American Journal of Philology

Making sound political decisions requires hard thinking. Most people do not want to think very hard, and some lack the capacity to do so. Many make decisions on the basis of narrow self-interest, and most lack vision. Given that this is so, it is not surprising that Athenian democracy has come in for a good deal of criticism. What is striking about this criticism, however, is its origins in the writings of Athens' own intellectuals. In this carefully argued and beautifully written book Josiah Ober explores in depth the critiques of democracy in several texts of the fifth and fourth centuries. His theses are several and extend from the centrality of the democracy debate in Athenian intellectual life to the interactive relationship between Greek history and contemporary political writing: the obvious contrast between the bloodthirstiness of the Thirty and the restraint shown by the restored democracy, he contends, mandated that analysis of democracy and its flaws become increasingly sophisticated and in some cases downright labyrinthine. The core of the book, however, is not what Ober sees as sociological analyses of Athenian democracy--the early work of the so-called Old Oligarch and the late work of Aristotle--but rather those critiques that focused, he suggests, on the Athenians' preoccupation with words, and on their efficacy as Austinian "speech acts." It is the middle chapters, tied together by the thread of this preoccupation, that are the most ingenious.

Since the logos/ergon relationship is, I would suggest, more nuanced in Thucydides' work than in that of the other authors Ober examines, I leave discussion of it for last and begin with the chapter on Aristophanes' Ecclesiazusae. This chapter offers an exciting reading of the play, one in which the potentially trendy Austinian speech-act theory proves an excellent tool of analysis. Like most readers of the play, Ober sees Aristophanes raising the question whether "the attributes essential for the exercise of citizenship" were "unique to Athenian biological males" (135); what is distinctive about his approach is the emphasis on questions that the playwright raises about the relationship of speech to reality. Can words create equality? This is the question, Ober argues, to which Aristophanes is directing his democratic audience's attention. Are there limits to the sociopolitical realities that the Assembly can enact? Does saying make it so? To what extent are notions of male and female fixed by nonverbal physis, and to what degree are they social constructions made by spoken (and [End Page 479] then written) psephismata? Could a decree of the Assembly create female participatory citizens in the way it could create a state of war? (Questions, of course, do not presuppose answers, and in this respect Aristophanes remains maddening to classicists trying to reconstruct the political views of this important thinker on the Athenian scene.)

Moving ahead to Plato, Ober explores the word/fact nexus in the Apology, Crito, Gorgias, and the Republic. Gorgias, of course, is the locus classicus for Plato's attack on democracy and rhetoric, which the philosopher represents as a package deal. It is there that Socrates gets Gorgias to concede that rhetoric works its magic on the ignorant more easily than on those who know, and that on the subject of medicine, for example, the most persuasive orator will be he who has studied not medicine but the art of speaking, and similarly with the other arts: there is no need to know pragmata as long as one has discovered a mechane for persuasion (i.e., appearance can substitute for reality). Socrates thus forces Gorgias into a position which we the readers recognize as untenable but poor Gorgias does not. When Socrates concludes that rhetoric must then consist of the blind leading the blind, Gorgias rejoices in the ease and efficiency of it all: how pleasant to skip all the drudgery of learning one art after another, when all one really needs to know is the art of persuasion! (459A-C, passim...