Classical Interstices: Imperial Democracy and Athenian Culture

Craige B. Champion

Deborah Boedeker and Kurt A. Raaflaub, editors. Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. viii + 504. $52.50.

The study of the classical Athenian democracy has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent years: classicists, archaeologists, art historians, numismatists, and ancient historians now regularly communicate with one another and profitably use approaches of related disciplines. Classicists are less likely to take literary texts at face value, and archaeologists are aware of complex, sometimes seemingly contradictory, interrelationships between ancient Greek material culture and the ancient Greek literary tradition. Such interdisciplinary awareness yields significant results. We see in these essays a healthy reluctance to posit facile causal relationships between empire, wealth, and the development of the arts in classical Athens and a sensitivity to the dangers of interpreting Greek history through a distorting Athenocentric lens. As the editors state in the preface, "The task we set ourselves . . . was to investigate whether and to what extent there really was a connection between the Athenian democracy and empire on the one hand and, on the other, the development of the arts in the fifth century and, if so, how such a conception should be conceptualized and explained" (1). The approach here, then, is one of an open-ended problematic, not one that seeks after hermetically-sealed closure.

The essays are uniformly of high quality. Some of them cast a wide geographical net that, while focusing on imperial Athens, encompasses much of the ancient Greek world, avoiding the pitfalls of Athenocentrism without adopting generalizing, diffusionist models that sacrifice historical specificity. I here select some individual essays for special comment in order to illustrate concrete instances of the overarching concerns and orientation of the volume as a whole. Lisa Kallett’s essay, "Accounting for Culture in Fifth-Century Athens" (43-58), shows that on balance Athens’ expenditure on cultural productions was a small part of the empire’s annual revenue. Yet, although wealthy Athenians did absorb much of the expense of the Athenian empire’s administration through liturgies, the people (demos) assumed the role of public financier of conspicuous consumption and display, most notably in the building program that produced the Parthenon. But in contrast to lavish public expenditure, there was a relative restraint in the private spheres of house-building and burials. This is the topic of Ian Morris’s chapter, "Beyond Democracy and Empire: Athenian Art in Context" (59-86). Morris shows that in the fifth century, the height of the imperial democracy, Athenians exhibited restraint in these private realms. Moreover, the situation at Athens in the fifth century finds parallels in other parts of Greece: Euboea, Corinth, Argos, and Macedonia. Morris contends that in the fifth century poorer male citizens were able to control the rich in sociological and cultural terms throughout Greece, which perhaps makes classical Greece historically unique.

In a fascinating essay entitled "Democracy, Empire, and Art: Toward a Politics of Time and Narrative" (87-125), Eric Csapo and Margaret Miller, reviving in some ways themes of a famous essay on sculptural art by E. H. Gombrich, argue that in fifth-century Greece we find "phased narratives" appearing for the first time. Classical narrative was different from that of the Archaic period insofar as it emphasized linear time and causal sequence. The historically unique moment was privileged, with far-reaching consequences for Greek society. "The present is now its own moment, caused perhaps by past events, but unconstrained by them. The gain is precisely a sense of human liberty and human responsibility. If classical art insisted upon a conjunction of temporal and causal sequence, if tragedy and history dramatized present deliberations and their future consequences, it was to make a theater of self-determination" (114). Again, these observations can be taken to apply to the fifth-century Greek world as a whole, not simply Athens, though there we can see tendencies towards which Greece was inclining in this period, such as large-scale individual participation in democratic self-government, in hypostatized exaggeration. Robert Wallace’s essay on the sophists in Athens (203-222), further argues for a wider purview in another vein: the development of the sophistic intellectual movement, in the past frequently considered as a by-product of Periclean Athens. Pointing out that many of the so-called sophists were non-Athenians, he argues that philosophical inquiry of the sort we commonly associate with the sophists predated 450 BCE and was to be found all over the Greek world. Links between this intellectual movement and democratic Athens, then, are more tenuous than we have supposed.

These brief remarks should be enough to indicate that Democracy, Empire and the Arts is an important book, certain to stimulate new directions in the study of classical Greece. The diversity of approaches is salutary. As an interdisciplinary endeavor of very high quality, this volume should appeal to students of various disciplines, beyond those with a particular interest in classical antiquity.

Works Cited