We have seen something of Plato’s personal history and something of the societal norms in the midst of which he invented political science. Now we must pay closer attention to contemporary government in the Greek world. From the Iliad and the Odyssey, an outline of governmental practice in early Greek city-states can be derived.27 There was a king and a series of subkings or nobles and a system of classes. The king consulted his leading subjects in council, and decisions were announced to the people assembled in the agora. Administration at the summit was still largely household administration carried out by a group of domestic servants with specific functions. These were supplemented by therapontes, a class of higher servants recruited from the noble families and arranged in ranks.
Those at the top assisted the king in his religious duties, or as heralds representing him at public functions, carrying his scepter or insignia of power. The therapontes served at the royal feasts, acted as messengers endowed with royal power, convoked the council, made proclamations to the people, carried the royal orders in battle, and bore the royal authority on missions abroad. Junior therapontes were assigned lesser responsibil- ities such as control of the stables or armory. Thus the Homeric king had a group of ministers, not quite an administrative class, in his household based upon the tribe to which the individual minister belonged. Recruit- ment of the army and the provision of ships and supplies to meet public needs were all allocated according to tribe. Each tribe made its contribution as commanded by the king through tribal leaders who held their hereditary titles from the king.28
By the beginning of the sixth century the Homeric kingship had declined in power. It survived only in Sparta, where a curious system of two kings was devised, the kings representing the two royal houses out of which the state had emerged. The Spartan kings acted jointly and exercised a check upon each other. They wielded simultaneously the authority of high priest and army commander, though they lost most of
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their judicial power to the gerousia. An interesting exception was the kings’ plenary judgment on all matters concerning public roads.29
The gerousia was a council of elders consisting of the two kings and 28 members of noble families over 60 years of age. Their selection was acclaimed in the apella (assembly) as the “prize of virtue.” Every Spartan citizen over 30 years of age sat in the apella as a duty rather than a right.
Day-to-day public administration was carried out by ephors.30
The ephorate consisted of five citizens chosen by lot, a process Aristotle called “excessively childish.” The senior ephor gave his name to the Spartan year. As an administrative class, ephors began as special assistants to relieve the kings of troublesome responsibilities beyond their personal control. Over the years they became guardians of the rights of the people, watching jealously over the conduct of the kings. They accompanied the kings on all official occasions and had the power to call them to account.
Each month the ephors exchanged oaths with the kings, the king swearing to rule according to the city’s established laws, the ephors swearing on behalf of the city to keep the king’s position unshaken as long as he abided by his oath. The balance of obligation was clear. The ephors had general control over the kings’ conduct, could prosecute the kings before the Spartan supreme court, and settled disputes between them. The ephors could enforce the kings’ appearance before their board at their third summons. Two of them accompanied the kings on all military campaigns.31 It would be wrong to interpret Spartan organization theory as a straightforward contest between kings on the one hand and ephors on the other. Though the latter combined executive, judicial, and disciplinary powers and, unconstrained by written laws, dominated the everyday administration of affairs, every Spartan citizen knew that their office was held for one year only and that it was not renewable. The eligibility of all Spartans for the office meant a wide range of possible support for the monarch despite the popular, antiaristocratic nature of the position. Finally, much of the time of the ephorate was spent on dealing with the indigenous and often rebellious helot serf population, over whom the ephorate exercised the arbitrary power of life and death.32
The development of public administration in Athens took a different form. The important names in Athens on this subject are Draco, Solon, and Pisistratus. By about 630 the kings of the city-state of Attica were being replaced by tyrants, fringe members of the aristocracy who usurped power with the support of discontented members of the community, often democrats. Their popularity depended upon their ability to curb the power of other aristocrats and to build public works. Tyranny was not a special form of constitution, nor was it necessarily a reign of terror.
The tyrant might rule directly, or he might retain existing political insti- tutions but exercise a preponderant influence over how they worked.
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His rule could be benevolent or malevolent. Tyranny was given a bad name by Plato and especially by Aristotle, for whom it was the worst possible form of government.33
Doing well by arbitrary methods never satisfied the Greeks. As early as 620 Draco put Athenian laws into writing. He established a constitution based on the franchise of hoplites, the citizens who made up the Greek heavy infantry in times of war. Draco’s laws are known for the severity of their penalties. When asked why he specified death as the penalty for most offenses, he replied that small offenses deserved death and he knew of no severer penalty for great ones. The fourth-century orator Demades said that Draco wrote his laws in blood instead of ink.
