Athens on Trial by Roberts Jennifer Tolbert

Author:Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert [Roberts, Jennifer Tolbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781400821327
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2011-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE BRITISH BACKLASH

The revolutions in America and France also inspired monarchists of other nationalities to warn their countrymen against trying the experiment at home. The anxiety was most keenly felt in England, and the reaction was discernible soon after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord. In his 1778 edition of Lysias and Isocrates, John Gillies, the Scottish historian to the king, warned dissidents who, ignoring the sad history of Greece, wished to “set on foot a republican confederacy” to tremble “at the prospect of those calamities, which, should their designs be carried into execution, they must both inflict and suffer.”111 Gillies’s 1786 History of Ancient Greece also served as a vehicle to convey to readers the evils of nonmonarchic government. Greek history, Gillies announced in his dedicatory epistle to the king, by “describing the incurable evils inherent in every form of Republican policy,” evinces the inestimable benefits to liberty from the “lawful dominion of hereditary Kings,” and therefore may with singular propriety be offered to George III as sovereign of the most free nation on earth.

Not surprisingly, Gillies presents the story of Athens as the history of “a wild and capricious democracy” in which an unbridled mob interacted with a series of worthless demagogues from Ephialtes to Eubulus.112 Gillies is not content to let his readers draw their own conclusions about the evils of democratic government; he states plainly that democracy in general is “a fierce and licentious form of government” with “incurable defects” and a “tyrannical spirit.”113 Frequent references to the character flaws of the poor with their “gross appetites” make plain the source of Gillies’s objection to popular sovereignty.114 In ancient times, he explains, as in modern, “the corrupt taste of the licentious vulgar was ever at variance with the discerning judgment of the wise and virtuous.”115

Developments in America also led Josiah Tucker to crystallize his thinking about government in his 1781 Treatise concerning Civil Government, but the nature of Tucker’s revulsion for Athens was different from Gillies’s. Though Tucker resembled Gillies in his desire to rouse in “every true Friend to Liberty an Abhorrence of the Idea of an Athenian Common-wealth,” he alternately censured Athens for being a flagrant democracy and mocked her as a closet aristocracy.116 An attack on the principles of Locke and their recent application in America, Tucker’s treatise warns potential republicans in England that “this very Argument of unalienable Rights, weak and trifling as it is, may nevertheless become a formidable Weapon, in the Hands of desperate Catalinarian Men, for establishing a real and cruel Tyranny of their own (according to the Example which the American Rebels have already set) instead of that harmless, imaginary Tyranny, of which they so bitterly complain at present.”117 Though Tucker censures all forms of unmixed government—absolute monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and democracy—he is particularly concerned to caution his readers about government by the “Caprice and Humour of the giddy Populace.”118 Tucker makes clear that it was experience rather than scholarship that led him to reject democracy.

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