I

An account of popular sovereignty that begins with the fifth century BCE may seem to be off to a false start. Foundational works in the history of political thought have taught us that the very notion of sovereignty, and thus of popular sovereignty, emerged from the particular historical circumstances of the early modern era. One might thus believe that fifth-century Greeks could not be discussing popular sovereignty some two thousand years before this concept's emergence.Footnote ¹ Leading ancient historians and classicists have adopted this view, deeming ‘sovereignty’ a misleadingly anachronistic way of thinking about Athenian democracy in the classical period.Footnote ² For the concept of sovereignty seems embedded in a later historical context, in which the dominant political unit is the state, the paradigmatic religion is Christian monotheism, and the term emerged – to simplify – from an attempt to articulate and reinforce the supreme authority of the monarch, and was then transferred to the people who depose him. The logic of sovereignty as initially formulated applies to a unitary, supreme and absolute political authority that has been thought to be alien to Athenian conceptions.Footnote ³ This view has been reinforced by recent scholars who have aspired to reject or moderate a simplistic understanding of Athens as a direct democracy and bring it closer to a more palatable constitutionalist system replete with constraints on all political power.Footnote ⁴

I wish to offer a reconsideration. I will first argue that we have misunderstood the relationship between early modern theorists of sovereignty and ancient political thought. If we pay close attention to seminal articulations of this idea, we do not find a simple break between ancients and moderns, but see instead that sovereignty is routinely characterised by early modern thinkers in Greek terms (and in Roman terms, but that is not my theme here). In particular, writers such as Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf appeal to the essential unaccountability of sovereignty, which must be immune from review, veto or punishment. Some explicitly cast their theories of sovereignty in terms of the Greek notion of being anupeuthunos, unaccountable to any authority. Significantly, being anupeuthunos (or aneuthunos) was for ancient writers a characteristic feature of tyranny; and I want to suggest that these early modern writers had ancient characterisations of tyranny in mind when they set out to articulate their modern theories of sovereignty.

It would thus turn out that there is an ancient Greek concept that meaningfully resembles and historically influences the early modern idea of sovereignty: tyranny. Given the Athenians’ opposition to tyranny and their use of it as the antithesis of their democracy, we might think that we have hereby found a different reason why it is impossible to locate a conception of popular sovereignty in fifth-century Athens. However paradoxical it may seem to us, there is nonetheless ample evidence that the Athenians frequently thought of their democracy in terms of tyranny, not only identifying Athens as a polis turannos, but also characterising the power of the Athenian people as anupeuthunos, and even referring to the authority of the dēmos as tyrannical and despotic. Advocates of Athenian democracy, like the early modern writers on sovereignty discussed briefly in the next section, arrestingly illustrate just how much power is required when they insist that it is tantamount to that of a tyrant.Footnote ⁵ Drawing on history, philosophy, tragedy, comedy and visual art, subsequent sections provide support for the idea that the dēmos or people was understood by fifth-century democrats as properly holding tyrannical authority.

As will become clear, I believe that there is evidence that a strong version of ‘the control thesis’,Footnote ⁶ according to which the people had power by exercising a significant measure of control over government officials, was already developed in the fifth century; and also that it was seen by democrats (though not by Aristotle) to be necessarily paired with what I would call ‘the out of control thesis’. On the democratic view, it is a prerequisite of the people's control of the powerful that the powerful not be in control of the people. Or, to put it differently, neither to be in control nor to be uncontrolled is by itself sufficient for sovereignty, but they are jointly sufficient. This also indicates an analytic advantage of the dramatic comparison of sovereign with turannos, rather than with kurios, the Greek word most commonly referred to when translators write ‘sovereign’. The one who is kurios is in control of people or things, but the Greek term does not imply that no one is in turn in control of him; rather, the reference is generally to an authority whose status is guaranteed and limited by a higher legal and political authority.Footnote ⁷ One may be kurios of some people or in some respect and still be under another's control; so too there can be multiple kurioi (e.g. with specific authority over distinct functions, or over distinct sub-groups) within a given domain.Footnote ⁸ By contrast, the sovereign, like the tyrant, is supreme.

While it may seem odd to begin the story of popular sovereignty in the ancient world, it may seem wilfully perverse to begin with ancient understandings of tyranny. This is only part of the story, of course, but it may help us to reconsider familiar yet false narratives about ancient and modern political thought. By thinking with the Greeks about popular sovereignty as analogous to tyranny, we may also gain useful, if perhaps discomforting, insights into our own conceptions of democracy and popular sovereignty.

II

The argument that the concept of sovereignty does not fit the Athenian democracy has targeted the suitability of the early modern conception articulated by Jean Bodin and taken up by thinkers like Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, and Samuel Pufendorf.Footnote ⁹ No one appears to have noticed, however, that these thinkers characterise their essential understanding of sovereignty in language strikingly similar to, and even directly borrowed from, classical Greek descriptions of tyranny.

A locus classicus of how tyranny is characterised and contrasted with democracy is the ‘constitutional debate’ in Herodotus, which has sometimes been seen as establishing or reflecting a paradigm of fifth-century political thought. In this debate about whether rule by one, few or many is best, Otanes assimilates monarchy to tyranny, and describes it as rule that ‘is unaccountable [aneuthunos] and can do what it wishes’.Footnote ¹⁰ This is contrasted with rule by the many, wherein every magistrate is hupeuthunos, subject to account.Footnote ¹¹ Aneuthunos here (like anupeuthunos, the generally later form of the word) means ‘unaccountable’, and so even ‘irresponsible’: the meaning can be narrower (not being liable to the judicial examination of a magistrate's performance and finances upon demitting office) or more extended (having impunity). In the Athenian democracy all officials, most of whom were chosen by lot from the citizen body, were subject to audit or euthunai; in principle, no one was powerful enough to escape this check and review.Footnote ¹² The administrative associations of the word hupeuthunos, accountable, were above all with the Athenian democracy, whereas the tyrant (as Otanes suggests) was the one who was unaccountable. The opposition between rule by tyrant and rule by dēmos is frequently drawn; so Alcibiades in Thucydides, to take just one example, says that ‘what is contrary to a tyrant is called the people’.Footnote ¹³ Aristotle later appears to confirm the nature of an established dichotomy when, in concluding his taxonomy of the different kinds of constitutions or regimes, his first characterisation of ‘tyranny in the highest degree’ is that ‘the monarch rules in an unaccountable fashion [anupeuthunos]’.Footnote ¹⁴

