1 the idiōtēs and the tyrant: two faces of unaccountability in democratic athens

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Democratic Athens and the Tyrant: Two Faces of Unaccountability inIdiotesThe

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Article

The Idiōtēs and the Tyrant: Two Faces of Unaccountability in Democratic Athens

Matthew Landauer1

AbstractAthenian democracy is rightly recognized for its extensive network of accountability institutions. This essay focuses instead on popular unaccountability in democratic Athens: ordinary citizens participating but not speaking in the Courts and the Assembly were unaccountable. I explore possible justifications of popular unaccountability, including arguments from democratic sovereignty and epistemic arguments, and stress the importance of a third strand: the identification of jurors and assemblymen with deservedly unaccountable, because comparatively weak and powerless, idiōtai (private citizens), whose political activity failed to reach a level requiring intense scrutiny and control. Nonetheless, such a justification was always tenuous in light of the power jurors and assemblymen collectively wielded in the city. As I show through a reading of Aristophanes’s Wasps, it was always possible to destabilize the juror idiōtēs identity and replace it with a much more troubling image: the identification of the juror with the dangerously unaccountable tyrant.

KeywordsAthenian democracy, idiotes, tyrant, accountability, Aristophanes

1Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:Matthew Landauer, Department of Government, Harvard University, 1737 Cambridge St., Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Email: [email protected]

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140 Political Theory 42(2)

Introduction—Unaccountability in Athens

In his prosecution of Ctesiphon in 330 BCE, Aeschines offered the assembled jurors the following reflections on the fundamental differences between politi-cal regimes: “You know well, men of Athens, that there are three types of regime among all mankind—tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies. While tyrannies and oligarchies are administered according to the will and pleasure of their leaders, cities with democratic constitutions are administered accord-ing to established laws.”1 Athens could be so governed only because, in con-trast with tyrannies and oligarchies, “there is nothing in the city that is exempt from audit, investigation, and examination [aneupeuthunon de kai azētēton kai anexetaston].”2 While the tyrant administered the polis by his own lights and without oversight, political actors at Athens were held accountable and limited by law.

In Athens, as in modern democracies, accountability was a central demo-cratic value. As Peter Euben has noted, “in many respects the Greek idea of accountability has the same range, breadth and ambiguity as our own. To render an account is to provide a story or description of events or situations as well as to explain oneself (often to a superior). To give an account is to give reasons . . . to call to account is to hold someone responsible or blame them.”3 Yet Athenian accountability institutions were remarkable, both in scope and in the intensity of their practice. For Aeschines and his fellow citi-zens, holding political office meant submitting oneself to multiple account-ability procedures before, during, and after one’s service to the polis.4 Even orators, holding no official magistracy, could be held to account for the advice they gave, through such procedures as eisangelia and the graphē paranomōn.5 Athenians active in politics were regularly called upon to give an account of their actions, and could be (severely) punished by their fellow citizens should their accounts be deemed unsatisfactory.

Three salient features common to Athenian institutions of accountability deserve particular emphasis. First, the institutions were popular. The central decision makers in accountability processes were large groups of ordinary citizens, serving either as voters in the Assembly or as jurors. Second, the institutions were discretionary. While the laws typically set out specific crimes and acts of malfeasance for which a political actor could be punished, they also characteristically allowed for considerable room for discretion and judgment on the part of the citizens trying the cases.6 Third, the institutions were asymmetrical. Ordinary citizens voting (but not speaking) in the Assembly, and serving as jurors in the large popular courts, played central roles in holding other officials to account, but they themselves were unac-countable, both individually and collectively. They could not be formally



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called on to explain or justify their votes before their fellow citizens, nor could they be punished for how they voted.

If ordinary Athenian citizens, acting as assemblymen and jurors, thereby exercised far more power than their modern democratic counterparts, they nonetheless enjoyed a similar immunity from scrutiny and accountability in the exercise of that power, familiar to anyone who has walked into a voting booth, pulled shut the curtain, and cast her ballot.7 In what follows, I call the unaccountability of ordinary Athenian citizens for the decisions they ren-dered as jurors and assemblymen “popular unaccountability.”

To speak of “popular unaccountability” might strike some as exaggera-tion. Scholars such as Peter Euben and Elizabeth Markovits have argued for a generalized “culture of accountability” at Athens, even while recognizing (as Euben does) that “for better or for worse, members of the juries and non-speakers in the Athenian Assembly . . . were not subject to the same intense scrutiny [as other participants in political life].”8 Markovits points to the dokimasia all citizens undertook when they came of age; the Athenian “spirit of civic-mindedness”; ostracism; the jurors’ oath; and the Athenian network of gossip as factors that contributed to general accountability in the city.9 Adriaan Lanni has argued that the corona, the crowd of spectators who were drawn to the courts each day and observed the judicial proceedings, “helped to rectify one of the perceived institutional weaknesses of the Athenian democracy, the immunity of its mass juries from formal accountability.” In Lanni’s view, the spectators might have served as an “informal euthuna,” exerting “a sort of informal social control, a compensation for the legal unac-countability of the jurors.”10

Without offering a full consideration of these arguments,11 which would be beyond the scope of this article, I want to stress two points. First, none of these scholars disputes the reality of what I call popular unaccountability—they merely argue that other factors mitigated it. Second, the very existence of the vast legal machinery of accountability at Athens suggests that Athenians were not overly confident in the efficacy of informal and cultural account-ability mechanisms—they did not leave the supervision, control, and punish-ment of other political actors to the forces of formally powerless spectators, oaths, and rumor.12 The existence of something like a culture of accountabil-ity at Athens, then, should not prevent us from seeing the force of the follow-ing puzzle: given the seemingly overriding Athenian commitment to accountability, how could popular unaccountability be justified?

I begin by examining two broad families of justification available to Athenians in thinking about popular unaccountability. The first relates popu-lar unaccountability to democratic wisdom, strength, and sovereignty. The second relates unaccountability to the weakness of the idiōtēs, the ordinary




“private citizen.” Jurors and assemblymen, as idiōtai, were not seen as the proper objects of Athens’s formidable machinery of accountability. I argue that this justification, while ubiquitous, was also tenuous. I offer a reading of Aristophanes’s Wasps to show the ways in which it could be undermined: Aristophanes tears down the image of the juror as an idiōtēs and offers instead the image of the juror as an unaccountable tyrant.

In the conclusion, I turn to the question of the power of the ordinary citi-zen in modern democracies. I argue that the dilemmas of popular unaccount-ability remain with us today, in the form of ordinary citizens voting for officials, serving on juries, and passing laws by referenda. Strikingly, con-temporary defenses of popular unaccountability continue to make recourse to the language of privacy. Far from seeing such claims as paradigmatically liberal and modern, I read them, alongside the discourse of the idiōtēs at Athens, as attempts to address a fundamental democratic problem: how to understand the status and role of ordinary citizens participating en masse in democratic politics.

Unaccountability as a Marker of Sovereignty and Infallibility

In this section, I want to look at two distinct justifications of popular unac-countability. Each conceives of that unaccountability as an attribute of the demos as a powerful political actor. On one view, the Athenian demos was sovereign, and the Assembly and Courts were the twin institutional loci of that popular sovereignty.13 Popular unaccountability can then be understood in light of the shared status of Assembly and Courts as the institutions through which the demos truly could rule. Jurors and assemblymen are not scrutinized or questioned in the exercise of their power, let alone punished for its misuse. To ask that they be held accountable would be to misunder-stand the nature of the demos’ power in the city. This “sovereigntist view” might find some support in the customary opening of Athenian Assembly decrees: edoxen tōi dēmoi, “it seemed best to the demos.” The formula could be read as implying that the mere fact that the people willed something is justification enough for its enactment. There may also be a sense in which unaccountability is not only a privilege of sovereignty but also a condition of its exercise. The demos’ power to make decisions without being called to account could be taken as a necessary condition for the free exercise of its political will. Of course, decisions of the demos were not final. Future assemblies could overturn the decisions of previous ones. Moreover, at least in the fourth century, Assembly decisions were subject to review by panels



