The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508-490 B.C.

by Greg Anderson

In barely the space of one generation, Athens was transformed from a conventional city-state into something completely new--a region-state on a scale previously unthinkable. This book sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: How and when did the Athenian state attain the anomalous size that gave it such influence in Greek politics and culture in the classical period? Many scholars argue that Athens's incorporation of Attica was a gradual development, largely completed some two hundred years before the classical era. Anderson, however, suggests that it is not until the late sixth century that we see the first systematic attempts by the Athenian polis to integrate all of Attica.

Anderson first takes issue with the prevailing view of Cleisthenes' landmark political reforms of 508-7 b.c., arguing that they were animated by a more comprehensive vision of regional political community in Attica. The Athenians' strengthened the state by establishing institutional mechanisms that would allow inhabitants of the Attic periphery to participate as never before in the life of the center. The creation of a suitable physical setting for the new order was accompanied by religious, military, and symbolic innovations. Regional participation in Athenian affairs was stimulated by encouraging the Attic populace to imagine themselves, for the first time ever, as members of a single, like-minded, self-governing political community.

Greg Anderson is Assistant Professor of Classics and History, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Genres: History

328 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2003

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow! I am speechless. Finally, I see why I have to pay ever increasing taxes: to help build quality scholarship like this. I mean, unlike the lazy historians who would just collate what some equally ignorant historians have collated from very dubious sources, Anderson actually comes with real research. Here is the distillation of countless video interviews with the people who have witnessed those events. In the footnotes there will even be links to the sites where one can see the security camera footage proving this man is entitled to have a generous pension and nephews and nieces hired on taxpayer money. And this is vital work. I mean how would president Washington pull the troops out of Iraq, if not by reading this important piece of... scholarship?

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are an innumerable number of books on Athenian democracy and most of them are more descriptive than argumentative. Most of them accept at face value many assumptions which we now have the evidence and wherewithal to question. Here, those assumptions are brought out into the open and found to be lacking.

As the title implies, the work is essentially turning the question of Athenian democracy toward a focus on state formation. Using a combination of literary and textual evidence, influenced somewhat by modern theory, Anderson argues that the primary goal of the shadowy reformer Cleisthenes had more to do with trying to create a unified Attica than establishing a democracy. Pointing out many times that the expansion of the meaning of the word "Athenian" to cover everyone in Attica occurred basically overnight and at some point toward the end of the 6th Century, Anderson then challenges the notion that the region's synoecism occurred under the tyrant Pesistratos, who he recasts as just another, albeit highly successful, aristocratic leader of the kind who had ruled Athens in turn since before the time of Solon. While there is necessarily no decisive evidence for this, the circumstantial likelihood that the imposition of ten new tribes, several trying battles for freedom against tyranny and then the Spartans, the creation of many new buildings, and the launching of many new festivals meant that a major change had taken place which was quite clearly a massive reform movement from on high.

Doubtless many of the individual interpretations on which the overall argument is based must be wrong due to the law of averages. We don't really know the exact dates when many festivals began or a lot of the buildings in the agora were constructed. However, it seems highly likely that Anderson's overall argument that the birth of democracy was actually just a key part of a larger movement to unify Attica is correct.

[Midori · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is what claims to be an experiment and as such, it may produce to the readers-lab rats two different effects: euphoria or nerve-wracking tension. My case belongs to the second group. Seriously speaking, I was expecting more, considerably more. However, the content of Anderson's book is rather disappointing. The author promises to offer a view on what had happened during the crucial years of the Cleisthenic political reforms but instead of a reconstruction based on "historical facts" or what the ancient sources say and how he understands them, the pages of this book are full of elusive abstructions and dubious one-sided archaeological clues. No, I have problems to accept Anderson's ideas on the Athenian experiment when he does not explain me what this experiment is and under which circumstances it came into being. The so-expected analysis of Cleisthenic reforms is not there when it should have been even as an introduction to his main subject-whatever this may be- and the scholar has little patient with all kind of historical facts and a true aversion to historical gossip; he is more at ease repeating his abstractions and downdating all previous era's accomplishments. In sum, before 508/7 BCE nothing that matters had occured in Athens; everything came into being in 508/7 BCE and this was preconceived experiment that was camouflaged with the robes of old. Nice try- swimming up the river is a great feat- but somehow, it misses the point.