The Classical World (33 page)

Culturally, nonetheless, where are the great names in the theatre and the arts? The question is a misleading one, because so much already existed and what continued is mostly lost to us. Fourth-century Athenians lived, as some of us still do, in the happy shadow of great architecture: they were not therefore ‘shadows’ themselves. The city-state still had its superb classical temples and statues on the Acropolis and outside in Attica. The place had not been sacked, nor (despite the Thebans) ploughed up. If Athenian religious building falls away, one good reason is that the Athenians already had the finest temples in the world. Stylish houses certainly did not die out, as archaeologists increasingly emphasize. In the 380s painted pottery in the old style does die out, but the result is not an artistic collapse: the terracottas of women, the famous ‘Tanagras’, then begin at Athens, where the genre possibly originated. In the late 370s we first know of a sculptor who copies a fifth-century statue (Cephisodotus’ Peace, copying aspects of a work by the great Pheidias), but there was nothing dead about a tradition which could then produce the great Praxiteles (Cephisodotus’ son). The fifth century
BC
had produced the ‘ideal type’ of male nude beauty; in the fourth century Praxiteles produced
what became the ‘ideal type’ of the female nude: small breasts, wide hips, an oval face and in general, a body-type which was well covered and not a skinny modern aberration. Praxiteles’ most famous work in this style was the naked Aphrodite which he sculpted for Cnidus, so erotically beautiful, it was said, that male spectators tried to make love to it. Hadrian had a replica of it in his garden, in an outlying temple where it occupied a similar circular shrine.

Below the Acropolis, the Theatre of Dionysus was still unscathed and even in the years of extreme financial shortage the payments for theatre tickets continued for every Athenian citizen. In 386
BC
an older tragedy was indeed put on again by the tragic actors at the Dionysia festival, and in the 330s the three great fifth-century tragedians were honoured with statues in a refurbishment of the Athenian theatre. Great plays from the fifth century are freely quoted to juries by the orators of the 350s onwards. But revivals did not mean a new age of sterility. The same people who quoted the classics still longed for the honour of a chorus-provider’s prize. The most conspicuous such monuments survive in Athens from the 320s, just before these liturgies’ abolition.

What obscures our view is that all the continuing flood of new tragedies has been lost: they did not pass into the small canon which was later imposed in Alexandria. There were surely some excellent new pieces, as Aristotle certainly thought, quoting two now lost to us, the
Lynceus
and the
Alcmeon
. The guiding force was probably Euripides, but the influence of Plato and especially Aristotle may have been important from the 350s on. One of the most admired tragedians was Theodectes, a migrant to Athens who was friendly with the philosophers; surely his treatment of character and moralizing speeches will have shown their effects. There were even a few history dramas, not just for living patrons outside Athens, but also within the city if (as I believe) Moschion wrote for the fourth-century stage. His works include a
Themistocles
and a tragedy about the death of Thessaly’s best-known tyrant, Jason. This event in 370
BC
would be a very odd choice for a dramatist of a much later era.

The ‘decline of tragedy’, then, is only a fact about our lack of evidence. In comedy, the usual view of a lull of about sixty years (380–320
BC
) is also mistaken. Already at the end of Aristophanes’
long career, the comic chorus was on the way out; not all of his comedy was still robustly personalized, but the genre was in no way shutting down. Scores of comedies went on being composed, although they are known to us only in fragments. Comedy’s re-emergence with Menander in the late 320s is only apparent. Two long-lived authors, among others, refute it: Antiphanes (active
c.
385–
c.
332
BC
) and Alexis (active
c.
355–275
BC
) were each credited with more than two hundred and forty plays, and the latter was admired into Roman times. It is simply that we have none of them nowadays. Their younger heir, Menander, then becomes the master of unpolitical ‘situation’ comedy with a pleasant feeling for character and dramatic settings. His comedies are evidence, among much else, that young Athenian males and females of citizen families would fall romantically in love and decide to marry even without their parents’ encouragement. In his comedies, unlike Aristophanes’, there are no homoerotic jokes or affairs. In my view, this ‘good taste’ reflects Menander’s own Athenian friendships and political inclination: Menander became linked with Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus, and then with the oligarchic Demetrius in whose dominance (317–307
BC
) his plays flourished. There was no lasting ban on personalized political comedy, but these ‘enlightened’ superior people disliked it (like Jacob Burckhardt). So Menander was more tasteful (homoerotic affairs continued, of course, but jokes about them and sodomy were simply too coarse). One contemporary, Timocles, did continue to write personalized political jokes, but he seems to have supported the Macedonians’ dominance, and so the targets of his jokes were acceptable to the governing class.

