Social cohesion in Athens: myths and realities
Stories about ancient Athens depict a paradise of multicultural societal cohesion. The reality was a long way from this.
Dr Carol Atack
When Plato depicted Socrates visiting Athens’ multi-cultural port Piraeus to see immigrants celebrating the first festival of the Thracian goddess Bendis, and then visiting his settled migrant friends Cephalus and his sons, he evoked a cohesive society in which citizens and non-citizens could meet both for celebrations and for serious discussion. This is an imaginary and idealised version of Athens, as the settings of Plato’s dialogues often are.¹ It recalls an Athens which had since been torn apart by external and civil war, and which was struggling to rebuild trust between its citizens.
The picture of Athens that we get from the Republic and other key texts is a complicated one. The drive to understand the experiences of external and civil war and the need to repair the city’s social fabric drove much of the political commentary in Plato’s time, and the Republic provides a case study in the problematic social and political legacy of Athens’ exclusionary political myth-making, in a city whose patriotic myths no longer matched its political realities. Of the Republic’s characters, Polemarchus, a resident alien in the city and brother of the orator Lysias, was killed without trial under the Thirty Tyrants of 404/3 BCE, and Socrates, an Athenian citizen, was killed under the renewed democracy in 399 BCE. The Republic’s opening scene depicts a version of Athens cohering in a way that the historical Athens did not always manage. Against the flexibility of the civic polytheism that was capacious enough to incorporate new gods and their cults, Lysias’ account of the destruction of his family, immigrants who had given as much to the city as wealthy citizens, stands as a reminder that the city was not always so welcoming. Athenian ideology presented the city as welcoming refugees and supporting fellow Greeks. The citizenship granted to refugees from the razing of Plataea in 427 BCE provided a historical counterpart to parts of the city’s foundation myths, like the support given to the Argives (the return of their dead after the battle at Thebes) and Heraclids (support in returning to the Peloponnese).²
Plato criticises a successful trading community on which Athens depended. Athens granted foreign traders some access to justice in merchant courts.³ While the city depended on its international workforce, enslaved and free, it set them apart from the narrow and strictly defined category of citizens, and spatially separated the port from the main city itself. Its nativist mythology kept them non-citizen residents distinct from the more established Athenian citizens, those whose familial connection with the city stretched back before the introduction of Pericles’ citizenship laws and whose ancestors had experienced the Persian Wars.
If Athens was, as Isocrates described it, a festival, non-Athenians were conditionally welcome guests; the establishment of festivals for non-Athenian cults, like that of Bendis, was criticised by conservatives. Place was central to Greek cult. Oaths were sworn to local gods, as when young men on military service swore to a long list of local cults, the ‘boundaries of the fatherland’ and the ‘ancestral religion’.⁴ The flexibility of civic polytheism, in incorporating cults like that of Bendis, was countered by the specificity and localism of cult practice.
The core Athenian myth of autochthony, the idea that the city’s founder had emerged from the earth and its citizens had never lived anywhere else, constructed barriers to the integration of immigrants and the development of a cohesive society extending beyond the citizen body itself. The effect of the Athenian hostile environment was recognised in Plato’s dialogues, when Protagoras expresses his anxiety about the Athenians’ negative responses to critical thinking from non-native teachers. The biographies of philosophers and sophists such as Anaxagoras and Protagoras feature prosecutions for impiety and hasty departures from the city; Aristotle, himself a resident alien, left Athens in 323 BCE fearing a rise in anti-Macedonian sentiment.⁵ While Athenians routinely criticised the Spartan practice of xenelasia, the ritual expulsion of foreigners, some non-Athenians found Athens itself to operate a hostile environment.⁶ Claims to citizen status were regularly scrutinised in the courts, as in Apollodorus’ Against Neaira.
The Piraeus, the port of Athens where the Republic is set, provided an Athens in which citizens and non-citizens could both celebrate the gods and debate the definition of justice together. As well as providing a home for established metics, it welcomed visiting intellectuals and teachers, such as the sophist Thrasymachus, as contributors to those debates. But within the dialogue, Plato criticises the mixture of democratic communities and imagines the establishment of a community, Kallipolis, which would avoid that mixture. The variety of democratic society is one of its failings; a better society would be one characterised by uniformity.
To replace that diverse community, Plato drew on ideas already present both in Athens’ own political myths of the origin and development of its political community, and in Greek natural philosophy. He reworked the central myth of autochthony, the claim that Athens’ first king had emerged from the soil of Attica, and that its citizens had never lived anywhere else, in the political myth or ‘Noble Lie’ which the philosopher rulers of the ideal city imagined by Socrates in the Republic deploy to ensure social cohesion.⁷ The citizens must think of themselves as born from the earth, making them all brothers and sisters, bound to each other and their city, and accepting their roles in its collective endeavours.⁸ This fiction will ensure social cohesion, Plato suggests; but 20th-century commentators saw the disturbing seeds of totalitarianism in his vision.⁹
The idea that a city should be a unified and ordered whole permeates early Greek thought and replicates, at a smaller scale, ideas about the unity and ordering of the entire cosmos fundamental to the thought of Presocratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Empedocles. These ideas fed into political thinking because the polis was seen as a literal microcosm, a miniature version of the cosmos.¹⁰ While the philosophers’ poems told that story in an abstract way, political myths in which the Athenians defended themselves and helped others portrayed the community acting as an ordered whole, and provided useful exemplars for inspiring citizens. These stories were so familiar to Athenians that orators could merely gesture towards them to invoke their power and establish Athens’ cultural claims, as Thucydides’ Pericles does at the start of his funeral oration.
