and the semantic approach to political ideology to study the Athenian democracy.34 In his book Mass

and Elite in Democratic Athens Ober tried to find the key to the success of the Athenians in

maintaining a democratic political system over a long period of time. Ober argues that the explanation

for this success can be found in ideology. He therefore started to reconstruct ideology by studying

ancient texts and formal rhetoric in particular. At the end of his book Ober comes to the conclusion

that the mediating and integrative power of communication between citizens especially between

ordinary and elite citizens in language whose vocabulary consisted of symbols developed and

deployed in public arenas: the peoples courts, the Assembly, the theatre, and the agora was the real

key to the success of the Athenians. In the democratic polis of Athens the people held the power,

because they controlled the symbolic universe. Networks of symbols were created in the reciprocal

communication between mass and elite. The vocabulary used in the rhetorical speeches was rich in

topoi that helped the Athenians to create a stable political system. According to Ober it was

29 T.A. Schmitz, Op. Cit., p. 145. 30 T. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 18, 19. 31 M. Foucault, Op. Cit., p. 101. 32 M. Freeden, Ideology: political aspects, in: Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Elsevier, 2001, p. 7174. 33 M. Freeden, Art. Cit., pp. 7174-7177. 34 Ober, MEDA, passim. He later elaborated his theory in. The Athenian Revolution; essays on acnient Greek democracy and

political theory.

9

communication that assured the dmos of an ideological hegemony over those who were their social

and economic superiors.35

The emphasis on discourse and the idea that it not only transmits, but also produces power, is clear

in Obers work. He repeatedly argues that formal rhetoric consists of the symbolic communication that

can be used to reconstruct the ideology of the citizenry. According to Ober the Athenians had no need

for democratic theory, because its function was already fulfilled by democratic discourse. This

discourse was created by the invention of new words (e.g. Dmokratia, isonomia), transvaluation of

existing terms (isegoria, plethos), subversion and appropriation of the terminology and ideals of the

aristocrats (kalokagathia, arete), but above all by the elaboration of the vocabulary of rhetorical topoi

and images...36 Christian Meier even suggested that this democratic discourse was the result of a

Begriffsweltwandel, a transformation in the entire conceptional universe, only surpassed in

importance by the Enlightenment. Es gibt Epochen, in denen sich der gesamte Bestand der Begriffe

auf politisch-gesellschaftlichem Feld wandelt: Zentrale Begriffe werden neu gebildet. Wichtige

berkommene Begriffe verndern ihre Bedeutung grndlich oder geraten ins Abseits. Die gesamte

Begriffswelt wird unter neue Vorzeichen gestellt, gewinnt neue Funktionen und bleibt sich dann, bei

aller Vernderung im einzelnen, fr mehr oder weniger lange Zeit wieder gleich.37

In this thesis I will argue that the approach Ober takes, the essential role of power and ideology in

providing symbols for communication, and the study of language as a means to reconstruct this

ideology, can be used when studying the politics of the post-Classical poleis. The conclusions Ober

offers are plausible for fourth century Athens, but the democratic system of Athens was unique even in

its time and can certainly not be compared with the political systems of the Graeco-Roman polis.

There is no doubt that the ideological hegemony of the dmos, as Ober described it for Athens, was

extraordinary and the Greek cities in the Roman period did show a tendency towards hierarchy and

oligarchy. In this thesis, however, I will argue that this did not mean that there was no room for

democratic elements in the politics of the polis. The view of the polis in the Roman imperial period as

a society in which the dmos had lost all of its power relies heavily on the idea that power can be seen

as restricted and repressive. In this view power was located in the institution of the elite, the boul, and

lacked by the institution of the dmos, the ekklsia. Power is seen as a one-dimensional relation

between the elite and the dmos. And when the ekklsia or dmos is still mentioned in the terminology

of the polis this is explained away as mere rhetoric. However, when we accept the idea that power is

something that is everywhere and that it is productive rather than repressive these statements become

problematic. When we see power no longer as being possessed by some and lacked by others and we

accept the idea that power is not only transmitted through discourse, but is also produced by discourse,

it becomes possible for the dmos to play a role of importance in the post-Classical polis.

