How did the first democracy die?

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2:39Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big. No question too small. No question too old. We're going to do something different this week. How often do you think about the Roman Empire? How often do I think about the Roman Empire? Yeah. Maybe three or four times a month. A few times a week, I'd say. Last fall, this meme circulated where people, mostly women on TikTok, asked their husbands or boyfriends how often they thought about the Roman Empire. Why do you think about the Roman Empire? It's a very interesting time. You don't think so? It's blowing my eyes. Well, you never think about it.

3:14What do you think about that? Not the Roman Empire. It was a moment where once again we learned there are two kinds of people. This time, those who think about Rome all the time, and those who do not. But there was a third type of guy, never mentioned in this meme. And that guy was me. I don't think about the Romans much, but I do think about ancient Greece a fair amount of the time. Specifically, I think about ancient Greece as a coping mechanism. When I get deeply upset about our democracy, I think about theirs. Athens was the very first democracy in human history. One that faced some of the same problems we faced, some problems of their own, and then died in spectacular fashion.

3:56I know this might not be the escapism some people are looking for this week, but walk with me for a sec. Any book can be a self-help book. And for the past few years, mine has been What's Wrong With Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, which is a factual academic look at the problems of Athenian democracy in the 5th century BC. I spoke to its writer this week. Okay, first things first, can you just introduce yourself? Sure. My name's Lawrence Sammons, but everyone calls me Jay. And I teach Greek history and Greek and Latin at Boston University and have done so for over 30 years.

4:34I also work for the American College of Greece in a consulting role in Athens. And my interests have been democracy and imperialism and the historians who write about democracy and imperialism for pretty much my whole career. One of the ancient historians who Jay thinks about most often is a Greek writer named Thucydides. Jay first encountered his work decades ago as a student. When I got to graduate school, I still thought I was going to be a Roman historian, but it was really Thucydides that dragged me into Athenian history. I found him so interesting that I abandoned my Roman studies and focused on the Greeks.

5:13And what was it about Thucydides? Like, what about the way that he wrote? It was so dark. I mean, Thucydides has an extremely dark view of human nature. He's very much like my father in many ways. If you think things are as bad as they can possibly get, you're definitely wrong. They're going to get worse. But I think sometimes people think Thucydides is sort of taking joy in that, that he's saying it's good that human beings exercise power in this really sort of awful way. But I think that's wrong. He's someone who recognizes the tragedy of the fact that human beings tend to make similar mistakes over and over again.

5:47Thucydides was an elite in Greek society, a general who was exiled from Athens after losing a big battle. He ended up spending time in enemy land, the only place he was welcome for much of his life. Exile is hard on people, but it can be useful for writers. And Thucydides took the opportunity to try to understand Athenian society from his new position outside of it. A lot of what Thucydides wrote, you could be forgiven for thinking was about us, today. Complaining about Athens, his hometown around 400 BC, he observed that, quote, most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

6:28Huh. Of course, one of the most famous things Thucydides said is, as long as human nature remains the same, similar things will happen again. And that's why he believed his work would be useful for those who want to know about the future. Not because history is cyclical, not because history repeats itself, but because human beings repeat themselves and make the same kinds of mistakes generation after generation.

6:51So Thucydides is going to be our primary source for this story. And he really was there. He watched the first democracy rise and fall. Chapter 1, Athens. When the story begins around 650 BC, Greece is a series of city-states. Athens was a typical one. The city itself, very small. Maybe 10 ,000 or 20 ,000 people live there. On the top of the big hill, there's a few temples, some spots for public gatherings. Most people live down below. Eventually, they'll build a city wall. Outside the city, miles and miles of rural farmland, where the majority lived. And then, if you keep traveling further, throughout the Mediterranean, there's something like a thousand other city-states.