Against this backdrop, it is remarkable that Bodin and his followers insist that the sovereign is necessarily unaccountable, above all but divine review and punishment. As Bodin puts it in his Six livres, the sovereign ‘is not held to render an account to anyone except God’.Footnote ¹⁵ He states the basic criterion of sovereignty in very similar terms: ‘the true marks of sovereignty are included under the power of giving law to all in general and each in particular, and not receiving it but from God.’Footnote ¹⁶ Bodin and his followers insist that sovereignty is unified, supreme and unlimited; within the commonwealth, all are subject to the sovereign and the sovereign is subject to no one.Footnote ¹⁷ Directly addressing the Bodinian view in 1625, Grotius writes that ‘sovereignty [is] something singular and in itself undivided, consisting of those parts enumerated here above, with the addition of the highest part, i.e. tōi anupeuthunōi, unaccountability’.Footnote ¹⁸ And in the second edition of De iure belli ac pacis, published in 1631, Grotius inserts the following passage: ‘In Herodotus, Otanes describes the rule of one thus: aneuthunos poieein ta bouletai, to do what one wishes, without rendering an account to another. And thus Dio Chrysostom defines kingship: epitattein anthrōpois anupeuthunon onta, to rule in such a way as not to render an account to another.’Footnote ¹⁹

That sovereignty is in its essence anupeuthunos continued to be forcefully maintained by other early modern theorists.Footnote ²⁰ Turning in his 1672 opus to an analysis ‘Of the characteristics of supreme sovereignty’, Pufendorf writes:

Sovereignty is necessarily supreme, unaccountable and above human law.Footnote ²² The Athenians were familiar with the conjunction of these criteria, but it might seem paradoxical to suggest that they defined their democracy thereby, as if the tyrant could serve as the proper measure of a free state.Footnote ²³ Thus, even if we locate an important classical element in early modern theories of sovereignty, we might doubt that anything like the idea of popular sovereignty was present in Athenian political thought.

III

It is true that in Athens the tyrannicides were lionised, distinctive practices such as ostracism were thought of as warding off the evil of tyranny, and encroachments on the democracy were denounced as tyrannical. But tyranny had an ambivalent legacy. Early denunciations of tyranny or monarchy were generally articulated by or for conservative aristocrats, and a monarch could correspondingly be seen as a euthunos of hubris, one who could overpower these elites and make straight and restore justice to the city suffering from the crooked ways of its leaders.Footnote ²⁴ The tyrant is certainly sometimes set up as a foil in the fifth century, yet the selection and construction of such a foil can reveal much about that to which it is contrasted. And although the democracy set up tyranny as an antithesis, we should not assume that this means that the tyrant's unity, supremacy and ultimate discretionary power imply democratic repudiations of these characteristics. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that these features of the tyrant were seen to be basic features of the ruling dēmos.Footnote ²⁵

Thucydides provides a good starting point. Addressing the assembly in 427 BCE, Diodotus complains in familiar terms about the irresponsible authority of the dēmos. He chafes at the constraints placed on the leaders in the Athenian democracy, and suggests that the deciding dēmos should be likewise reined in by being held responsible for their decisions:

Although the members of the dēmos in the Athenian assembly would not have taken seriously Diodotus’ suggestion that they should be liable to constraint and punishment (which is thus best read as a way of exhorting the assemblymen to correct their own error), there is no reason to think that they would have questioned or disliked his characterisation of them as aneuthunos.Footnote ²⁷ The Athenians’ own account of the rise of democracy in response to tyranny has been plausibly interpreted as an account of the seizure by the dēmos of the supremacy and total arbitrary power that the dēmos was seen to have replaced, rather than as a repudiation of such supremacy and authority.Footnote ²⁸ That the power is in this sense tyrannical does not mean that it could not be understood as democratic: what Otanes had singled out as the democratic characteristic that officials be hupeuthunos is presented by Diodotus as part of the same Athenian system that makes the dēmos, like the tyrant, aneuthunos.Footnote ²⁹ The basic tenet here is that the dēmos is the uncontrolled controller: from Diodotus’ objection to it, we can glean the Athenian democratic principle that it is essential to the authority of the dēmos both that it holds all other powers to account and that it is itself unaccountable.

It may be objected, following Otanes (Herodotus 3.80), that if it is the people who seize sovereignty, then that is enough to change the character of sovereignty essentially. The tyrant is singular, and that is much of the problem, whereas the people is necessarily multiple and diverse, and so in taking over supreme power no longer holds it in a single locus. It is striking, however, how ready Athenian writers were to treat the dēmos as singular, willing as they were to attribute characteristics of an individual or personality to a polis, or to personify the people as a whole.

The Athenians were quick to identify dēmos and polis, and in some ways of course it is easier to understand how we might consider a whole people, rather than one individual like a monarch, as a sovereign equivalent of the state. In Greek it is especially easy to see, given that in political contexts what we refer to as Athens was commonly referred to as hoi Athēnaioi: the Athenians. This was apparently tied to the ultimate power of decision in classical Athens being in the hands of the citizen body as a whole. For example, when Thucydides writes of actions and decisions, he overwhelmingly chooses to characterise those done or made by Athens as undertaken by ‘the Athenians’, for that captures the responsible agent; but when he talks about Persians or Macedonians, they are not the subject but the object of action (or description), whereas the subject of action is generally the autocrat who ruled them.Footnote ³⁰

It is also worth noting that the Athenians were more prone than most moderns to understand ‘the people’ as a unified entity, and were much more inclined to identify the people with the polity itself.Footnote ³¹ Understanding ‘the people’ as singular is facilitated by the language: ho dēmos is masculine singular, so while the Greeks would have regarded the referent as a collective, they were simultaneously primed to think of the people as having the unity and other characteristics of a man.Footnote ³² The ready identification of the Athenian people with their polity can be seen in the language of surviving treaties that refer to the entity making the inter-state agreement as ho dēmos ho Athēnaiōn, the people of the Athenians. It is also seen in the opening language of decisions of the assembly, found on inscriptions and in many literary sources: edoxe tōi dēmōi, it seemed good to the people that….Footnote ³³