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of jurors through the graphē paranomōn. Yet none of this poses a challenge in itself to the sovereigntist view, provided that both institutions—Assembly and court—remain firmly identified with the people.14

The sovereigntist view is not without merit, but it coheres uneasily with the Athenian emphasis on the need for power to be exercised accountably. Defended in such stark terms—unaccountability is the privilege and enabler of the sovereign demos, and needs no further justification—popular unac-countability is in tension with Aeschines’s elaboration of democratic ideol-ogy. The confident distinction he made between accountable democracy and unaccountable tyranny becomes difficult to sustain (at least on this axis of differentiation).15 Perhaps in light of this tension, we also see efforts to argue that members of the demos are particularly deserving of the privilege of unac-countability. One such argument adverts to what many scholars take to be a central tenet of democratic ideology—the epistemic superiority of the judg-ing demos.16 As Hansen puts it in a discussion of the graphē paranomōn,

there seems something absurd about punishing a political leader for a proposal that the people had accepted, possibly unanimously. The philosophy behind the penalty was, however that the people are never wrong, and will indubitably reach the right decision if a matter is properly put to them, but they can be misled by cunning and corrupt orators and make erroneous decisions against their better judgement.17

We could call this the infallibilist argument: popular unaccountability is justi-fied by the Athenian faith in the “wisdom of the masses.” Why hold jurors and assemblymen accountable when, if given the right information, they can-not help but judge well?

Plenty of evidence attests to Athenian confidence in the ability of regular citizens in the ekklēsia and dikastēria to judge matters correctly and even wisely. This confidence was buttressed by a general belief in the rectitude of mass opinion.18 Nor was this strain of democratic thinking mere ideological cant. Aristotle took it seriously enough to offer a qualified endorsement of collective decision making in the Politics. In considering the claims of ordi-nary citizens to some share in the government of the polis, he takes note of the argument that groups of people might be as good as or better than indi-viduals at judging at least some matters.19

Nonetheless, Hansen’s infallibilist argument goes too far. In his view, Athenians justified popular unaccountability on the grounds that poor collec-tive decision making could only be the result of oratorical interference, manipulation, and deception. Consider the passage that Hansen cites in sup-port of this view, from Demosthenes’s Against Aristocrates:




[i] If he [a juror] fails to understand something explained to him, he should not be punished for his misunderstanding. [ii] But the man who knowingly betrays and deceives the jury—he is the one liable to the curse. That is why, at each meeting of the Assembly, the herald calls down curses not on those who are deceived, but on he who deceives.20

In my view, Demosthenes has two different scenarios in mind in this passage, which I have marked above as [i] and [ii]. We will do well to keep them dis-tinct, although Hansen runs them together. In [i], Demosthenes forthrightly recognizes that jurors sometimes simply fail to understand what they are told, even in the absence of a sly orator’s efforts to mislead and deceive his audi-ence. Far from bolstering the claim that collective decision making is infal-lible absent oratorical abuses, the passage is striking for the seemingly casual way that Demosthenes denies that ordinary citizens are immune to errors of judgment. Of course, Demosthenes is also keen to highlight a second sce-nario, in which orators actively mislead and deceive jurors. In such cases, it is no surprise that he thinks the orators should be held responsible. What is perhaps more surprising is that even where the fault seems to lie with the juror (as in [i]), Demosthenes assumes that it would be inappropriate to hold him responsible (or at least, to punish him). The passage is less an endorse-ment of the infallible wisdom of the masses than a claim about whose mis-takes in the polis are culpable. Jurors unable to follow arguments are excused, while malevolent orators, whose attempts to deceive their audience represent a much graver crime against the state, are justly the object of punishment. Demosthenes’s division of responsibility may be perfectly reasonable, but it is clear that the passage makes it difficult to ascribe to him anything like the infallibilist argument for popular unaccountability. The passage provides no grounds for thinking that Athenians rejected accountability for jurors and assemblymen on the grounds of their infallibility; on the contrary, it explic-itly recognizes their limitations.

Unaccountability as a Marker of Weakness: The Unaccountable Idiōtēs

With the infallibilist argument rejected, we might think we are left with only the sovereigntist view, which asserts unaccountability as the demos’ privilege without much justification. However, Demosthenes’s recognition of mistake-prone jurors also points to a family of justifications for popular unaccount-ability rather distant from those we just examined, to which I now turn. Here we set questions of sovereignty and knowledge aside. Rather than positing a link between unaccountability and the demos’ power in the city, I want to



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explore the possible relationship between unaccountability and powerless-ness. Underlying popular unaccountability may be an analysis of the varying levels of responsibility that properly accrue to different modes of participa-tion in politics. The demos may be unaccountable less because it is above the law than because its characteristic political activities are almost beneath the law’s notice.

To understand popular unaccountability in this light, we must turn to the figure of the idiōtēs. The word idiōtēs comes from the Greek adjective idios, meaning “private” or “personal.” Its antonyms are koinos and dēmosios, what is “common,” “public,” or belonging to the people. Idiōtēs is therefore often translated as private citizen, as opposed to a magistrate or a citizen more actively involved in political life. At the limit, to be an idiōtēs was to play no role in politics at all. Such a figure, totally withdrawn from public life, was anathema to the Athenian participatory ideal, and is met with scorn in such texts as Pericles’ Funeral Oration: “We [Athenians] alone hold the man who does not take part in politics to be less a person who refrains from meddling, than a person who is utterly useless.”21 Yet to be an idiōtēs did not primarily connote a retreat from all politics. Idiōtai also denoted the class of amateur, but actively participating, ordinary citi-zens, whose level of participation nonetheless did not surpass some (ill-defined, as we shall see) threshold.

Who exactly counted as an idiōtēs in this sense was a matter of some debate. In some contexts, everyone not currently serving as a magistrate might be considered an idiōtēs. For example, a law cited by Demosthenes refers to “idiōtai and archons” as an exhaustive division of the citizen body, and in some speeches former officers are referred to as idiōtai to differenti-ate them from those currently serving office.22 Yet in other contexts, the status of idiōtēs encompasses all unskilled or amateur participants in poli-tics, including magistrates. Demosthenes differentiates between those mem-bers of the Council who speak frequently and those who do not, identifying the latter group as idiōtai.23 Similarly, he refers to the typical holder of a small-time magistracy—a market-overseer or city-regulator or deme-judge—as “a poor man, and an amateur (idiōtēs), without much experience and selected by lot.”24 The contrast here is between those who devote much of their time and energy to politics and ordinary citizens who do not, rather than between office holders and others. Accordingly, Athenian rhetoric is filled with contrasts between idiōtai on the one hand and politeuomenoi (those citizens very active in politics) or rhētores (orators) on the other.25 Finally, Demosthenes’s invocation of the economic status of his putative small-time magistrate—“a poor man”—highlights another dimension of cleavage in Athenian politics. To be considered an idiōtēs may have held




connotations of being an “ordinary citizen” as opposed to a rich and power-ful member of the Athenian political and socioeconomic elite.26

Given the multiple shades of meaning of the term idiōtēs, it is unsurprising that the line separating idiōtai from the rest was hard to draw, a fact under-scored by Aeschines’s claim in his speech On the Embassy to be an idiōtēs himself, despite the fact that he was one of Athens’s leading political figures at the time.27 Yet if there was confusion and disagreement over who counted as an idiōtēs, Athenians nonetheless agreed on the political valence of the term. To be an idiōtēs was, at least in some contexts, a good thing. Aeschines’s efforts to portray himself as one attest to that fact, as does, for example, Demosthenes’s preference in Against Androtion for the Boule to be domi-nated by “amateurs” rather than “talkers.”28 The preference for idiōtai can be read as a democratic version of Plato’s thought in the Republic that those who wield political power should not be lovers of political rule.29 Just as Socrates voices suspicion that those who desire to rule will invariably do it poorly, Athenian democrats may have been suspicious of those who were too eager to play an active role in politics, as compared with the less ambitious idiōtai. Accompanying this respect was an agreement that idiōtai and politeuomenoi should be treated differently in politics and public life: idiōtai should not be held to the same strict standards of accountability as the more politically active members of the polis.