7:39It looked more or less like Athens did. These city-states are independently ruled and constantly at war with each other. And like our American states, they're a series of experiments, each representing a different way society could function. Spartans lived in a country with more women's rights, but also lived under military rule. Corinthians knew their state was the wealthy commercial hub, but that it was run by oligarchical elites. Athens, when our story begins, is not yet known as the home of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle, as the cradle of Western philosophy and government. Athens is known instead as kind of a backwater.

8:20Athens was a second-tier state, maybe even a third-tier state in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. And what does that mean? Like, what is a third-tier state at that time? Well, I mean, A, they weren't as powerful as some other states. Their military strength was not up to some other states. But what I really mean is that they didn't have the early history that other states had, like Sparta and Thebes and Argos. Those are names that ring through mythology and what the Greeks thought of their very ancient past. Whereas Athens, for example, if you take Homer, the Iliad, Athens plays almost no role at all in the Iliad.

8:54Most classicists can't even name the Athenian hero of the Iliad because he's a nobody in the story. He appears four times and twice he's being called a coward. But they do know that Odysseus comes from Ithaca and Ajax comes from Salamis. So you have all these other heroes that come from other places that seem far less important than Athens. But to an Athenian reading Homer, he fails to find himself there. So what does this mean for the Athenian psyche? And I think it's actually a major factor in how the Athenians thought of themselves. You mean that they had like what, I'm from Philadelphia, like they had what Philadelphians have, which is like this feeling of like sort of being sandwiched between places that thought of themselves as greater, like this sort of angry, overlooked feeling?

9:36Yeah. Yeah, I do. I do think that. That's probably making it too strong. Yeah. I think that this feeling rarely rises to a kind of conscious level, but it's active. It does rise to a conscious level. For example, Pericles, in one of the speeches that Thucydides records, says, we don't need any Homer to sing our praises. That's a really odd thing to say. We don't need any Homer. We know we're not there and we don't need him. We're going to write our own epic. This nation that wanted to write its own epic, it had a plan. Chapter 2, The Athenian Experiment. Athens' plan to make a name for itself involved constantly picking fights with its neighbors.

10:16The Athenians were obsessed with imperialism. That's how they believed they'd get into the history books, as a conquering power. That's their goal. But in the 5th century BC, they happened to make what will turn out to be a very consequential choice for human history. They offer widespread voting. There were some other Greek city-states that allowed voting, but it was restricted to small groups of elites. Aristocrats, property owners. In Athens, the politicians start allowing more and more regular people to vote. And this is one of the things that makes Athenian democracy different. It starts to look different from other Greek city-states because the Athenians lowered the property qualification to the point eventually you don't have to own property to be a citizen and vote in the assembly.

11:02This was an extraordinarily radical idea. Of course, there were big groups excluded, women, foreigners, enslaved people. But by the standards of the time, letting the masses vote was unheard of. And what's most interesting is that Athenian voting looks completely different from the voting we do today in America. Like to them, the idea of an election day where we all show up and pick the politician who will represent us and then get a little sticker afterwards the Athenians would have found this comical. In Athens, what would happen instead was much more exciting. The Athenians had a stone machine called a claritarion, which it's sort of hard to picture, but you could just imagine instead if you want the random ball jumbler from a bingo hall.

11:49The claritarion helped randomly assign random citizens to the Athenian version of Congress. There, they would serve for a year. You didn't vote for your congressman. you became one, at random, and then got to put forth laws which any other citizen could vote on. If this sounds crazy, it has an upside. The lottery system, sortition, prevents the thing we have, a system where we get to vote for our politicians, but those politicians are usually elites, and wealthy people use their money to influence that vote. Another Greek writer, Aristotle, foresaw this problem over 2 ,000 years ago. Aristotle said you can't define democracy by voting in elections because if you have voting in elections, you're going to have rule of the rich.

12:39Aristotle said this necessarily follows from elections that you'll end up with rule of the rich. They saw it that early. Yeah, isn't that amazing? I mean, that's obviously not true. I mean, clearly, Aristotle got it wrong. This is something Jay clearly relishes about the Athenians, how their dark view of human nature meant that in some ways they could predict problems with democracy that we encounter as surprises. I had my own moment where I felt a shock of recognition hearing about a different part of Athenian democracy. It had to do with how they ran their justice system. So I should say, I first found Jay's book in 2021, which meant I was reading it during a very unique moment in American life.

