You're Dead to Me - Ancient Athenian Democracy (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: July 29, 2023

Greg Jenner is joined in Ancient Greece by special guests Prof Michael Scott and comedian Alice Fraser as they examine the start of democracy with the Athenians. Aside from it obviously being a system that only benefited men, we will take a closer look at the fundamental issues that still apply today, why you’d want to avoid red ropes and broken pots, and just why the Romans disliked the very idea of it.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research by Rosie Rich Written and produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Siefe Miyo and Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Abi PatersonA production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the former chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. Today, we are journeying back all the way to ancient Greece to learn everything we need to know about Athenian democracy.

And to give us the political lowdown, I am joined by two very special guests. In History Corner is a classicist from the University of Warwick, TV broadcaster, author of several books about the ancient Mediterranean world and global history. It's the marvellous Professor Michael Scott. Welcome back, Michael. Thank you, Greg. It's lovely to be back as always. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award winning writer, broadcaster and comedian. You may have seen her many stand-up specials, including The Brilliant Savage, which you can watch on Amazon Prime, or heard her on loads of podcasts, including her funny news pod, The Gargle, her alternate universe satirical show, The Last Post, and frequent appearances on one of my absolute faves, the marvelously silly The Bugle. Who is it? Well, it's Alice Fraser. Welcome, Alice. Hello, Greg. Hello, Michael. This is very exciting to me. I'm a big history fan, I would say.

You paused on the adjective. Yeah, I'm not convinced by that answer at all. We'll have to see. We'll have to see. Well, I feel like a fan is a good thing because I think buff would indicate that I know something, whereas fan means I sort of don't know you, but I'm vaguely impressed by you. Okay. So, what do you know?

We begin, as ever, with a So What Do You Know? where I have a go at guessing what you, the lovely listener, knows about our subject. And I think you know a fair bit about this one. Athens is widely understood as the birthplace of Western democracy, inverted commas. You may be imagining the Parthenon, the Acropolis. You may have visited them on your holidays. But when I say Athenian democracy, perhaps you're imagining a bunch of bearded dudes in white tunics standing around voting for war against Persia again. But is that how democracy really worked? So Alice, democracy is the great experiment, great inverted commas, which shows up

roughly 2,500 years ago. The year is 508 BCE. What do you think was the system beforehand? Who do you think held power in Athens before 508? I assume it was an elaborate system of whoever won the biggest arm wrestle. Is it an accurate guess? It is a really good guess. So 508 BCE, which is the date that traditionally we talk about as the kind of invention of democracy. That is, if you want to be technical about this, the archaic period of ancient Athens. And basically the whole of the sixth century, the 100 years before we get to 508, Athens was in a lot of turmoil. And so we get into a period of effectively arm wrestling between the biggest, strongest elites, most powerful aristocrats. And we call

these guys tyrants. And one of the most famous is a guy called Peisistratus. I mean, he gets no marks for his name, but he does get marks for how he managed to convince the Athenians to listen to him and give him power. Yes, Alice, Pisistratus is a bit of a sneaky chancer. He sets something up to win the sympathy of the crowds. When he murders someone, he says, I can't help it. I'm a Pisces, like as a charming little astrology foible. He fakes an ambush on himself, self-inflicted wounds, and he runs into the town square and says, I've been attacked. I've been attacked. I need bodyguards. And then he uses

those heavies to take power. As somebody who won a lot of fights as a child by pretending that I was worse hurt than I was until my twin brother leaned over and then I whapped him, I approve of this tactic. I have a lot of sneaky respect for Peisistratus because, I mean, despite the fact that, yes, okay, he cheats and lies his way into power, that doesn't work for very long. People discover it, go, hang on a sec, and chuck him out again. But is he done? Is he down? Is he out?

No, he comes back just a couple of years later with an even better plan. It's a two-prong approach. One is he marries the daughter of his big rival. Brilliant plan. Smart move. Second plan, even more impressive. Find the most beautiful girl in Athens, dress her up as a goddess, particularly Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. Put her in your chariot as you ride through the city and claim that the goddess herself is on your side how does how does your new wife feel about this sexy goddess lady in your carriage but he then gets

chucked out again and is he down and is he out i mean really frankly none of our politicians have anything on this guy because he comes back a third time and this time he does it in a good old fashion way he just turns up with a whole army arm wrestle time lads yeah exactly uh and that time he then stays in power also i just want to quickly mention that his rival is called megacles uh which is the best name and i just imagine him as a giant robot transformer who fights with optimus prime so i'm really sorry i mean now i understand why he kept winning it's because everyone thought that his rival was a supervillain. If your rival is a supervillain, you must be a good guy. And Megacles falls out with him because Peisistratus refuses to have sex with his daughter.