Judicial rhetoric abounds with claims that defendants who are idiōtai should be treated leniently. Defendants often represented themselves as mere private citizens, unfamiliar with the court system and its rhetoric, in an effort to garner sympathy from the jury.30 For example, in his prosection of Timokrates, Demosthenes allows that his target would potentially deserve excuse had he been a mere idiōtēs and not a frequent (and potentially corrupt) proposer of laws. Timokrates will not be able to show that he, “being an inexperienced amateur [apeirian idiōtēn], did not know what he was doing; for some time, he has been seen composing and introducing laws for pay.”31 Similarly, in another speech Demosthenes accepts that a speaker’s status as an idiōtēs affects his potential culpability and liability to accountability procedures: “If Aeschines were an idiōtēs, talking foolishly and blundering about, you wouldn’t be exces-sively critical; you would let it go, and forbear judgment.”32 The set of idiōtai might be loosely defined, but counting as one before a jury was clearly advan-tageous: to view a defendant as an idiōtēs was to hold him to a lower standard of culpability, if not to excuse his misdeeds altogether.

We can also see the special status of idiōtai in the frequency and ferocity of the rhetorical assaults on those who would prosecute them improperly.33 As Demosthenes put it in his prosecution of Aristogeiton, famous for bring-ing graphai paranomōn before the people,



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What then is this man [Aristogeiton]? “The guard dog of the democracy!,” they say. Yes, but what sort? One that does not bite those he censures as wolves, but instead devours the cattle he says he guards. Which of the orators has he harmed to the degree that he has harmed those regular citizens [tous idiōtas], against whom he has been convicted of moving decrees? What orator has he accused since he again started speaking in public? Not a single one—but many regular citizens [idiōtas pollous]. But they say that dogs given a taste of cattle must be cut to pieces—and the sooner he is destroyed the better [emphasis mine].34

Demosthenes’s denunciation of Aristogeiton might be rhetorically spectacu-lar, but its message was commonplace: to direct the full force of Athens’ legal machinery—including the institutions of accountability—against idiōtai was seen as a gross abuse.

As Aeschines neatly summed up the matter, when it came to holding citi-zens accountable in Athens, “the law closely scrutinizes those who are active in public life [tous politeuomenous], not regular citizens [tous idiōteuontas].”35 This was a bedrock assumption of Athenian politics; as Demosthenes told an opponent, “no one is ignorant” of the fact that “the life of regular citizens [ton bion tōn idiōtōn] involves no danger, and is secure and free of strife, while the life of those actively involved in politics [tōn politeuomenōn] is perilous, liable to censure, and is each day filled with trials and evils.”36 In another speech, Demosthenes justified this bifurcation of responsibility with a metaphor:

Consider mistakes made on naval voyages. Just as, when it is a common sailor who errs, the harm produced is small, but when the pilot goes astray he produces a common disaster for all embarked on the voyage, so too the mistakes of private citizens [ta men tōn idiōtōn hamartemata] bring harm to themselves, but not to the mass of citizens, while the mistakes of the archons, and those actively engaged in politics, reach everyone.37

Some members of the polis, on this view, are akin to ordinary sailors. They are not immune from making errors, but when they do, the damage done to the ship of state is small. It is those men who participate more intensively in politics, akin to the captains and pilots of ships who have the potential to cause real harm to the state. Hence, Demosthenes concludes, it is right that the laws of Athens place a premium on prosecuting, speedily and surely, the crimes of magistrates and orators, while taking a more lenient approach to prosecuting the misdeeds of regular citizens.38

Popular unaccountability can be understood in light of the above analysis: it would follow naturally from an understanding of jurors and assemblymen as fundamentally idiōtai, rather than professional politicians. As such, they




were not the proper objects of Athens’s legal machinery and accountability mechanisms, and these institutions correctly did not focus on them. One need not advert to the infallibility of group decision making to defend the unac-countability of assemblymen and jurors. Rather, one must only consider them as ordinary citizens—fallible, perhaps, but not deserving of censure and pun-ishment in the same way that other, more active citizens might be. Hyperides’s speech In Defense of Euxenippus makes this understanding of jurors explicit. Consider the following passage:

Ever since you decided to participate actively in politics—and by Zeus, you certainly are able—you should not have brought regular citizens [tous idiōtas] to judgment nor treated them with your youthful insolence. Instead, if some orator does an injustice, prosecute him; or if some general does wrong, impeach him! The power to do harm to the city belong to these men, whichever of them who choose to do it, but not to Euxenippus or to any of the jurors.39

Hyperides is attacking Euxenippus’s prosecutor with a move analogous to Demosthenes’s rhetorical assault on Aristogeiton. Yet here, the speaker also assimilates the defendant and the jurors to the category of rightfully unac-countable private citizen. The familiar rebuke for prosecuting idiōtai is pres-ent, as is the claim that it is orators and generals, rather than idiōtai, who “have power to harm the city.” In addition, we see the explicit identification of the jurors with the class of blameless, harmless idiōtai.

Justifying popular unaccountability by pointing to the status of jurors and assemblymen as idiōtai also fits neatly with the Athenian emphasis on the accountable exercise of power. All that is required is a new gloss on it: “accountability is for the politeuomenos; the idiōtēs is justifiably unac-countable, because he is weak, an amateur, and does not have the power to harm the city.” Nonetheless, I want to close this section by calling attention to the way in which the identification of jurors with idiōtai was, if under-standable, also problematic. After all, even if jurors were not formally mag-istrates, serving as a juror was an intensive form of political activity, involving full-day commitments on as many as 240 days of the year.40 There is evidence that the precise place of jurors in the city struck contem-poraries as something of a puzzle. The orator Lycurgus, for example, divided the politeia into three parts, archons, jurors, and idiōtai, suggesting a desire to keep idiōtai and jurors conceptually distinct (although just what distinction Lycurgus is trying to make here is a matter of debate).41 Aristotle, too, had trouble figuring out where to place jurors and assemblymen in a schema of the city: “Perhaps someone would say that such persons are not magistrates at all, and that sharing in these activities does not constitute



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holding office; but it is laughable to withhold the title of official from those who are most powerful.”42

What this suggests is that the identification of jurors and assemblymen with the class of unaccountable, blameless idiōtai was a tenuous one. For if it involved a basic claim about powerlessness, it necessarily came into tension with the fact that jurors and assemblymen really did wield power in the city. To the degree that this was recognized, arguments for popular unaccountabil-ity that hinged on the jurors’ status as idiōtai threatened to dissolve into cir-cularity. The image of the juror as idiōtēs was potentially unstable, and vulnerable to deconstruction. As I will show, Aristophanes undertakes just such a deconstruction in his Wasps, replacing the image of the juror as idiōtēs with one of the juror as tyrant. But before the force of the demos–tyrant anal-ogy in this context can be felt, I must make clearer the connection between unaccountability and tyranny in Greek political thought.

The Unaccountable Tyrant

When Aeschines invoked the image of the unaccountable tyrant in his Against Ctesiphon, he was drawing on a long-standing Greek tradition that took unac-countability and tyranny to be closely related. Herodotus’s Histories are an early source for that tradition. In the “Constitutional Debate,” Otanes criti-cizes monarchy (which he does not distinguish systematically from tyranny) as the form of government where “it is possible for the ruler to do what he pleases without having to render an account [tēi exesti aneuthunoi poiein ta bouletai].”43 The ruler’s power to do what he pleases is dependent on his unaccountability—if there were an authority over the autocrat, his freedom of action would be compromised. Otanes claims further that unaccountability would render any man a bad ruler: “even the best of all men, set up with this power, will leave his usual ways of thinking.”44 A tyrant will “disturb heredi-tary customs, assault women, and kill without trial.”45 Otanes thereby offers the beginnings of a theory of how unaccountability has a tendency to ramify throughout the autocrat’s life, distorting and perverting the ruler’s actions and desires. The violent, hubristic, and unrestrained desires and actions of tyrants on display throughout the Histories arise, on this view, as a result of, or in conjunction with, their unaccountability.46