Many Greek writers were ready to characterise poleis and their peoples as bearing the traits of individuals, including their passions, attitudes and capacity or incapacity for prudential calculation. Although we may particularly identify the move of talking about poleis as if they were people with Plato in the Republic, Thucydides and other earlier writers provide many examples. In some of these cases the polis is cast as a tyrant, a figure who in normal language is always a single person. So the Corinthian envoys in Book I of Thucydides, mobilising a striking contrast with Athenian democratic valorisations of liberty and equality, say that ‘a tyrant polis set up in Greece is set up alike over all and rules over some already and the rest in intention’, and thus recommend action: ‘Let us attack it and bring it to terms, and let us henceforth live our own lives in safety and set free those Greeks who are already enslaved.’Footnote ³⁴ The Corinthians put themselves in the role of resisting a tyrant who is enslaving Greece as a master, where that tyrant and master is the Athenians. The Athenians here are treated as an individual: the Athenians are the polis, and the polis, however democratic, is a tyrant.

Thucydides also shows the Athenians embracing this description of their position. As the war takes an early bad turn and the people begin to lose heart and consider treating for peace, Pericles insists: ‘You cannot now give up possession of your rule [archē], should anyone be frightened by the present situation and try to make a manly virtue of non-involvement. For you already hold your rule [archē] like a tyranny.’Footnote ³⁵ The Athenians (Pericles would have them believe) can be likened to a tyrant because they are unified as a polis that has relations with its allies that are akin to those of a tyrant over his subjects. In the following book, Cleon upbraids the dēmos in the Athenian assembly in similar but less tentative terms: ‘You do not see that the rule [archē] you hold is a tyranny, and one imposed on unwilling subjects.’Footnote ³⁶ And in Book VI, Euphemus, the Athenian envoy at Camarina, asserts that both tyrant and ruling polis follow the same logic: ‘For a tyrant man or a polis that holds rule [archē], nothing is unreasonable that is advantageous.’Footnote ³⁷ The emphasis here is on the rule of the Athenians over other poleis, but it is worth bringing out two points. First, if the Athenians were ready to understand themselves as holding a tyranny over others, then, because of the identification of the polis and the dēmos in Athens, the dēmos could see itself as a tyrant. Second, and relatedly, the vocabulary of tyranny here is not simply negative.

The recent discussion of the polis turannos is peculiar, focusing as it does on rebutting Robert Connor's answer to the puzzle of why Athenians such as Pericles and Cleon use terms similar to those of the critics of Athens, like the Corinthians.Footnote ³⁸ If ‘tyrant’ is a term of abuse in Athens, why do the Athenians apply it to themselves? Connor's answer is that it was a negative term when deployed by those under or threatened by something describable as tyrannical, whereas it was a positive term from the point of view of the tyrant or would-be tyrant, and that Pericles and Cleon are here flattering the dēmos. Connor's critics, by contrast, argue that tyranny never has a positive significance in Athenian political rhetoric.Footnote ³⁹ But to limit analysis of the term to either positive or negative uses is to disable an adequate answer to the question of how the term is deployed.

For Pericles and Cleon in the above passages surely depend on (while not being limited to) both positive and negative connotations of the term. Each uses the stark comparison to urge the Athenians to recognise that they have to proceed as one does who rules in the face of resistance. Pericles himself had been frequently portrayed as a tyrant, a king, or even as Zeus himself by the comic poets, including Cratinus, Telecleides and Aristophanes.Footnote ⁴⁰ He is effectively telling the same people who would have laughed at these barbs that they themselves – that all of them together – are in effect a kind of tyrant. To tell or remind the Athenians that they hold the reins of power like a tyrant is to focus on what are claimed to be the realities of their power, to tell them that they have to be tough and clear-eyed about the imperatives of action in a context of resentment and hostility. Connor misses this, presenting the matter too simply as a kind of flattery. But those who differ tend instead to overlook just how pervasive are the indications of the attractions of tyranny in the sources of the day, and how this inflects political uses of the vocabulary by Pericles, Cleon and others.Footnote ⁴¹

Such earlier writers as Archilochus, Solon and Pindar express or report some of the attractions of tyranny. The widespread and powerful appeal of tyranny comes across most clearly, however, in the reactions of the Socratics to its attractions (and particularly in their accounts of the views of fifth-century figures). ‘Everyone envies tyrants’, according to Simonides in Xenophon.Footnote ⁴² It may seem that Polus and Callicles in Plato's Gorgias, or Thrasymachus in the Republic, are extreme figures whose praise of tyranny should not be seen as representative. It is worth noting, however, the extraordinary language that they use in praise of tyranny: those who praise it (or are represented as praising it) do so in the language of obviousness (of course everyone would choose tyranny as a good), and in the language of exaltation (tyranny is not merely a good to be wished for, but is something especially good, and even uniquely fine and choiceworthy). Other Platonic figures use such language, including Alcibiades and Theages, who says: ‘For my part I would pray, I suppose, to become tyrant – preferably over all human beings and, if not, over as many as possible, and so would you, I suppose, and all other human beings – or, probably even better, to become a god.’Footnote ⁴³ We might suspect that these figures, too, are being represented as unusually wicked, but it is clear that Plato presents his fifth-century characters as believing that this envy of the tyrant's lot is altogether commonplace. In Republic Glaucon says, and Socrates agrees, that ‘most people’ believe that a tyranny such as that of Gyges’ ancestor is desirable and provides for the full range of human goods.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Athenian in the Laws begins a list of what are commonly regarded as the highest goods with ‘health and wealth and lasting tyranny’.Footnote ⁴⁵