Oh. Well, the sources are a little unclear here. Because the way the Greek talks about it is that either it's not consummating the marriage or it's refusing to consummate the marriage in the usual way. The classical interpretation I've heard is he's got two kids from a previous marriage and he doesn't want to get another kid in the way because he wants those two kids to inherit power. They are Hippias, the elder, and Hipparchus. One of them ends up in power. Hippias, right?

And his brother sort of is his backup. But we end up with a curious love triangle, a gay love triangle, which brings about democracy in some strange way. Do you want to explain what the love triangle is, Michael? This is where I put my little academic hat on and go, well, it depends on which sources you choose to believe. Okay. The story goes like this. Alice, you can be our arbiter whether you buy it or not.

Hipparchus, he falls in love with a beautiful young youth, male youth called Harmonius. But Harmonius is already in a relationship with an older man called Aristegiton. Harmonius rebuffs Hipparchus because he's already in a relationship with Aristegiton. Hipparchus takes the huff, and as a result then spurns Harmonius' sister in an official Athenian civics religious ceremony. And as a result of all that, Harmonius and Aristegiton decide to kill Hipparchus and Hippias. And we end up with three of them dying, but Hippias survives, right? I mean, this sounds like fan fiction to me, but I like it.

right? I mean, this sounds like fan fiction to me, but I like it. So this was in 514. Then in 510, the Spartans show up on the Athenian doorstep going, we're here to get rid of Hippias. And you're like, why would the Spartans get involved in anything to do with Athens? It's because they had been told by the Delphic Oracle that they must free Athens. Why had the Delphic Oracle that they must free Athens. Why had the Delphic Oracle been involved in telling the Spartans to free Athens? Because the rival aristocratic family to that of Hippias and Hipparchus and before them had, over the last decade, been building a new temple for the Oracle at Delphi. I mean, I always sort of assumed that the Oracle at Delphi talked like my six-month-old talks,

which is to say you can't really understand it, but you're like, she said bird. Yeah. I mean, clearly there's some family politics happening here and perhaps they're wangling it. So the Spartans are in, and then we have the son of Megacles, my favourite, the robot. Is the son of Megacles called Minicles? Come on.

No, he's called Cleisthenes, which is a much more adorable name. He's Mr Democracy, right? 508 BCE. He invents it, apparently. But he's had a complicated youth. He's been exiled, hasn't he, Michael? He's been off out of the city and living elsewhere. And then he comes back in. How does he get hold of power? Yeah, Cleisthenes he's not really a great pinup as the inventor of democracy.

By this stage, by 510 to 508 BCE, he's actually 62 years old. Oh, really? He's an elite aristocrat. And his family have been part of all the political infighting in Athens for the past century. So they've got rid of Hippias. He's been ousted by the Spartans. Cleisthenes is back in town, but the same old game is afoot. Cleisthenes has a big rival, a guy called Isagoras. Isagoras tries to bring the Spartans back in, but Cleisthenes plays the blinder. And he realises for the first time, although any of these elites, there's a whole mass of poorer, less educated, unelite people in Athens who are just sort of waiting to be welcomed into somebody's gang.

So you're saying a very rich and elite man decided to leverage the power of the, let's say, stupid and resentful masses. It's a good thing democracy isn't like that anymore, huh? So along comes Cleisones with with his big shiny new idea. And where does he get it from is the question? Because I know some scholars recently have been making really fascinating cases saying democracy maybe existed in ancient China, ancient India.

It may not be a Greek invention. Cleisthenes lived in exile for part of his life, so he maybe was exposed to other ways of thinking, other systems other ancient cultures so i'm just curious michael do we know where he gets his big idea from yeah i mean we know strangely little about where he's got these ideas from and frankly i mean it wasn't like he kept turned up with a sort of one pager and went this is my reform package but he did then have and what's then a really accredited to him, which

I think he does deserve a big round of applause for, is a genius reorganisation of the state. It's a bit like rejuring constituency boundaries in UK politics. What's the Greek word? Deems? Demis? Deems. The tiny unit of civic organisation in Athens is called a deem, and there's about 139 of them. These deems are organized into slightly bigger groups that are called trites. But what Cleisnes does, which is the really smart bit, is he says, okay, we'll take a trites that is by the coast. We're talking about the big territory that Athens controls, which is called Attica. People by the coast have tended to be moderate politically. They're often commercial traders, those kind of guys.