Again this is not to say that an institutional approach is worthless. After all the institutions of the

ekklsia, the boul and the dikastria (the popular courts) functioned as fora for the communication

between mass and elite.38 As we will see in chapter one it is often argued that these institutions

transformed or even disappeared after the Classical period. If this is true it would be very difficult to

see where the dmos would have been able to play a role of significance in the politics of the Graeco-

35 Ober, MEDA, pp. 35. 36 Ober, MEDA, pp. 35-42, 338, 339. 37 C. Meier, Die Entstehung des Politischen bei den Griechen, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1980, pp. 275, 278. 38 Ober, MEDA, pp. 127-148.

10

Roman cities. It is therefore of the utmost importance to establish whether these institutions continued

to exist or not and to see if there were major changes in their functioning.

1.3.2 Literature

Discourse is an essential element in the construction of power relations and therefore an essential

element of studying politics. Ancient texts reflect the language that is used to construct the structures

of power and the relation between mass and elite. Compared to other sources ancient literature has also

other advantages. Ancient texts contain a lot of evidence; they can be read in modern editions of good

quality; they are often electronically searchable; most of them have decent translations and are

accompanied with commentaries and other interpretive media; and it is relatively easy to date them.

There are, of course, also serious problems that have to be faced when using ancient literature for

historical purposes. Historians handle these problems, according to Tim Whitmarsh, often without care

by ignoring a more literary perspective. One of the mistakes historians tend to make is taking all the

statements and narratives of ancient authors at face value which can cause naive and partial readings

of ancient texts. Whitmarsh sees historians also as vulnerable to the pitfall of focusing too much on

points of contact between the text and the contemporary world or even neglecting and explaining away

textual evidence that does not fit in the historians particular view on society. Whitmarsh is, however,

also harsh on literary students who fail to take the historical context of ancient literature into account

and only pay attention to aesthetic and formal aspects, such as allusion and narratology. Focusing too

much on a literary perspective can also bring with it a tendency to privilege an elite perspective and to

neglect realities. 39

According to Whitmarsh historians and scholars of literature have much to learn from each other.

Historians should take into account the issues of interpretation raised by literary texts and students of

literature should take the historical context of the literature they are examining into account. Scholars

should therefore try to combine knowledge about the historical context of ancient society and insights

that derive from modern literary theory. Whitmarsh calls this approach literary historicism.40 This

perspective is stimulated by postmodernism and the responses to some postmodern questions offered

by cultural history and New Historicism. In the following pages I will describe a few problems of

interpretation associated with ancient literature and in what way literary historicism combines

historical and literary knowledge. Issues of interpretation can be found on the three levels of

transmission, translation and meaning.

Transmission

The level of transmission deals with the fundamental problem of establishing a text and trying to find

the authors original words. Some of the difficulties associated with the level of transmission follow

from the fact that ancient texts were copied by hand. The texts that survived the centuries were copied

and recopied many times leaving many opportunities for errors. Besides this the people who copied

39 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient History Through Ancient Literature, in: A, Erskine (ed). A Companion to Ancient History. Blackwell

Publishing, 2009, pp. 77-86. 40 Ibidem.

11

these texts were Alexandrian, Byzantine and Baghdadi scribes who had their own criteria to determine

which texts they should copy. So it can be said that the surviving texts may well be unrepresentative of

the whole range of ancient literature. Although this should be kept in mind, these first issues with

transmission do not cause serious problems for the general understanding of a text.41

A second, and maybe more problematic, group of issues on the level of tranmission are raised by

the fact that many texts were originally designed for oral performance in public space. The polis

always remained a public-orientated community. This is why Aristotle described man as a political

animal or an animal of the polis.42 Contrary to contemporary literature, ancient texts were meant to

stimulate engagement, not contemplation. When transcribed into written form texts were altered in a

way which makes it hard to recover the oral and public context they were originally designed for.43

Although modern editions of ancient texts are maybe closer to the original than earlier copies, they

remain the products of the decisions of editors.44 Knowledge of the historical context, and more

specifically the public and rhetorical context, is therefore very important.