13:19People were angry about society, and that anger was roiling on social media. At the time, it felt like every week there were these impromptu public events, some trial by internet, these speedy affairs where some schmo was prated out, almost always found guilty, and then usually ostracized, sometimes permanently, sometimes just temporarily. I witnessed a lot of these events as a spectator. I even reported on a few. And then one day, I found myself inside of one as the schmo. The main thing I was struck by was how uniquely modern it felt. Even when I tried to write about it, it felt too modern to describe.

13:58There were no words, or all the words were wrong. Reading Jay's book, I realized this was not as modern as I had believed. What I thought was an unprecedented system of justice was, in fact, a very unprecedented system of justice. Chapter 3, The People Decide. So just help me picture, like, I'm accused of a crime in ancient Greece. What does my trial look like in Athens? Well, it's going to be heard by a jury. a large jury of Athenians. You're going to have to defend yourself. There's no lawyer to defend you. You can hire someone to write a speech for you, but you're still going to have to deliver that speech yourself.

14:39And am I delivering that speech in, like, I'm assuming I'm not in a mahogany courtroom. No. Where am I? They're outdoors. Athenian courts were typically outdoors, jurors sitting on benches around you, no microphones, no amplification, no nothing. The whole trial is going to happen in one day. Prosecution will make its case. The prosecutor will also not be a public prosecutor. It'll be an individual Athenian citizen who has the ability to bring this case against you. And you're going to defend yourself. And the whole thing will be over in a day. The jurors will vote whether you're guilty or not.

15:10And if they find you guilty, then they're going to vote on what punishment you're going to get. And how many people are sitting on my jury in a trial? 500, 1 ,000, sometimes more than that. So I am pleading my case in front of 500 to 1 ,000 people. Am I screaming the whole time? I hope so. if you want to be heard, if you've got any chance. And you need to think about entertaining the jury, too. Right. You've got to hold people's attention. It's just like public speaking anywhere else. You know, you may have all the evidence in the world, but if you can't hold their attention, or if they just don't like you, I mean, let's just say they jurors don't like you.

15:43They've been looking for a chance to get rid of you, right? And there's no mechanism for making sure that only evidence is used here. One of the practices the Athenians engaged in that I found very fascinating was that they had a formal system of ostracism. Can you just describe for me how that worked? Sure. Once a year, the Athenians would get together and vote on the question, are we going to ostracize anybody this year? Ostracism would mean sending somebody away for 10 years. Their property wasn't seized. Nothing was done to them. They were just sent away. So there's no right to property that prevents the Athenian people from doing this.

16:19the Athenian people can do what they want. It is, in fact, a direct democracy. Of course, I always tell my students, I'm definitely voting yes. Every year, are we going to have an ostracism? Yes, definitely. I don't know who we're going to ostracize, but I don't want to miss the chance of having an ostracism. That's pretty great. Then a few days later, they would come back and they would have the actual vote. The day of the vote, you would write the name of the person you wanted to ostracize on a broken piece of pottery. That pottery is called an ostracon, so that's what gives ostracism its name.

16:48And so you wrote the name of the person you wanted ostracized, you know, Professor Sammons, and then you turn that in. And if 6 ,000 people voted, then whoever got the most votes had to go. No matter what? No matter what. There's no appeal. There's nothing you can say, well, they just don't like me. You know, they have a bias against people from Arkansas like me, you know, and they're throwing me out. There's no appeal to this. You have to go. And why? At what point did they realize our society will function better if once a year we can take the human desire to cast some of ours out and formalize it?

