J. Citizenship in the Polis

Until this day those athletes which return home victorious from the games are bestowed all honours and are regarded with such reverence as it may only be given to successful military leaders elsewhere. They rose then above common people, and many privileges were given to them. For they had brought great honour upon the Polis wishing to recognize itself through citizens capable of great feats, and who showed courage where they risked defeat. Such citizenship meant gaining a name known to all.

When Robert Payne asks why is this so, he gives a convincing answer: it is through them that the Polis obtains a feeling for a "continuing existence of the Greek people" (Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p. 132). As Hesiod would point out, this was the harder, but better way to survive: the path of sweat up a steep slope, that is by entering competition and not war, and gain through it prosperity. Their achievements had a powerful impact upon the imagination of the Greeks.

Important is that only Greeks could attend those games defining thereby the Pan Hellenic unity as something greater than local and tribal loyalties. All those who participated, they had to provide proof of their citizenship's. Only then they were recognized as belonging to the commonwealth of Greece. Foreigners could only attend the games as observers, but not as participants. How strict this rule was observed, depends upon sources of information. It is said that the Hellenic identity could be acquired through participation in the Greek education system. That would make it into a matter of openness of culture and not so much of dependency upon a strict descendancy by blood, that is birth. Still, the citizenship through that belonging together in the games was realized as a sacred act. News of them having gained this glorified citizenship by victory at the games was passed on to the Gods, and to Hades, for it was an announcement of man's own divinity.

From there the poets began to leap into the abstract, there where in the heavens the 'holy light' plays with man's visions brought about at times by mere ecstasy. Homer's Gods are still far removed, but for Pindar they have become lightening-like real. Using the victories at the Games as an excuse, he makes the imaginative leap into the world of the Gods, and brings them closer to man as if involved in quite another race: the one against death.

This then is the true core of citizenship: to keep in reins the fear of death. The imagination could easily gallop away, break through and disappear into the darkness. Citizenship meant calmness despite this other reality. Only barely able to cope with that thought, the calmness always under threat of sudden bursts of anguish and revolts in vain against that destiny, life in the city meant mediation between these two facets. While knowing man has to die despite of life going on, he had to realize that it shall not be the same as the one looking on right now. This sudden divorce from all hustle and bustle which gives life at the market place its odd mixture of colours, proves to be too much of a burden upon man's mind - more in the city, than in nature. In the latter, death is often a single act, a fact of a lawless world as Hesiod would say, but in the city, there where the law of man exists, and notions of the divine, there is also this great division to be faced! Good citizenship meant, therefore, the ability to acquire this calmness and dignity despite of growing old.

People are best understood through their desires, and fears. Not only Pindar, but all Greeks were terrified by death, and they clung to citizenship as if the only means to off-set that heavily tilted scale, but not in favour of man despite all of his achievements, but of something greater, equally more mysterious since it remained hidden in darkness. Thus every effort was made to extend this citizenship into belonging to something like an eternal Paradise. Through citizenship is was thought to gain 'immortality', that life which all other human beings could not understand since they were mortals, that is the common or average kinds of people.

All this had a great influence upon how citizenship was regarded in practice. Many cultivated the past, glorified it as a tradition to be upheld, and could not, as a result, comprehend the challenges a changing Polis was facing. The most significant change was the one leading on towards democracy, the rule of the many. Plato was to realize later, that this involved also such massive structural changes as the increases in population demanded other political forms of governance. One way to ignore such needs was, of course, to keep citizenship restricted to the privileged few, but that then was definitely not the democracy of the many which had aspired all great men, poets and statesmen alike. If Pindar was one poet unable to keep strength of character despite all changes, one who managed this was Simonides of Cos. Through him different qualities to citizenship were added, and all was based on terms of friendship with the Athenian democracy. The one was valour, a virtue to be gained by reaching one's zenith without forgetting that one was but a mortal human being:

They say that virtue dwells

On a steep high unapproachable rock,

Attended by a ring of dancing nymphs,

Who never yet were seen by mortal eyes

Except by men who poured their heart's sweat out

To climb the heights of valour.

Simonides of Ceos (quoted by Robert Payne, p. 150)

The other aspect of valour was to gain eternal glory without being so much a fool as thinking to be stronger than the 'all-conquering Time'; rather care should be taken within one's life that "nothing low nor stain" shall bring the "ruin of decay" to one's citizenship.

Along similar poetic thoughts, but coming even closer to mortal man, Bacchylides develops the idea of citizenship derived out of the coming of a stranger to Athens. He models this stranger according to Theseus, the nearly fully accepted patron saint of Athens. Important is the transformation the stranger undergoes as he strides into the city, for he comes as

A boy in the flush of manhood,

Playing the game of war

With clang of bronze on bronze,

He seeks illustrious Athens.

