{"id":53560,"date":"2016-11-04T04:57:00","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T04:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=53560"},"modified":"2016-12-09T04:46:27","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T04:46:27","slug":"thucydides-roundtable-addendum-cleon-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=53560","title":{"rendered":"Thucydides Roundtable, Addendum: Cleon Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Mark Safranski<\/strong> \/ “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

After posting about “The Most Violent Man at Athens<\/a><\/strong>“, commenter Neville Morely<\/strong> who is a professor of the classics, brought it to my attention that he recently offered a qualified defense of the populist Athenian politician, Cleon<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0 I thought that this would serve as an excellent rebuttal to my post that would interest and inform\u00a0the readership. So, without further ado, Professor Morely:<\/p>\n

Cleon and the Lying\u00a0Media<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Another day, another classical Trump analogy \u2013 or rather, a reiteration of one that\u2019s already somewhat familiar, Trump as Cleon, put forward this time by G.W. Bowersock in the\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/a><\/em>. I have to say that, the more I see this comparison, the more I think it\u2019s deeply unfair to Cleon, and reproduces an old-fashioned view of Athenian democracy that is based largely on sources hostile to the whole thing. Of course we don\u2019t expect classical analogies to be based on detailed historical insight \u2013 I don\u2019t have much to add on this point to Donna Zuckerberg\u2019s \u2018Make Comparison Great Again\u2019<\/a> \u2013 but there are definitely bad and worse cases, evocations of the ancient world for present political and polemical purposes that are deeply dodgy rather than just moderately dubious.<\/strong><\/p>\n

At best, what this offers us is the pantomime villain whom we can boo and hiss with a sense of smugness that we have a superior idea of how bad he really is. But this one seems riskier than normal, if it slides easily into the belief that the emergence of such a figure is also a judgement against the system that has allowed him to rise to prominence. That\u2019s precisely how Thucydides and Aristophanes (the lying MainsSteam Media) present Cleon, as evidence of the negative tendencies of Athenian democracy that headed downhill from there; is there a sense that Trump, even as he denounces American institutions, is also fuelling a suspicion of those institutions among some of his fiercest critics? Yes, there may be a case for that \u2013 but it shouldn\u2019t be a case based on this arguable interpretation of the relationship between Cleon and Athens.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I may return to this theme in more detail \u2013 currently supposed to be working on a paper on a completely different topic for tomorrow evening \u2013 but for the moment, it suddenly occurred to me that I\u2019ve already developed these ideas nearly twenty years ago in a piece for\u00a0Omnibus<\/em> called \u2018Cleon the Misunderstood\u2019 (can\u2019t remember whether I put a question mark after that in the original). I\u2019d certainly update this today with more discussion of how Cleon gets read in relation to Thucydides\u2019 trustworthiness \u2013 George Grote\u2019s criticism of the portrayal, and the academic row that ensued \u2013 but I think this stands up well enough as a summary to be worth reproducing here:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cleon the Misunderstood<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the mid-fourth century B.C., an Athenian citizen called Mantitheus sued his half-brother for the return of his mother\u2019s dowry. At one point in the speech, he tells the jury that his mother had once been married to a man called Cleomedon,<\/strong><\/p>\n

Whose father Cleon, we are told, commanded troops among whom were your ancestors, and captured alive a large number of Spartans, and won greater renown than any other man in the state; so it was not fitting that the son of that famous man should wed my mother without a dowry. (Demosthenes, 40.25)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Juries in Athens were made up of at least a hundred and one dikastai<\/em>, chosen by lot from volunteers who had to be Athenian citizens over thirty years old. The speaker had to try to persuade the majority of these jurors to vote in his favour, whether because of the strength of his case or by appealing to their sentiments. Certainly he would not want to alienate too many people by expressing unpopular views; Mantitheus must therefore have assumed that his description of Cleon as a famous Athenian leader would be accepted by many among his audience. Yet such a positive assessment is likely to come as a surprise to most students of Athenian history, especially those familiar with Thucydides\u2019 account of the part played by Cleon in the course of the Peloponnesian<\/strong>War<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest here<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Mark Safranski \/ “zen“] After posting about “The Most Violent Man at Athens“, commenter Neville Morely who is a professor of the classics, brought it to my attention that he recently offered a qualified defense of the populist Athenian politician, Cleon.\u00a0 I thought that this would serve as an excellent rebuttal to my post that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[414,247,1449,1404,1435],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-history","category-reader-response","category-thucydides-addenda","category-thucydides-roundtable","category-trt-book-iii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53560"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53709,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53560\/revisions\/53709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}