Smell like fish. Exactly. Yeah. He takes a treatise of inland heartland agricultural lot who are the kind of obvious sort of oligarch elite supporters. And he mixes that with a trites of people from the city centre. And he makes these three trites come together in a single tribe. So he makes a bunch of moderates have to actually liaise and work with a bunch of oligarchic supporters and a bunch of people power supporters. And that creates his new 10 tribes of Athens. And that is his big revamp. And that is his big revamp. Basically, that you have to fight among yourselves before you can get anything done. So you're too busy to argue with him. Is that the plan? Because that, I mean, that's very good. Have the arguments elsewhere before they come here.

But also it means that fundamentally all the old loyalties, whether they were to your friends in one place or to your landlord and the elites in another place, don't actually matter anymore because these tribes are the way now that you engage with every kind of city business. We should probably talk about some of the administrative reforms. Yes, tell me about the administrative reforms. Admin, admin, my favourite. I think it's really important to mention that at the moment, no one is calling this system democracy. The word doesn't exist. What they are talking about it in terms of is this Greek word. It's isegoria. Everyone's got an equal right to speak. And that's at the very basis of the admin reforms is that every male adult citizen has the right to speak in the

assembly and they debate all the issues. And at the end of it, they vote on what they should do. And it's a kind of majority vote rules kind of thing. So you've got the assembly. Then guiding the assembly is a council that's called the Boulare. And every tribe contributes the same number of people to the Boulare. And as far as free speech goes, how much like Twitter is this? Utterly, entirely. As long as you have the guts to stand up and say it, and you could say it in an attractive and engaging way, which everyone didn't just go like, God, he's talking again. Go for it. I mean, Alice, you probably can guess this. Who do you think is not allowed to speak in political terms?

Me, me, especially me, mostly me. Yes, definitely me. I'm afraid you would fall into the no speaking category it's women it's foreigners it's the enslaved which of course is a huge percentage of the population michael a third perhaps yeah i mean at his at his biggest athens and thene democracy probably only had 50 000 male adult citizens out of a total population of at least a couple of hundred thousand when you add back in women, children, slaves. And the boule sits often for 35 days in a row. It would be in session for 300 days of the year. It's sort of always on. Every single male adult citizen equally

could end up on the top governing council, the boule of the Athenian state, because it was a sort of random lot that they chose people by. You were only allowed to do it twice in your life, and you couldn't do it in two consecutive years. So actually, with that kind of turnover, we estimate that something like two thirds of the entire adult male citizen population had the experience of being on the top council of Athens at some point in their lives. And there's also the legal system too, but their legal system is huge, right? I mean, they're often trying to get jurors in the hundreds or thousands even into a courtroom sometimes. Yeah. Again, so everyone alongside being able and ready to be on the boule or to speak in the assembly, everyone was also, of those adult male citizens, was supposed to be available to be a juror. There was a point later on in Athenian democracy where they do have to start paying jurors

for their service because they realise not everyone can take part because people have jobs to do. Yeah. By the time we're into the 460s, 450s BCE, two things have happened, which I think are really important. One is they're actually calling this system democracy. I think are really important. One is they're actually calling this system democracy. Demos, the people, kratos, power. So power to the people. And it's such a cool name in Athens in the 460s and 450s.

The boys are actually being called as their first names, demokratos. I don't know why you're laughing. My child capitalism is an extremely sweet little boy. laughing my child capitalism is an extremely sweet little boy so in the middle of the fifth century they introduced pain for jury service so that they can have a good representation of all the different economic classes of adult male citizen kind of on their juries and we need to talk about um the assembly direct democracy actual physical democracy happening. Do you know how it worked? I mean, I know how assemblies work. It's it, you sing the school anthem, and then the principal gives a speech, and then you get the awards, and then they talk about how the tuck shop's going to be closed for a couple of hours for renovation.

What is involved then? Where is the assembly happening? Is it up on a hill? The assembly happens on the nicest place for you to go in Monday, Athens, to have a picnic. So that's my tip. If you're in Athens, forget the Acropolis, forget the Parthenon, go to a nearby hill called the Panix. It's an archaeological site, but no one will ever be there because no one really knows about it. And you can sit on this nice hill overlooking the Parthenon and the Acropolis. The 6,000 people gather on a hill. Someone says, who wishes to speak? And you can speak, right, Alice? I mean, have they calculated how loudly you would have to shout?

Yeah, so there is a piece of stone architecture that's still there today, which is the speaker's platform where you sort of stood up so that you were raised up above everyone else. So there's another reform in 390 where, again, the payment compensation system comes in for going to the assembly. So we've already had payments for going in to be a jury member, but now also 390, they're paying people to go and vote for stuff. And Alice, I wanted to ask a little mini quiz for you here.

