The Athenian Navy and Democracy: Top-Down, Bottom Up, or Topsy-Turvy Organization?

Over the last two decades, a consensus has emerged around the proposition that naval power played no causal role in the formation of democracy at Athens (Ceccarelli 1993; van Wees 1995; 2004) or indeed, anywhere in the Greek world (Robinson 2011: 230-37). Perhaps the most powerful assault on the entire tradition—ancient and modern—of linking social class, military service, and constitutional form is Vincent Gabrielsen's (2002) " SocioEconomic Classes and Greek Warfare. " Viewing the connection between thetes, naval power, and democracy as the fantasy of elite theorists and ideologues—the primary transmitters of this connection are Pseudo-Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and later writers such as Plutarch—he severs ties among them, arguing that the link between fleets and thetes has no historical basis as a matter of class duty; the association of the poor with the fleet is an elite ideological construct; the navy was not a lynch-pin of class identity. I want begin with a response to this point, for the reference to " bottom-up " organization in the rationale for our panel may be a something of a misnomer (agency is typically shared along a spectrum and it is often difficult to determine which end of the spectrum is the source of the agency); even so, the effect of Gabrielsen's argument is to make the bottom vanish, and as tempting as that may be, the evidence is insufficient to permit it. After a brief discussion of the top-down nature of the Athenian navy, I will discuss an example of bottom-up agency involving the fleet, the undoing of the recently formed oligarchy 300 on Samos and creation of a parallel Athenian democratic government on the island dedicated to restoring the ancestral laws—fully democratic government instead of moderate oligarchy—at Athens. Finally, I briefly examine the trial and execution of the six generals held responsible for failing to recover wrecks, corpses, and survivors after the battle of Arginousai as a possible example of bottom-up agency, but end up suggesting the opposite: the fact that hippeis uniquely served in the fleet on that occasion might explain (in addition to vicious political enmities) the drive to kill the generals rather than demotic outrage over the failure to recover corpses.