The mutually sustaining relationship between unaccountability and unlim-ited desire is exemplified in Herodotus’s recounting of Cambyses’s attempt to marry his sister. Cambyses, Herodotus tells us, had fallen in love with his sister and wanted to marry her, but recognized that to do so would be “uncon-ventional.” He therefore summoned the Royal Judges, whose task it was to judge lawsuits and interpret “ancestral ordinances and institutions,” and




inquired whether “there was any law that would sanction a man’s marrying his sister.” The response of the judges, Herodotus notes, was both “just and safe: they said they had discovered no law that would sanction marriage between a man and his sister, but they had found another law stating that the king of the Persians was permitted to do whatever he wanted.”47 Cambyses thereupon “married the sister he was in love with then, but a short time later he also took another one of his sisters to be his wife.” Cambyses’s behavior illustrates the dynamic relationship between unaccountability and stereotypi-cal tyrannical behavior. In coming before the Royal Judges in the first place, Cambyses engaged in an attempt to negotiate the extent of his desires, and to see what limits, if any, could be placed on them. The Judges’ decision rein-forced his unaccountability, underlining their inability to put any limits on his sphere of action. The result was that Cambyses felt free to marry not one sister, but two, illustrating the way in which Cambyses’s unaccountability was implicated in a process of ever-expanding desires.48

Over time, the stereotypical autocrat’s reputation for unaccountable rule in accordance with his own desires would become a commonplace. In particu-lar, the relationship between unaccountability and the metastasizing of desire characteristic of the tyrant would become both a stock image and an object of further inquiry and elaboration, as we can see in Plato’s treatment of tyranny and tyrannical desires in his dialogues. The centrality of unaccountability in Plato’s depiction of the tyrant and the (false) attractions of the tyrannical life is brought out most clearly in the obsession of various Socratic interlocutors with doing injustice with impunity. This is the basic idea behind Glaucon’s presentation of the story of Gyges, in book II of the Republic. Glaucon is confident that the best life involves “doing injustice without paying the pen-alty [mē didoi dikēn].”49 Gyges’s ring, which renders its bearer invisible, serves as the central element of a thought experiment Glaucon proposes in support of his claim (360b). It is clear that the role of the ring in the thought experiment is to simulate a condition where one cannot be punished for one’s actions, that is, unaccountability. Indeed, this idea is reinforced by a detail in the story that Glaucon tells: Gyges discovers the ring’s power when he, along with the other shepherds, comes before the king to make his monthly report on the status of the flock. It is while taking part in an exercise of accountabil-ity, then, that Gyges discovers the ring’s power to liberate him from such limitations (359e-360a).50 In Glaucon’s view, the unaccountability that the ring provides would lead any man, whether just or unjust, to give life to his desires: he would begin “to take what he wanted from the market without fear, and to go into houses and have intercourse with whomever he wanted, and to slay or release from bonds whomever he wanted, and to do other things as an equal to a god among humans.”51 As numerous scholars have noted,



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Glaucon’s ring-wearer closely parallels the stereotypical tyrant in his misbe-haviors and misdeeds.52

The unaccountable idiōtēs, then, has an evil twin in the Greek imagination—the unaccountable tyrant. Whereas the former is politically benign in his unaccountability (and indeed, is unaccountable just because he is benign), the latter’s unaccountability is an enabling condition for the most destructive forms of social and political behavior. Given the two faces of unaccountability, we are left with a question—which sibling did the unac-countable juror take after? Aristophanes’s Wasps is in part a polemical answer to just this question.

The Unaccountable Juror in Aristophanes’s Wasps

Aristophanes’s Wasps, produced in 422 BCE, has as its core an exaggerated but trenchant critique of the Athenian jury system. Aristophanes’s portrayal of Philokleon undermines the idea that jurors fit the “amateur ideal” of Athenian politics, confounding attempts to identify jurors as idiōtai, and offering instead an image of the juror as unaccountable tyrant. While Aristophanes is unsparing in his depiction of popular unaccountability and the problems it may engender, he also, I argue, points to the limits of the demos–tyrant analogy.

The Wasps opens on a scene of two slaves, Xanthias and Sosias, keeping watch on their master’s father, Philokleon. The reason, Xanthius explains to the audience, is that the old master suffers from a strange sickness.53 The problem is that “he’s a jury-addict [philēliastēs] like no other man, he’s in love with judging, and he groans if he cannot sit on the front bench.”54 Philokleon’s love of judging has taken over the old man’s life. Night and day, dreaming and awake, his world revolves around the court.55

Xanthias pairs Philokleon’s love of judging with his anger and a desire to punish, observing that the old man always chooses the harsher punishment during the penalty phase of the trials he judges.56 The anger and ferocity of the jurors is a major theme of the play and the basis for its central image, the swarm of juror-wasps ready to sting whoever angers them.57 The conversa-tion among the chorus of jurors often revolves around whom they have pun-ished, and whom they will have the opportunity to punish next.58 Yet even among that tribe of angry old men, Philokleon stands out. He prides himself on never voting to acquit, explaining, “once I consulted the oracle at Delphi and the god prophesied to me that when I let anyone get off I’d just shrivel up then and there.”59 His fellow jurors agree with the characterization of Philokleon as a particularly unsympathetic juror: “Truly he was far the fierc-est of those in our place, the only one who couldn’t be talked around; when




anyone begged for mercy, he’d lower his head and say, ‘you’re trying to cook a stone.’”60

The relation between the two dominant features of Philokleon’s character—his love of judging and his anger or ferocity—is on its face something of a puzzle. It is tempting to solve that puzzle by assuming that Philokleon simply finds pleasure in feeling angry and punishing others. There is something to this thought. When his fellow-jurors arrive at his house, Philokleon calls out, “What I’ve been wanting to do for a long time is to go with you to the voting-urns and do some harm to someone!”61 Yet Philokleon is not—or not merely—mean spirited; his addiction to judging is not an addiction to the pleasures of cruelty. Rather, as Danielle Allen has noted, Philokleon’s anger and ferocity are instrumental in achieving what he sees as the central good of jury service—a sense of empowerment.62 This comes out most clearly in the debate staged between Philokleon and his son, Bdelykleon. Bdelykleon argues that Philokleon and his fellow jurors are the pawns of the powerful: “you don’t understand that you’re being made a fool of by men whom you all but worship. You’re a slave, and you’re not aware of it.”63 Philokleon responds, to the contrary, that he is “lord of all.” It is in defending this claim that he makes clear both the source of his addiction to judging and how his ferocity benefits him.

Philokleon begins his defense of the jury-lover’s way of life with the fol-lowing claims: “Yes, right from the start I’m going to prove as far as our power is concerned that it’s equal to that of any king. What creature is there today more happy and enviable, or more pampered, or more to be feared, than a juror, and that though he’s an old man?”64 As Philokleon elaborates on these claims, it becomes clear that it is the fear others feel for him that is central to his vision of the superiority of his way of life. For example, it is fear of the juror’s power that makes young, strong men, charged with crimes, bow down before Philokleon as he approaches the courts, and beg him for mercy.65 As Philokleon recounts the lengths even the rich and powerful will go to in their efforts to assuage his anger, the connection between their fear and his feeling of empowerment is reinforced, as is the thought that this is the chief benefit of serving as a juror in his mind. His closing remarks highlight the relation-ship between the fear others feel for him and his sense of empowerment:

PHILOKLEON: Do I not wield great power, in no way inferior to that of Zeus—seeing that the same things are said of Zeus and of me? For example, if we get noisy, every passer-by says: “What a thunder’s coming from the court! Lord Zeus!” and if I make lightning, the rich and the very grand all cluck and shit in their clothes for fear of me. And you yourself are terribly afraid of me—by Demeter, you are—but I’ll be damned if I’m afraid of you!66



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Insofar as his anger and ferocity generate fear in those who come before the court, and insofar as their fear in turn is central to his feeling of empower-ment, the connection between his love of judging and his ferocity is made clear.67

