The Greeks in history

Weber had already stressed in “Agrarverhaeltnisse im Altertum” that this was the fundamental difference between the Occidental (Graeco-Roman) world and Oriental world (ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Israel)… The citizen-state as a self-organizing military body developed in the coastal civilization of the Graeco-Roman world, because there the aristocracies had access to the gains made from commerce and thus could reduce the kingdom to a merely military leadership... Later they had to accept the political participation of the bulk of the citizenry who, as hoplites, provided most of the military. Priests were always mere functionaries of the community: they could claim no independent authority in political questions.
In the civilizations at the banks of great rivers, the necessity of river regulation and irrigation strengthened the primordial kingdoms and nurtured the development of a centralized bureaucracy subject to a monarch with an indisputable monopoly in political, military, and economic power. The monarch could rely on the support of a privileged priesthood. On this basis there later emerged what Weber described as “authoritarian liturgical state”. In the end this authoritarian liturgical state, especially as it has been created in Ptolemaic Egypt, came to dominate the later Roman Empire.
In his view commune building depends on the ability of the members to unite in a ritual community that he calls Verbruederung (confraternity) a community based on artificially-created and free-willed mutual ties, not in consanguinity. This meant that the community depended on the equal rights (in principle at least) of all its members, solidarity against non-members, connubium and a common cult symbolically expressed in communal cult-meals.
The notion of Verbruederung explains the fundamental difference between Occidental and Oriental city-dwellers and their different potential for commune-building; it also allows Weber to accentuate an important distinction between European Antiquity and Middle Ages.
In pre-Christian Antiquity… confraternity materialized in the union of heads of sibs that originally constituted the city-state by means of synoikismos (the real housing-together in an urban center or the constitution of a singular political center for hitherto separate communitites). The patrician clan, however, tried to preserve their ritual exclusivity with respect to the plebeians, an exclusivity abolished only after prolonged struggles… According to Weber, the ancient city-states failed to reach the intensity of confraternity that was later achieved in the medieval commune… In the European Middle Ageds confraternity possessed a positive religious basis, since all the members already belonged to the same church, as symbolized in the community of the Eucharist. (Of course, this inevitably implied the outsider-status of the Jews)…
In “Die Stadt” he makes the famous distinction between the ancient homo politicus and the medieval homo oeconomicus:
Whereas in Antiquity the hoplite army and its training, and thus military interests, increasingly came to constitute the pivot of all urban organization, in the Middle Ages most burgher privileges began with the limitation of the burgher’s military duties to garrison service. The economic interests of the medieval townsman lay in peaceful gain through commerce and the trade, and this was most pronouncedly so for the lower strata of the urban citizenry…

Weber followed a long tradition of criticism that held Graeco-Roman Antiquity responsible for cultivating the omnipotence of the state and preventing economical progress. This tradition goes back to the Scottish and French Enlightenment. It then was taken up in the French postrevolutionary debate (in reaction to the cult of Antiquity fostered by the Jacobins). In 1819 Benjamin Constant summarized and sharpened it in his famous essay on the distinction between the freedom of the ancients and that of the moderns. Finally, the tradition was developed in greater historical detail by late-nineteenth-century authors such as N.D. Fustel de Coulanges and Jacob Burckhardt.

Wilfried Nippel

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Wilfried Nippel. Homo politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: the European Citizen According to Max Weber. In: Anthony Pagden ed. The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge UP, 2002.

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.