Book chapter (not an article!) by Carugati and Ober on Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens.
Reading and Access
Carugati, Federica, and Josiah Ober. "Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens (413-403)." When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse, from Ancient Athens to the Present Day. Eds. Archon Fung, David A. Moss and Odd Arne Westad. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. 25-42.
Access online via Library. (Provides access to webpage and PDF versions of chapter.)
SWA Prompt
What, according to the authors, caused the classical Athenian democracy to fail and then to recover, twice? What do you see as the strengths of the authors' arguments? Weaknesses? Do you see parallels with today?
Relevant Background
For timelines, see the following study guides:
- Early Politics (ca. 620-507 BCE)
- Plutarch Themistocles (ca. 528-ca. 462 BCE)
- Thucydides (463-403 and later BCE)
This last Study Guide has a timeline ending with developments on which the assigned reading, especially its concluding sections, focuses. The main political-historical development addressed by the reading is the transformation of Athenian democracy starting in 403 BCE, after the second of two oligarchic revolutions and the second of two democratic restorations.
The main development is the establishment of two new bodies working in tandem at Athens, each referred to as (plural) nomothetai. (Singular, nomothetēs. It seems that the oligarchs of 411 also had their version of nomothetai. Here we're talking about the later nomothetai.) As the reading explains, the nomothetai were, literally translated, "legislators," and there were, starting in 403 BCE, two boards so named.
But we're also talking about two, very distinct modalities of legislation, and covering distinct types of laws handled by two, very different sets of entities:
- Nomoi ("laws," sing. nomos), that is, statutes intended to have lasting and general application. Such nomoi included changes to the constitution and a possible/likely (?) nomos argias, "law against idleness," a law intended, it seems, "to fight off unemployment and criminality" (Cecchet in Incidenza dell'antico, 2016). Nomoi were passed by a pair of boards of nomothetai. To quote Brill's New Pauly, "With the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 BC, new laws [nomoi] had to be proposed by a commission of nomothétai appointed by the council and then had to be accepted or rejected by a second college of nomothétai." The nomothetai could only be convened by the assembly.*
* According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, "In some cases (or in all, according to one view) they [the nomothetai] were drawn by lot from the list of 6,000 jurors [that differs from the account in Brill's]; thus they were ordinary citizens, without special expertise, but their function was to examine proposals more closely than the ekklēsia ["popular assembly"] would do."
- Psēphismata (sing. psēphisma), that is, "decrees" passed by the Council of 500 and the popular assembly. In theory, at least, psēphismata were of an ad-hoc nature, that is, they addressed special needs or circumstances and weren't intended to apply beyond the duration of those needs or circumstances. One psēphisma that looks rather like a nomos is the Decree of (i.e., sponsored by) Eucrates against tyranny, passed in 337/6 BCE in response the victory won at Chaeronea in 338 BCE by Philip II of Macedon, who thereafter threatened free Greek states with subjugation. So it was a response to an emergency, which makes sense for a psēphisma. Still, insofar as it permitted killing would-be tyrants, it necessarily bore upon the very ancient and permanent thesmoi/nomoi dealing with homicide.
Previous to 403 BCE, there was no hard and fast distinction between nomoi and psēphismata.
Other developments/facts on the ground deserve mention: starting in or around 403 BCE, nomoi superseded psēphismata; newly passed nomoi and psēphismata were not permitted to override preexisting nomoi; Athenians had at their disposal judicial procedures to challenge nomoi and psēphismata, and to prosecute political malfeasance. The upshot seems to have been that, starting in 403, arbitrary and inconsistent legislation was less of a problem.
The best secondary source for all this remains:
Hansen, Mogens H. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology. Trans. J. A. Cook. Oxford, 1991.