Also posted to Revise and Dissent.

Athens is the city that gave the world democracy. While the idea has been inherited, the reality was rather different to a modern democracy. In ancient Athens all the citizens voted on the laws, whereas these days people vote for people who vote for the laws. Or even vote for the person who will unilaterally decide the laws for themselves. While that might make Athens more democratic, in some ways Athens was also less free. Certainly all the citizens voted but so be a citizen you had to be male, quite old and the son of Athenian parents. If your parents were slaves or metics (resident foreigners or Athenians deprived of citizen status) then you had no vote. A lot of these differences are the meat and drink of usual studies into ancient democracy. But it wasn’t just the human world which was viewed differently, so was the divine. This is the subject Bowden’s book Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy examines, the relationship between the will of the Gods and the will of the people in ancient Athens. Specifically he looks at the will of Apollo as it was revealed by the Delphic Oracle. The introduction makes the case for doing this well:

What is the relationship between religion and democracy? More precisely, to what extent should religious considerations affect the decisions taken by citizens in a democracy? In the modern world it is generally thought that religion and politics occupy, or should occupy, two different spheres. Religion may promote moral goodness, and moral goodness may be considered desirable in a community, but the idea of giving preference to the divine will – however it is established – over the will of the people – as revealed by a vote – would be seen as fundamentally undemocratic. This understanding pervades not only approaches to modern democracies, but also the study of democracy in the ancient world.

For the rest of the book Bowden shows how this cannot be the case for the ancient world. In world where the Gods are thought to umbrage and exact revenge in unpleasant ways it’s a brave ruler to defies them.

It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to think about the role of religion in modern politics at the moment. Usually matching ancient Greek religion with modern fundamentalism would make a classicist wince. The idea of fundamentalism is that there is a canonical will of the God(s) which can be known. Greek religion in contrast had no core texts, but Bowden makes a couple of very good points. One is that fundamentalism is about the practice of religion. It is possible to debate the finer points of religion with a fundamentalist, so long as you follow the practices. If you’re a woman for instance you’d have to cover your head, stay silent and not express any opinions. Which is very similar to the idealised position of women in ancient Greece. Bowden says that Greek religion was also about practice of religion and notes Margaret Attwood’s fundamentalist Christian state in A Handmaid’s Tale is similar to the ancient Greeks in their treatment of women. He’s not arguing that Greeks were fundamentalists, but that there other ways of thinking about how religion interacts with democracy. This is all from the first couple of pages of the introduction.
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