Notice that Philokleon is especially keen on the asymmetry of fear between jurors and others—“you yourself are terribly afraid of me—but I’ll be damned if I’m afraid of you!” He thereby points to a second theme that comes to prominence as he elaborates on the power he has as a juror: he is able to exer-cise his power unaccountably. After accepting the supplications of those out-side the courthouse, Philokleon does not let their pleas affect him: “Then when I’ve been supplicated and had my anger wiped away, and gone into court, once I’m inside I take no account of all the promises I’ve made.”68 He brags that the jurors do not have to follow the law—“if a father leaves a daughter as heiress and gives her to someone on his deathbed, then we tell the will it can go and boil its head, and the same to the shell that’s lying very grandly over the seals, and we give the girl to anyone whose entreaties per-suade us.”69 Moreover, the jurors do all of this with absolute impunity, a point he takes care to emphasize: “And doing all these things we cannot be called to account—a power not given to anyone else.”70

Philokleon here invokes the unaccountability of the tyrant, not the idiōtēs.71 Philokleon takes his unaccountability as the guarantor of his power, not the marker of his powerlessness. Philokleon’s character and actions undermine the idea of juror as idiōtēs at every turn. If the amateur ideal dic-tates occasional political participation, for the benefit of the polis, Philokleon participates every day that he is able, and does so explicitly for the benefits he gains. If the amateur ideal is predicated on a suspicion of those who wield too much power, who love “serving the city” too much, a dislike of ambition and distrust of the ambitious, then Philokleon repudiates that ideal even while seeming to serve it, coupling distrust and disrespect for the city’s political elite with his own love of jury-service. If the amateur ideal is in part predi-cated on an Athenian version of Plato’s dictum that only those who do not wish to rule are suitable rulers, then Philokleon has missed the mark. Philokleon’s open exultation in the power of the juror and his unaccountabil-ity underscores the tension between the image of the juror as idiōtēs and the actual role the juror played in the polis.

With the juror stripped of his idiōtēs mask, Aristophanes happily goes about dressing Philokleon in the robes of a tyrant (quite literally, at 1130-1150, where Bdelykleon has him exchange his home-spun cloak for Persian garb).72 Philokleon’s defense of jury service is a masterful satire on the tyrannical life, even though the word “tyrant” is never uttered.73 We have already seen the way in which Philokleon stresses the unaccountable nature of the juror’s




power. His self-identification with the tyrant is also underscored by his invo-cations of Zeus and his claim to be “Lord of All.” Jeffrey Henderson has noted the way in which “the hallmarks of the Classical tyrant” feature promi-nently in Aristophanes’s portrayal of demagogues usurping the power of the demos: “Cleon uses public and imperial funds for his own pleasures, espe-cially sexual excess, gluttony, and heavy drinking; violently suppresses opposition; lords it over the people’s administrative and military officers and over the allies; intrigues with enemy states; harasses the elite classes, includ-ing homosexuals.”74 Philokleon lays claim to a remarkable number of these tyrannical vices in his speech. He clearly takes great delight in “lording it over” the city’s archons who must face him at their euthunai, and harassing “the elite classes.” Moreover, after expounding at length on the joys of domi-nation, Aristophanes has Philokleon paint a scene of domestic pleasure that serves as a send-up of the tyrannical pleasures of “sexual excess, gluttony, and heavy drinking.”75 Food, sex, and drink feature prominently in Philokleon’s description of the jurors’ home life, including an eroticized account of his daughter’s attempts to get a share of his jury pay, re-enacting Cambyses’s infamous flouting of sexual boundaries and norms:

But what’s the most delightful of all of them, which I’d forgotten, is when I come home with my pay . . . first of all my daughter washes me and anoints my feet and bends down to kiss me, and keeps calling me “daddy dear” while really trying to fish my three obols out of me with her tongue. And the little wife fawns on me, bringing me a puff-pastry and then sitting down beside me and forcing me to have it—“eat this, take a nibble of this” . . . if you don’t pour wine for me to drink, I bring in this “donkey” full of wine, and then tip it up and pour myself some.76

In Philokleon, then, Aristophanes seems to have offered his audience a repre-sentative of the demos who, at least in his own self-image, bears more than a passing resemblance to a tyrant. We might be tempted to conclude that just as Otanes predicted in the case of the autocrat, Philokleon’s unaccountability has ramified throughout his life, leading to stereotypically tyrannical behavior.

Yet we should be cautious in evaluating the critical force of Aristophanes’s portrayal of Philokleon as tyrant. As John Zumbrunnen has recently argued, we should not read Aristophanes’s plays as offering straightforward diagno-ses of political problems along with uncomplicated solutions to his Athenian audience; rather, the plays “work in the end to raise questions and generate uncertainty.”77 In keeping with this line of thought, we should note, first, that Aristophanes offers up this vision of the tyrant-juror enjoying his pleasures



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with a wink and a nod at his audience. The relative austerity of Philokleon’s pleasures—after all, his pay is a mere three obols a day—compared to the luxuries of the tyrant should make us wary of the comparison, as should the obvious comic exaggeration at play. The scene, we might even say, maps Philokleon onto the tyrant almost too perfectly, as though Aristophanes is simply following a script, filling in the details of his tyrannical character and thereby living up to audience expectations.

Moreover, Philokleon’s attempts at self-aggrandizement cannot be read in isolation because they are not the only invocations of tyranny in the play. The main accusations of tyranny in the Wasps are leveled not against Philokleon but against his son. Bdelykleon’s attempts to prevent Philokleon from leaving the house to judge are met with anger and suspicion by the other jurors: “Is this not terrible? Is it not open tyranny?”78 Bdelykleon responds to the jurors’ accusations with telling mockery:

BDELYKLEON: How you make everything into “tyranny” and “conspirators,” if anyone makes a criticism of anything big or little. . . . If someone buys perch and doesn’t want sprats, straight away the man selling sprats nearby says: ‘This man seems to buying fish like a man after tyranny.”79

Bdelykleon’s response is frequently read as a comment on the state of politi-cal discourse in Athens in the 420s, and the role therein of the image of the tyrant. Henderson’s interpretation is typical: “The picture painted by Aristophanes in Knights and Wasps shows that populist charges of tyrannical conspiracies were a novelty. They were also leveled so frequently, were so broadly construed, and directed at such unlikely targets as to be arguably absurd, as in this passage from Wasps [citing the passage above].”80

Attuned to the importance of Bdelykleon’s remark as a comment on politi-cal discourse at large, commentators miss its relevance to Aristophanes’s own portrayal of Philokleon as a tyrant-like figure. On one level, the accusations against Bdelykleon serve to sharpen Aristophanes’s critique of the demos by way of contrast. Aristophanes is lampooning Athenian accusations of tyranny against demagogues while dramatizing what he takes to be the real similari-ties between demos and tyrant. Yet we can also read the two passages together differently. In having Bdelykleon call attention to the vacuity of accusations of tyranny, Aristophanes may implicitly invite his audience to apply the same standard to his own exaggerated critique of the jurors. If he faithfully repro-duces every aspect of tyrannical behavior in his portrait of the juror, he does so at least in part to mock the very idea of jurors as tyrants. The satire could have two targets – both the jurors posing as idiōtai and the people who take the juror-tyrant analogy too seriously.




This line of thought is reinforced by Bdelykleon’s claims in the play that the jurors are really the slaves of the demagogues, rather than their masters. A number of commentators have correspondingly read the play as emphasizing the powerlessness of ordinary Athenians serving as jurors, rather than their tyrannical power. For example, Lisa Kallet recognizes that Aristophanes is playing with the image of demos as tyrant in the play. But she sees Bdelykleon as someone who effectively “pokes holes in what he sees as an illusion of power,” thereby establishing that Philokleon is not “as powerful as he thinks; and by implication, he is not a tyrant.” 81 The play does not offer a final answer to the question of who is really in control in Athens: ordinary citizens serving as jurors or the demagogues who attempt to manipulate them.82

The ambiguity of power relationships in Athens should lead us to view the demos–tyrant analogy warily; nonetheless, the analogy maintains critical purchase. What remains of Aristophanes’s portrait of the juror as tyrant is the problem posed by unaccountability, which manifests itself in interactions between jurors and those who come before them to be judged. For all Bdelykleon’s insistence that the jurors are dupes rather than masters, he never challenges his father’s claim that the jurors are unaccountable; indeed, he accepts it as the only good point Philokleon has made.