The fourth-century democracy was not at all in retreat, until the Macedonians ended it forcibly in 322
BC
. After the awful oligarchic coups in the late fifth century, the people voted to entrench it even further. Pay for attending the assembly (some forty days a year) was introduced for all citizens, even in the dark financial days of the mid-390s; the pay for jurymen and council-service continued unassailably (though unlike assembly-pay neither was increased). The total pay for state service probably came to about a hundred talents by the 340s, a sum spread widely among participants rather than supporting a small group of professional civil servants. There was also a democratic concern about the methods of adopting new laws. Eventually,
the agreed procedure was to appoint a panel of ‘law commissioners’ to make a recommendation on a particular topic. But their recommendations came back to the people’s assembly and had to be voted on to have any force. There was no loss of ‘popular sovereignty’. After the brusque malpractice of the reforming oligarchs, there was a sharpened awareness of the difference between a ‘law’ and a mere ‘decree’ as resolved at a public meeting. This awareness could be exploited against political enemies. The older political check of ostracism had disappeared since
c.
417
BC
(when Alcibiades had artfully distorted the result of one), and instead, orators’ proposals were increasingly exposed to lawsuits for ‘illegality’. However, the procedure for such suits had existed in the late fifth century, and once again they were not a surrender of popular ‘sovereignty’. These cases were heard in the popular courts by random panels of citizen-jurors. They were not the objects of a separate Supreme Court.

In the end, the people of Attica were still the only sovereign body, meeting in their assembly in the belief that ‘the people can do whatever seems good to it’. Their meetings were not ignorant occasions. Practice increased a citizen’s political discernment, and to judge from surviving orators’ speeches, or references to them, a whole body of complex foreign diplomacy would be brought to the assembly for a decision. There was no ‘government’, no continuing group who ‘ran’ the place: the councillors still changed yearly, and their ‘recommendations’ had to be voted in by all the people. Since the death of Pericles a division had already become apparent between the military generals and the most prominent political orators. In the fourth century this division becomes even clearer, as does the Athenians’ propensity to prosecute generals who failed them on expeditions abroad. The people were highly suspicious of malpractice, and so their generals realized that they were well advised to work with a political orator who would champion them at home.

These political orators owed their pre-eminence to speaking and persuading. ‘Those who engage in politics’ begin to be referred to as an identifiable group, but they were not paid to do so by the state. They would take ‘gifts’ for their services, a difficult line to sustain when the accepting of ‘gifts against the interests of the state’ could be prosecuted as bribery. Some of them became known for particular
specialities. Demosthenes, for instance, for his views on policy towards Macedon and the North: he maintained contacts and sources of information up in these areas which kept him well informed.
⁴
Some speakers made particular sense about finance or the West or the corn-imports, but the crucial skill remained the same: to be persuasive in the assembly and to establish credibility for what was proposed as one’s own decree. It was necessary for orators to have active friends and contacts, not least on each year’s council, as the council set the assembly’s agenda. It could also help, surely, to have good contacts with deme officials locally who might encourage citizens to come and vote. But without good speaking and a record of successful persuasion, an orator was soon a nobody. There was no new expertise, no specialized technology which only ‘those in politics’ had mastered. They sometimes had more information, but above all, they were the ones who spoke with success.

