JUDGING ALCIBIADES

Antiphon's contribution to Athenian intellectual life legitimized the frame of physis as a temporary shelter or retreat where each citizen could perform a certain kind of moral deliberation with himself and rationally calculate his self-interest. Once an individual completed this deliberation and calculation, however, Antiphon advised him to seek recognition by returning to the contest in question, abiding by its rules, and risking a rise or fall in self-interest at the hands of opponents or fortune. But from the 420s onward, other Athenian minds responded differently to the lure of calculations forged within the crucible of physis – and to the intellectual and moral legitimacy with which Antiphon endowed these calculations. Because it maximized the freedoms nomos conferred on Athenians, this paradigm of citizenship and selfhood almost invited them to exploit its breakthrough and devise other strategies for a citizen's life – especially strategies reflecting a more radical attachment to self-interest. What sort of strategy would emerge, for example, if a citizen disregarded the need to return wholeheartedly to the frame of nomos and risk the moves prompted by physis and self-interest? What if, in returning to citizen life within the frame of nomos, he held the autonomy conferred by physis as a nonnegotiable value? What if he could play the polis game by sometimes confusing opponents about the rules of the game, or persuading them that his novel – and illegal – moves were permissable, even desirable, for communal well-being?

as performances of justice, the iliad's scripts of funerary ritual (especially lamentation) and chieftain deliberation (especially when redistributing plunder) provide prototypes for the nascent state and its citizen because they succeed in exposing the basileus of the Formative period (ca. 900–760) as a problematic person. We've seen that an Agamemnon or an Achilles becomes controversial by exercising greater moral autonomy than others, especially within scripts designed to redistribute timê competitively. If their problematic decision making reflects with any accuracy the realities of this period, then by the eighth century a chieftain's attempt to evaluate his own worth in relation to social rivals often provoked criticism of his validity claims. But we must remember that the basileus enjoyed moral privileges not only in the Iliad's wartime scripts but in peacetime too. As we saw in Chapter 1 the role of basileus is enacted as a center in exchange relationships of reciprocity and redistribution in village and regional polities, combining elements of the authority identified with a headman, big man, or chief. In this chapter we'll examine a script whose successful outcome was vital to the Formative period's fragile, village-based societies, which from time to time witnessed among their households and descent groups intractable disputes that threatened community stability. This is the earliest judicial script we can reconstruct; we might call it “rendering a dikê” or “rendering the ‘straightest’ dikê,” which is the nonviolent solution most acceptable to all parties and most in conformity with tradition.

so far we've examined homer's two fictive heroes as prototypes for ways the basileus of the Formative period (ca. 900–760) and early state (to ca. 700) transformed himself into a new kind of social role and a new kind of self. I've proposed that Homer dramatizes Achilles' and Odysseus' struggles to assume this traditional role as the agent of justice, and that as they struggle to “render a dikê” they open to Homer's audiences the possibility of theorizing about the self. Each hero is temporarily isolated from his peers and inferiors, experiencing a version of individuation that enhances his moral autonomy. This takes the form of a shelter in which he chooses performatively to redefine and realign himself with the dominant social other, whom I identify with the corps of elite citizens in the nascent state. In contemporary terms each hero enacts an autonomy that briefly conjures up the image of an “unencumbered” self – but then chooses to “re-encumber” himself with a cluster of intersubjectively constituted social roles. This re-encumbering, we saw, enables Achilles to resolve disputes among peers and reconcile with an arch-enemy; it enables Odysseus to undergo a self-transformation in order to punish peers who threaten his individual status (timê) and his household's welfare. For Achilles this led to acknowledging that his fate was in some way interchangeable with the fates of others in his community; for Odysseus it led to understanding that achieving justice means realigning the objects (victims) and subjects (perpetrators) of a crime as persons rather than mere agents.

HOW WERE SCRIPTS AND AGENTS OF JUSTICE TRANSFORMED?

If the basileus served in the city-state's Formative period as the arch-performer of justice thanks to his privileged cognitive and communicative skills, could an ordinary citizen ever acquire these skills as an agent of justice? In Chapter 2 we saw that the basileus, not unlike an epic poet, demonstrated several virtuoso abilities: he put the dispute at hand into different temporal and ontological frames, one of which would trump the others; he marshaled the illocutionary force of themis when performing themistes and yoked such speech genres as the oath challenge, the exemplum, and the genealogical catalogue to the appropriate thesmia in community memory; he controlled the dispute as a potential joint action by hijacking the autonomy of litigants and spectators and representing to all present the subject positions of both litigants and of the community at large; and he achieved consensus by realigning the litigants' timai in a manner that left intact his own authority as a center of redistribution for the community. In this chapter and the next, we'll consider how, as the state's central authority grew after 700, these specialized talents of the basileus yielded the performance of justice to other citizen scripts and agents.

