As an organ for judicial purposes, the Athenian dikasteries were thus a simple and plenary manifestation of jury-trial, with its inherent excellences and defects both brought out in exaggerated relief: they insured a decision at once uncorrupt, public-minded, and imposing,—together with the best security which the case admitted against illegal violences on the part of the rich and great.[711] Their extreme publicity, as well as their simple and oral procedure, divested of that verbal and ceremonial technicality which marked the law of Rome, even at its outset, was no small benefit: and as the verdicts of the dikasts, even when wrong, depended upon causes of misjudgment common to them with the general body of the citizens, so they never appeared to pronounce unjustly, nor lost the confidence of their fellow-citizens generally. But whatever may have been their defects as judicial instruments, as a stimulus both to thought and speech, their efficacy was unparalleled, in the circumstances of Athenian society. Doubtless, they would not have produced the same effect if established at Thebes or Argos: the susceptibilities of the Athenian mind, as well as the previous practice and expansive tendencies of democratical citizenship, were also essential conditions,—and that genuine taste of sitting in judgment, and hearing both sides fairly, which, however Aristophanês may caricature and deride it, was alike honorable and useful to the people. The first establishment of the dikasteries is nearly coincident with the great improvement of Attic tragedy in passing from Æschylus to Sophoklês. The same development of the national genius, now preparing splendid manifestations both in tragic and comic poetry, was called with redoubled force into the path of oratory, by the new judicial system. A certain power of speech now became necessary, not merely for those who intended to take a prominent part in politics, but also for private citizens to vindicate their rights, or repel accusations in a court of justice. It was an accomplishment of the greatest practical utility, even apart from ambitious purposes; hardly less so than the use of arms or the practice of the gymnasium. Accordingly, the teachers of grammar and rhetoric, and the composers of written speeches to be delivered by others, now began to multiply and to acquire an unprecedented importance,—as well at Athens as under the contemporary democracy of Syracuse,[712] in which, also, some form of popular judicature was established. Style and speech began to be reduced to a system, and so communicated: not always happily, for several of the early rhetors[713] had adopted an artificial, ornate, and conceited manner, from which Attic good taste afterwards liberated itself,—but the very character of a teacher of rhetoric as an art,—a man giving precepts and putting himself forward in show-lectures as a model for others, is a feature first belonging to the Periklean age, and indicates a new demand in the minds of the citizens. We begin to hear, in the generation now growing up, of the rhetor and the sophist, as persons of influence and celebrity. These two names denoted persons of similar moral and intellectual endowments, or often indeed the same person, considered in different points of view;[714] either as professing to improve the moral character, or as communicating power and facility of expression, or as suggesting premises for persuasion, illustrations on the common-places of morals and politics, argumentative abundance on matters of ordinary experience, dialectical subtlety in confuting an opponent, etc.[715] Antipho of the deme Rhamnus in Attica, Thrasymachus of Chalkêdon, Tisias of Syracuse, Gorgias of Leontini, Protagoras of Abdêra, Prodikus of Keôs, Theodôrus of Byzantium, Hippias of Elis, Zeno of Elea, were among the first who distinguished themselves in these departments of teaching. Antipho was the author of the earliest composed speech really spoken in a dikastery, and preserved down to the later critics.[716] These men were mostly not citizens of Athens, though many of them belonged to towns comprehended in the Athenian empire, at a time when important judicial causes belonging to these towns were often carried up to be tried at Athens,—while all of them looked to that city as a central point of action and distinction. The term sophist, which Herodotus[717] applies with sincere respect to men of distinguished wisdom, such as Solon, Anacharsis, Pythagoras, etc., now came to be applied to these teachers of virtue, rhetoric, conversation, and disputation; many of whom professed acquaintance with the whole circle of human science, physical as well as moral (then narrow enough), so far as was necessary to talk about any portion of it plausibly and effectively, and to answer any question which might be proposed to them. Though these men passed from one Grecian town to another, partly in the capacity of envoys from their fellow-citizens, partly as exhibiting their talents to numerous hearers, with much renown and large gain,[718]—they appeared to have been viewed with jealousy and dislike by a large portion of the public:[719] for at a time when every citizen pleaded his own cause before the dikastery, they imparted, to those who were rich enough to purchase it, a peculiar skill in the common weapons, which made them seem like fencing-masters, or professional swordsmen, amidst a society of untrained duellists.