The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oedipus, Antigone, Clytemnestra, and Electra all offer us visions of heroes and villains, personalities and psychologies caught in the labyrinthine consequences of their own characters and of fate. Yet, ancient tragedy goes well beyond the portrayal of the actions and choices of these commanding figures. Through the presentation of an Antigone or an Oedipus or an Orestes, it explores as well the challenges entailed in the founding of political communities. Today, whether we turn to the newly democratizing states or the issues surrounding the creation of a political union in Europe, our understanding of political beginnings and communal life often resides in the process of constitution making, the creation of institutions, and legal safeguards intended to provide for the security and protection of individual freedom. The ancient Athenians, writing long before the legalistic language of constitutions came to define political foundings, grappled with a range of issues that force us to reflect on the beginnings of political communities and to take those concerns well beyond the abstract legalistic focus that dominates the contemporary process. The tragedians recognize the myths, the gender-laden choices, the exclusions at the base of assertions of political order.

For George Grote, the nineteenth-century Philosophical Radical and close associate of John Stuart Mill, “[t]h eleven chapters of Thucydides” that comprise Pericles' Funeral Oration are “among the most memorable relics of antiquity” ([1851–6] 1900: 6.142); in particular, Grote's History of Greece highlights those passages that pay tribute to “an unrestrained play of fancy and diversity of private pursuit” (6.148). Sounding very much like the friend of Mill that he was, Grote explains: “[T]he stress which he [Pericles] lays upon the liberty of thought and action at Athens, not merely from excessive restraint of law, but also from practical intolerance between man and man, and tyranny of the majority over individual dissenters in taste and pursuit, deserves notice” because “all its germs of productive genius, so rare everywhere, found in such an atmosphere the maximum of encouragement” (6.149).

The liberties of the ancients have had their defenders and their attackers – as well as those who have questioned whether those liberties really existed. Indeed, Grote (most likely in response to Benjamin Constant's essay on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” from 1819) justifies the “peculiar attention” he devotes to the passage in the Funeral Oration on the “rich and varied fund of human impulse” in Athens “because it serves to correct an assertion, often too indiscriminately made, respecting antiquity as contrasted with modern societies – an assertion that the ancient societies sacrificed the individual to the state, and that only in modern times has individual agency been left free to the proper extent” (148).

Today the challenges of practicing and protecting freedom of speech seldom fade from the headlines of our newspapers or the controversies in our courts. This was not always the case. Though in the series of amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution freedom of speech takes pride of place as part of the First Amendment, its inclusion at that point is the result more of chance than of its perceived importance when the amendments were adopted. Over time the interest in free speech has varied greatly as have the justificatory arguments about its place in political regimes. On occasion, Athens and its democratic regime surface as part of a justificatory argument as writers connect free speech with the Athenian experience of self-rule. The more contemporary recourse to the language of freedom of speech underscores for the most part, however, the differences in the ways in which this practice becomes part of the life of a regime. The brief story of the inclusion of freedom of speech among the “first” protections in the Bill of Rights will serve as preface to a synopsis of some of the many ways that freedom of speech enters our discourse as we reflect on the goals of political life.

GOVERNMENT AS OGRE

Sitting in the first session of the U.S. Congress in 1789, Representative James Madison, one of the architects of the Constitution, acknowledged that document's inadequacies.

THE INVOCATION OF ATHENS

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, George Grote wrote his memorable multivolume history of Greece. In striking contrast to the popular view of the historians of his time and earlier centuries, democratic Athens shines forth in his work as a wondrous regime of freedom and creativity rather than as a warning about the chaos and tyranny of mob rule. After recording several paragraphs of Pericles' Funeral Oration as presented in Thucydides' history, Grote reflects wistfully: “nor can we dissemble the fact that none of the governments of modern times … presents any thing like the picture of generous tolerance towards social dissent, and spontaneity of individual taste, which we read in the speech of the Athenian statesman” ([1851–56] 1900:6.150). If only “the governments of modern times” could recapture those practices of freedom of which Pericles spoke, Grote seems to muse here, then the modern world might again be able to produce the monuments of culture that emerged from the freedoms of ancient Athens. Benjamin Constant in his justly famous speech of 1819 warns Europe about romanticizing the liberty of the ancients so praised in authors like Rousseau and imagined in the events of the French Revolution. But among the ancients he excepted the Athenians whose dedication to commerce gave, he writes, “its citizens an infinitely greater liberty than Sparta or Rome” (1988: 315). If one sought to define the benefits of liberty in the nineteenth century, Athens could serve as a potent model.