This is not a mere artifact of a Socratic theory about the hidden impulses of the depraved. The Socratics portray fifth-century characters as perfectly willing to endorse tyranny as a good, and have them cite fifth-century evidence. Thus Plato's Socrates observes that the tragedians express admiration for tyranny, and Adeimantus notes that Euripides and the other poets praise it as godlike.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the extant plays, this matches Euripides’ Trojan Women of 415 BCE, where Hecuba ranks tyranny as the highest of human blessings, one equal to the gods.Footnote ⁴⁷ A fragment from Euripides’ Archelaus reads similarly, marking this out as a common view: ‘Tyranny is esteemed [nomizetai] second to the gods. For it does not provide immortality, but it provides everything else.’Footnote ⁴⁸ It is impossible to be sure what an average citizen of this time would have thought, or even what they would have openly avowed, but the evidence suggests that when, for example, Plato's Socrates presents it as inevitable that the one who has the first choice of lives will choose the greatest tyranny, this reflects a common view during Socrates’ lifetime.Footnote ⁴⁹

So when Pericles and Cleon tell the Athenians that they are a tyrant, we have reason to believe that they were invoking these aspirational associations along with some harsher ones. Presumably Pericles himself did not find being called a tyrant wholly unwelcome, as the very jest depended on recognition of his pre-eminent power. This appeal to a range of semantic associations makes best sense in the rhetorical contexts. Pericles and Cleon are telling the people that they are in a position of the greatest political power, and that they have to live up to the hard necessities of that position; the related claim that the dēmos is a tyrant within the polis can similarly weld together congratulation and caution into a pointed exhortation to do what it takes to retain rule. The tyrant may be both hated and envied by those he rules, who can be assumed to want to displace or diminish his power. This is not an unalloyed blessing and requires vigilance, but it is a tribute to the tyrant's supremacy.

IV

We are used to thinking of the classical Greek constitutional division being that between rule by one, few and many, and according to whether each of these is virtuous or vicious. To think of the dēmos as a tyrant is instead to treat the many as if it were one; to think of this as the democratic view is to see in it approval rather than pure opprobrium. While the archetypal and indelible image of early modern sovereignty is that of the crowned figure constituted by the people on the illustrated title page of Hobbes's Leviathan, such a portrait of political personality and unity out of multiplicity might seem to be inconceivable by ancients who did not think of political authority in terms of a relation of representation.Footnote ⁵⁰ Among the most famous images from Athenian political theory are instead Plato's verbal portraits of the rabble, in which even the democratic individual, like the democratic polis, is a riot of inconsistency, seething multiplicity and disorder.Footnote ⁵¹ That the Athenian people did see themselves in the figure of a single ruler may be discerned on the Greek stage; and before glancing at just a few of the many evocative tragic reflections on this topic, it is worth looking at an example from the visual arts.

Dēmos appears to have been a popular subject for both painters and sculptors. In the surviving representations he is invariably portrayed as an individual man, though a man of nearly divine stature, sometimes towering over a meritorious citizen who is being rewarded or recognised. Among the images no longer extant was a famous painting of Dēmos by Parrhasius, active during the last decades of the fifth century; and Pausanias reports that there were sculptures of Zeus, Apollo and Dēmos in the Athenian council chamber.Footnote ⁵² Pausanias also describes a public colonnade with pictures of the twelve gods on one wall, and (undated) paintings of Theseus, Democracy and Dēmos on the other (the first tied in to the others by the tradition that Theseus gave political equality and government to the Athenian people).Footnote ⁵³

The images of Dēmos that have survived are not paintings or sculptures in the round, but stone reliefs. A few of the figures are labelled as Dēmos, while identification of others depends on similarity to labelled figures or descriptions of lost depictions. There are a score or more of likely candidates extant, often paired with a god or goddess (usually Athena), and sometimes either honouring a smaller-scale citizen or watching him being honoured by the divinity.Footnote ⁵⁴ The figure of Dēmos is always a mature male, perhaps modelled on Zeus, and most commonly adorns decrees of the assembly. Although dating is often highly uncertain, it is clear that the great majority of extant figures are from the fourth century. At least two strong fifth-century candidates survive. Especially spectacular is the Choiseul Marble of 409 BCE, from the Athenian Acropolis and now in the Louvre.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although some scholars have maintained that the figures are Athena and Erechtheus, a mythical king of Athens, most have identified them as Athena and Dēmos.Footnote ⁵⁶

Figure 1.1 Stele, called Marble of Choiseul, with Greek inscriptions, c. 410/409 BCE. Ma 831. Musée du Louvre, Paris, France.

© Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Daniel Lebée and Carine Déambrosis/Art Resource, NY.

The placement of Dēmos (if it is he) on this stele erected for public viewing on the Acropolis is significant: he stands nearly on a level with the patron goddess of the polis and over a detailed listing of the accounts of the treasurers (tamiai) of Athena for the preceding year (410–409 BCE). These include the names of officials, precise amounts (of 32 disbursements, from more than 57 talents down to 91 drachmas and 3¼ obols, and including an annual total), funding sources, dates of payment and the public purposes of the expenditures. The inscription makes clear that although the treasurers are responsible for managing the money, the authority for this management comes from the dēmos, and it is to them that the officials are held to account. The inscription begins by stating that the Athenians have undertaken these expenditures (the first words are Athenaioi anelosan), and that Kallistratos of Marathon and his fellow treasurers have transmitted (paredosan) the following amounts from the annual revenues in accordance with the decree (or vote) of the people (phsephisameno to demo).Footnote ⁵⁷ Observing this figure above these accounts set up on the Acropolis, the people of Athens witnessed both a public statement of and a public representation of the controlling supremacy of the people, and at the same time they were invited to effect that control by examining the accounts themselves. Knowing as they did about the formal process of euthunai, citizens who examined these records took up the stance of those who held all magistrates accountable without being held accountable themselves as citizens. Citizens examining this stele mirrored and enacted the position of the controlling Dēmos.

Another place on the Acropolis where the people of Athens could see themselves represented was at the theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus, where they went to see both tragic and comic performances. This becomes most explicit in comedy, but it is worth at least a mention of tragedy, the audience of which was called to reflect on its own identity while watching the unfolding fates of both good and bad monarchs.