The strong relationship between literature and society is also stressed by certain developments in

literary theory. Romantic conceptions that see literature as the spontaneous outpourings of genius have

been challenged for some time now. The focus nowadays is more on the effects of texts in society than

on the origins of these texts. Roland Barthes calls this the shift from work, defined as the product of

an author, to text, the challenge to readers.45 Texts are no longer seen merely as reflections of history.

Texts actively participate by defining and popularizing certain perceptions of society. In this way

reality becomes a collection of perceptions of the world, instead of a static structure that can be seen

through the window of literature. Texts are not the evidence of society; they are the building-blocks of

society.46

Translation

The second issue with ancient literature is what Whitmarsh calls the translational challenge of an

alien cultural artifact. The translation of ancient literature is necessary, because it keeps the literature

alive by making it understandable to a modern reader. In doing so, however, a translation inevitably

introduces a certain distance from the ancient language itself. The Greek language causes some

additional problems. One of them is that there are many almost untranslatable abstractions in it that

only are understandable within their cultural context. More important for this thesis is that political

language is also hard to translate. This is why terms as basileus and polis are often left untranslated.

This avoids the misleading associations that modern translations cause, but can also, as stated above,

conceal the problem.47 So also on the level of translation context is extremely important to question our

modern interpretations of the cultural and political concepts of the Greeks.

41 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient History Through Ancient Literature, in: A, Erskine (ed). A Companion to Ancient History. Blackwell

Publishing, 2009, pp. 78-80. 42 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. 43 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004, pp. 4, 5. 44 T. Whitmarsh, Art. Cit., p. 80. 45 R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, transl. R. Howard, Berkley, University of California Press, pp. 56-65. 46 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004, p. 6. 47 T. Whitmarsh, Art. Cit., pp. 80, 81, 85. Citation from p. 85.

12

Meaning

Ancient literature is not only in need of a linguistic translation, it also needs to be culturally translated.

This consists of searching for the meaningof a text. Historians often use a rather out-dated form of

literary criticism in which texts are searched for signs that could indicate what the ideas and

motivations of the author had been. This approach is also known as the expressive-realist school and

can be defined as a combination of the Aristotelian view on art as mimsis, the imitation of reality, and

the Romantic idea that literature was the direct expression of the perceptions and emotions of a

person.48

Over the last decades this literary theory has been contested in various ways. Cultural products are

less searched for signs of the inner emotions of the author and more for different and conflicting

voices. According to reception theorists searching for the original meaning of a text is a waste of time.

There is no possibility of reaching a final interpretation. Reception theorists therefore analyse the

different interpretations of a text that add to the existing meanings of a text. Each interpretation of the

meaning of a text has more or less its own validity. Whitmarsh agrees that it is indeed hard to establish

anything in the interpretation of ancient texts beyond the banal and that our interpretations will always

have to be expressed in a language biased with modern cultural priorities. However, this does not

mean that we should stop using ancient literature for studying ancient societies. The correct response,

according to Whitmarsh, should be one of interpretative pluralism. This approach can be taken by

searching for the likely range of possible interpretations in a given historical context.49 New

Historicism is the name mostly given to scholars who approach literature in this way. Central to the

approach is the historicity of texts and the textuality of history.50 Literary texts are grounded in

political and socio-economic materiality, but are also active in the constitution of power and identity:51

The meaning of a text is never simple. Texts are written to provoke and to be debated over,

especially in a community that was as publicly orientated as the polis. This does not mean, however,

that each text can have an infinite range of meanings. The degree to which a text is open to multiple

interpretations differs from text to text. Poetry for example is more likely to contain different meanings

than forensic oratory;52 and the speeches from Dio Chrysostom contain more ambiguity than the more

philosophically orientated advices of Plutarch.

Applying this interpretative pluralism is not always easy. Especially in texts that deal with politics

there is much debate over the possible range of meanings. The reason for this is that ancient authors

rarely opposed the political system or the structures of power directly. However, the Greeks did

sometimes use figured speech as a rhetorical device that allowed the author to deliver two different

messages as one. In this way the author could please two different interpretative communities at the

same time. The literature of the Roman imperial period is often characterized as fond of using this

both-sidedness (to epamphoteron). The possible range of interpretations of the texts analysed in this

thesis should therefore include readings that are implicitly critical of the political system.53

48 C. Belsey, Critical Practice, London, Methuen, 1980, p. 11. 49 T. Whitmarsh, Art. Cit., pp. 81, 82. 50 L.A. Montrose, Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture, in: H.A. Veeser (ed.) The New Historicism,

New York, Routledge, 1989, p. 20. 51 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004, pp. 29-33. 52 Ibidem, p. 6. 53 T. Whitmarsh, Art. Cit., pp. 83-85.