Chapter 4 will explore how lawgivers and statute law contributed to the development of the jury trial, but in this chapter I ask what sort of self the Greeks needed to imagine as the archetypal performer of these new roles and scripts of justice.

chapters 5 through 7 examined a number of competing models for citizenship and selfhood appearing in democratic Athens during the seven decades between around 470 and 399. We saw in Chapter 5 that, after defeating the Persians in 480–479, Athenian democrats in the early days of popular sovereignty wrestled with the demands and risks of public deliberation and decision making under the guidance of elite leaders. Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy frames these demands and risks in the form of a contest citizens face between competing senses of community, types of personal identity, and the reason giving on which each depends. On one hand a “real” man and citizen furthers the interests of his political community by distinguishing himself from foreigners and women and by forming alliances with an eye to the city-state's strategic advantage and autonomy. On the other hand, as a human being, the same citizen cannot resist the pull of compassion and fear drawing him to acknowledge a sense of nonpolitical community with foreigners and women, even when alliance with them imperils his political freedom and civic autonomy. In Suppliants, I suggested, Aeschylus seems repeatedly to be prompting his spectators to think long and hard about Mead's conundrum, about what it might mean in Athens in the 460s to need to be another if one is to be oneself. In slightly different terms, he encourages them to ponder well the consequences of the boundaries they choose to draw around various senses of community and self.

in our discussion of aeschylus' suppliants we've seen that tragedy invites its spectators to deliberate as both citizens and as noncivic members of a wider, more hypothetical community, the human race. We've seen too that the trilogy prompts spectators to reason differently as members of each community. Citizen deliberation favors a reason giving that uses shared teleological and normative criteria to determine collective self-interest, often by separating the citizen self from others. Reasoning as a human being, however, relies more on an individual's ability to evaluate subjective (or “dramaturgical”) criteria by withdrawing into the self, making cognitive use of such powerful emotions as compassion, shame/respect, and fear, and temporarily identifying with others. And in an age when popular sovereignty was beginning to flex its ideological muscle (470s–60s), the Danaid trilogy seems to suggest that a community's well-being may depend on how wisely citizens, guided by their leaders, oscillate between these two deliberative experiences. Apparently, in the age of popular sovereignty some Athenians like Aeschylus sensed that, when citizens experience emotions individually and use them to reason about public affairs, they may be blinded to what lies in the city-state's interest.

In Chapter 4 I noted a similar anxiety about how citizens make decisions during the script of the jury trial.

CITIZENSHIP AND MANHOOD

In Book 3 of his History, Thucydides describes a civil war gripping the city-state of Corcyra in 427, but this event inspires him to sketch out a portrait of factional strife between democrats and oligarchs everywhere in Greece where Athenian–Spartan hostilities provoked “the same human nature” (3.82.2) to acts of hostility and brutality (82.1, 82.3 and 83.1). His portrait highlights several variations on the basic script “how citizens deliberate,” and the cumulative effect of this script's several tracks dramatizes how citizens individually and in factions can assume performative attitudes toward one another which produce (in Taylor's terms) “webs of interlocution” and a “for-us” public space that is actually degenerative to city-state community. By this I mean that, in these quickly sketched variations, deliberating citizens believe they are following a familiar script to achieve the consensus necessary for dikê and nomos, but in reality their deliberations sabotage the goals of the script in question and push their communities beneath the threshold of statehood. The tracks include: “forming an alliance” (82.1–3); “interpreting the habitual meanings of language” (82.3–4); “evaluating the deliberator” (82.5–6); and “how to achieve consensus” (82.6–7).

If it is true that these citizens show how a city-state can fall beneath the threshold of statehood when they depart from the goals of deliberation, then it's reasonable to ask whether as deliberators they push themselves beneath the threshold of citizenship itself. What might it mean to regress from the ability to speak, think, and respond like a citizen?

PERFORMING CITIZENSHIP AND ITS SCRIPTS IN DEMOCRATIC ATHENS

A new field has emerged over the past fifteen years out of the perennial interest ancient historians and classicists have shown in the Athenian democracy of 508–322 bc; we might call it “Athenian democracy studies.” Reasons for its popularity are not hard to identify in an era devoted to the ideal of interdisciplinary research, but its developing contours already demonstrate how complex a topic democratic society can be, especially if we inquire into ways human subjects experience it through democratic citizenship. And so not surprisingly Athenian democracy studies are expanding rapidly right now, propelled by variety in evidence and eclecticism in methodology as scholars seek out Athenian cultural practices and beliefs peculiar to the democracy – and devise new ways to scrutinize them. For one manifestation of this variety and eclecticism we need only look to the “smorgasbord” essay collections by multiple authors that proliferate in so many fields today: major collections on Athenian democracy keep multiplying, at least in English. One effect of these collections is to suggest that scholars find it difficult to forge a single, interdisciplinary approach to the Athenian democracy. They may also encourage readers to believe – mistakenly, I think – that democratic community and citizenship are too multiform and confusing to accommodate a single line of inquiry.

About a decade ago a neat bifurcation distinguished old and new paradigms for studying Athenian democracy and citizenship.

before the formation of the city-state and ethnos-state, what kinds of script and what kinds of self enabled Greek communities to perform justice? Did these scripts and selves undergo changes when the state and its citizens emerged in the early eighth century? My goals in this chapter are to recover a likely version of the earliest pre-citizen script, including its cognitive dimensions (especially the sort of reasoning) and its communicative dimensions (especially key speech acts, speech genres, and performative attitudes), and to identify a kind of performer we can consider a prototype for the earliest citizens, including his or her degrees of social and moral autonomy. Given the nature of the evidence at our disposal, my argument must remain hypothetical. I claim that, first, Early Iron Age communities created a heroic self when they used funerary ritual, especially lamentation, to render justice to deceased warrior chiefs (basileis); and, second, that around the time of state formation this heroic self achieves a degree of autonomy when performances of the Iliad enable Homer's Achilles to manipulate scripts of lament and deliberation, effecting a self-transformation into a prototype for the citizen.

I divide my inquiry into three unequal parts. The first, “Doing Justice to the Dead in Early Iron Age Communities,” outlines key social features of typical communities in Early Iron Age Greece (ca. 1100–700), particularly in the state's “Formative Era,” the Early to Middle Geometric periods (ca. 900–760).