Democracy and Its Subjects: Towards a Total History of Democracy in the Hellenistic Period

The political history of the ancient Greek city-states is conventionally told as a struggle between an ‘elite’ and an opposing ‘mass’ of the citizens. This analytical perspective is often grounded in Aristotle’s political sociology but owes as much to the elitist strand of 19th- and 20th-century democratic theory. Though open to criticism on its own terms, the mass-and-elite perspective’s most important shortcoming is its extreme political myopia: it considers only the adult male citizens. But in relegating all other inhabitants of the city-state to a single group of political outsiders, inhabiting an apolitical social sphere, historians run the risk of accepting the biased representations of citizens’ regimes.

Apart from expanding on this critique, this paper outlines a different approach: an histoire totale of ancient Greek democracy. The point of departure is the observation that the adult male citizens’ collective constituted a ruling class that not only governed themselves but also ruled over the many politically disenfranchised inhabitants of their city-states and, indeed, that its organisation and actions cannot be properly understood outside its relationship to those it governed: women, foreigners and slaves. It further argues that the epigraphic and archaeological record of the Hellenistic period offers a more fertile empirical basis for such a history than that of Classical Athens, the conventional starting point for histories of democracy.

Finally, the paper offers a case study of the democratic ordering of slaveries in the cities of Central Greece in the early second century BCE.