What is Justice? This is a question Socrates asked no less than, What is Temperance? What is Piety? What is Courage? But the stakes seem larger with justice, because this virtue plays an immense role in community interactions. Socrates acted on an ideal of justice when he stood up against the Assembly at the trial of the generals. How we treat others, and how we explain what we should do when we interact with others, makes a big difference in our ability even to live in a community, as it did on that day in 406 when Socrates made a courageous stand. The question of justice is one that is prominent in poetry and sophistical treatises because the issue is important to living itself. And in Athens the problem of justice was especially acute.
On the one hand, Athens was a pioneer in the most radical political experiment ever undertaken, the notion that ordinary people could rule themselves. Originally people had lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers who treated their members as equals. As societies had grown larger and more complex, hierarchies had emerged to distinguish the noble from the base, the haves from the have-nots, the rich from the poor, the elite from the masses.
Some Greeks, and chief among them the Athenians, had glimpsed the possibility of making society more just by making more people responsible for directing the public affairs of the community. Why leave the deliberations of the state to the Few? Why not include the Many in the political process, give them a stake? As with all known governments, the elite did not give up power readily, but under the tutelage of wise leaders such as Solon and Cleisthenes, and under pressure from the infantry who were now the dominant military force, the city had expanded the franchise, and finally under Ephialtes and Pericles members of the lowest class came to share in all the rights of citizenship (see ch. 2.6*). In the Assembly and in the courtroom every citizen had an equal opportunity to participate.
On the other hand, there were still a great many adults in Athens who were not, and never could be, counted as citizens. In the first place women. Although Plato would later envision an ideal state in which women would share leadership with men,[1] his conception remained no more than a philosopher’s dream. In the second place, “metics” (metoikoi), resident foreigners who often lived their whole lives in Athens but were not born of two Athenian parents, were excluded. There was no regular process for them to become naturalized citizens—although a few were awarded citizenship for outstanding service to the state. In the third place there were xenoi, non-resident foreigners, present on short-term business or passing through. Finally, there were slaves. A large fraction of the city was made up of slaves with virtually no rights, official chattel of citizens or of the state itself.
Many slaves were “barbarians,” non-Greeks captured in raids on neighboring peoples. Many, however, were Greeks who had been enslaved as a penalty for being captured in a siege of a rebellious or hostile city. Athenians, too, became slaves of their enemies, most notably the survivors of the Sicilian expedition who were enslaved by Syracuse. But the Athenians failed to call into question the fundamental inequities of the institutions of slavery. For these disenfranchised groups there was no equality before law in Athens, and no hope for improvement. For a change in the status of slaves and women the world would have to wait until movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries AD, which would redress the problems only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Yet for all its limitations, the Athenian state should be judged for what it accomplished rather than what it failed to attempt. The government of Athens was, by any standard, a stunning achievement. After Athens there would be no democracy, not even a democracy of adult male citizens, until the eighteenth century AD. And even in that modern century, the experiment of democracy in North America would stun the world, sending shockwaves through every nation, launching revolutions on three continents—and inspiring popular uprisings that continue to this day. After the appearance of democracy in early modern times, the world would never be the same.
Yet there was one other area in which democratic ideals clashed with actual practices. In its brave new world, Athens defeated the Persian Empire in the Aegean with the help of an alliance of city-states on its rim, the Delian League. But once the Persians made peace in 449 and ceded the Aegean to the Greeks, the league lost its primary justification and evolved into an empire which existed for the profit and aggrandizement of its metropolis. Athens became an exploiter of its member states and an enforcer of laws designed to help only the mother city. To be sure, Athens set up democracies in its subject states and thereby promoted an ideology of freedom and equality for the Many—but at the cost of autonomy for its member states. Members of the Delian league enjoyed a certain amount of freedom, but they remained subject to a foreign city.
[1]. Plato Republic V; for a comic (but seriously meant) treatment of a female government, see Aristophanes Lysistrata.