Greek politicians and public figures

When I began research, in 1957, the two most original and stimulating scholars working on Ancient Greece were Moses Finley and Jean-Pierre Vernant. It was their example that led me into anthropology; both, but especially Finley, led me to see anthropology as concerned with the criticism of culturally shaped categories and presuppositions…

The posthumous honours granted to Lycurgus in 307/6, when the city was freed from Demetrios' rule, form a fitting end to this somewhat ambivalent career. His descendants were granted perpetual dining rights in the Prytaneion.
In the archaic period the grant of lifelong dining rights in the Prytaneion - mainly, probably, to victors in major events at the Panhellenic games - meant a permanent seat at the centre of power in the city. After the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny the honour was awarded - partly, perhaps, in sympathy with the growth of a more critical attitude towards the honours heaped on successful athletes, partly as a snub to the Alkmaionidai - to the senior representatives of the families of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who had assassinated Peisistratos' son Hipparchos. The next Athenian to be awarded lifelong sitesis was Cleon, in the enthusiasm which followed his capture of the Spartan force on Sphacteria in 425. A similar grant was made to Iphicrates after the peace with Sparta in 371. In the period after Chaeronea, two divergent conceptions of the role of grants of perpetual sitesis seem to have coexisted in implicit contradiction. Grants to Demades in c. 335… and the comic poet Philippides of Kephale in 283/2 seem to extend to citizens who have played an important role as intermediaries between Athens and Macedonian rulers the honours which were being granted to non-Athenians for performing the same functions. Yet the posthumous hereditary honours granted to Lycurgus and (in 280/79) to Demosthenes indicate a different view: those who dine in the Prytaneion are seen as representing glorious moments in the city's past, players in a perpetual historical pageant. Less than twenty years after his death, Lycurgus had become a museum piece, a figure almost as remote as Harmodios and Aristogeiton - two other Athenian aristocrats whose lives ended in irony…
In 1985 I saw an analogy between Lycurgus and Margaret Thatcher in that both combined a patriotic and ostensibly democratic rhetoric with undemocratic practice (in the British case, dismantling the welfare state), and both seemed to be clinging in their patriotism to an outdated conception of their states as Great Powers… Demosthenes political speeches can be read in a Thucydidean light; he presents himself as having to argue a relatively unpopular political programme before voters who are either reluctant to support military action or still convinced that the major danger to Athens was Persia rather than Macedon. The hectoring tone, however, seems closer to that of Thucydides' Cleon than his Pericles; perhaps hearers did not find a significant difference between Demosthenes' harangues and the moralizing rhetoric of Lycurgus. Did Lycurgus indeed see himself as following in Demosthenes' footsteps?... Asking questions about what we want from our own politicians and how we would like to be constructed as citizens may be a way of formulating new questions about Athens.

S. C. Humphreys

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Sally C. Humphreys. The Strangeness of Gods. Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion. Oxford UP, 2004.