A History of Trust in Ancient Greece by Steven Johnstone;

Author:Steven Johnstone;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Apportioning Liability

Just as the previous chapter showed that two external factors—random assignment and irrevocable membership—affected the internal dynamics of boards of officials in classical Greece, so this chapter takes up a decisive third: the regime of liability. Although scholars have written extensively about the accountability of officials in ancient Greece,1 they have rarely considered how the typically collegial nature of their offices complicated officials’ liability for rewards and punishments. Greeks often held members of groups liable for success or failure with equal shares of rewards or punishments. While in some senses rewards and punishments can be seen as linked inversions (so that the denial of a reward is a punishment),2 when applied collectively to groups their effects might differ. If equal shares of rewards promoted shirking (as the Greeks recognized), the threat of collective sanctions encouraged group participation, solidarity, and trust.

Collective liability avoids two challenges in determining individual liability in groups: calibrating the formula for proportionalizing the penalty with the responsibility and acquiring enough information to apply this formula accurately. For the Greeks, the problem of proportionalizing focused especially on the individual’s role in the group’s deciding and on the distinction between deciding and executing. Athenian litigation involving groups or their members shows both of these problems. In this chapter I investigate three cases: the trial of a member of a murderous junta who sought to disassociate himself from the acts of his colleagues; the trial of several generals whose joint command had ended disastrously; and the trial of a guardian charged with defrauding his ward in league with his two co-guardians. While these cases raise questions about the ethics of particular regimes of liability (about which Greeks could disagree), my analyses focus more intently on what they reveal about ways in which the practice of collective liability affected the normal relationships of members of a group, even before any sanction was applied. A regime of collective liability—the possibility that all members of the group might be held liable for the actions of any member—prompted colleagues to cultivate and intensify personal relationships of trust (or distrust) with one another. I conclude the chapter with a sustained examination of Xenophon’s detailed critical analysis of equally shared liability. Unlike many Greek writers, whose sense of status was affronted by such equality, Xenophon carefully considered how shared liability affected the behavior of associates in groups.

The Challenges of Liability in Groups: Lysias against Eratosthenes

Lysias’s prosecution speech against Eratosthenes highlights the two fundamental, interrelated issues regarding liability that conglomerate political bodies gave rise to: first, the challenge of proportionalizing liability to individual members of a group when the whole group made a decision; and second, the practical difficulty of getting information to apply any formula for individual liability.

The defendant Eratosthenes had been one of the Thirty, the antidemocratic governing board that Sparta had imposed on Athens after defeating it in the Peloponnesian War. The Thirty had initiated a bloody purge of Athenians—a reign of terror initially justified as upholding standards of virtue, but quickly devolving into an attack on anyone (especially if wealthy) who supported democracy.

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