13

In this thesis I will try to reconstruct the original reception contexts of my primary sources in order

to create a map of possible readings. By doing this it should be possible to avoid the mistakes

historians see literary students making and vica versa. In chapter one I will focus on the political

context of the Graeco-Roman polis. In chapter two the literary context will be examined and in

chapters three and four the direct historical context of the works of our three authors will we

described. In this way a historical frame will be created after which a more literary approach can be

adopted. During all this it should be kept in mind that: literary texts are cultural products, no more or

less than material artifacts; but they are also (often) designed to generate multiple interpretations, and

for that reason they cannot be reduced to the status of epiphenomena of a cultural system.54

Literature and Power

Uptill now I have been silent on the biggest problem the use of ancient literature causes for this

inquiry into the democratic elements in the Graeco-Roman poleis. Ancient texts are always the

product of a select group of individuals often described with the acronym FAME (freeborn, adult,

male elites). Ancient literature is therefore biased in favour of elite perspectives. This is certainly

problematic for a study of the political system and the relations of power in society, because dominant

groups in society always try to present their power as stable and uncontested and tend to downplay the

voices that struggle against their dominance. As stated above this is, however, not how power works.

Power is not something that the elite possesses and the rest of the people lack. Power is a set of

relationships between unequal partners,55 or to cite Foucault once more: power is not something that

is is acquired, seized or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away; power is

exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations.56

The focus in my analysis of the specific texts in part two is therefore on the dialogue between elite

writers and the dmos and on power as a set of unequal relations between dmos and elite. In this way

I hope to adjust the dominant view of the Greek cities in the Roman imperial period as strong

oligarchies in which the dmos lost all of its powers.

1.4 Structure

I have divided my thesis in two main parts. The first part is primarily meant as a status quaestionis of

the political and literary context of the poleis in the Roman period. It will introduce the debates in

modern scholarship that are most important to the subject of this thesis. The first chapter deals with the

political context of the polis and will give an overview of the dominant views on the evolution of the

political institutions. In this chapter I will describe the dominant view on the political systems of the

Graeco-Roman cities and the evidence that supports this view. Here I will also question parts of this

54 T. Whitmarsh, Art. Cit., pp. 85, 86. Citations from p. 86. 55 T. Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2004, p. 7. 56 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, New York: Vintage Books, 1990 (trans. Robert Hurley) p. 94.

14

view and discuss the possibility of an alternative view on politics in this period. The general focus will

always be on democracy and democratic elements. The second chapter is about the phenomenon of the

Second Sophistic, which is very important for the literary and cultural climate of the period, although

it also has consequences for the political context of the polis. In this chapter I will describe the

evolution of the debate on the Second Sophistic and how recent approaches influence how the

literature of the period is studied.

The purpose of part one as a whole is to contextualize the research that will be done in part two.

This is important for several reasons. Without an overview of the scholarship on the subject it would

be impossible to avoid making simple mistakes or doing research that has already been done by others.

It will also help to steer the analysis of part two in the most productive direction. In the conclusion I

will try to answer the research question by means of the information given in the first chapters and the

study of the literature in the second part.

Part 1

17

Chapter 1

The Decline of the Polis?

La cit grecque n'est pas morte Chrone, ni sous

Alexandre, ni dans le cours de toute l'poque hellnistique.