Aristophanes, then, offers a portrait of the juror that shares in many of the classical tyrannical topoi discussed above. We do not need to assign to the play a single meaning or message to see the way in which Aristophanes has complicated any efforts to read the unaccountability of the jurors as the benign unaccountability of the idiōtēs. The jurors have been given their own Ring of Gyges, and even if their unaccountability does not lead them to embark on a campaign of terror, it still raises real political issues.

Conclusion: The Power of Ordinary Citizens

If jurors in Athens were idiōtai, they were nonetheless idiōtai who wielded great power. Consider Aeschines’ reflections on the role of jurors, in his speech Against Ctesiphon:

If the judges at the Dionysian Festival do not judge the cyclical choruses justly, you punish them; but will you yourselves, established as judges not of cyclical choruses but of laws and political excellence, give rewards, not in accordance with the laws, and to the few and deserving, but to a successful schemer?

Furthermore, such a judge will leave the courts having made himself weaker, and the orator stronger. For in a democratic city the private citizen rules as king through the law and his vote; but when he hands these over to another, he has dissolved the basis of his own power [emphasis mine].83



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In this passage, Aeschines accepts that jurors are unaccountable. The judges of choruses can be punished if they do not judge correctly. No such possibil-ity exists for the jurors, those judges of the “laws and political excellence”; in pleading with his audience to judge in accordance with the laws, Aeschines acknowledges that no power in the city can compel them to do so. Aeschines here identifies the jurors as idiōtai, but idiōtai dignified with a political epi-thet: “in a democratic city, the private citizen rules as king.” Given the asso-ciation of the figure of the idiōtēs with powerlessness, Aeschines’s formulation has the whiff of paradox. Yet if the formulation is borderline contradictory, it is because it represents an attempt at bringing together two very different ways of understanding the demos’ unaccountability, neatly capturing an important tension in the status of jurors and assemblymen in the democratic city: they are ordinary citizens, but they wield an almost royal power.84

Rather than trying to resolve these tensions, we should acknowledge them as expressive of a certain Athenian ambivalence about the power of the demos. This is not to say that regular Athenians did not appreciate the demo-cratic political system and zealously guard their privileges within it. Still, the attempt to identify jurors and assemblymen as idiōtai reflects a level of uneasiness with unaccountable power. It is an attempt to find a justification for the unaccountability of jurors and assemblymen that fits neatly with the general Athenian emphasis on accountability. The need for such a justifica-tion is perfectly understandable, for unaccountability is linked closely in the minds of Athenians to the exercise of tyrannical power—a form of politics anathema to democratic ideals. Aristophanes’s critique both highlights the need for a justification of popular unaccountability and puts tremendous pressure on one justification that the Athenians could and did make use of.

In modern democracies, the ordinary citizen no longer rules as king. Yet the relationship between unaccountability and the exercise of democratic power is a question not only for Athens but for us. Popular unaccountability remains with us today, in forms that parallel the Athenian cases. Most obvi-ously, we find it in the form of a mass electorate making laws (in the case of referenda) and choosing leaders (in the case of elections) by means of the secret ballot. Less obviously, the contemporary jury in Anglo-American legal systems, for all its differences with the Athenian version, is also an instantia-tion of popular unaccountability.85 Ordinary citizens exercising power in modern democracies are, to return to the Aeschines quote with which I opened this essay, typically shielded from “audit, investigation and examina-tion.” And the issues that popular unaccountability raises today are less removed from the Athenian case than we might think.

Consider the now defunct practice of some Swiss cantons of making natu-ralization decisions by a secret ballot vote of the canton’s citizens. The Swiss




Supreme Court overturned the practice in 2003 after a ballot in Emmen resulted in the rejection of all of the applicants of Balkan heritage. The Court ruled that referenda, with their closed ballot and subsequent lack of justifica-tion for their decisions, were inappropriate means for making naturalization decisions. In their ruling, the Swiss court discussed the potential tension between the Swiss Constitution’s guarantee of the freedom of the ballot and its provisions against discrimination and arbitrary treatment.86

We might take from the Swiss example the lesson that popular unaccount-ability is only problematic in cases of direct democratic administration. Those are the cases where we may rightly be concerned about an unaccount-able demos wielding power over, and directly harming, identifiable individu-als, without justification. But ballot initiatives, in which the modern electorate acts legislatively rather than administratively, also allow ordinary citizens to make unaccountable decisions, sometimes with momentous and troubling consequences. California’s Proposition 184, “Three Strikes and You’re Out,” mandates prison sentences of twenty-five years to life for third felony convic-tions. It is a striking fact that the most punitive sentencing law in the United States was promulgated by a body—the citizens of California—that was never asked to justify or explain that decision. Indeed, the secret ballot expressly prevents any such justification. Nor should we be overly comforted by the possibility of appeal from the unaccountable decisions voters may render in referendums. That Proposition 184 remains law today should serve to remind us that the theoretical possibility of appeal is no panacea for unjust decisions. Moreover, in political systems, like Athens and our own, that value accountability, there is something troubling about decisions that no one seems to be responsible for, and that no one can be held responsible for.87

Nonetheless, political theorists and ordinary citizens alike are generally untroubled by popular unaccountability. John Stuart Mill stands out among canonical democratic theorists in his rejection of the secret ballot and his insistence that ordinary voters be accountable, at least on some level.88 Today Mill has few followers. Even deliberative democrats, whose commitments to norms of reason-giving, mutuality, and accountability seem to support, on their face, a Millian position, rarely challenge the secret ballot. Gutmann and Thompson, for example, do not seem to think that their deliberative commit-ments should extend to voters in the ballot box.89

Just as in Athens, justifications for popular unaccountability today often make use of the language of privacy. One prominent line of defense for the secret ballot adverts to voting as a “private” act.90 Such language, indeed, was central to arguments seeking to uphold the practice of naturalization by refer-endum in the Swiss case, which posited that ordinary voters should be trusted to make such decisions according to their own convictions.91 Appeals to pri-vacy were also invoked in the wake of a recent attempt to hold supporters of



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a ballot initiative accountable for their support. Proposition 8, passed in 2008, wrote a prohibition of same-sex marriage into the California constitution. When opponents of the proposition made public a list of those who supported Proposition 8 financially, “supporters of Proposition 8 argued that this public posting invaded their privacy, subjecting them to hectoring from individuals who objected to their support.”92

Such arguments may appear to be paradigmatically modern, grounded in the “liberal” distinction between the public and private spheres. Yet the use of similar appeals in the Athenian context suggests that there is something beyond liberal norms that makes it attractive for democrats to view the exer-cise of popular power as in some sense “privatized.” In part, such appeals can be explained by the perfectly understandable desire of ordinary citizens to shield their views and actions from scrutiny: the modern idiōtēs has no more desire to be scrutinized in her political actions than her Athenian forbearers. But appeals to privacy also answer a deep democratic need: how to under-stand and justify the role mass groups of unaccountable, ordinary citizens play in the central institutions of democratic politics. To think of these forms of participation as in some sense private is to limit their liability to scrutiny, whether we cash out the appeal to privacy in terms of the Athenian ideology of the unaccountable idiōtēs or contemporary liberal rights-based theories.

To recognize the reality of popular unaccountability is not to advocate for a retreat from mass participation in politics. But looking at it with clear eyes is a necessity, and merely bracketing off the behavior of ordinary citizens from scrutiny does not itself make the potential problems disappear.

Author’s Note

I would like to thank Richard Avramenko, Tae-Yeoun Keum, Joe Muller, Eric Nelson, Emma Saunders-Hastings, Arlene Saxonhouse, Joel Schlosser, Melissa Schwartzberg, Christina Tarnopolsky, Andrea Tivig, Richard Tuck, John Zumbrunnen, audiences at the 2011 APT conference and the Harvard Graduate Student Political Theory Workshop, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Political Theory for helpful comments and criticism.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-tion of this article.