[720] Moreover, Sokratês,—himself a product of the same age, and a disputant on the same subjects,—and bearing the same name of a sophist,[721] but despising political and judicial practice, and looking to the production of intellectual stimulus and moral impressions upon his hearers,—Sokratês carried on throughout his life a constant polemical warfare against the sophists and rhetors, in that negative vein in which he was unrivalled. And as the works of these latter have not remained, it is chiefly from the observations of their opponents that we know them; so that they are in a situation such as that in which Sokratês himself would have been, if we had been compelled to judge of him only from the Clouds of Aristophanês, or from those unfavorable impressions respecting his character, which we know, even from the Apologies of Plato and Xenophon, to have been generally prevalent at Athens. This is not the opportunity, however, for trying to distinguish the good from the evil in the working of the sophists and rhetors: at present, it is enough that they were the natural product of the age,—supplying those wants, and answering to that stimulus, which arose partly from the deliberations of the ekklesia, but still more from the contentions before the dikastery,—in which latter a far greater number of citizens took active part, with or without their own consent. The public and frequent dikasteries constituted by Periklês, opened to the Athenian mind precisely that career of improvement which was best suited to its natural aptitude: they were essential to the development of that demand out of which grew not only Grecian oratory, but also, as secondary products, the speculative moral and political philosophy, and the didactic analysis of rhetoric and grammar, which long survived after Grecian creative genius had passed away.[722] And it was one of the first measures of the oligarchy of Thirty, to forbid, by an express law, any teaching of the art of speaking. Aristophanês derides the Athenians for their love of talk and controversy, as if it had enfeebled their military energy: but in his time, most undoubtedly, that reproach was not true; nor did it become true, even in part, until the crushing misfortunes which marked the close of the Peloponnesian war. During the course of that war, restless and energetic action was the characteristic of Athens, even in a greater degree than oratory or political discussion, though before the time of Demosthenês a material alteration had taken place.
The establishment of these paid dikasteries at Athens was thus one of the most important and prolific events in all Grecian history. The pay helped to furnish a maintenance for old citizens, past the age of military service. Elderly men were the best persons for such a service, and were preferred for judicial purposes both at Sparta, and, as it seems, in heroic Greece: nevertheless, we need not suppose that all the dikasts were either old or poor, though a considerable proportion of them were so, and though Aristophanês selects these qualities as among the most suitable subjects for his ridicule. Periklês has been often censured for this institution, as if he had been the first to insure pay to dikasts who before served for nothing, and had thus introduced poor citizens into courts previously composed of citizens above poverty. But, in the first place, this supposition is not correct in point of fact, inasmuch as there were no such constant dikasteries previously acting without pay; next, if it had been true, the habitual exclusion of the poor citizens would have nullified the popular working of these bodies, and would have prevented them from answering any longer to the reigning sentiment at Athens. Nor could it be deemed unreasonable to assign a regular pay to those who thus rendered regular service: it was, indeed, an essential item in the whole scheme[723] and purpose; so that the suppression of the pay of itself seems to have suspended the dikasteries, while the oligarchy of Four Hundred was established,—and it can only be discussed in that light. As the fact stands, we may suppose that the six thousand heliasts who filled the dikasteries were composed of the middling and poorer citizens indiscriminately: though there was nothing to exclude the richer, if they chose to serve.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Herodot. vii, 3, 4.
[2] Herodot. vii, 1-4. He mentions—simply as a report, and seemingly without believing it himself—that Demaratus the exiled king of Sparta was at Susa at the moment when Darius was about to choose a successor among his sons (this cannot consist with Ktesias, Persic. c. 23): and that he suggested to Xerxes a convincing argument by which to determine the mind of his father, urging the analogy of the law of regal succession at Sparta, whereby the son of a king, born after his father became king, was preferred to an elder son born before that event. The existence of such a custom at Sparta may well be doubted.
Some other anecdotes, not less difficult of belief than this, and alike calculated to bestow a factitious importance on Demaratus, will be noticed in the subsequent pages. The latter received from the Persian king the grant of Pergamus and Teuthrania, with their land-revenues, which his descendants long afterwards continued to occupy (Xenoph. Hellen. iii, 1-6): and perhaps these descendants may have been among the persons from whom Herodotus derived his information respecting the expedition of Xerxes. See vii, 239.
Plutarch (De Fraterno Amore, p. 488) gives an account in many respects different concerning the circumstances which determined the succession of Xerxes to the throne, in preference to his elder brother.
[3] Herod. vii, 187. The like personal beauty is ascribed to Darius Codomannus, the last of the Persian kings (Plutarch, Alexand. c. 21).
[4] Herodot. vii, 6; viii, 20, 96, 77. Ὀνομάκριτος—κατέλεγε τῶν χρησμῶν· εἰ μέν τι ἐνέοι σφάλμα φέρον τῷ Πέρσῃ, τῶν μὲν ἔλεγε οὐδέν· ὁ δὲ τὰ εὐτυχέστατα ἐκλεγόμενος, ἔλεγε τόν τε Ἑλλήσποντον ὡς ζευχθῆναι χρέον εἴη ὑπ’ ἀνδρὸς Πέρσεω, τήν τε ἔλασιν ἐξηγεόμενος, etc.