Louis Robert1

If we look at the polis from the perspective of world history our conclusion can only be that it was one

of the most successful forms of political organisation. The polis continued to be a primary locus for

politics for 1200 years. Of course there were significant changes during this long period and there has

been a lot of debate on the precise nature of these changes and their consequences. Onno van Nijf and

Richard Alston are right in saying that the final outcome the decline and fall of the ancient city is

perhaps clear, but that there is no general agreement about the pace and the route along which this

decline took place and that the level of disagreement is radical.2 In this chapter I will describe some

of the different views on the pace and route of this decline. Although there is indeed intense

discussion on the subject I will often speak of the theory of decline. The theory of decline is not a real

theory in the sense that it has been consciously developed as a heuristic device to help explain the

post-Classical society, but it has influenced the study of the post-Classical polis nevertheless. Before

going into more detail I will first argue what I mean by the theory of decline and why it is important

for this thesis.

For a long time the dominant view in historiography has been that changes in the fourth century

B.C. led to the failure of the Greek polis, followed by a steady degeneration of virtually every

political, social, cultural, and other facet of civic life in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.3 The

classical period was the golden age of the polis and the end of the classical period meant the beginning

of the degeneration of the polis. The decisive turning point for many scholars was in 338 B.C. at

Chaeronea when Phillip is said to have murdered the polis. For a time the only debate was whether

Philip had murdered a terminally ill patient, the polis as an evolutionary dead end and therefore

1 L. Robert, Thophane de Mytilne Constantinople, in: Comptes rendus de lAcadmie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, p. 42. 2 Van Nijf and Alston, PCGC, p. 4. 3 P. Harland, The Declining Polis? in: L.E. Vaage ed. Religious Rivalries in the Early Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity.

Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006, p. 22.

18

doomed to extinction,4 or someone who was still very much alive. The outcome, however, was clear.5

The theory of decline emphasises the degeneration of almost every aspect of civic life, especially those

aspects that had contributed most to the grandeur of the classical polis, such as literature, autonomy

and democracy. The cause for these different declining aspects is the same: the advent of large scale

politics and the incorporation of the Greek cities first in the Hellenistic kingdoms and later and more

thoroughly in the Roman Empire.

In more recent years the politics of the post-Classical polis has been revived as a subject for

historical research. Before these recent studies could be written their authors had to overcome an

important prejudice, namely that the dmos acquiesced in the dominance of the elite and the Roman

authorities. This prejudice is, according to Giovanni Salmeri caused by the stereotype image that is

reflected in the enormous number of inscriptions. Yet in contrast with the epigraphic material, ancient

texts often show that politics in the institutions of the polis, both boul and ekklsia, are still very

much alive.6

Over the last decades there has been a shift in scholarship on the consequences of Hellenistic rule

for the Greek cities. The validity of some essential parts of the decline theory has been increasingly

contested from the early nineties onwards. One of the first scholars who seriously challenged the

theory of decline was Louis Robert. Nowadays it has almost become a new orthodoxy that the poleis

did not die at Chaeronea.7 However, it can be said that Actium has replaced Chaeronea as the

beginning of the end.8 It is true that Roman rule differed from that of the Hellenistic kings, certainly

from the Imperial period onwards. In this thesis I will argue, however, that the polis was still very

much alive in the first two centuries A.D. and that it continued to be a primary locus for politics. The

Greek cities of the Roman imperial period can no longer be seen as secondary societies.

In the two paragraphs of this chapter I will describe the main features of the theory of decline. The

focus will be on the political aspects of the decline theory and not on its cultural aspects. The first

paragraph will be on the external politics of the polis and the impact of Roman rule. The second

paragraph is about the decline perspective on the internal politics of the polis and its consequences for

democracy. I will begin each paragraph with a summary of the decline perspective on the subject at

hand. After this more recent contributions and authors with a different perspective will be discussed.

Important passages in the primary sources, both epigraphic and literary material, are mentioned in the

text and if needed can be found in more detail in the appendix.

4 W.G. Runciman, Doomed to extinction. The polis as an evolutionary dead end, in: O. Murray and S. Price, eds., The Greek city

from Homer to Alexander, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 347-368. 5 Van Nijf and Alston, PCGC, pp. 5-8. 6 G. Salmeri, Reconstructing the political life and culture of the Greek cities of the Roman Empire, in: Van Nijf and Alston,

PCGC, pp. 197-202. 7 Van Nijf and Alston, PCGC, pp. 5-8. 8 A. Heller, La cit grecque dpoque impriale : vers une socit dordres ? in: Annales HSS, mars-avril 2009, p. 342.

