Aristophanes has often been read as a conservative who was nostalgic for the days before the advent of radical democracy in Athens. This article offers a more complex reading, centering on the portrayal of ordinary citizens in "Archarnians" and "Knights". Focusing on their "cleverness," Aristophanes recognizes both the potential of ordinary citizens and their limitations as heroes in the struggle against elite domination of democratic politics. This complex portrayal of ordinary citizens, the author suggests, complements recent calls for a more (...) agonistic democratic politics. (shrink)

Scholars have long noticed in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War a concern with the collective 'character' of cities. Thucydides and his Greeks appear to rely in understanding the course of the war on consistent Athenian and Spartan character traits. Focusing on the protagonist of the History, and drawing in part on an Arendtian notion of identity, I offer a re-conceptualization of Athenian character as characteristic action and as the subject of political rhetoric. This view, I suggest, more fully reveals (...) what Thucydides has to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics and complexities of democratic politics. (shrink)

Aristophanes has often been read as a conservative who was nostalgic for the days before the advent of radical democracy in Athens. This article offers a more complex reading, centering on the portrayal of ordinary citizens in Archarnians and Knights Focusing on their “cleverness,” Aristophanes recognizes both the potential of ordinary citizens and their limitations as heroes in the struggle against elite domination of democratic politics. This complex portrayal of ordinary citizens, the author suggests, complements recent calls for a more (...) agonistic democratic politics. (shrink)

It is in the complex interplay of silence, speech, and action that Zumbrunnen teases out the meaning of democracy for Thucydides in both its domestic and international dimensions and shows how we may benefit from the Thucydidean text in ...

The role of elites vis-à-vis the mass public in the construction and successful functioning of democracy has long been of central interest to political theorists. In _Silence and Democracy_, John Zumbrunnen explores this theme in Thucydides’ famous history of the Peloponnesian War as a way of focusing our thoughts about this relationship in our own modern democracy. In Periclean Athens, according to Thucydides, “what was in name a democracy became in actuality rule by the first man.” This political transformation of (...) Athenian political life raises the question of how to interpret the silence of the demos. Zumbrunnen distinguishes the “silence of contending voices” from the “collective silence of the demos,” and finds the latter the more difficult and intriguing problem. It is in the complex interplay of silence, speech, and action that Zumbrunnen teases out the meaning of democracy for Thucydides in both its domestic and international dimensions and shows how we may benefit from the Thucydidean text in thinking about the ways in which the silence of ordinary citizens can enable the domineering machinations of political elites in America and elsewhere today. (shrink)