While several extant tragedies focus on this theme, the most famous turannos is Sophocles’ Oedipus. Among the multiple layers of meaning in this play, one central concern is how vexed it is for one to stand for the many. ‘One cannot be equal to many’, Oedipus muses.Footnote ⁵⁸ Throughout the action he nonetheless identifies himself with his people and his polis, and yet comes to recognise the costs of this identification.Footnote ⁵⁹ Bernard Knox influentially suggested that Sophocles presents the tyrant standing for Thebes, and takes care to make Thebes parallel to Athens; thus the Athenians in the audience are asked to identify with the tyrant.Footnote ⁶⁰ Froma Zeitlin has argued that the stage Thebes is instead ‘the mirror opposite of Athens’ whose representation instructs the Athenians ‘how their city might refrain from imitating the other's negative example’.Footnote ⁶¹ On either view (and the audience may well have contained some people who adopted views akin to each), the Athenian audience is supposed to reflect on itself when observing the tyrant, even as it is enjoined to resist his flaws and his fate. The tragic poets, Euripides says in Aristophanes, are to be admired for their warnings, by which they make people better in their poleis; and surely the tragic monarchs are generally the ones through whom these warnings are made manifest.Footnote ⁶² It has been said of Sophocles’ heroes that ‘they will not be ruled, no one shall have power over them, or treat them as a slave, they are free’ – a characterisation that also fits the imperial and democratic Athenian people for whom he wrote.Footnote ⁶³ Tragedy presents the dēmos with the effects of powerful rulers making both good and bad political judgements, and it is surely meant to learn thereby about its own exercise of authority; but there is little evidence that it is supposed to learn to lessen its power or freedom.Footnote ⁶⁴

The festival of the Great Dionysia was itself a public commemoration of Athenian power. Once the tragic theatre was full, and even before the plays began, the Athenian people saw the extent and the peril of their rule evoked on the stage. The annual tribute of silver from the subjects of the Athenians was divided into talents and laid out on the stage, for example; at the same time, the sons of those citizens who had been slain in the war (and who were now wards of the dēmos) were led onto the stage.Footnote ⁶⁵ What may make it hard to believe that the dēmos saw itself in the monarch once the dramatic action was under way is a traditional view that the citizen body would have seen itself instead in the chorus. Despite prominent advocates from Schlegel to Vernant, such a view fits ill with the language or content of many extant odes, relies on a doubtful view of the psychology of the classical audience, and ignores the fact that tragedies usually featured choruses of women, foreigners or slaves.Footnote ⁶⁶

The tragic monarch does not only serve as a foil against which the Athenians’ democracy shines all the brighter, but could also serve to exhibit its virtues or to warn the Athenians about the hazards of their own power. The most complex explorations of democratic virtues via their endorsement by a tragic monarch are found in Aeschylus’ Suppliants (where Pelasgus is the first of the extant ‘democratic kings’ of tragedy) and Euripides’ Suppliants (where Theseus insists both that Athens is free because not ruled by one man, and also that the Athenian dēmos is itself a monarch).Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet the Athenian stage also presented the vices of tyrants opposed to Athens or to someone standing for or allied with Athens.

Consider Aeschylus’ presentation of two such tyrants: Xerxes, says Atossa, is not accountable to the polis (ouch hupeuthunos polei); and Zeus, according to Okeanos, is a harsh monarch who rules without being accountable (oud’ hupeuthunos).Footnote ⁶⁸ Neither case is animated by the simple idea that rule by one is unacceptable because unaccountable. In Persians Darius is presented as a moderate monarch who is as constitutionally unfettered as his son Xerxes; in Prometheus Bound there is a strong suggestion that Zeus should choose to moderate his actions and behave justly, but no suggestion that he can or should be checked by the power of others. Each case presents to the ascendant power of Athens, the dēmos of the audience, a vivid warning about the tyrant's fall. The fate of the good and prudent Darius is better than the destruction of Xerxes; Zeus would have been overthrown, but heeds the warnings of Prometheus and goes on to reign supreme. Xerxes is presented as the hated enemy and opposite of Athens, but his dramatic fall serves as a multi-layered exhortation to the audience.Footnote ⁶⁹ Both the wiser Zeus and the wiser Darius are unlimited monarchs, and their tyrannical power is admirable; the rash and imperious Zeus would have been deposed, and the hubristic Xerxes was destroyed. Assembled together, the dēmos simultaneously observed the wonderful power of the tyrant, and the terrible vices that would lead to ruin.

I cannot here explore the reflective surface that tragedy provides for the Athenian dēmos, as these tragedies were written over many decades, had varying purposes and heterogeneous audiences, and should not be reduced to mere political allegories. I wish only to point out that the dēmos could see itself in the tragic tyrant, in myriad and challenging ways. The most explicit confrontation of the dēmos with an image of itself as a tyrant occurred not in tragedy, however, but in comedy.

V

The Athenian dēmos could conceive of itself as a tyrant over other poleis, so it was not a far step to see itself as a tyrant within the polis, where the dēmos held ultimate power; and this tyrannical control was associated with control of those who aspired to lead or control the dēmos itself. This is indicated by Diodotus, and is woven into tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; but Aristophanes does something striking in Knights, which the citizen-judges awarded first prize at the Lenaea of 424: he brings Dēmos on stage as a character.Footnote ⁷⁰ Aristophanes first presents Dēmos as the master (despotēs) in a household and lord over slaves.Footnote ⁷¹ The slaves are recognisable Athenian leaders (Cleon and – very probably – Demosthenes and Nicias, all of whom then held the highest elected office of stratēgos), and the context from the outset is domestic: the mastery of Dēmos is a mastery of the people as a body over Athens, especially its most powerful individuals. Dēmos is then shown to be a tyrant as well.Footnote ⁷² Rather than being asked to contemplate its likeness in the mask of a tragic tyrant or king, the dēmos is here presented with an inescapable and politically freighted comic caricature of itself as tyrant and king. Yet it is an image presented to the dēmos for their approval in a dramatic competition, and ends up presenting Dēmos using his tyrannical power for good democratic ends.Footnote ⁷³