Notes

1. Aeschines, 3.6. Translations of Aeschines are my own; some are modifications of the Loeb edition of Aeschines, with translations by Charles Darwin Adams (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1948).

2. Aeschines, 3.22. 3. Peter Euben, Corrupting Youth: Political Education, Democratic Culture, and

Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) 97, fn 21. 4. Magistrates underwent a dokimasia before their terms in office; while in office,

they could be impeached using procedures such as the eisangelia; finally, upon completion of their duties, they underwent a euthuna. General discus-sions of Athenian accountability procedures include Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Accountability in Athenian Government (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); M. H. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999); and R. K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. ch. 6.

5. Harvey Yunis’s “Law, Politics and the Graphe Paranomon in Fourth-Century Athens,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 29, no. 4 (1988): 361–82, argues that the graphē paranomōn is best understood as a combined legal and political process. Cf. the discussion of the institution in Hansen, Athenian Democracy, pp. 205–12.

6. See Adriaan Lanni’s discussion of the ways in which laws were framed to leave much to juror discretion, using the hubris law and the decree of Cannonus as examples: Lanni, Law and Justice in the Courts of Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 64–70. Cf. Matthew Christ: “Jurors’ understanding of community norms and ultimately their sense of what was right (to dikaion) determined how and even whether they applied laws [emphasis mine].” See his The Litigious Athenian (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 41. Lanni also stresses that jurors as a matter of course consid-ered extra-legal factors when reaching their verdicts (Law and Justice ch. 3). The jurors’ discretion over when and how to apply the laws is an important point of contextualization for Aeschines’s claim that political actors at Athens were lim-ited by law. Scholars such as Edward Harris and Lene Rubinstein have argued that jurors were subordinate to the rule of law in Athens; see their introduction to The Law and the Courts in Ancient Greece, ed. Edward M. Harris and Lene Rubinstein (London: Duckworth, 2004). See also Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Rule of Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), for an extended argument stressing the rise of the rule of law in Athens. In this article, I side with Lanni and others who see jurors as wielding wide discretion-ary powers, and hence as relatively unconstrained by the laws, the interpretation and enforcement of which remained in the last instance in their hands.

7. The analogy between modern voter and Athenian citizen holds best when considering Athenian jurors, who cast their votes according to secret ballot. Assemblymen voted by show of hands, and hence could less easily hide their



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vote from their fellow citizens. Nonetheless, they were not formally accountable for how they voted.

8. Euben, Corrupting Youth, pp. 97–99. 9. Elizabeth Markovits, The Politics of Sincerity (University Park: Pennsylvania

State Press, 2008), pp. 54–55, 60–61.10. Adriaan Lanni, “Spectator Sport or Serious Politics? οί περιεστηκότες and the

Athenian Lawcourts,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 117 (1997): 183, 187–88. Of course, since jurors voted under a secret ballot, the efficacy of the corona as an institution of accountability may well have been quite limited.

11. I discuss accountability in Athens further, particularly as it related to political speech, in “Parrhesia and the Demos Tyrannos: Frank Speech, Flattery and Accountability in Democratic Athens,” History of Political Thought 33, no. 2 (2012): 185–208.

12. Nor can we look to the principle of rotation and the wide dispersion of offices at Athens to avoid the charge of popular unaccountability. The point is not that jurors never found themselves having to account for their political actions in Athens (e.g., if they served as a Counsellor one year, they would face both a dokimasia and an euthuna), but they never had to account for their actions under-taken as jurors.

13. This view of the relationship between the courts and the assembly is not uncon-troversial. Hansen in particular has argued strongly against assimilating the courts to the demos; in his view, the courts, at least in the fourth century, were separate from the demos and indeed constituted something like a check on its power. See Hansen, Athenian Democracy, pp. 154–55, for a (very) succinct summary of his position. Josiah Ober has been one of the strongest proponents of the opposing view, that the courts and assembly both count as institutions through which the demos exercised its powers. For a summary of Ober’s position and his arguments against Hansen, see his The Athenian Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), ch. 8. In my view, Ober is closer to being correct than Hansen, at least insofar as both jurors and assemblymen wielded a similar kind of unaccountable power in the city.

14. Nor is this a challenge to my claim that assemblymen were unaccountable. The question is not whether their decisions could be reviewed and overturned; the question is whether the agents responsible for the decision could be called to account for their part in making it.

15. This is not to say that all distinctions between tyranny and democracy col-lapse. The Athenians, of course, had a number of democratic commitments—to freedom, to equality, and to democratic self-rule—with no tyrannical equivalents. My aim in this paper is not to equate tyranny and democracy but to show how Athenians wrestled with a single formal similarity: the pres-ence of unaccountable decision makers in each regime. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.

16. See, for example, Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), for a discussion of “the wisdom of the masses”;




see also Jeremy Waldron, “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Reflections on Book 3, Chapter 11 of Aristotle’s Politics,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (1995): 563–84, for an influential reconstruction of that doctrine.

17. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, p. 207.18. Cf. Demosthenes Ex 44.1, quoted in Ober, Mass and Elite, p. 164.19. Aristotle, Politics, 1281a–1281b.20. Demosthenes, 23.97, cited by Hansen in Athenian Democracy, p. 207, n. 311.21. Thucydides, II.40. It is worth noting that Pericles does not use the language of the

idiōtēs here, instead referring to the apragmōn. Indeed, given the understanding of the idiōtēs advanced in this essay, it is tempting to read Pericles’s indictment of the apragmōn as a spur to get such citizens to behave more like responsible idiōtai: that is, to play an active, but limited, role in Athenian politics.

22. Demosthenes 23.62; 18.78.23. Demosthenes 22.37.24. Demosthenes 24.112.25. E.g. Demosthenes 25.97, 52.28; Aeschines 3.252–253.26. On class tensions and cleavages in Athens, see Ober, Mass and Elite, especially

part V. I thank the anonymous reviewer for suggesting this line of thought to me.27. Aeschines 2.181, cited by Ober, Mass and Elite, p. 282.28. Demosthenes 22.37.29. Plato, Republic 521b.30. See e.g. Demosthenes 44.4, 34.1; cf. Socrates’ self-representation as a stranger to

the Courts in the opening of the Apology, 17c-d.31. Demosthenes 24.66.32. Demosthenes 19.182.33. E.g., Aeschines accuses Demosthenes of “taking vengeance on private citizens”

(Aeschines 1.173); Cf. Demosthenes 25.38. See also Demosthenes 24.112-3, cited earlier. The context for considering holders of small-time magistracies “idiōtai” is that holding them too strictly accountable for their small errors con-stitutes an abuse. To be clear: the small time magistrate idiōtēs is still subject to euthunai, as all magistrates are, and Demosthenes does not suggest that there is anything improper about that. The idea, though, is that to prosecute him to the full extent of the law is an abuse.

34. Demosthenes 25.40; translation modified from the Loeb translation by A. T. Murray.

35. Aeschines 1.195.36. Demosthenes 10.70. This speech is not always accepted as a work of

Demosthenes, but for our purposes here the attribution is unimportant.37. Demosthenes 26.3.38. Demosthenes 26.4. Compare Danielle Allen, World of Prometheus (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 193: “Demosthenes uses the distinction between what was private and what public to express the idea that those who rise to prominence through politics must take especial care to recognize that they have entered the realm where they will be directly impacting the shared life



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of the city” (with reference to Demosthenes 24.192). This is right, I think, but only gets at half of what is going on with references to the idiōtēs in Athenian judicial and deliberative oratory: orators such as Demosthenes also use the distinction between public and private to attempt to establish who should be immune from the high degree of scrutiny that typically falls upon those who enter “the realm where they will be directly impacting the shared life of the city.”

39. Hyperides 4.27.40. Hansen, Athenian Democracy, p. 186.41. Lycurgus 1.79. Lene Rubinstein takes Lycurgus here to be using idiōtēs only

in the sense of ho boulomenos; see Rubinstein, “The political perception of the idiōtēs,” in Kosmos: Essays in Order, Conflict and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 126. Ober inter-prets it in a looser sense—“all Athenian citizens who were not serving in mag-istracies or on juries were idiōtai, if we are to accept Lycurgus” (Mass and Elite, p. 111).