Speakers could also assert the opposing claim, that other cities lacked Athens’ structural cohesiveness. Thucydides’ Alcibiades, for example, argues that the cities of Sicily will be easy to defeat because the lack of cohesion in their complex communities makes them vulnerable to faction and civil strife; their ‘mixed rabbles’ will never act with unitary purpose. While Aristotle would later claim that diversity brought valuable benefits for democratic decision-making, his was a minority view.¹¹
The privileging of similitude in Athens’ political culture generated what Arlene Saxonhouse labelled a ‘fear of diversity’.¹² From the advent of democracy, the city’s myths were retold to dramatise anxiety about foreigners gaining access to the Athenian economy.¹³ While political myths might encourage uniformity and cohesion among citizens, they did little to encourage a wider section of society to feel part of that venture. Myths that encouraged citizens to stand firm in the battle line as foot-soldiers dependent on their neighbour might not be so effective in motivating the foreigners and slaves who rowed the city’s fleet warships, or the women sending their young citizen sons off to battle. Nicole Loraux showed how the exclusionary rhetoric of autochthony echoed the city’s political structures in effacing the contributions of women.¹⁴ Just as definitions of a citizen which focused on political and military participation elevated the role of men, the myth of autochthony minimised women’s vital role in social reproduction.
Although Plato helped himself to Athenian myth, he regarded other Athenians’ reliance on it as absurd. In a parody of Athenian patriotic speeches in the Menexenus, he mocks Athenian pretensions to continuing greatness, putting the most positive spin possible on its fourth-century decline while emphasizing autochthony. The Athenians of the present are deluded in thinking themselves connected to their great past, a view that Isocrates emphasises. For him the Athenians of slave and metic background granted citizenship for naval service in the Peloponnesian war are not real, autochthonous Athenians. The greatness of the past Athens, which he repeatedly evokes as an idealised exemplum, is a property of its autochthonous citizenry and the virtues they displayed.
The reality of Athenian society was some way from the myth of autochthony. The practicalities of trade in the port of Piraeus provided foreign traders with access to justice, enabling international trade and driving the Athenian economy.¹⁵ Yet Athens’ political culture privileged ideas about citizens as people who held ideas and culture in common and shared an ancestry that connected them directly to the land on which they lived. While Athenian democracy featured many concepts and ideas on which contemporary democracies draw, its patriotic myths failed to account for diversity and excluded the possibility of integration. When politicians such as Lycurgus relied on these myths to encourage citizens through the city’s difficult times, they failed to engage the vitality of the city’s democracy. But they also provide an example of how traditional appeals to the past, such as Athens’ foundation myths, and indeed our own recourse to the classics of Greek political thought, may undermine rather than advance social cohesion.
[1] Broadie 2012 posits a counterfactual Athens as setting for the Timaeus/Critias. Broadie, S. (2012), Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
[2] Gray, B.D. (2017), ‘Exile, Refuge and the Greek Polis: Between Justice and Humanity’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 30 (2), 191–219; Rubinstein, L. (2018), ‘Immigration and Refugee Crises in Fourth-Century Greece: An Athenian Perspective’, The European Legacy, 23 (1–2), 5–24.
[3] Ober, J. (2008), Democracy and Knowledge: innovation and learning in classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press): 222–26, 49–53
[4] RO88 = SEG xxi 519 (Rhodes, P.J. and Osborne, R. (2003), Greek Historical Inscriptions: 404–323 BC (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 442–45).
[5] Although many are simply patterned after Socrates’ story, with little evidence for their historicity; see Filonik 2013 for a sceptical reappraisal. Filonik, J. (2013), ‘Athenian impiety trials: A reappraisal’, Dike, 16, 11–96.
[6] Figueira, T.J. (2003), ‘Xenelasia and Social Control in Classical Sparta’, CQ, 53 (1), 44–74.
[7] On autochthony see Rosivach, V.J. (1987), ‘Autochthony and the Athenians’, CQ, 37, 294–306.
[8] Schofield, M. (2009), ‘Fraternité, inégalité, la parole de Dieu’, in C. Partenie (ed.), Plato’s Myths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 101–15; two contrasting interpretations of the myth in Rowett, C. (2016), ‘Why The Philosopher Kings Will Believe The Noble Lie’, OSAPh, 50, 67–101 and Rancière, J. (2003) [1983], The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. A. Parker (Durham: Duke University Press).
[9] Most famously Popper, K.R. (1966), The Open Society and its Enemies (5th edn., London: Routledge).
[10] See chapters by Arnaud Macé and Malcolm Schofield in Horky, P.S. (ed.), (2019), Cosmos in the Ancient World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
[11] Aristotle’s arguments have however been foundational for accounts of epistemic democracy. See Lane, M.S. (2013), ‘Claims to rule: the case of the multitude’, in M. Deslauriers and P. Destrée (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 247–74.
[12] Saxonhouse, A.W. (1992), Fear of Diversity: the birth of political science in ancient Greek thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
[13] Bakewell, G.W. (2013), Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: the tragedy of immigration (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press); Kennedy, R.F. (2014) Immigrant Women in Athens: gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the classical city (New York: Routledge).
[14] Loraux (1993) [1984], The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas About Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes, trans. C. Levine (Princeton: Princeton University Press).; Loraux (200) [1996], Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, trans. S. Stewart (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), with Loraux (1979), ‘L’autochtonie, une topique athénienne. Le mythe dans l’espace civique’, Annales, 34, 3–26.
[15] Ober (2015), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