19

1.1 Autonomy

One of the premises of the theory of decline is that autonomy was essential for civic life in the polis.

Without autonomy a city could not be called a real polis. From this perspective the quality of the civic

life of a certain city is regarded as directly connected to the autonomy of that city. So when large scale

politics began to dominate the region this caused a serious problem for the civic life of the Greek

cities. The political aspects of the polis life began to degenerate in the Hellenistic period and continued

to do so under the rule of the Romans. According to the theory of decline the loss of autonomy was

disastrous for local politics. In this view, autonomy in its strict sense is the essential ingredient

without which the polis becomes an empty shell, causing a corresponding decay in other dimensions

of civic life.9

There have been several objections against this view on autonomy and the polis. First, the question

must be answered if autonomy was as important to the cities as is assumed in the theory of decline.

Second, it is hard to answer the question when the autonomy of the poleis had disappeared, if it ever

did disappear totally before the third century A.D. In describing the different ways in which scholars

have answered these questions it will become clear that the politics of the Graeco-Roman polis can

still be considered a serious subject of investigation.

We begin with the first question. Was autonomy essential for the Greek city? One of the scholars

who has studied the ancient city excessively is Mogens Herman Hansen. In one of his articles he

opposes the tendency among historians to see autonomy as a defining characteristic of the polis.

According to Hansen in the orthodox view on the Greek cities the concepts of autonomia and polis are

wrongly connected. The Greek word autonomia means literally living under one's own laws, but the

Greeks used the word more in the sense of being independent than only self-governing. When we

accept this definition of autonomia the cities in the Roman imperial period could certainly not be

called autonomous. Hansen, however, points to the fact that in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. many

poleis were dependencies and in the fourth century B.C. even most of them. The Greeks continued to

refer to these cities as poleis.10 So if the Greeks did not think of autonomia as a precondition for being

a polis and if autonomia could not be applied to all poleis even in the classical period, why should the

supposed loss of autonomy in the Hellenistic and Roman period necessarily lead to the disintegration

of the polis? For the larger poleis, such as Athens, Thebes and Sparta, the Hellenistic age did signify a

loss of power, but for many smaller poleis nothing much had changed. The smaller poleis may even

have benefitted from the fact that the Macedonians destroyed the supremacy of Thebes and Athens,

since they could no longer be the victims of the expansionist aggression of these larger poleis.11 It

would therefore be absurd to speak of the decline of the classical city according to the sole criterion of

international responsibilities.12

The second question, if and when autonomy disappeared, is even harder to answer. The

relationship between the cities and the Hellenistic kings has been described as being dominated by the

9 P. Harland, Art. Cit., p. 23. 10 M.H. Hansen, The Autonomous City-state. Ancient Fact or Modern Fiction in: Studies in the Ancient Greek Polis. M.H. Hansen

en K. Raaflaub eds. Historia-Einzelschriften 95, Stuttgart, Steiner, 1995, pp. 21-25, 43. 11 R. Strootman, Kings and Cities in the Hellenistic Age, in: Van Nijf and Alston, PCGC, p. 146. 12 M. Sartre, LOrient Romain: Provinces et socits provinciales en Mditerrane orientale dAuguste aux Svres (31 avant J.-C.

235 aprs J.-C.), Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1991, p. 121. Footnote 3.

20

latter. According to the theory of decline Hellenistic monarchs determined the fate and governed the

policies of the cities within their spheres. The political institutions of the cities therefore endured

only as hollow survivals. Although the discourse suggests otherwise the monarchs only posed as

advocates of liberty while keeping control and safeguarding their dominance. Seen from the

perspective of the theory of decline one could say that the poleis became the playthings of the great

powers. Eric S. Gruen disagrees with these conventional clichs, because they give a misleading

image of the nature of the relation between cities and kings. The many declarations in which

Hellenistic kings guaranteed autonomia, eleutheria and dmokratia cannot be explained away as mere

rhetoric or empty sloganeering. Seeing the subtle discourse between cities and kings as a faade is too

cynical. To prove his point Gruen refers to the occasion of the Isthmian Games of 196 B.C. in Corinth

on which the Roman general T. Quinctius Flaminus declared after beating Philip V in the Second