42. Aristotle Politics 1275a. Plato also recognizes that it is difficult to say whether popular jurors should be thought of as magistrates (see Laws 768c).

43. Herodotus 3.80.44. Ibid.45. Ibid.46. Cf. Carolyn Dewald, “Form and Content: the Question of Tyranny in Herodotus,”

in Popular Tyranny, ed. Kathryn Morgan (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), p. 30. Dewald argues that Herodotus sets up a “despotic template” in The Histories, which he explores and plays with throughout the narrative (p. 27). See also Sara Forsdyke “The Uses and Abuses of Tyranny,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Ryan K. Balot (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 238–39.

47. Herodotus 3.31. This translation is from The Landmark Herodotus, ed. Robert Strassler, trans. Andrea L. Purvis (New York: Anchor Books, 2009), p. 221.

48. James F. McGlew cites this story, as well as Periander’s sexual relations with his wife’s corpse, as representing “the extension of this freedom [the tyrant’s sexual freedom] to the grotesque.” See McGlew, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 26.

49. Plato, Republic 359a.50. Plato, Republic 359e–360a.51. Plato, Republic 360b.52. See McGlew, Political Culture, pp. 26–27, fn 23.53. Aristophanes, Wasps, line 71. Translations from the Wasps are from Wasps, ed.

and trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 1983), although I have modified them slightly in places. Below, references to the play will simply read “W. x”, where x is the line number.

54. W. 88–90. Translation slightly modified.55. W. 103–5.




56. W. 106.57. W. 223–27: “If anyone angers that tribe of old men, it’s just like a nest of wasps.

They’ve even got a very sharp sting sticking out from their rumps, which they stab with, and they shout and jump about and strike you like sparks of fire.”

58. E.g. at W. 240 and 285.59. W. 158–60.60. W. 278–80.61. W. 322.62. Allen, World of Prometheus, 128–30.63. W. 515–1764. W. 548–51.65. W. 555.66. W. 620–30.67. My reading of Philokleon’s anger thus departs somewhat from John

Zumbrunnen’s recent analysis in his Aristophanic Comedy and the Challenge of Democratic Citizenship (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012). Zumbrunnen sees Philokleon’s anger as a reaction to the contingency of his rule: “Philocleon (and the other jurors) are angry because, while they love being in control, they often feel as though they are not” (p. 69). Zumbrunnen’s reading helpfully brings out an important issue—the ambiguity of power relationships in Athens, about which more below—but it downplays what I take to be the clear instrumental value of Philokleon’s anger.

68. W. 560.69. W. 586.70. W. 587, translation modified.71. In considering the ways in which Aristophanes here plays with the idea of the

idiōtēs, it is worth considering that at the beginning of the play Philokleon is locked up at home: the idiōtēs has been restricted to the private sphere. The play might then be read as what happens when the idiotes begins to exercise public power. I thank Tae-Yeoun Keum for suggesting this line of thought to me.

72. As Lisa Kallet has noted. See her “Demos Tyrannos: Wealth, Power, and Economic Patronage,” in Popular Tyranny, pp. 147–54 (see also pp. 139–40). Kallet sees this a symbol of the demos as rich tyrant, stressing the importance of the demos’ wealth for the demos–tyrannos analogy as a whole. In my view, Kallet overemphasizes wealth in her reading of the play; see fn. 81 below for more discussion.

73. Perhaps because tyranny is never mentioned in the passage, it is not often read as a satire of the tyrant. Compare Jeffrey Henderson, “Demos, Demagogue, Tyrant in Attic Old Comedy,” in Popular Tyranny, p. 160: “It is noteworthy that in comedy this rulership [of the demos] is typically characterized as “rule” (arche), “monarchy” or the like rather than as “tyranny . . . .” David Konstan reads Philokleon’s speech as evincing a “childish” (rather than tyrannical) “desire for flattery that transparently betrays the pathetic self-importance of the weak and helpless.” See Konstan, Greek Comedy and Ideology (New York: Oxford



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University Press, 1995), p. 18. Cf. S. Douglas Olson, “Politics and Poetry in Aristophanes’ Wasps,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 126, p. 133; there Olson recognizes that Philokleon is arguing that jury service is a means to an “almost unrivalled degree of power and pleasure” (although he does not make the comparison to the tyrant).

74. Henderson, “Demos, Demagogue,” p. 167.75. W. 605–15.76. Excerpted from W. 605–2077. Zumbrunnen, Aristophanic Comedy, p. 39.78. W. 417, translation mine; accusations of tyranny against Bdelykleon appear also

at 463–70.79. W. 488–97; translation modified to emphasize Aristophanes’s use of the word

“tyranny.”80. Henderson, “Demos, Demagogue,” pp. 163–64. See also Konstan, Greek

Comedy, p. 22 and fn 32 for more citations.81. Kallet, “Demos Tyrannos,” pp 142, 139. Kallet, in keeping with Bdelykleon’s

critique, focuses her argument on wealth, linking the demos’ power in the city to their control of the public finances. In contrast, I read Bdelykleon’s focus on wealth to be something of a nonsequitur. The comparative poverty of the jurors does not diminish their central institutional role in the city. The relative independence of the jurors’ power from the demos’ wealth also shows through in Philokleon’s character; throughout the play he shows little interest in money and wealth.

82. Cf. Zumbrunnen, Aristophanic Comedy, p. 70.83. Aeschines, 3.232-3.84. We might try to resolve the tension by claiming that sovereignty and pow-

erlessness operate on different levels. That is, individually, each juror and each assemblyman is an idiōtēs, and does not wield enough power to be held accountable for his actions. It is only collectively, as the demos, that they wield great power. The problems with this formulation are two. First, it calls for a strict distinction between individual and collective power, which the sources do not bear out; after all, Aeschines encourages each juror to think of his power as his own individual possession, with each idiōtēs ruling as a king. Second, ascribing unaccountable power only to a collective agent merely shifts the problem up a level: we are still faced with the tension between an Athenian ideology of accountable power and an undeniably unaccountable, hugely pow-erful, collective actor. That is, even if individual jurors and assemblymen are idiōtai, is the collective demos an idiōtēs?

85. No branch of government can inquire into the reasons why jurors render the judgments they do, nor can jurors be fined or otherwise punished for those judg-ments. Moreover, insofar as the jury is not politically inert, it is owing to this unaccountability. Jury nullification, a process through which jurors can, after a fashion, make political statements and have political effects, relies on the “inde-pendence” of the jury.




86. See Bundesgerichtentscheide (BGE) 129 I 217, especially section 3.6. For a dis-cussion, see J. Hainmueller and D. Hangartner, “Who Gets a Swiss Passport? A Natural Experiment in Immigrant Discrimination,’’ American Political Science Review, forthcoming.

87. Cf. the discussion in Eric Beerbohm, In Our Name (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 255–59. That book stands out as an exception to the general lack of interest in the unaccountability of ordinary citizens.

88. In Mill’s words, from Considerations on Representative Government: “the duty of voting, like any other public duty, should be performed under the eye and criticism of the public.” Mill recognized the dangers of voters being coerced, but held that the greater danger lay with voters acting unaccountably. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XIX, ed. John Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), pp. 490–91.

89. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 380, note 20.

90. For a discussion and critique of this view, see Daniel Sturgis, “Is Voting a Private Matter?,” Journal of Social Philosophy 6, no. 1 (2005), 18–30. Similar justifica-tions adverting to privacy are offered in defense of jury nullification, as Simon Stern notes in his “Between Local Knowledge and National Politics: Debating Rationales for Jury Nullification After Bushell’s Case,” Yale Law Journal 111 (2001–2002), p. 1815.

91. BGE 129 I 217, 2.2.92. Quoted in Beerbohm, In our Name, p. 258.

Author Biography

Matthew Landauer is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Department of Government at Harvard University. His article, “Parrhesia and the Demos Tyrannos: Frank Speech, Flattery and Accountability in Democratic Athens,” was published in History of Political Thought 33, no. 2 (Summer 2012).



1 the idiōtēs and the tyrant: two faces of unaccountability in democratic athens

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