What do you think these three things have to do with democracy in ancient Athens? One, a red rope. Two, the word idiot. And three, broken pottery. Am I trying to build something with these three things or? By all means, you can. The red rope has to be symbolic, right? And the broken pottery, that's very Greek.

End of a party, I assume. And then you get called an idiot after you smash yourself in the head with a plate. Obviously. It's a good guess. The red rope is dipped in red paint and that it is used to corral the crowd, to drag them up the hill to the assembly. And if you get touched with the red rope, it means you're going too slowly and you're not taking democracy seriously enough. It's basically a shaming tool. But if you are judged to be not taking part in society you

are a idiot is that right michael yeah from which we get idiot but idiot is an integrated technically means a private person so someone who doesn't get themselves involved in all the public affairs that that athenian citizens are supposed to get involved in and then the broken pottery is how you get rid of the freeloaders or maybe how you get rid of the arrogant douchebags who everyone is bored of hearing about. Because this is we're talking now about ostracism. Ostracism is... Like this bird. It's based on the word ostraca or ostraca, which is broken pottery.

Right, Michael? Yeah, the ancient Greek word ostraca means broken bits of pots. And this was the method of voting that they employed for this rather bizarre system of ostracism and if there is a vote that says yes we'll ostracize everyone goes and writes the name of the person that they want to have ostracized which means to basically exile them chuck them out of athens for 10 years on a piece of broken pottery and then the names will be read out counted counted up. And if you've got the biggest number of pieces of broken pottery with your name on, you have to op it. So in the assembly, it's show of hands to vote for something.

So if you're voting for a law, show of hands. But when you're voting to get rid of someone, you write their name down. So that they don't come back 10 years later and go, I saw you with your hand up, mister. I was going to say, can you see any problems with a system in which writing a name is the process through which you get rid of someone? I assume that not everyone was literate. Exactly right. Which can lead to some election tampering, perhaps.

There's a guy called Aristides and he gets the nickname Aristides the Just because apparently, so the story goes, he there in athens and joe blogs from the outskirts of attica turns up and goes i want to vote to ostracize this guy aristides he's so annoying he's so honorable and good and you know but i can't write his name will you help me write his name and of course aristides because he's honorable and just and good writes his own name on the pot shirt and gives it to the guy and go, here you go, you go ahead. Ah, lovely democracy. But apparently this guy, he does, he actually writes his name on it. And as a result, he gets ostracized. So that's kind of one end of the spectrum. But then we have a whole bunch of actual surviving pieces of these pottery shards that we've dug up out of the ground that have

got names written on. And there was one particular collection of these pottery shows that were found that all had the same name on, a very famous Athenian political figure, a guy called Themistocles. Except when people then analysed the handwriting of the about 190 different pieces of pottery that had the name Themistocles written on, they were only able to identify 11 different hands writing those pieces. So was there a scribe? I mean, could you get a scribe to write it for you if you couldn't write? Now, Alice, you see, you're not a cynical person. I think Greg's a cynical person. Alice takes the non-cynical view where this is democracy helping itself to function so those illiterate people who couldn't write the name could turn up and there was a central scribe system.

No, this is absolute cynicism because democracy doesn't work without capitalism these days. So I've just assumed there's a booming business of scribes out the side. Scribes are us, yeah. A more cynical view, which I think Greg takes, is that effectively this was vote rigging. We should also mention that there are a couple of other really important democracy pioneers who come quite late, really. Pericles and Ephialtes. Yeah, so these are guys all in that first half of the fifth century who are kind of,

again, making changes to the system. They are really big voices in the gradual evolution of the democratic system. Let's be honest here. They are tightening up on democracy because they want to see people's genitals. Well, now there's a sentence I never thought I'd hear. Alice, do you know what I mean when I talk about tightening up and seeing genitals? Have I completely lost you? Wait a minute, is this so women can't vote? You are on the right lines, Alice. Over time, the Athenians get much stricter about who can be a citizen. So they start to say around about the 450s,

they start to say, actually, both of your parents need to have been athenians for you to be a citizen and as a result almost overnight that law is passed and overnight a whole bunch of people just lose citizenship people are just chucked out so when they were in the deed they'd be checked whether both of their parents were athenians they'd be checked kind of whether they were married when you were born so that you were a proper child. And then crucially, your genitals would be checked, not just to check that you were a man, but whether you were adult, whether you were of the right age to become a full Athenian citizen. By the mid-400s, Athens is a superpower. When modern politicians talk about democracy, they talk about exporting it.

