That this indictment, as one of the most direct vents for such enmity, was largely applied and abused at Athens, is certain. But though it probably deterred unpractised citizens from originating new propositions, it did not produce the same effect upon those orators who made politics a regular business, and who could therefore both calculate the temper of the people, and reckon upon support from a certain knot of friends. Aristophon, towards the close of his political life, made it a boast that he had been thus indicted and acquitted seventy-five times. Probably the worst effect which it produced was that of encouraging the vein of personality and bitterness which pervades so large a proportion of Attic oratory, even in its most illustrious manifestations; turning deliberative into judicial eloquence, and interweaving the discussion of a law or decree along with a declamatory harangue against the character of its mover. We may at the same time add that the Graphe Paranomon was often the most convenient way of getting a law or a psephism repealed, so that it was used even when the annual period had passed over, and when the mover was therefore out of danger, the indictment being then brought only against the law or decree.
Such were the great constitutional innovations of Pericles and Ephialtes,—changes full of practical results,—the transformation, as well as the complement, of that democratical system which Clisthenes had begun and to which the tide of Athenian feeling had been gradually mounting up during the preceding twenty years. The entire force of these changes is generally not perceived, because the popular dicasteries and the nomothetæ are so often represented as institutions of Solon, and as merely supplied with pay by Pericles. This erroneous supposition prevents all clear view of the growth of the Athenian democracy by throwing back its last elaborations to the period of its early and imperfect start. To strip the magistrates of all their judicial power, except that of imposing a small fine, and the Areopagus of all its jurisdiction except in cases of homicide—providing popular, numerous, and salaried dicasts to decide all the judicial business at Athens as well as to repeal and enact laws—this was the consummation of the Athenian democracy. No serious constitutional alteration (excepting the temporary interruptions of the Four Hundred and the Thirty) was afterwards made until the days of Macedonian interference. As Pericles made it, so it remained in the days of Demosthenes—though with a sensible change in the character, and abatement in the energies, of the people, rich as well as poor.
In appreciating the practical working of these numerous dicasteries at Athens, in comparison with such justice as might have been expected from individual magistrates, we have to consider: first, that personal and pecuniary corruption seems to have been a common vice among the leading men of Athens and Sparta, when acting individually or in boards of a few members, and not uncommon even with the kings of Sparta; next, that in the Grecian cities generally, as we know even from the oligarchical Xenophon (he particularly excepts Sparta), the rich and great men were not only insubordinate to the magistrates, but made a parade of showing that they cared nothing about them. We know also from the same unsuspected source, that while the poorer Athenian citizens who served on shipboard were distinguished for the strictest discipline, the hoplites or middling burghers who formed the infantry were less obedient, and the rich citizens who served on horseback the most disobedient of all.
To make rich criminals amenable to justice has been found so difficult everywhere, until a recent period of history, that we should be surprised if it were otherwise in Greece. When we follow the reckless demeanour of rich men like Critias, Alcibiades, and Midias, even under the full-grown democracy of Athens, we may be sure that their predecessors under the Clisthenean constitution would have been often too formidable to be punished or kept down by an individual archon of ordinary firmness, even assuming him to be upright and well-intentioned. Now the dicasteries established by Pericles were inaccessible both to corruption and intimidation: their number, their secret suffrage, and the impossibility of knowing beforehand what individuals would sit in any particular cause, prevented both the one and the other. And besides that the magnitude of their number, extravagant according to our ideas of judicial business, was essential to this tutelary effect—it served further to render the trial solemn and the verdict imposing on the minds of parties and spectators, as we may see by the fact that, in important causes the dicastery was doubled or tripled. Nor was it possible by any other means than numbers to give dignity to an assembly of citizens, of whom many were poor, some old, and all were despised individually by rich accused persons who were brought before them—as Aristophanes and Xenophon give us plainly to understand. If we except the strict and peculiar educational discipline of Sparta, these numerous dicasteries afforded the only organ which Grecian politics could devise, for getting redress against powerful criminals, public as well as private, and for obtaining a sincere and uncorrupt verdict.
Taking the general working of the dicasteries, we shall find that they are nothing but jury-trial applied on a scale broad, systematic, unaided, and uncontrolled, beyond all other historical experience—and that they therefore exhibit in exaggerated proportions both the excellences and the defects characteristic of the jury system, as compared with decision by trained and professional judges. All the encomiums, which it is customary to pronounce upon jury-trial, will be found predicable of the Athenian dicasteries in a still greater degree; all the reproaches, which can be addressed on good ground to the dicasteries, will apply to modern juries also, though in a less degree.
RHETORS AND SOPHISTS
The first establishment of the dicasteries is nearly coincident with the great improvement of Attic tragedy in passing from Æschylus to Sophocles. 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, 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 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 Periclean 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; 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 commonplaces of morals and politics, argumentative abundance on matters of ordinary experience, dialectical subtlety in confuting an opponent, etc. Antiphon of the deme Rhamnus in Attica, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Tisias of Syracuse, Gorgias of Leontini, Protagoras of Abdera, Prodicus of Ceos, Theodorus of Byzantium, Hippias of Elis, Zeno of Elea, were among the first who distinguished themselves in these departments of teaching. Antiphon was the author of the earliest composed speech really spoken in a dicastery and preserved down to the later critics. 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 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 to answer any question proposed to them.
Though they passed from one 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—they appear to have been viewed with jealousy and dislike by a large portion of the public. For at a time when every citizen pleaded his own cause before the dicastery, they imparted, to those who were rich enough to purchase it, a peculiar skill in the common weapons, which made them like fencing-masters or professional swordsmen amidst a society of untrained duellists. Moreover Socrates—himself a product of the same age, a disputant on the same subjects, and bearing the same name of a sophist—but despising political and judicial practice, and looking to the production of intellectual stimulus and moral impressions upon his hearers—Socrates or rather Plato, speaking through the person of Socrates—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 Socrates himself would have been if we had been compelled to judge of him only from the Clouds of Aristophanes, or from those unfavourable impressions respecting his character which we know, even from the Apologia of Plato and Xenophon, to have been generally prevalent at Athens.