This talent prevailed even though financial circumstances marked the biggest change from Pericles’ days. In the fifth century
BC
no need had been felt for a budget each year: the imperial revenues were usually more than enough. In the fourth century a yearly division of revenues was introduced, and authorized by law; under it, particular funds received moneys for particular purposes, ‘military’ or ‘festival’ (from the mid-350s the latter was voted by law to be the recipient of any yearly surplus too). After this law of the mid-350s supervisors of this ‘theoric fund’ did have particular importance, and in the 330s the fund was to be headed by a commissioner, elected for five years: the Athenians thus came near to having a financial Chancellor.
⁵

Without previous levels of tribute, particular value attached to the income from rents on state property (including mines), indirect taxes (including taxes on imports and resident foreigners) and fines (always a temptation). These sums covered the state’s basic running costs, but in a time of continuing wars capital levies became more common on the defined group of richer citizens who were liable for them: they fell on ‘visible property’ and had to be paid in cash, nonetheless. Even if they were imposed at only 5 per cent of a citizen’s assets and were not imposed annually, they still had to be funded, and after several such years they would certainly stretch a payer’s resources. The full range of liturgies continued too and were met by the rich: excluding the
variable number of military liturgies, there were between 100 and 120 such ‘services’ to be met in a year.
⁶
There was no income tax, let alone surtax, but the richer Athenians were not given an easy time, especially in the difficult decades of the 390s, 380s, 360s and 350s. In 378, the collection of the capital levies was reformed, with the introduction of syndicates whose richer members had to pay up in advance. Pre-payment was quite a burden for them, as was the need to recoup the sums from the less rich members. Nonetheless, the military crises of the 350s and 340s saw a conspicuous number of ‘voluntary donations’, too, made over and above the levies of tax. Proposed in assemblies, they were met by voluntary ‘donors’ who gained honour before their fellow citizens by volunteering.
⁷
The civic spirit of the richer Athenians was certainly not dead, and they cannot be ‘blamed’ for Athens’ failure to defeat Macedon.

The social profile of the citizenry was not drastically changed, either: ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’ are still quite inappropriate terms for it. There was still a rich upper class, whether we assess it by the 800–1,000 men who were capable of serving as cavalrymen, or by those sufficient to put forward 1,200 members a year for the considerable cost of ‘commanding’ a trireme. Those liable for the capital levies were not, in my view, as few as these groups: the net was thrown wider, catching perhaps 3,000–4,000 people, including the estates of orphans.
⁸
To judge from the imposed oligarchies of 322 and 317
BC
, there were another 8,000–9,000 citizens with enough land and property to rank as hoplite-soldiers, owning anything from about fifteen acres down to the minimal ‘seven acres and two cows’. In 403
BC
, at the end of the war, 5,000 Athenians were believed to be without any land at all. Probably the number of the landless did reduce as the city-state recovered, but what did not change was the general pattern of land-holdings in Attica. Small freeholdings (to our modern eyes, very small ones) remained the rule. The biggest known fourth-century estates are still only about 70–100 acres, although a rich man might own several such farms at once.

Within the richest group, there was the usual fastidiousness and interest in visible distinctions, and we know most about them because orators and comedies make such fun of them. A man might travel in a smart chariot pulled by white horses, groom himself too fussily or
even keep an Ethiopian slave and a pet monkey. Smart drinking-parties still went on, where one or two self-important people now had their ‘personal assistants’ or ‘parasites’ (
parasitos
meant a man ‘beside you at table’).
⁹
In the late fourth century comic poets made great fun of these obsequious attendants who smoothed and flattered their way to a living but were surely an amusing exception. There was also a continuing polemic against ‘luxuries’, against the eating of rare fish, the search for the best imported fruit, the use of the smartest metal drinking-cups. This polemic slipped into polemics about dissipation, about spending too much on scent, or on the city’s demanding courtesans, or on gambling. This sort of selfishness and lack of control could then be used against the credibility of a political orator.