Although bad citizenship in Athens could arise from a wide range of motivations, it was rooted in the individual's pursuit of self-interest. While few scholars would deny the presence of self-interest among Athenians, the role of self-interest in democratic citizenship in Athens has not been sufficiently explicated. Athenians were highly attuned to the tug of self-interest on the individual and the problems this could pose for their city. Democratic ideology did not seek so much to suppress the pursuit of self-interest as to exploit this: good citizenship, it proclaimed, benefits both the individual and the city. Because individuals varied widely in the extent to which they embraced this view and because shrewd, self-serving behavior was always a temptation, the city faced an ongoing challenge: to persuade and, if necessary, to compel citizens to perform their civic obligations.

This chapter seeks, first, to contextualize self-interest in Athens by surveying how Athenian sources treat this as a fundamental problem for human society. The frank and persistent treatment of the subject in a range of sources attests to the primacy of self-interest in Athenian understandings of human motivation and behavior. The chapter then turns to consider how Athenian civic ideology engaged with the problem of individual self-interest by portraying the relationship between citizen and city as a mutually beneficial one.