After just 25 years, Draco’s law code was drastically revised by Solon, elected chief magistrate of Athens in 594. Solon was a poet as well as a politician, and he did not like killing people. He could have made himself a tyrant, but, as he wrote, “Tyranny is a very pretty position. The trouble is that there’s no way out of it.” Solon served as archon, the highest of three magisterial positions that had replaced the Athenian king, while simultaneously he kept the idea of tyrant at bay. The other two positions were basileus, who served as a religious leader and judge in religious cases, and pole march, who served as a judge in all cases involving noncitizens and as commander-in-chief of the army. The archon was supreme judge in all civil cases and defender of the property rights of citizens.34 All three magistrates were elected annually. The selections were controlled by the Council of the Areopagus, or elders, in whose hands all governing power ultimately rested.
Solon laid the foundations of Athenian democracy. Under his reforms, citizens were to meet in the ekklesia, or general assembly, and henceforth participate in the election of the magistrates. All citizens were eligible to sit in a new popular court, the heliaea, which gradually took over all the judicial functions of the city. The Council of the Areopagus was deprived of its deliberative function and ceased to participate directly in both administration and legislation. It assumed the new role of protector of the constitution, with supervisory powers over the magistrates and censorial authority over citizens.
In the middle of the sixth century Attica was divided between those who lived along the coast, land that might be generating new wealth in the form of olive oil, for example, and the great outback. The interior was rich enough, but it was geographically and culturally far from the center of commerce. Its leader was Pisistratus, a blue blood who under- stood economic development and who parlayed produce from the plain of Marathon and silver deposits from Attica’s southeast corner into what can only be called a golden age of tyranny. From his consolidation of power in 546 until his death in 527 Pisistratus did more to encourage
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Athenians toward national unity, local pride, and individual dignity than any previous leader. He directed attention to the city of Athens as the population center of Attica, and there he built public works, temples, fountain houses, and drains. Most important of all, he fostered the cult of the goddess Athena, patroness of Athens and of Pisistratus himself. He created national festivals and games, the Panathenaea, at which prizes were jars of Attic olive oil, and the Dionysia, where began one of Athens’s greatest creations, the drama.35
Pisistratus lent money to poor farmers and established a panel of itinerant judges to settle local disputes, previously in the hands of the local aristocrat. It is a paradox that an autocrat, a tyrant, could in fact promote individual freedom and dignity as much as Pisistratus did. Solon had opened government to new men but had done nothing to diminish the power of the aristocrat at the local level beyond r obbing him of legalized mastery over the poor around him. Now the aristocrat had either died in the last battle against Pisistratus, or thought it prudent to go into exile. Even if the aristocrat stayed, he knew he had to acknowledge the existence of someone more powerful than himself. The average citizen either lost his master or realized that the masters who were left did not matter as much as before. Such a realization was the first step toward being one’s own master and toward citizenship in Plato’s Republic as well as St. Augustine’s City of God.
Following the defeat of the Persians at the great sea battle of Salamis in 480, the Greeks for a time achieved a high degree of unity.36 The unity was based on two factors directly related to organization theory:
1. The Greeks learned that what they called barbarians, i.e., those who spoke a language other than Greek, were militarily inferior to Greek hoplites. The hoplite phalanx, later to be fully exploited by Alexander the Great, proved at Marathon that it could win against cavalry, archery, and any infantry formation thrown against it, however armed or brigaded. Hoplites formed a line eight men deep — helmeted, corsleted, and greaved — presenting a solid front of round shields. The shields were damped on to the left arm of the hoplites by two grips while each hoplite thrust his spear forward. The phalanx won by cooperative weight and cohesion, victory lying with men who kept their order, did not break, and advanced in practiced unison.
2. Revised Athenian political institutions had created a population that fought willingly as free men, “fearing the laws more than Xerxes,” as Demartus, king of Sparta, put it. A new political confidence inspired the Athenians as the old aristocratic control waned in an increasingly powerful assembly. Aristotle illustrates
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the matter in his discussion of the curious institution of ostracism, first used by the Athenians in the decade after Marathon.37 Ostra- cism was Cleisthenes’ idea. The assembly could decide every year to send one of the city’s political figures into temporary ten-year exile without loss of property. The explicit reason for the first three ostracisms was suspicion of treachery in connection with the Per- sian invasion. Aristotle shrewdly observed that the courage to exercise such power is as significant as the occasion to exercise it. Appeasement was understood to be treason in unified Athens.