17:22Right. So this looks pretty clearly to have been something they invented right after the Persian Wars and in the context where Athens had gotten rid of its tyrants, but the Persians had tried to bring a tyrant back and impose a tyrant on Athens, a previous tyrant. And the first people who were ostracized were people who could be associated in some way with the tyrants. So it looks like the Athenians thought to prevent a potential tyrant, we will use this thing, ostracism, right? We can't trust having this guy around even, so we're going to get rid of him. But it turns into something else. I think we both know where this is going.

17:58But before it does, it is only fair to acknowledge that the mob was not always wrong. Athenians used ostracism to remove some very dangerous tyrants, people who may have broken no laws, but who did threaten society. The mob also, I mean, this one's just funny, they ostracized Erisides the Jest, in part because they were so irritated by his nickname, which, to be fair, does sound a little bit like virtue signaling. Over time, as you'd expect, elites began just casting each other out of society for all sorts of reasons. Some fair, some not. Athenian democracy was not concerned, as we sometimes are, with due process.

18:37It was concerned strictly with amplifying the voice of the people. And today, we question some of the Athenian people's choices. Like when they tried, convicted, and executed Socrates. Socrates, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the history of the West, found guilty of being insufficiently pious, of corrupting the youth with his strange ideas. In Socrates' case, we're told that more people voted that he should be executed than found him guilty. So there were people who voted for Socrates' innocence who still voted that he should be executed. And why? Why in Socrates' case? He had annoyed a whole lot of people, including some very powerful people.

19:18This is part of what's so confusing about how to think about the first democracy. The Athenians gave us Socrates. They also killed him. And every democracy since has had to wrestle with this moment. This moment where the people got exactly what they wanted. And how much were the American founders thinking about Athenian democracy when they designed our democracy? Oh, they thought about it, but they didn't see it as a positive example. Almost everything they said about it was, we want to avoid that. The founders just didn't want the American system to be that open to the will of the people. The will of the people had to be controlled to some degree.

19:56It had to be blunted, you know, the force of the will of the people. James Madison, one of our founders, wrote that had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob. And in Athens, unlike in America, the leaders really learned to fear the people. Generals who lost wars, wars that people had voted for, were sometimes executed, often exiled. Sometimes the people would ostracize a general, then a few years later realize they wanted him back and have to hit undo. It was a raucous, I would suggest insane way to run a city-state. And over time, the leaders who would learn to thrive in a society like this would be the ones who would help destroy it.

20:40After the break, a new word becomes popular in Athens. Demagogue.

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23:29Welcome back to the show. Chapter 4, Greek Tragedy. When our story began, Athens had been a third-tier city-state, a backwater. But by the middle of the 5th century BC, that had changed. They defeated the Persians while fighting alongside the Spartans. They dominated islands like Noxos, Ahina, Evia. Throughout the Aegean, all these cities are paying tribute back to Athens. Things look good. The threat to Athenian democracy when it arrives, it won't come from one of Athens' neighbors. It'll come from its people. One of the early ideas in Athenian democracy had been that all these random people who are being pulled off their farms and into public service, they should get paid.

24:15A good idea, which spun into something else. One of the things is that the pay for public service in the 5th century became eventually pay for all kinds of things, including in the 4th century, they paid themselves to vote. They're paying themselves to vote. Like, a lot? Well, no, not a lot. What you would get paid as a laborer for one day. Something like that. It's funny, I have to say, on first blush, the idea of paying people to vote does not seem so bad to me. It would mean more people voted, maybe more working people voted. But what happened in Athens is that the demagogues realized offering to pay people to do things was a very good way to buy public support.

24:53Eventually they got to the point where they paid themselves to go to the theater so that they subvented, they underwrote theater tickets for Athenians. And why were they making, those are terrible decisions. Well, I mean, how do you, if you're in an assembly and a politician gets up and says, I think you guys should be paid to vote, who's going to vote against that? Right. I mean, once that idea is out there, once the idea of paying people to do X or Y is out there, it's just impossible, it seems to me, in a democratic environment to get people to go, no, no, I'll give up that money. I don't want to be paid.