Bacchylides

But once engulfed by this illustrious Athens, he will heed following council only a poet can give with a clear distinction of war and peace in mind:

To mortal man Peace bringeth good tidings,

Huge wealth and flowers of honey-throated song,

And to the gods she bringeth the yellow flames,

Burning thighs of sleek oxen,

Fat sheep on the iron altars

Leap to Olympus, while the naked boys

Play on their flutes, dance daylong in sacred chorus.

Then on the iron shield-thong the brown spider

Intricately weaves his dusky web:

Rust grows on spears and two-handed swords,

And the trumpet-blasts of bronze are no longer heard.

Eyelids at dawn

Sink into sleep,

Into the ripeness of honeyed slumber.

While the streets are thronged with revels of love,

And hymns in praise of boys ascend like flames.

Bacchylides

Indeed, it was not at all self-understood as to who could consider himself as citizen of the Polis. There are many examples in both history and literature, that is memory retained for following generations, on how the stranger is regarded. Homer reminds how Odysseus returned to Ithaca as a stranger, that is in disguise to hide his emotions until the moment to strike at the friars had come. Even Aristotle was regarded as a stranger by the Athenians since from Macedonia; he did not inherit the Academy after Plato had died, and only once Alexander the Great made his rule felt in Athens, could Aristotle teach at a school set up especially for him.

In the classical period, citizenship meant not only abiding to the laws of the city state, but also to participate in the deliberation process deciding over the fate of both its citizens, including Socrates and over the non-citizens: foreigners, slaves, barbarians or others such as the Persians. While the Polis was on the one hand eager to bestow honours upon the stranger, it wanted to retain at all times the privilege to call the stranger a non-citizen, an undesired 'alien' if need to be. This retention of power implied that the Polis was still a very closed society with many checks and balances, and even kept together by fear since in not knowing fully the background of the stranger, that is where he came from, it was always thought that he may come from the barbaric part of the world. The latter implied always other customs, languages, religions, and hence different Gods, that is a potential threat because of not being cultivated as much when compared to what had been achieved by the citizens of the Polis.

This early time of the Polis had elevated tribal and local loyalties to the level of a city starting to look from the inside what influences from the outside were good, or which ones hostile, that is of danger. By all quick aptitudes towards celebrating victors of the games, it meant basking in splendour. The early thinkers and poets did not ask as of yet hard questions difficult to answer, for they were satisfied if they could establish the linkage between men and the Gods. Later on, and especially after the pre-Socratic thinkers had left their mark, attitudes towards tradition changed. The Polis had to measure up to their discovery of an intelligible universe which man could grasp with his mind. Citizenship was to be based since then much more on learning, including what philosophy had to teach on how to acquire truth. At the same time, philosophers like Heracleitus left no illusions about man's claim to immortality, for "Gods are mortals, men are immortals, each living in the others' death and dying in the others' life". He made 'man into the measure of all things', but he denied him any kind of divinity. Like the citizen of the many, he was to become just a spark of life which extinguishes and could be forgotten.

After the reign of the Tyrants, it was Solon who spoke out what difference it makes once men swear their allegiance not to a clan, but to the Polis. This allegiance ushered in the era of citizenship under the rule of the law. The core of that idea was really friendship, and the Polis the home where it was possible to make friends. However, that idea was contested as long as different parties lay in dispute amongst themselves, and at times organized semi-uprisings against the tyrant despite his benevolence. Solon was replaced by Peisistratus who came from the hillmen and shepherds, and had a different influence upon people still wanting more than mere peace or safety. To them the city looked still more like a dangerous hunting ground than a place of luxury. Peisistratus gave them at least a taste of the later before his sons Hippias and Hipparchus took over power, but not for long since people judge things according to what they feel is just as opposed to unjust.

Then came Cleisthenes and with him a new spirit of citizenship, for finally the people of Athens took fate into their own hands and ousted the party of the tyrants. After his reforms of the entire face of the Polis became democratic. His political act included establishing demes:

"The demes were self-governing units with their mayors with their

mayors, town councillors, treasurers, priests and priestesses to attend

to the local gods, and they passed laws which were binding so long as they

did not conflict with the laws of the state. They formed the basic political

units, and to make them more effective Cleisthenes ordered that all those

who resided in the deme at the time of its institution were automatically

enfranchised. Even resident aliens and emancipated slaves were included."

Robert Payne, Ancient Greece, p. 189

Cleisthenes greatest achievement was to create the Assembly of citizens as the sovereign voice of the state, and all laws had to be passed through it. By way of constitutional reform, he aimed to ensure that equal rights for all before the law was the legal basis of all citizens. Abiding to the law meant giving equal opportunities to everyone to gain office. He introduced the system of ostracism by which the citizens voted once a year against any of themselves if proven to have deserved 'banishment', that is the loss of the right to participate in the life of the Polis.

So then you hark with a voice not strong

if you have to plead that you did not know the law -

go then into the wildness, and stay there as long

as you need to know what it means to live

with the rule of the law made by all men.

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J. Citizenship in the Polis