Mainland unity led to the Confederacy of Delos and hence to the Athenian Empire. The victory at Salamis taught the Athenians that suprem- acy at sea was the key to Greek security. Over 200 cities thereafter joined a sea-defense league. Some contributed ships, others money to build ships. The money was collected by ten hellenotamiae or “treasurers of the Greeks,” who were all citizens of Athens. The money was paid into the treasury at Delos, where the council of the confederacy met to decide general policy. Each member state had one representative on the council, regardless of size, but Athens, by virtue of her wealth, influenced the votes of the smaller cities and dominated the confederacy. What began as a naval union developed into an empire. Gradually the other city- states were absorbed, leaving only the ship-contributing cities of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos with any real autonomy In 454 the treasury of the confederacy was transferred to Athens, and Athenian overlordship became an accepted fact. The very idea of empire was anathema to the spirit of the Greeks, however, and within 50 years the Athenian Empire had ceased to be.
It was in the rejection of empire that Athens achieved her greatest glory. The period corresponded roughly with the life span of a single politician, the great orator Pericles (495–429). Plato lived in the generation immediately following Pericles and spent much of his intellectual energy contesting the influence of this charismatic figure and the administrative forms democracy took under his leadership of the assembly in the years 443–429. Pericles was elected general every year during this 15-year period, and Plutarch described him as “Athens’ unchallenged leader” (Aristotle 1946, Book VI). We must rely on Aristotle (384–322) for a description of Greek public administration during the Periclean age.38
The constitution of Athens divided the most important public offices into two levels. In the top level were:
The magistrates, who were concerned with general control of the whole range of public life and responsible for convening and introducing matters to the assembly
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The generals, who were charged with the defense of the city, including superintendence of the city gates and walls and the inspection and drill of citizens39
The financial officers, known variously as auditors, accountants, examiners, and advocates of the fisc,40 who received and audited the accounts of other officers
At the second level of public office, described by Aristotle as “absolutely indispensable,” were:
The agoranomos, who was charged with the care of the market place as well as the supervision of contracts and the mainte- nance of public order
The astynomos, or city manager, who was responsible for oversight of both public and private property in the center of the city plus the maintenance and care of buildings and roads
The agronornoi, who were to protect the forests, superintend the city-state’s boundaries, and prevent boundary disputes
The receivers of accounts, or treasurers, who received and held public revenues and disbursed moneys to the several depart- ments of government
The public recorders, who were concerned with the registration of private contracts and court decisions and the issuance of indictments
The executors of sentences, the officials who served court decisions on citizens, took custody of prisoners, and recovered debts These magistrates constituted the executive management department of the city-state.41 At issue throughout the last half of the fifth century was whether these and other officers of the state should be elected or chosen by lot. Selection was usually by lot on the theory that the gods were more likely to make a wise selection than citizens. Great store was placed in the fact that the Greek magistrate was not a specialist, and that rotation in office every year ensured responsiveness to citizen concerns. It gradually became customary, however, for certain offices with responsibilities of a high order to be elected. These were treasurer of the military chest, disburser of the theatrical dole, curator of fountains, and the strategoi, or military commanders. Citizens chosen for diplomatic missions were also elected for the obvious reason that personality was an important factor in the mission’s success.
There was a special class of officers who served the cult of civic deities.
They went by various titles in different city-states, e.g., priest, superinten- dent of sacrifice, guardian of the shrine, and steward of religious property.
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Where it was the custom to conduct public sacrifice on the city’s common hearth, the duty was assigned to an archon or, where a king remained, to the king as his chief remaining function under a mixed constitution.
As Plato was to lament, the system had serious flaws.42 One was that the magistrate’s activities were subject to microscopic review at all times.
It began with inquiry about his character and reputation at the time of his selection. At the examination, the clokimasia, he had to produce witnesses to attest to his character as well as present documents proving his adequate military service, payment of taxes, family conduct, and fulfillment of religious obligations. Any citizen could show cause before the court why the magistrate-elect should not be confirmed in his office.
Upon relinquishing office, the magistrate’s conduct while in office and his accounts were subject to careful scrutiny by a special board whose report had to go to the courts either for specific charges to be laid or for discharge to be approved. Even if the magistrate were given a clean bill by the board, it was still possible for a citizen to bring charges in the assembly and show why the discharge should not be granted. Given this continuous system of public inquest, it is hardly surprising that Plato characterized Greek public administration as unenterprizing.43
Plato had other criticisms such as the payment of magistrates, who he thought should serve gratis as an act of civic obligation, and especially the payment of citizen-judges in the heliaea. He reserved his most stinging commentary on Athenian democracy for the expert speechwriters and orators — sophists he called them — who were able to sway untutored judges and make justice a sometime thing. Plato was scandalized by the fact that slaves could be forced to give evidence before Athenian courts under torture. Such assessments drove him to write his two masterworks on political science, the Republic and the Laws.