It may seem that the dēmos cannot be a tyrant within the city – for whom would the body of the people rule over? The play suggests a twofold answer. First, the analogy is meant to highlight the necessary power of the dēmos, understood in terms of its power to act intelligently and effectively. This focus is on those who do hold power (the dēmos in the place of the tyrants). Second, in so far as the ruling power of the dēmos is understood as power over someone else, it is in the first instance over those who aspire to rule over the dēmos, especially the leading politicians and powerful officials who are of the citizen body but always threaten to stand above it. So the chorus warns Dēmos against being manipulated by the politicians: ‘Dēmos, the rule [archē] you bear is fine indeed, when all humankind fears you like a tyrant [hōsper andra turannon]. But you are easily led about, you enjoy being flattered and beguiled, and the orators always leave you with your mouth hanging open.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Aristophanes plays a careful game, poking fun at the laziness, gluttony, gullibility and insatiable desire for praise that characterise Dēmos, and that thus characterise the dēmos of Athens who constitutes his audience. But the lazy life of pleasure that Dēmos leads is not one that Aristophanes was likely to have thought his audience would have regarded as altogether without its attractions. A particularly attractive feature is that Dēmos is presented as having, so long as he grasps it, total power over those who are normally considered most powerful in the polis. This is the power we have seen Diodotus lament. Moreover, the transformation of Dēmos at the end of the play would also appeal to the audience, though more to their aspirations than their immediate desires. And the implicit exhortation of the dēmos comes not as an insistence that it should have less power or be guided by others, but on the contrary that it should insist on wielding its full powers of judgement and action wisely and effectively. The rule of Dēmos is praised by the chorus as fine (kalēn…archēn), a judgement justified by the observation that Dēmos rules like a tyrant man (lines 1111–14). The criticisms of the rule of Dēmos that follow are not complaints about the strength of that rule; rather, they are expressed as concerns about characteristics that tend to weaken it. The admirable excellence of tyrannical rule is particularly at risk from the tendency of Dēmos to be swayed by seductive speakers, and thus to put the politicians rather than the people in charge.Footnote ⁷⁵

Dēmos retorts that he acts foolishly on purpose, reassuring the chorus (and both reassuring and exhorting the dēmos of the audience) that Dēmos always remains in control, using the political leaders to serve his interests rather than being used by them to serve theirs.Footnote ⁷⁶ The chorus makes clear that this is the right course of action: ‘Indeed, in this way you would do well, should there be as much shrewdness in your character as you say.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Tyrannical rule is fine; the dēmos rules like a tyrant in the polis; what the dēmos needs to be on guard against is unwittingly ceding any of its ultimate power of judgement or action to the political leaders, who should not be the masters but the servants, slaves or subjects of the dēmos.Footnote ⁷⁸ If resources are accumulated or policies developed away from the direct supervision of the dēmos, they will inexorably tend to benefit one or a few individuals at the expense of the people.Footnote ⁷⁹ The dēmos is hereby urged to pursue its true interests, to avoid the blandishments of flatterers, to resist easy policies of public handouts, to avoid and prevent corruption, to pay the naval oarsmen what they are owed, and above all to enter into a peace treaty.Footnote ⁸⁰ While the dēmos should live up to its capacity for shrewdness in order to do these things, it would be self-destructive to follow the policies of political leaders or officials, or to allow itself to be hemmed in by institutional constraints.Footnote ⁸¹ Rather, the dēmos is urged to do all these things by its own judgement, as monarch (monarchos) of the polis and of all Greece.Footnote ⁸² Aristophanes presents Dēmos as having what were later formulated as hallmarks of sovereignty: Dēmos is unitary, of course, this unity being built into the presentation of Dēmos as an individual character; and as a master and especially as a tyrant or monarch he is supreme and accountable to no one.Footnote ⁸³

Orators would later identify this tyranny and mastery of the dēmos over the political leaders as a magnificent and distinguishing ideal of fifth-century Athenian democracy. So Isocrates in his Areopagiticus says that in the democracy of Cleisthenes (and of Solon) the dēmos was not only kurios but like a turannos, while the magistrates were like the slaves of the public.Footnote ⁸⁴ In the Panathenaicus he describes this earlier tyrant-like dēmos as embodying the truest democracy.Footnote ⁸⁵ Around the same time, Demosthenes in the Third Olynthiac sets up a sharp contrast between the fifth-century situation of popular authority over the leaders (including particular prostatai pilloried by Aristophanes) and its reversal in his own day.Footnote ⁸⁶

Both Aristophanes and Isocrates suggest that the dēmos should be like a turannos over the political elite; both Aristophanes and Demosthenes exhort the dēmos to be despotēs, to ensure that it controls the politicians rather than being controlled by them. The dēmos should be (and be understood to be) the fountainhead of power and goods, with the officials and politicians dependent for them on the people; the democracy is fundamentally compromised if the people instead see themselves as dependent on handouts from the leaders and officials.Footnote ⁸⁸ The choice is presented starkly: the dēmos either rules as a master within the polis and controls the politicians, or will be subjected to them. Any talk of a moderate position seems to be treated as a dangerous illusion, and most likely a pointed deception.

The two main political incarnations of the dēmos are as an assembly and as a jury (or as members of the assembly, ekklēsiastai, and judges or jurors, dikastai). Whereas the dēmos of the Knights is especially identified with the power of the people as wielded in the assembly, in the Wasps, performed in 422, Aristophanes turns to the popular power of the jury.Footnote ⁸⁹ The story follows Bdelycleon's attempt to convince and, in the event, compel his father Philocleon to refrain from his zealous participation on juries. The angry chorus of wasps, or jurors, repeatedly complains that this attempt to remove his father is tantamount to tyranny, as it undermines the democracy. ‘Tyranny has stealthily overpowered us’, they say, preventing them from taking up their position of judgement, without justification and ‘as the sole ruler himself’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Accused of tyrannising for interfering with the jurymen, Bdelycleon complains:

Tyranny is used here as an epithet for what is perceived or presented as an arrogation of power or privilege at the expense of the Athenian people – whether undermining the jurors or committing a symbolic offence, the comic version here being to opt for one large solitary fish (the wreckfish) over a group of little schooling ones.Footnote ⁹² The complaints about tyranny may set up a modern audience for surprise when a claim to exercise tyranny is made from the same quarter. For Philocleon the democratic juror goes on to present himself and his fellow jurors in all the trappings of a tyrant, arguing that as a juror he is ‘overall ruler’.Footnote ⁹³ Tyrannical power is seen not only as what would put down or restrain the power of the people – though in that form it meets with popular outrage – but also as the fullness of the people's power itself. ‘As far as our power is concerned’, Philocleon tells his son, ‘it is nothing less than a kingship [basileias]. What creature is there today more happy and enviable, or more pampered, or more to be feared, than a juror?’Footnote ⁹⁴ The jurors are supplicated to give certain verdicts, but Philocleon insists that they are able to decide whatever they want, as their power is entirely discretionary. Thus everyone fears them and they fear no one.Footnote ⁹⁵ ‘Do I not wield great rule [megalēn archēn archō], in no way inferior even to that of Zeus?’Footnote ⁹⁶ What Philocleon does with this great power is what Dēmos initially does with his in Knights: he goes in for gluttony, drinking, sexual activities and the joy of wielding power unaccountably. This position of being unaccountable is integral to the jurors’ supremacy: they engage in scrutiny of the magistrates, but – crucially – no magistrates can scrutinise or punish them.Footnote ⁹⁷ Philocleon emphasises the total discretionary power that jurors have over magistrates as they submit to their euthunai or audits, comparing it to the power of a god.Footnote ⁹⁸ The jurors hold all others to account, but they are themselves unaccountable: ‘And for doing this we cannot be called to account [anupeuthunoi] – which is true of no other public authority [archē].’Footnote ⁹⁹ As in Knights, this picture of total control is contested, as Bdelycleon charges his father the juror with being a slave rather than the master he ought to be.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This is again because the politicians act as if they are serving the people's interest, but instead are using them to serve their own.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Revealingly, being anupeuthunoi is the one point on which Bdelycleon concedes that the jurors are majestic.Footnote ¹⁰² He holds that the people do exercise a vast rule, but that the deceptive and self-serving politicians have kept them from benefiting from it.Footnote ¹⁰³

VI

The unaccountability of the dēmos may promise the people freedom and other benefits,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ but it also opens up the possibility that they will take on characteristics for which the monarchical tyrant was notorious, including greed, cruelty and arrogance. The democratic challenge, articulated in the Knights and elsewhere, was for the dēmos to avoid these self-destructive excesses through self-control rather than through allowing itself to be controlled. Although unaccountable supremacy could lead to tragic reversal, to weaken the unaccountability of assemblymen and jurors is to compromise democratic control, to render the polis vulnerable to insidiation or takeover by anti-democratic forces. Some interpreters have understood the use of mechanisms of accountability or what we might call constitutional checks to be the form of that self-control, but this is not warranted by the fifth-century sources.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Such mechanisms as euthunai were aimed at individuals, not at the people as such: the dēmos was the source rather than the object of review. Although they were drawn from the body of the people by lot or election, the magistrates were always the object of strict control as potential usurpers of the people's ultimate authority.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Some scholars have thus identified an elemental Athenian distinction between sovereignty, which inhered in the dēmos as a whole, and government, which was undertaken by officials accountable to the sovereign dēmos.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

One of the best sources for understanding the justification for the unaccountability of the dēmos comes from the work of an author who is sometimes called the ‘Old Oligarch’, and who was probably (though this is much disputed) writing about 424, around the same time as Aristophanes’ Knights.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He declares his contempt for the dēmos, and contends that what is truly good furthers the best men, whereas what furthers the worthless men is bad. And yet, implicitly contesting an aristocratic dismissal of the rule of the people as stupid and self-destructive, he offers a penetrating account of the intrinsic intelligence of Athenian democracy as a set of institutions, policies and practices designed to ensure that the dēmos rules and is not ruled.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In writing to an audience of aristocrats, he draws on an interest-based version of radical democratic ideas:

How can the dēmos ensure that, like the tyrant, it is able ‘to be free and to rule’? By making all others accountable to it, while being accountable to no one.Footnote ¹¹¹ Granting some people greater influence – such as greater access to speech, agenda setting, legislation, power to punish, or control over membership – on the basis of their intelligence, judgement or ethical or social standing, will lead to those who have been granted greater influence using that influence to procure power and benefits for themselves. Once the people invest powers in an epistemic, ethical, economic, political or social elite, they slip from mastery into slavery. Again, the view is that there is no other option: delegation to those who are wiser and better, or reputed to be so, will not effectively meet the people's aims or realise their interests, but will inevitably subvert those aims and interests. The only way to avoid this is to retain rule and mastery.

In the late fifth century, eunomia, good order according to law, is an anti-democratic watchword. Critics of democracy praise the constitutional constraints of aristocracy or oligarchy according to law, and lament Athenian democratic lawlessness. As the Old Oligarch observes, however, the people understand that if the constraints of law are applied to them, then they no longer have supreme authority: to be in control, they must be uncontrolled. We can see vociferous insistence on this tenet in Xenophon's report of a notorious meeting of the assembly in 406 BCE for the collective trial of the generals who were at the naval battle of Arginusae. When Euryptolemus tries to block the proceeding on the grounds that it is paranomos or against the law, which would have suspended the assembly and the trial until its legality was approved, ‘the majority shouted that it would be outrageous if someone were to prevent the dēmos from doing whatever it wished’.Footnote ¹¹² This episode has frequently been seen to illustrate the descent of direct democracy into (or its ultimate identity with) mob rule. But it can instead be read as a potent expression of the democratic conviction that the dēmos must be able to direct and judge even the most powerful officials as it wishes, while not being itself hemmed in by laws or officials.Footnote ¹¹³

VII

I should like to return in conclusion to Aristotle. Although he is a fourth-century figure, I wish to consider a famous passage that has often been read as analysing the late fifth-century Athenian democracy.Footnote ¹¹⁴ First, however, two preliminary passages, one ignored in these contexts and the other well known. Consider first Rhetoric I 8, where Aristotle distinguishes constitutions according to the controlling and deciding power:Footnote ¹¹⁵ ‘In a monarchy, as its name indicates, one alone is supreme over all [hapantōn kurios]: that which is according to some ordering is a kingdom, whereas that which is unlimited is a tyranny [hē d’ aoristos turannis].’Footnote ¹¹⁶ A monarchy is a kingship if it is subject to some regulation or right ordering (kata taxin); it is a tyranny, however, if it is aoristos, without a boundary, unlimited (from horos, boundary; horistos, limited).

