So please join me in welcoming the Gresham Professor of Rhetoric, Melissa Lang.

Thank you so much, Professor Baines, and thank you all for joining. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. So which way did democracy end in Athens and when? So many have thought that it was with a bang, and that this came in 322 before the Common Era, when the Macedonians defeated the Athenians to the point of establishing domination over them, enforced by the installation of a Macedonian garrison on the outskirts of the city. Some have emphasized a preceding bang in 338, when the Macedonians had already inflicted a decisive military blow at the Battle of Kirenea. Or one could also make a case for, say, 58 BCE, when Clodius' law, as one scholar has noted, turned Athens from a partner into a vassal of Rome, though their relations continued to mutate after that. And there were many other moments in between and later when the Athenians would briefly succeed in shaking off one or another foreign yoke, only to be defeated and subjugated once again. So if we equate Athenian democracy with free self-rule, then if we choose any of the dates I've mentioned so far, we are equating democracy with external self-rule, independence from foreign domination, not being under the thumb of any foreign power. And that is often a matter of avoiding a bang, though domination can also creep in gradually. But free self-rule can also have another sense, one that's connected instead to a polity's domestic constitution. So here we can ask self-rule at home, of whom and by whom? Who counts as a citizen? Who is eligible to hold office? And how inclusive must those terms be for a constitution to truly count as democracy? We might put it another way with the scholar Andrew Bayliss, we can take the guiding principle of Athenian democratic ideology to be that all the citizens should be allowed to participate in the governing of Athens at all or most levels. So then we might ask how restrictive might such participation become before the constitution tips into oligarchy? Might that too happen as a sudden bang, or might democracy sometimes whimper itself to death by a thousand cuts? So if we emphasize these latter questions, we can consider possible dates for the death of Athenian democracy in a different light. So when we focus on full domestic democracy, a fully inclusive democratic franchise, the date 322 will remain important because there was now foreign domination by Macedon, but also it was significant that that Macedonian overlord insisted that the democratic constitution be replaced by an oligarchic franchise. And we'll say more about this as we continue. So in this light, then 322 followed on some dates in the late fifth century that I discussed in my lecture at Gresham College last week, when there were two short-lived oligarchic revolutions about a century before this time. We might notice, however, that just a few years later, democracy was briefly restored in Athens. And this would keep happening over the next century and beyond. Democracy would be restored again from oligarchic regimes in 307, in 288, and 229. So we can add many more dates when we might think democracy has ended, most of them not definitive. So Athenian self-rule and self-rule in general is buffeted by two different kinds of waves. On the one hand, oscillations of foreign influence that might stop a polity or an assembly from being able to take independent decisions, and then on the other hand, by oscillations between a wider and a narrower set of terms for citizenship. And sometimes these waves are mutually reinforcing, sometimes they're cross-cutting. So when we look at the later history of Athens, we can see these two waves washing through a set of institutions that in some ways remained remarkably stable for centuries. So the Athenian assembly, the council, the jury courts, many of the public offices are all attested on stone decrees as continuing to function. But the way they worked would be very different depending on where on this graph a given moment was situated. So just to make this more intuitive, let's consider how some examples from modern times of each of these dimensions. So in terms of being able to make wholly independent decisions, think about the Channel Islands under Nazi hegemony during the Second World War. There was still relatively wide participation by people who had already been citizens, but their ability to make independent decisions was strongly curtailed. And then on the other axis, we can think about a polity that is externally independent, but is governed by a narrow elite. So think about the British Parliament before the 1832 Reform Act, where the Parliament is externally independent, but only very few people are enfranchised to elect. So which of these axes grips your imagination more? Depending on your answer, you might be attracted to a different definition of democracy as either independence from foreign rule or inclusion for maximizing participation. So, as you may have begun to suspect, in this lecture, I'm not going to give you a singular date when Athenian democracy unequivocally ended. Instead, I'm going to explore this question by considering both of these understandings of democratic self-rule. And what I want to illustrate are the stakes in thinking this issue through. And we're going to do that with reference to a period when many people continued to pay at least lip service to democratic symbols and values, and when many institutions that had been central to democratic life persisted. So when we look at post-classical Athenian history, and we're going to be covering moments from all the way before the Battle of Kironea all the way down to Roman hegemony, we can see what it might mean to live in a once proudly independent democratic polity as it contends with a series of foreign enemies, undergoes internal struggles between the elite and the masses, and grapples with both continuity