deconstruct it. First of all, it seems that a broad set of assumptions and value
judgments plays a role in many scholars’ implicit plotting of historical
developments as the tragic decline and fall of the ancient city from the
glorious days of classical Athens. Seldom is the underlying plot line or
meta-narrative as explicit as when Kathleen Freeman states that the his-
tory of Greece “reads like a tragedy in three acts”: the glorious emergence
of city states like Athens; the intellectual and political achievements of sci-
ence and philosophy in the fifth and early fourth centuries; and the unfor-
tunate “break-up of the city-state system” in the later fourth century which
brought with it the end of the distinctive thought and work of ancient Hel-
las (Freeman 1950, xv–xx).
Quite often, it seems to be an idealization of classical Athens—a reflec-
tion of scholars’ value judgments—that serves as the archetype against
which the inferiority of cities in Hellenistic and Roman times is estab-
lished. Rarely are the value judgments that accompany the idealization of
the classical polisas blatant as when Ernest Barker laments that “those
who have been touched by the tradition, and educated by the philosophy,
of the Greek city-state may be permitted to stand by its grave and remem-
ber its life; to wonder what, under happier auspices, it might have achieved”
(1927, 535). In a critique of Ste. Croix’s affirmation of the popularity of the
Athenian empire, Donald W. Bradeen perceptively notes: “most of us ancient
historians have a sympathy for Athens and her Empire; no matter how
impartial we try to be, our whole training as classicists, and possibly our
political bent as well, incline us that way” (1975, 405).
Classical Athens itself, however, may not have lived up to the scholarly
ideal. Arlene W. Saxonhouse’s recent study suggests that scholars “still
bring to the study of ancient democracy our conceptions of democracy as
it has emerged in the nineteenth and...twentieth centuries,” often allow-
ing modern values to shape a romantic view of Athenian democracy (1996,
7, 1–29). We must also be cautious about assuming that classical Athens was
typical, since it is the only polisof that era for which substantial evidence
survives; as P.J. Rhodes points out, a variety of different constitutions were
adopted by other cities in the classical era, some of which included vary-
ing combinations of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy (1994, 579; cf.
Pecirka 1976, 6–7).
Even if democratic Athens was, in some respects, typical of the earlier
forms of the polis,and even if the decline-scholars are justified in the degree
to which they emphasize the loss of autonomy and democracy in subsequent
years, such historical developments do not demonstrate the precipitous
decline in civic life and identity scholars usually presume. Changes in one
nora
(Nora)
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