The management of civil administration, subject to the constant direction of the ecclesia and the watchful supervision of the council,—which in this matter also acted for the body of which it was a miniature,—was entrusted to a multitude of committees, each composed normally of ten members. Aristotle, in his Constitution of the Athenians, specifies the duties of twenty-five such committees and estimates at seven hundred the number of citizens engaged annually in domestic administration. The work of each committee was definitely circumscribed by law and formed a small bundle of routine matters. The committees may be thought of as standing drawn up in a long line for the council to inspect. Had they been placed one behind the other in files, the rear committee being responsible to the one before it and so on down to the front, the council would have come into direct contact only with a few powerful committees. Such committees, however, must have proved impossible for inexperienced councilors to manage. Besides, while the councilors, as agents of the ecclesia, and subject to its commands, might properly hold all the civil magistrates to a monthly accounting, it was not thought in accord with democracy that one group of citizens who happened to hold one civil office should have under their direction another group of citizens also engaged temporarily on public work. Though all the committees were thus on the same plane, and recognized only the council as their common superintendent, the work that they did was by no means of equal dignity or importance. It ranged all the way from managing the scavengers to managing the Great Dionysia.
All committees were reconstituted annually. No man could be a member of the same committee twice in his lifetime. At the end of his year each magistrate was required to render an indescribably minute accounting of his public acts, first to specially appointed auditing committees, and finally to the heliæa. It was an easy matter to get an office in Athens, but a very difficult task to get honorably rid of it. For the lot was used to select the requisite number of members for each committee from among the citizens thirty years old or older who had not disqualified themselves by earlier service. The theory that one citizen was as competent as another for public office was thus put into practice. Every office was refilled annually by a chance group of new and necessarily inexperienced men.
While defining constitutions Aristotle lays down the condition for a thorough-going democracy that all citizens should hold governmental positions in turn. On this theory, there should have been an approximate agreement between the number of places in Athens and the number of citizens reaching their thirtieth year annually. That, however, was not the case. Even if we assume that men were councilors only once and held only one magistracy in their lifetime, we need to include some of the seven hundred (?) imperial posts in our calculation, and regard them, too, as subject to the conditions of tenure assumed for domestic positions, in order to reach the required total of about thirteen hundred. This is, naturally, an unwarranted and unworkable series of assumptions. It is, however, reasonable to suppose that the majority of Athenian citizens, and practically all of those who made a habit of attending the meetings of the ecclesia held a deme, or municipal, position, let us say, in their youth; a post in the council or in the domestic or imperial administration in their maturity; and a place in the register of the six thousand jurors in their advancing years. Recall, now, that three hundred and sixty of the five hundred councilors had to preside at meetings of fifty and five hundred men, and, if chance willed, at one of from five to fifty thousand also; observe that magistrates had not only to know the duties of their office,—which included the reception and preparation of some kind of cases for submission to a panel of jurors, over which they had, moreover, to preside,—but had also to keep accounts which they must defend in a law court; reflect that jury service involved acting as judge and jury in both domestic and imperial litigation, and it will appear that the knowledge of reading and writing which Clisthenes presupposed in all citizens would not have carried a man far in the age of Pericles; he must then have had a working knowledge of parliamentary forms, he must have had the view of administration which comes of being on the inside of the wicket; he must have been so conversant with the law and legal procedure that he could assume heavy personal responsibility for the legality of all bills proposed by him and could argue his own cases when acting as plaintiff or defendant in a law suit. It was a proverb in Athens that "office will show the man." We may be sure that most men took some pains in advance that it did not show them wholly incompetent. It must have left them with a new insight into public affairs. It is fair to say that, as a consequence of all this, the normal town meeting of the Athenians was, from one point of view, an assembly of experts, while viewed differently it possessed simply a high level of amateur attainment, comparable, perhaps, with that Mr. H.G. Wells postulates in his socialistic Utopia.
The office assigned by Pericles to this assembly of high-class amateurs was to choose the best among divergent policies proposed to it by citizens of exceptional endowment. The ecclesia by no means closed the door in the face of such real experts as it possessed. Thus it did not leave it to the council to draw up the specifications for the construction of the naval arsenals or any similarly technical job, but it could and did delegate such tasks to men of special competence. Nor was it so doctrinaire as to entrust the command of its expeditions or the conduct of its diplomacy to chance persons; but it both elected its generals, reëlected them as often as it cared to, and gave them special rights of calling and canceling meetings of the ecclesia and of laying proposals directly before them. It was, accordingly, aware of the difficulty and danger which it faced in settling questions of foreign policy, where the elements involved, being the resources, aims, sentiments, and traditions of other states, far transcended the knowledge of the common citizen; and where error might mean irreparable disaster; where, in fact, error did mean irreparable disaster.