and change in understanding its own history and values. And what we'll learn is that it's not so easy to know whether democracy was or is persisting. So these themes stretch across this very long history of ancient Athens. And that's a history that's complicated and to many relatively unfamiliar. So I'm not going to try to give you a continuous narrative. But what I will do is to highlight three episodes where we see independence and inclusion interacting. And then I'll skip across some later centuries to talk a bit about Rome and Roman-era Athens in the course of my conclusion. So here are the three episodes. So first of all, we'll look at before 322 when Demosthenes was leading Athens and trying to defend democracy both externally and internally. In his eyes, the two were linked. And so we'll ask how can democracy defend itself against foreign pressure. Then we'll look at one particular decade in Macedonian domination of Athens, when paradoxically we see an oligarchic franchise, but where there are paradoxes about the sense in which this might in some ways still have democratic dimensions. And the third episode will be a different Demetrius. We'll meet both of them. This time, paradoxically, widening the democratic franchise and giving nominal external freedom, but all of this being done by a Macedonian king, so still not having full external independence. And so here we can ask what happens when democracy is reinstalled by foreign force. And then I'll briefly conclude by sketching how Macedonian domination of Athens gave way to that of Rome, and by assessing the significance of a single Athenian institution that survived all of these changes. So, episode one, how can democracy, how can Athenian democracy, how did it try to defend itself against foreign pressure? So in the 350s before the Common Era, the ambitious king Philip of Macedon built a new kind of military force that could threaten foes across Greece and beyond. And Athenian political leaders were struggling to figure out how to respond to Macedonian pressure, and indeed, so were other Greek cities such as Rhodes. All of these cities had to try to contend with Macedonian force. And so the Athenians had to debate: should they stand up for democracies elsewhere? For example, supporting the Rhodian Democrats? Should they decide their policy based on justice or simply their own advantage? Should they invest more in guns than in butter, as it were? In Athens, that took of the force of more in warships than in dramatic plays. And how should they assess Philip's intentions and plans? So the Athenian who was most intensely Macedonian against Macedon, anti-Macedonian, was Demosthenes, and I'll come to this quotation in a moment. Overall, Demosthenes was arguing that the Athenians could not preserve their self-rule in the sense of their inclusive democratic participation if they did not preserve self-rule in the sense of external independence. So he was urging his fellow Athenians to stand up and resist Philip. But at the same time, he feared that the very dynamics of democratic deliberation were lulling the Athenians into potentially fatal complacency. And in one speech here, we see him offering that analysis. So I'll introduce this quotation. He begins by asking ever since these speakers in the assembly have appeared, who are always asking you, what would you like? What may I propose for you? What can I do to please you? That is you, the Athenian people. And here we come to it. The interests of the city have been wantonly given away for the sake of the pleasure and gratification of the moment. And the result is that the Athenians are not willing to stand up and fight. So Demosthenes went on to pose a stark challenge to his fellow citizens. When will you do what is needed, if not now? So, in other words, the Athenian orator was warning his contemporaries of what the political theorist David Runciman has called the democratic confidence trap. And Runciman describes this as the dangerous belief that democracies can muddle through anything which may lead to a crisis that is just too big to escape. So the background of this slide is the great fire of London. And what this shows is that the citizens of a democracy are often reluctant to grasp the nettle of action demanded in any given moment because they have the confidence, which may be vain hope, that they will ultimately do what is needed just in time. Indeed, the great fire stopped just short of this building, which is why it has the splendid architecture that it does. Now, Demosthenes himself had actually sometimes fostered such hope. So at one point he assured his fellow citizens it cannot be, Athenians, that a wrongdoer and an oathbreaker and a liar acquires a power that is stable, in time they will collapse on themselves. And I couldn't resist quoting that because perhaps it will give us all some hope in our own time. But such reassurance risked fostering dangerous delay. The historian James Rom has highlighted that in another speech, the third Philippic, Demosthenes berated all the Greeks for seeing Philip's approaching tyranny as they would gaze at a hailstorm, each people praying that it may not come their way, but no one trying to prevent it. So ultimately, Athens and its Greek allies were devastated by Philip's forces in the Battle of Kyrenea in 338. Now Demosthenes himself fought in that battle and survived. We're told the story that after the battle, Philip was wandering around to see the bodies of the dead, and he started chanting mockingly the beginning of every speech that Demosthenes made in the assembly. So this is Philip chanting, Demosthenes, son of Demosthenes of Paenia, thus moves, sort of to mock, look at where Demosthenes' speeches have gotten Athens. That defeat showed that Athenian external independence was now overshadowed by the flex of Macedonian power. But it didn't yet undermine the inclusiveness of democracy at home. In fact, in the aftermath