Aristotle's definition of tyranny as aoristos has been overlooked in favour of the one that he emphasises in the Politics, that tyranny is rule by one in the interest of the ruler (whereas kingship is rule by one in the interest of the ruled or in the common interest). To define tyranny as rule by one without limitation is related to this, but distinct and intriguing; it is, I believe, at work in the Politics too.Footnote ¹¹⁷

In the Politics Aristotle repeatedly characterises tyranny as similar to the rule of a master (a similarity played upon to great effect in Aristophanes’ Knights). So he argues that a form of rule that participated in some way in kingly rule was also ‘tyrannical, in as much as the monarchs ruled like masters [despotikōs] in accordance with their own judgment [kata tēn hautōn gnōmēn]’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ This conception of the tyrant as following his own gnōmē (judgement, inclination or will) fits with Aristotle's characterisation of a kind of tyranny that is no longer kingly at all, but ‘tyranny in the highest degree’: ‘Any monarchy is necessarily a tyranny of this kind if the monarch rules unaccountably [anupeuthunos archei] over people who are similar to him or better than him, with an eye to his own benefit, not that of the ruled.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ The last of these criteria has received the most attention, and is often offered as Aristotle's definition of tyranny; but it is worth focusing on the first, cast in the language of Otanes’ characterisation of tyranny, Diodotus’ account of the power of the people in assembly and Philocleon's self-portrait of the power of the people's juries.

Aristotle's view of extreme tyranny as a form of rule that is unaccountable (anupeuthunos) fits well with his view of tyranny as unlimited (aoristos). For the introduction of accountability would render the rule horistos, limited; and any true limitation would come with some kind of accountability. It also brings out the similarity to early modern theories of sovereignty as discussed in the second section, above. The tendency to focus on a Greek (particularly Aristotelian) view of tyranny as rule for the ruler's own interest may have obscured the connection between an ancient understanding of tyranny and a modern concept of sovereignty. For example, according to the influential Hobbesian analysis, forms of commonwealth cannot properly be distinguished (as Hobbes takes Aristotle and his followers to have done) according to whether the aim is the ruler's benefit or the common benefit. This distinction, he holds, is nothing more than a misconception ‘that the Government is of one kind, when they like it, and another, when they mislike it’.Footnote ¹²⁰ By contrast, what Hobbes insists on is that any sovereign must be unlimited and unaccountable – incorporating into his account of sovereignty one part of Aristotle's definition of tyranny even as he vehemently rejects another.

This account of Aristotle on unlimited or indefinite rule may seem odd, as the best-known passage about such rule has been taken to be about something different and more limited. In Book III of the Politics, according to the best English translation of that work, Aristotle writes:

The vocabulary of ‘office’ in this translation by C. D. C. Reeve is tenable, but there is at least a strong connotation throughout (and even a suitable alternative translation) of ‘rule’ whenever ‘office’ is mentioned.Footnote ¹²² Moreover, ‘indefinite’ can instead be rendered as ‘unlimited’, such that in discussing their aoristos archē Aristotle would be addressing the unlimited rule of the members of jury and assembly (putting particular emphasis on the adjective by moving it to an unusual place in front of the substantive). Aristotle is here especially concerned with one sense of the ‘unlimitedness’ of the rule or offices of assemblyman and juror, namely, that they do not have limited or specific terms. And the word has therefore been narrowly construed here as an innovation of Aristotle's in this quite specific way: one serves as a juror or assemblyman without a specific term of office. Indeed, the LSJ lexicon gives this as a distinct meaning (‘without limit of time’), citing this one passage as its authority. Although Aristotle is here referring to (because at this point concerned with) one primary aspect of the unlimitedness of the juror and assemblyman, I doubt that this is all there is to it. Even if we are to understand the referent here to be only a limitation in tenure, that is itself central to any question of sovereignty. For whoever may set, enforce or alter the terms of office has a kind of control over those who serve a limited tenure, and (at least according to the likes of Bodin and Hobbes) a time-limited sovereign is no sovereign at all. And the unlimitedness of the authority of jurors and assemblymen is more general (and contrasts sharply with the specified duties, legal restrictions and mechanisms for review of the magistrates), though time is the instant case. If the dēmos of Athens in its dominant political functions (as jurors and assemblymen) were regulated, then, as the Old Oligarch forcefully puts it, it would be or would quickly become a slave rather than sovereign. Instead, the dēmos in its political incarnations of jury and assembly is ‘most authoritative’ (kuriōtatos) and essentially aoristos, like the tyrant.

This brings me to a final extended passage, from Book IV of the Politics, in which we may now see Aristotle not merely criticising but also representing the substance of the radical democratic ideal:

It is the democracy where the dēmos is sovereign, or authoritative over all, that is like a tyranny.Footnote ¹²⁴ In this democracy, the dēmos – like Aristophanes’ Dēmos – operates as a tyrant in the polis, yet must always jealously guard control lest it be usurped by officials or other political leaders. It is the tyrannical dēmos that judges the magistrates, and any other individuals, without being itself answerable to any authority. Read in light of the evidence above, Aristotle does not appear to be criticising the radical democrats for falling into tyranny unawares, but for their candid commitment to it.

Aristotle does nonetheless suggest an internal critique of the radical view, which is that the sovereignty of the people is illusory because of the dominance of the demagogues. The radical democratic view, which we can see in Aristophanes’ Knights, is that such dominance is a serious risk and would indeed dethrone the dēmos, but that it is not inevitable. On the radical view, the Athenian dēmos must be as hostile to the rise of any individual power as it is protective of its own. Thus, the self-conception of popular tyranny not only does not contradict popular antipathy to individuals who would be tyrant, it is a natural source of and response to that antipathy. This recalls the simple answer that the Old Oligarch identifies to the existential challenge to the Athenian democracy: because everyone can be assumed to look out for their own interests, any and every restraint on the authority of the dēmos will tend to undercut the democracy, so the strict democratic solution is to allow no restraint.

The Athenians did have a word – fraught, double-edged – for unitary, supreme, unaccountable political power: tyranny. If the dēmos was to be able to look after its own interests, it had to be unlimited and unaccountable, and thwart the rise of leaders who would diminish its authority. The materials of sovereignty not being available under that name, the people put on the robes of the tyrant.