Paul Rhodes

M. I. Finley sought to rescue the ‘demagogue’ as an essential ingredient in Athens’ democratic processes. This paper explores the interactions of politicians and the assembly. There is some evidence for pressure on men to attend and to vote on a particular side. There were many occasional speakers and proposers in addition to the few most active politicans. We should not think of a series of duels; and experienced assembly-goers were not mere ‘spectators of speeches’. Speakers could be supported by cheers or heckled. Nobody could count on the assembly’s voting as he wanted consistently time after time. Politicians sought to cultivate an image, whether the aloof, magisterial image of Pericles or the extravagantly populist image of Cleon. Orators had to master a range of strategies to succeed, but there was not a simple division between élite politicians and a lower-class demos to whose tune they had to dance.

The dossier of decrees concerning the Deceleans and the Demotionidae of Athens presents fascinating problems and has attracted plentiful discussion. For a long time there has been a division between the view of Wilamowitz and his followers, that the Demotionidae were a phratry and the Deceleans a privileged genos within it, and that of Wade–Gery refined by Andrewes, that the Deceleans were a phratry and the Demotionidae a privileged genos within it.3 Each of these interpretations gave rise to problems; and since the work of Bourriot and Roussel on the gene there has been a reluctance to believe in gene as aristocratic clans able to control their phratries. Recently Hedrick has argued that the Demotionidae were the phratry and the Deceleans the members of the deme of Decelea; and Lambert has argued that the Demotionidae were the phratry and the Deceleans a genos–like body which formed a semi–independent group within the phratry and which in these decrees was extending its independence further. These interpretations also give rise to problems: in this paper I attempt to continue the debate and to show that an interpretation on Wade–Gery′s lines is after all the most likely to be right

A. R. W. Harrison in The Law of Athens, i , 63–5, argued that the exclusion of bastards from the phratries and the severe restriction of their right of inheritance does not entail their exclusion from Athenian citizenship; and that the form of Pericles' citizenship law, not stating that were to be , and Solon's law restricting the inheritance rights of , both point to the conclusion that bastards were not ipso facto debarred from citizenship. D. M. MacDowell in CQ N.S. 26 , 88–91, rightly finds Harrison's positive arguments inconclusive, but suggests that three texts provide more definite support for this conclusion

Political activity and political thinking began in the cities and other states of ancient Greece, and terms such as tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and politics itself are Greek words for concepts first discussed in Greece. Rhodes presents in translation a selection of texts illustrating the formal mechanisms and informal workings of the Greek states in all their variety. From the states described by Homer out of which the classical Greeks believed their states had developed, through the archaic period which saw the rise and fall of tyrants and the gradual broadening of citizen bodies, to the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries, Rhodes also looks beyond that to the Hellenistic and Roman periods in which the Greeks tried to preserve their way of life in a world of great powers. For this second edition the book has been thoroughly revised and three new chapters added

The Greek polis has been arousing interest as a subject for study for a long time, but recent approaches have shown that it is a subject on which there are still important questions to be asked and worthwhile issues to be explored. This book contains a selection of essays which embody the results of the latest research. Beyond the historical development of the Greek polis , the contributors ask questions about the civic institutions of ancient Greece as a whole and their relationships to each other. Questions of power or the significance of a written code of law are discussed as well as the nature of Greek overseas settlements. Development of the Greek Polis presents up-to-date research and asks up-to-date questions on various aspects of an important topic.