of Kyrenea, Athens doubled down on its commitment to protect democracy, passing a new law to do so, and erecting a bronze figure, which is also depicted on this stone stella, which shows the Demos, the people of Athens, being crowned by Democratia, democracy portrayed as a goddess. So as one historian has remarked, democracy was a cult in Athens at the time, and the Athenians were still trying desperately to protect it. Now, Philip was assassinated and succeeded by his son Alexander the Great, who then died suddenly in 323. And that paved the way for actual Macedonian intervention in Athens, which was brought about over the next century or so by a succession of warlords who divided up Alexander's empire. The bars show you roughly the different divisions that they established as they were battling out their claims for hegemony. So we're now moving towards our second episode, which is Demetrius of Philarum as caretaker of Athens under Macedon. But before we get there, we need to back up just a little bit. So the first Macedonian intervention in Athenian self-rule was actually made a little bit before Demetrius of Philarum took power. It was made by Antipater, there in the middle of the slide. And in fact, he began with the demand that Demosthenes and other orators who had supported Greek resistance should be condemned to death. And the Athenian Demos, to its shame, complied. They condemned Demosthenes to death. So this first intervention then is followed by a very brief restoration of the democracy. But what I want to focus on is what happened in 317 when a new kind of political leader was installed in Athens. So this is what happens in 317, and now we have the next Macedonian warlord, Cassander, who becomes king in Macedon. So when the Athenians could not get rid of the garrison of Macedonians, it was unanimously decided to send an embassy to Cassander, and they concluded peace on the following terms. The Athenians were to retain their city and much else. They were to appoint as caretaker one Athenian with the approval of Cassander. This is Demetrius of Philarum, who assumed the supervision of the city and ruled in a peaceful and caring way. So it's clear that Athens is now directly under a Macedonian thumb. One historian has described this Demetrius as playing the puppet to Macedonian domination. So Athens now lacked external independence. And some ancient commentators took this to make the new domestic ruler automatically into a tyrant. So we have one ancient source who says Demetrius was installed as tyrant because he's under the Macedonian tyrant, as it were. But it's also clear that at the conqueror's behest, Demetrius established what we can call an oligarchy. In other words, he raised the wealth threshold for being a citizen of Athens to a very high level that effectively disenfranchised many of the poor who had previously been citizens. And this had already been done in 322, and now he's doing it again. So you might think how is this in any way demonstrated? Demetrius is described as a tyrant. He's instituting an oligarchy. But another later chronicler tells us that in this period, Demetrius restored democracy to the Athenians. So we have a complex situation. What was Athens in this period? Was it a democracy? Was it an oligarchy? Was it a tyranny? And by looking at that question, I hope we can shed more light on the various things that democracy might mean. So let's say a little bit more about Demetrius himself. He was a philosopher who was trained by Aristotle's successor. He was later described as well educated and widely experienced beyond anyone, and he composed numerous political studies, books on legislation in Athens, on leadership of the people, on the art of politics. So he clearly had a vision for the 10 years in which he ruled. So as we saw, he was appointed as a caretaker. He also took the opportunity to act as a lawgiver, and we're told that he made laws in Athens. That's inscribed on a later marble column. So this introduces the idea that Demetrius was comparing himself, as he actually did explicitly, to the archaic Athenian lawgiver Solon. And some of you might recall from my previous lectures or elsewhere that Solon, in the 6th century before the Common Era, had been appointed to act as a reconciler between the rich and the poor. So he had established laws that still persisted in Athens. And they, on the one hand, opened the door to democracy, but on the other hand balanced democracy with oligarchy. So Solon was remembered as a kind of moderate proto-democrat, perhaps, but one who also allowed for certain particular privileges and political roles for the elite. So if we think of Demetrius of Philarum in this light, then we have new ways to think about this question. Is he a Salonian? Is he a Democrat? So some of the laws that he passed do seem to embody this reconciliatory Salonian spirit. For example, like Solon, he passed what are known as sumptuary laws that restrict lavish spending on funerals or grave markers, for example. And he also revived the Ephebea, the training program for young men. So you can see that both of these foster civic reconciliation. They reduce the lavishness of the expenditure of the rich, so they make people more accustomed to accept coexistence between rich and poor, and the ephabea fosters civic habituation and unity. But then some of Demetrius's other laws seem even more democratic than those of Solon. So consider the new public office that he established, called the Agonothetes, to manage the production of plays and civic festivals with public funding. So this replaced private donors, and from a modern perspective, that looks anti-oligarchic, curbing wealthy donors and expanding the role of public money. And we can continue to see how Demetrius might have seemed democratic by thinking about how he ruled in the city. So he never abolished the role of public discussion, he never abolished the assembly, he never ruled