The surest way to avoid error was to pick out a single individual of high character, intelligence, and competence, and give him cordial and resolute support in the policy he advocated. The ecclesia was accordingly a great "contest," or agon, of statesmen. The Athenians believed in competition. A public contest, in which excellence might be displayed and determined, was arranged to encourage effort in every conceivable employment. To digress a little, there was a contest of potters, as we learn from a gravestone on which an unknown affirms by a mighty oath that he was adjudged the first of all the potters of Attica. There were probably contests of painters and sculptors as well. There were contests of horse-breeders—the chariot- and running-races; contests of athletes of all ages in all kinds of physical exercises, of torch-racers on foot and on horseback; there were contests between the successive prytanies of the council, between detachments of cavalry, and between regiments of foot; at each of many festivals there were contests in singing of five choruses of boys and five choruses of men, each fifty voices strong, so that a single festival called for the training of five hundred singers annually and the production of ten new musical compositions; there were contests of rhapsodists in reciting Homer, contests of rhetoricians; above all contests of tragedians and contests of comedians, each tragic contest demanding twelve new plays annually and the participation of one hundred and eighty choral singers and dancers, each comic contest involving six new plays yearly and one hundred and forty-four choral singers and dancers. The rivalry which produces Olympic records and superdreadnaughts nowadays, the Athenians turned to advantage in art and music as well: with the result that the taste and skill of the artisan as well as the sculptor and painter, of the consumer as well as the producer, became well-nigh faultless; that in the hundred years of the empire close to two thousand plays of picked quality were written and staged in Athens, while during the same time from five to six thousand new musical compositions were made and presented. It is estimated that upwards of two thousand Athenians had to memorize the words and practice the music and dance figures of a lyric or dramatic chorus every year. Hence, a normal Athenian audience must have been composed in large part of ex-performers, a fact which students of Sophocles and Aristophanes would do well to bear constantly in mind.
The reward of victory in an athletic or musical contest was the glory and the prize. Great, indeed, was the reward which the victor in the supreme contest, the struggle for political leadership in the ecclesia, obtained. The man to whom the Athenians gave their confidence became stronger than a king. "In form," says Thucydides, "their government was a democracy: in reality it was the rule of their ablest citizen." The man who was vanquished in a chariot-race might be the victor on the next occasion. Not so the victim of a decisive political defeat. His fate was ostracism. That is to say, he was exiled without dishonor or loss of property for ten years. The way was thereby cleared for the victor. By this strange device the Athenians saved themselves for over two generations from the procrastination and uncertainty of distracted counsels. It was ostracism which made possible the uncrowned kingship of Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles; and when, after the death of Pericles in 429 B.C., this institution failed them utterly, the Athenians were pulled this way and that by rival leaders; till finally, misled by Alcibiades and Cleophon, they were convicted by disaster of being unsound judges of foreign policy.
There is nothing that dies so hard as a well-nurtured delusion. In the romantic-idealizing view of the Greeks which was long current, the Athenians found leisure for art, literature, and philosophy by having all their work done for them by their slaves.[25] By this means, too, they were enabled to devote themselves freely to politics. If this were so, the inference of Calhoun was a sound one, that seen "in its true light" slavery was "the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." The "first lie" is that the Athenians of the great age, whose dominant characteristic was their vibrant mental and physical activity, were in any sense men of leisure. The few among them who had slaves and other property to the extent of great wealth had to make and manage their own investments. The majority of the farmers had to till the land with their own hands. Many citizens—at least one third of the whole, in all probability—had to earn their living by selling their labor. This they could do easily in the time of the empire. For during that period of rapid commercial and industrial expansion the demand for labor was so great that the price could be regulated only by the constant import of slaves and by a steady stream of immigration from less prosperous parts of Greece. Outside labor served the purpose in Athens which immigrant labor serves in the United States to-day. With its growth grew the need that the material prosperity which occasioned it should endure. The problem of food-supply became progressively acute and the control of the sea was soon seen to be an economic necessity. More than one half of the grain sold on the Athenian market came ultimately from abroad, as did an even larger proportion of the raw materials of Athenian industry. "The Athenians are the only people in the Hellenic and barbarian world," wrote an Athenian aristocrat[26] in about 420 B.C., "who are able to control an abundant supply of raw materials. For if a state is rich in timber for shipbuilding, where will it find a market for it if not with the masters of the sea? If another abounds in iron or bronze or linen yarn, where will it find a market except with the sea-lord? Yet this is the stock from which ships are made in Athens. One city yields timber to her, another iron, a third bronze, a fourth linen yarn, a fifth wax, and so on. Moreover, Athens prevents her rivals from transporting goods to other countries than Attica by the threat of driving them from the sea altogether."