THE TYRANNY OF THE DÊMOS

The ambiguity of the term dêmos noticed above (chapter 5) – meaning both the citizen body as a whole, and the poor majority of same – laid open dêmokratia, the kratos of the dêmos, to the charge of mob rule. The trope of the dêmos as tyrant recurs repeatedly in the non- or anti-democratic theorising of the fifth and fourth centuries, and indeed has recurred ever thereafter, from the fourth century bce to the American founding father Alexander Hamilton and beyond (Roberts 1994). Plato, towards the end of the Republic (563c), enjoys playing with the magnificent conceit that under a regime of ultra-egalitarian democracy even the humblest dumb animals such as donkeys get puffed up with ideas above their proper station in life. Nonetheless, one of the cleverest illustrations of this strong countercurrent of oligarchic sentiment, theory and activity is to be found in a less predictable source, Xenophon of Athens, showing himself in this respect at least a worthy fellow pupil of Socrates (for whom the majority was pretty much always by definition wrong).

The earliest surviving example of Athenian prose, a vehemently anti-democratic ‘Athenian constitution’, was handed down from antiquity and subsequently printed as being a genuine work of Xenophon. That attribution is demonstrably false, however (see appendix II). The real Xenophon's own, highly derivative oligarchic political theory is to be found elsewhere, partly in the arguments he borrows from others or places in the mouth of his mentor in the work entitled Memoirs of Socrates, but more especially in the Cyropaedia (further, below, s.v. ‘Xenophon’).