Power and the People by Alev Scott

Author:Alev Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

Day of Reckoning

As far as we know, there were no organized protest movements in Athens as there are today, although there were moments of mass hysteria and outrage, like the public’s reaction to the generals’ conduct at Arginusae. The ways in which we attempt to punish our politicians – either by organizing protests, or by not voting for them in an election – would have seemed laughably inadequate to the Athenian demos. Instead, their statesmen and magistrates were subjected to a sophisticated and targeted matrix of laws dedicated to punishing those who abused power. There were even rules in place to check on those in office (including all members of the Council of Five Hundred) before and after their term in office – the dokimasia (pre-check) and the euthyna (post-check), which is still the modern Greek word for ‘responsibility’. Ancient public officials were effectively frisked by the overzealous security guards of the legal system and the tiniest bleep would condemn them to trial.

Modern scandals involving misconduct in office, like the scandal which followed the Daily Telegraph’s publication in 2009 of British MPs’ abuse of expenses, leading to resignations, repayments, sackings and in some cases jail terms for members of the House of Commons and House of Lords, pale in comparison to the rigours the Athenian demos applied to their public officials. In fact, that particular scandal would never have happened, because expenses would never have been privately recorded anyway (it was a 2008 Freedom of Information Request that started the chain of events that led to their publication) and the MPs in question would not have gone undetected for years; more sobering yet, if it had happened, even the more minor offenders would have been executed.

While ostracism was a proactive measure to prevent public figures becoming too powerful, most measures against misconduct in public office in Athens were reactive and incredibly draconian, certainly not to be emulated in our times. The two best known were the law of the graphe paranomon, which was prosecution for introducing an illegal proposal to the people, and the law of eisangelia, i.e. impeachment, when there was a serious charge such as treason or corruption. The accuser, who could be any citizen (like Marcus Ball), could denounce someone in the Assembly or the Council of Five Hundred for having committed offences such as ‘subverting democracy’, serious offences in the military sphere, or deception of the people by an orator. Demosthenes conjures up the outrage of the crowd responding to a lying politician, and the reluctance to give him a second chance:

When a man, then, felt no shame in deceiving you to whom he had pledged his word, though there are laws which declare that, if a man deceives the people by a promise, he shall be liable to impeachment − when, after swearing and imprecating destruction upon himself, he had no fear of the gods in whose name he had perjured himself − was it strange that I was unwilling to allow him to take

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