Macedonian war that the Greeks were to be free, subject to no tribute, and at liberty to govern

themselves according to their own ancestral laws. For the audience this discourse of autonomy was

very meaningful and their response was one of extreme joy.13 For Gruen this is a clear sign that these

declarations were more than just a faade.14 Moreover even if the declarations in which a polis was

guaranteed its autonomia, eleutheria and dmokratia and the freedom to govern themselves according

to ancestral laws can be seen as merely a faade, it remains true that these declarations were not

limited to the Hellenistic period. Such declarations were also made to the many cities in the classical

period that came to be in one way or another under the influence of the Persian and Athenian Empire

or the hegemony of the Spartans. It would therefore again be wrong to make too sharp a distinction

between classical and post-Classical cities.15

The relation between the cities and the Hellenistic kings was one of mutual benefits. The empires

of antiquity needed the cities as generators of surpluses for the many wars they fought. Besides that it

was extremely costly and time-consuming to besiege cities and success was never guaranteed. The

kings therefore preferred peaceful coalitions. Cities could gain protection from their enemies, grants of

autonomy and certain benefactions as trading privileges and exemptions from taxation. The Hellenistic

monarchs in turn gained the citys acknowledgment of their suzerainty, military aid and the pay of

tribute.16

1.1.1 The Impact of Roman Rule

When the Roman Republic conquered parts of the eastern Mediterranean the nature of their rule was

not very different. Polybius writing about the arche of the Romans did not mean the creation of

provinces and the subjection of the cities to tribute. He meant that everyone in practice must obey

Roman orders.17 The arche of the Romans was their right as military victors to decide whether or in

13 Pol. 18.46.5, 18.46.15; Livy 33..32.5, 33.33.5-7, 34.41.3, 39.37.10; Plut. Flam. 10.4, 12.2; App. Mac. 9.4. 14 E.S. Gruen, The Polis in the Hellenistic World, in: R.M. Rosen and J. Farrell eds. Nomodeiktes: Greek studies in honor of

Martin Ostwald, Michigan, Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1993, pp. 339-342. 15 Ibidem, pp. 339-342. 16 R. Strootman, Kings and Cities in the Hellenistic Age, in: Van Nijf and Alston, PCGC, pp. 142-146. 17 P.S. Derow, Polybius, Rome and the East, in: JRS 69 (1979), 1, p. 4.

21

what form a city or a kingdom might keep its independence.18 The Graeco-Roman poleis could

therefore hope to keep some form of independence. There was a whole range of privileged statuses or

favours the cities could acquire from the Romans. In what combination these rights normally existed is

difficult to tell, but we can distinguish the following most important grants. One of the possible rights

was libertas (freedom). This meant that the city was exempt from the jurisdiction, and the personal

visits, of the governor. Another right was immunitas, the exemption from taxation. A city could also

have the status of colonia, which automatically carried with it exemption from taxation, at least in the

early period of the Empire.19 An important factor for the status of a polis in the imperial period was the

role it had played in the civil wars prior to the formation of the principate. Although the poleis in the

Roman imperial period could not decide on big issues of peace and war, they were not necessarily

stripped of all of their powers.

Besides these formal grants there is another reason not to exaggerate the loss of autonomy. The

Roman authorities tended to avoid interfering in the affairs of the poleis. The Romans ruled their

empire in a rather passive and reactive way.20 This is not surprising taking into account the very low

number of Roman officials in the provinces. Both the province of Pontus and Bithynia (until the rule

of Marcus Aurelius) and the province of Asia were senatorial provinces and were therefore governed

by a senatorial governor. There was no large military force stationed in these provinces. In the

province of Asia there only was one proconsul, three legates and a quaestor. A small number

especially when contrasted with the large number of about 300 - 500 civic communities the province

of Asia contained.21 Garnsey and Saller therefore use the term government without bureaucracy in

describing the Empire. According to them the imperial rulings fell far short of a rash of general

enactments that drastically undermined the autonomy of local government institutions. The emperor

did not want a large bureaucracy or a systematical reorganisation of local governments.22

The province governor was in charge of defending his province and he judged the important

criminal and civil cases. When certain poleis had acquired the rights of libertas and immunitas they

could pretty much manage their own affairs. In order to do so they had, however, to avoid local

unrest.23 We can therefore conclude that the autonomy of the polis not totally disappeared. Certain

rights could be acquired by diplomacy to or from emperors. Besides that the polis kept on existing as a

political community whether it was truly autonomous or not.