by force alone. On the contrary, we're told that he led the city for 10 years through public speeches, and also that he himself said that speech has as much force in political affairs as iron has in war. So this looks democratic in the sense that he's relying on persuasion, on rhetoric, on argument in order to affect political leadership. And indeed, on this basis, one scholar has gone so far as to compare Demetrius, the puppet of Macedon, as we've set seen, who restricted citizenship to an oligarchic threshold, but nevertheless to compare him to the great Athenian democratic hero, Pericles. So you might think, how can Demetrius be like Pericles? Well, this scholar, Laura O'Sullivan, calls the evidence indicative not of a man who legislated away the constitutional powers of the assembly, but of one whose personal influence gave him de facto guidance of the demos, of the people. And as we can see, if we compare what was said of Pericles with what's said of Demetrius, so at the bottom you can see Athens under Pericles was described by Thucydides as in name a democracy, in reality, a rule by the foremost individual. Plutarch later describes Demetrius at the top as, in theory, an oligarchy, his regime, but in practice a monarchy. So here are the paradoxes. We can compare Demetrius to Pericles, arguing that both of them are really democratic statesmen, but only when we interpret democracy as having room, perhaps even need, for a kind of monarchic leadership within it. So once again, the lesson of this story is that democracy may not always mean what we first think that it does. So I've been arguing that Demetrius of Philarum's relationship to democracy might have been more subtle than first appears. Nevertheless, the Athenians did rejoice when they were finally rid of him, and I'll mention the men who ousted him in a moment. For a moment, just think about the exing out of Demetrius. He was sent into exile and were told that when his accusers could not get hold of his person, they disgorged their venom on the bronze of his statues. So they tore down all the statues of himself that he'd had erected, and some of them, it said, were even broken up to make chamber pots that people could piss in. So who brought about this change? Well, these two Macedonians that you see in the middle and on the right. So at this point, Antigonus is king of Macedon. His son, another Demetrius, sails into the harbor, and his nickname, which you saw in Greek a moment ago, is the Besieger. So I'll call him the Besieger so that we can distinguish him from the Athenian Demetrius, whom we were just describing. So this new Demetrius, the besieger, sails into the harbor proclaiming that he had been sent by his father to set Athens free and to restore to the people their laws and constitution. So here's a new paradox. This new Macedonian warlord, who would himself soon become king, restores the full democratic franchise in Athens. All those people who'd been ousted in the oligarchic constitution are now made full citizens again. And the result is that these new Macedonians in town were celebrated by the Athenians in dramatic ways. So we have fragments of ancient Athenian history that tell us that the Athenians sang songs of victory in honor of these two men. And that Greek term for Demetrius is his nickname in Greek that means city besieger. And they even voted that the whole month, which they now named after him, should be designated as one long festival. In fact, they even erected gold-plated statues in their honor next to the most celebrated statues of the Athenian democracy, which honored its archaic tyrannicides. So we see this new Demetrius, the besieger, restoring the democratic franchise, claiming to restore Athens' external freedom, though still under his own thumb, acting as king, and finally now being honored with his father with the creation of two new tribes of Athenian citizens. And I spoke in my lecture in October about how important the tribes were to the establishment of Athenian democracy. Now they've been redrawn to incorporate these Macedonian kings. So here's the paradox: citizenship was widened at the behest of a foreign king who was then written into the very fabric and organization of the democracy. So ultimately, this paradox started to lose its charm. The Athenians became horrified by Demetrius's louche lifestyle and by what Plutarch called the many lawless and shocking things done by Demetrius in the city at this time. So after some further ups and downs, the Athenians rebelled in 287 and they reached an agreement allowing the besieger to maintain a military presence around Athens, but achieving a more meaningful autonomy in managing their own affairs. So the city removed his partisans and now elected their own magistrates. The implication is that they could do so without worrying about who it was that he would have wanted them to choose. Now, still Macedonian domination did not disappear. So some 25 years later, history repeated itself once again. A new Antigonus, who's the son of the Demetrius that we just met, comes again into power in Athens. Honors and prayers are again dedicated to this Macedonian king. And this time we start to see the whimper, the hollowing out of the continuing democratic institutions. So one chronicler would record that in this period everything became subject to the will of one man. Now that doesn't mean that all the public offices were eliminated, but rather, as one scholar has put it, what it seems to mean is that this one man could now veto the decisions that were made by the subordinate officials. And so over these next years, then, the conventional institutions of democracy continued to exist, but with limitations on their powers, incompatible with democratic ideology, as the scholar Christian Habicht has put it. And he says also the assembly had little or no latitude to make political decisions. The archons of this period, some of the most important