But the Athenians, they didn't give a hoot about exporting democracy, did they? They're not trying to share their great system. They're just using it to empower themselves. So by the 450s, Athens is in charge of a humongous empire of different city-states that it has basically crushed and said, you've got to do what we tell you to do. So you've got this democracy ruling an empire in a nicely kind of inconsistent and ironic kind of way. So Michael, we know roughly when democracy is invented, 508 perhaps BCE, but then you get your kind of evolution through it.

When does democracy die? It's only at the end of the 4th century BCE, when the Greek world changes beyond all recognition. That's when Alexander the Great turns up and he rides over, roughshod over everyone and creates a big empire, and the whole world changes. So that's the kind of end of the story. But up to that point, it's in a constant evolutionary process.

So, Alice, we've heard a lot of stuff. You've laughed in shock and horror sometimes, and sometimes you've sort of gone, oh. So I wanted to ask, what do you think about ancient Athenian democracy? Are there any things we can borrow from it? Are there things we should avoid? I mean, I'm delighted by the idea of paying people to come in and do, Georgia, your, in this instance, vote. Because I think, particularly in America, that's one of the things that is really playing against them, that they've set it up so that their working class people find it very difficult

to go out and vote and arguably some places have set that up on purpose. But I think, yeah, the idea of you just get paid for this day, it's a public holiday and you go and you vote. Also, I think only men who own property should be allowed. No. Men who own property should be... No. I do quite like the idea of everyone can get up on the platform and have a chat. That idea that two-thirds of the citizen body would have been on the main top council during their lifetime.

There, for me, that would be the real thing to learn that along with paying people to give them the time the possibility to be involved to actually have systems whereby we train people and got them involved in the business of actually running our state on a more regular basis as part and parcel of like we have jury service today why don't we have government service or citizen service or whatever we want to call it but where we actually get involved in running our country the nuance window The Nuance Window! Okay, well, it's time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Alice and I take a short parliamentary recess. We go quiet for two minutes while Professor Michael tells us something we need to know. So the floor is yours, Professor Michael.

What are you going to tell us about? Well, we've talked a lot today about how the story of democracy that began in ancient Greece continues through to our modern world and to our democracies of today. We'd like to see that link, and people talk so often about that link. Obama, when he was finishing up his presidency, he talked about it in terms of a flame lit in ancient Athens, nurtured by the Enlightenment and then fanned by the founders of the USA. But actually, I think we need to recognise the story is a lot darker than that. The Romans hated it. They called Athenian democracy mob rule. They couldn't stand the idea of letting everyone have a say. And no one could for centuries afterwards. The idea of

letting people, all the people, have a say was an utter abomination. And even when you get to the American founding fathers, when you look at the debates they had, they are expressly against Athenian democracy as an option for the modern world. They talk about it and they say things like, even if every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates, i.e. a wise philosopher, Athenian democracy would still have been nothing more than mob rule. We don't want it. And that's why in America, you do not have the Bulaire and the Pnyx, you have the Capitol and the Senate, because they much preferred the model of ancient Rome. So actually, when did we start rethinking about

how great Athenian democracy really was? And it's very recently. It's the 19th century. It's after the Greek War of Independence when Greece was freed from the Ottoman Empire. And suddenly everyone started falling in love with ancient Greek culture, philosophy, wisdom, and politics. So actually, our love of ancient Greek democracy is a very recent thing indeed. And the reason I think people try to hide that all the time is that they don't want democracy to be such a fragile thing in our human story. They want it to be a continuum, but actually we need to remember it's a hell of a lot more fragile and a recent love affair than that. Thank you so much. Thoughts on that, Alice?

Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. And it's also, I mean, not just in this kind of self-congratulatory way, this line drawn from ancient Greek to modern times, I think is also sort of a weird, creepy, cultural supremacy thing where you draw this line through cultures that are not actually directly connected with one another as though that we are the direct heirs from or of Athens via Rome. So this track through development that we take credit for, I find extremely weird and creepy. And this is something which is much more global in its origins, as well as in the different places that it's popped up around the world

in our history. So in trying to connect just to the ancient Greece and keeping it as our thing, it's a very, very Western supremacist viewpoint. It's time for me to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the magnificent Professor Michael Scott from the University of Warwick. Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure as always. Lovely being with you guys. We enjoyed it very much. In Comedy Corner, the wonder from down under, the absolutely

fabulous Alice Fraser. Thank you, Alice. Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time for some more stories of power hungry tyrants. But that's enough having me. It's a delight. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time for some more stories of power-hungry tyrants. But that's enough about me. Bye! Are you fed up with the news? There are unconfirmed reports that the former Culture Secretary Nadine Doris has been heard banging in the wreck of the Titanic. The skewer. The ske Titanic. The skewer.

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