According to P.J. Rhodes autonomy was in the Roman period very similar to autonomy under the

Hellenistic kings. Although the right kind of rgime sometimes was encouraged or required and

compliance with every command of the Romans had to be guaranteed, a city which did not provoke a

reaction of the authorities could pretty much govern itself. It is true that some inscriptions from the

principate suggest a position of greater subservience than in Hellenistic times. This portion of

evidence is, however, small in comparison to the rest that stays silent on the subject. For Rhodes the

conclusion must be that the Roman authorities could be, and sometimes were, involved in the internal

18 F. Millar, Polybius between Greece and Rome, in: F. Millar, H.M. Cotton and G.M. Rogers eds. Rome, the Greek World and the

East, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002, III + p. 91. 19 F. Millar, The Greek City in the Roman Period, in: F. Millar, H.M. Cotton and G.M. Rogers eds. Rome, the Greek World and the

East, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002, III + p. 113. 20 G.P. Burton, Proconsuls, Assizes and the Administration of Justice under the Empire, in: JRS 65 (1975), pp. 92106. 21 G.P. Burton, Provincial Procurators and the Public Provinces, in: Chiron 23, (1993), pp. 1328. 22 P. Garnsey and R. Saller, The Roman Empire : economy, society and culture, Berkely, University of California press, 1987, pp. 20

40. Citation from p. 38. 23 P.A. Brunt, Roman Imperial Themes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. 116 17.

22

affairs of the Greek states, and that as time passed this involvement tended to occur more frequently

and to penetrate deeper, but that this process was haphazard rather than systematic, and the Greek

states were not regularly reduced to a pretence of deciding freely what was in fact ordered by the

Romans.24

24 P.J. Rhodes and D.M. Lewis, The Decrees of the Greek States, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 545-547. Citation from 547.

23

1.2 Dmokratia

A second and for this thesis more important part of the theory of decline concerns the internal politics

of the Greek cities of the Roman period. In the classical period democracy meant that every citizen

could participate actively in politics through voting and participating in the ekklsia. One of the central

hypotheses of the decline theory is that this was no longer the case for the post-Classical poleis.

According to the theory of decline the roles of the ekklsia and the dmos diminished in the Hellenistic

period and with the advent of the Roman era democracy finally disappeared altogether. The death of

democracy caused the detachment of most citizens, especially those who were less well to do, from

civic identity and pride. In short the loss of democracy destroyed the relation of most of the citizens

with their polis and this damaged the civic life in the post-classical polis severely.25

The aim of this paragraph is to critically re-evaluate the evidence for and against the claim that

popular participation in the politics of the polis had disappeared by the Roman imperial period. First I

will recapture the different arguments that have been made in support of the decline of democracy.

The general view stated above is worked out at length by A. H. M. Jones26 and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix27.

Both authors stress the fact that Greek democracy degenerated after the classical period and that this

was a gradual process that started in the Hellenistic age and was completed somewhere in the Roman

period. After this I will go into more detail and consider some more recent attributions to the debate.

Jones account starts with the bright future of Greek democracy that seems to lie ahead at the start

of the Hellenistic period. Alexander established democracies in every city he conquered or liberated

from the Persians, whether they were tyrannies or oligarchies. In this way democracy became the

normal constitution of the Greek cities throughout the east. The kings who came to rule parts of the

empire after Alexander had died mostly followed his policy towards the cities. When Antipater and

Cassander tried to install oligarchies they became so unpopular that their adversaries could exploit the

situation. Jones puts it this way: Whatever devices the kings might invent to secure their control over

their cities, there was one which they could not use, the formal limitation of political power to a small

class. In the Hellenistic age democracy was the normal constitution for a Greek city and when the

Greek city spread over the former Persian Empire democracy rode along.28

This, ho