officials, were no longer chosen by lot, and other normal democratic practices were interrupted or suspended. So at this point, democracy is whimpering. It still nominally exists, the institutions still function, people are put in office, but they have relatively little true self-rule. But even then, after decades of whimpering, democracy would sometimes still speak up. The Athenians again managed to attain full external independence in the year 229 before the Common Era. And at that point, they strike the Macedonian king and his family from their prayers, their decrees, their sacrifices, their coins. And although the names of those two tribes, named in honor of the earlier Macedonian kings, remained. So despite all the bangs, despite all the whimpers, the Athenians were still attached to the ideals and images of their democracy. And they renewed in this period an emphasis on the cult of Damos. So those are our three episodes of democracy fighting off Macedon, succumbing to Macedon with an oligarchic turn, and then succumbing to Macedon again, paradoxically, with the restoration of a domestic democratic franchise. So as I move towards my conclusion, I want to very briefly comment on what happened to Athens then as it came under the Roman thumb. So from the year 200 before the Common Era, a renewed Macedonian threat began to drive many Greek cities, including Athens, into the arms of Rome. So Athens started to fight on the Roman side in a number of wars, for example. And even while Greek cities for long periods could maintain formal independence, the Roman Republic, and then later the Empire, found various ways, formal and informal, to curb that independence. Now again, Athens would sometimes seek to achieve full freedom, including through occasional revolts. So the figure on the left is the Pontic king, who was one of Rome's most threatening enemies for a period, and the Athenians threw in their lot with him, trying to throw off the Roman yoke. That failed. Athens succumbed briefly to domestic tyranny and then was brutally reconquered by the general Sulla on behalf of Rome, returning the city to Roman control. In later decades, in honor of Caesar Augustus, the Athenians would find themselves installing a temple of Roma and Augustus on the Parthenon itself. Now there's much too much history here to recount. We could talk about the visits of Cicero, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and others to Athens. Many of these men sought to be initiated into the city's fabled mysteries and to glorify themselves with association with the philosophical and cultural traditions of Athens. And indeed, in this period, even under the Roman thumb, Athenian iconography of democracy, some of the civic institutions like the Ephabea, remember the training of young men, and one of its most ancient councils, the councils of the Areopagus, all of these institutions continued to function. So for centuries, literally centuries, these institutions are continuing through all the ups and downs that I've described. So what we've seen is that instead of a single on-off switch, democracy alive, democracy dead, the issue may be rather how much democracy and of what kind. So I want to close by considering just one of those Athenian institutions, the Areopagus Council, to illustrate these paradoxes of democratic survival and change. So in the early archaic history of Athens, the Areopagus was an aristocratic council and court, holding many of the reins of power in its hands. Solon had somewhat reduced its role, and as Athens democratized, the Areopagus became a body of ex-office holders, so you no longer had to be aristocratic by birth to become a member, and its judicial functions were reduced to homicide trials. Now, by the time of Roman rule, the Areopagus was given new powers in order to limit and constrain democracy. So for example, the Roman general Umsullah whom I mentioned when he reconquered Athens, likely restored, as one scholar has said, the supervisory role of the Areopagus over the Archons, those office holders, and expected Archons to be pro-Roman. So now the Areopagus is acting as the sort of caretakers of the democracy, making sure that they're not turning against their Roman overlords. And indeed, the Areopagus became so important again in Athens that Cicero would observe that when one says the Athenian state is ruled by the council, the words the council of the Areopagus are omitted because it's obvious that it was this archaic council that was once again in control. But before we too quickly conclude that this elevated Areopagus meant to diminish democracy, we need to think again. For the Areopagus had also been elevated in late classical Athens. Indeed, Demosthenes, the great democratic statesman, had himself successfully proposed a decree in the late 340s to allow the Areopagus to act on its sole authority without consulting the assembly against those it suspected of wrongdoing. So the Areopagus is not just an elite institution that the Romans have revived, it's one that even in the time of the most extensive democracy that was still surviving from the classical period, that was already sometimes playing this elevated role. And so this returns us to those questions about what democracy really requires, with which we began. When has the line between democracy and oligarchy been definitively crossed? And how far can self-rule remain meaningful when independence of foreign influence is undermined? So the history of Athens asks us to ask those questions for ourselves. It presents them as enduring paradoxes alongside the paradoxes that are embodied in the Arch of Hadrian. This was commissioned by the Athenians in 132 of the Common Era. It's inscribed on the west side. This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus, the legendary founding Athenian king. But on the east, this is the city of Hadrian and not of Theseus. Thank you very much for your attention.