Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens

Democracy, Political Theory, and Political History

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Search in Text Entries Starts With Entries Per Page: 20 40 Kurke eds. Morgan ed. POLIS 19, Rabb and E.

Suleiman eds. London and New York: Routledge , McCann and B. Strauss eds. Sharpe , Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Leiden: E. Brill , Osborne ed. Flensted-Jensen, T.

Nielsen, and L. Rubinstein eds. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press , Rowe and M. Schofield eds.

Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens

Putnam, , Raaflaub and I. Morris eds.

Questions and Challenges. Darnton and O. Duhamel eds. Euben, J. Wallach, J. Ober eds. Both literates and illiterates 6 could have used letters in this way on vases, out of mere delight in their shapes. Trade and business. The opinions of scholars are divided 1 , and it will be necessary to look at the evidence in some detail. It is certainly true that, at least in the fourth century, Greeks engaged in trade at Athens put some of their contracts into writing.

They are most commonly used to refer to the contract recording a maritime loan 3 , but they can also refer to the document involved when the loan is for other purposes 4. We must now ask how far down the scale this habit extended: was anything put in writing when relatively small sums were involved? All the examples which 1 have quoted concern large sums of money — a man's entire estate in one case 14 , minas in another 15 ; the smallest sum that.

I have been able to find is drachmae 16 , and even that is equivalent to little less than a workman's wages for a whole year At first sight, it might be thought that we have an untypical sample. But the motive which an orator emphasizes to strengthen his case may not be the whole truth, and to my mind the question cannot be settled one way or the other.

But we do not know at what level a transaction ceased to be trifling. A consideration which is very relevant in this context is the date at which contracts were first used. For if the idea is relatively late, then one can assume that since Greek traders had managed without contracts for so long, their use would at first have been confined to a small number of transactions — -the more important and the more complex.

It is true that practically every example I have cited 20 comes from the fourth century: did Greek traders in the fifth century use no written contracts? Here again lack of evidence prevents a clear reply. Our examples are from the fourth century because the extant speeches are mostly from the fourth century.

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My refusal to commit myself on this question will come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Hasebroek's arguments. Hase- broek believed that most merchants were illiterate 23 , and he sought to prove this by demonstrating the rarity of written contracts. His conclusions, however, are mistaken. In the first place, he alleges that "only in bottomry loans do we find evidence of the use of written contracts" As a general statement this is untrue; we have already seen that written contracts were used in a wide variety of activities.

Whether or not it is true of merchants depends largely on the interpretation of a law cited in the Demosthenic speech against Zenothemis Hasebroek's other arguments hang closely together. And in many cases, where we would expect a speaker to cite a document, he fails to do so. Therefore, merchants were generally illiterate I would question nothing in this argument except its conclusion.

We do not need the hypothesis of illiteracy to account for a situation which can easily be explained otherwise. There are two reasons for the facts stressed by Hasebroek, one palaeographical, one legal; and both were pointed out by Pasquali The Greeks did not join their letters together; they lacked a developed cursive script of the type with which we are familiar, and consequently there was nothing corresponding to the modern signature. So it was a very simple thing to forge a man's name on a document; and therefore witnesses were a more reliable means of proof than a document The other consideration is simply this, that the law is conservative, and lags behind current practice.

In Athenian law, 'proof had come to mean the production of witnesses, the swearing of oaths and the use of torture. Aristotle's discussion of the value of written documents in the Rhetoric 30 is illuminating; he shows how a speaker can emphasize their value if they are in his favour, or pour cold water on them if they tell against him.

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It was not because they could not write, then, that Greek traders chose to use witnesses. This can be shown conclusively, for there are some cases in which they used both a written contract and witnesses Hasebroek also makes much of the fact that the Greeks did not use receipts Here we ought to distinguish between two types of situation.

When a sum of money was handed over, and there had been no previous written transaction, the payment was made before witnesses; there was no receipt In neither of these cases does the lack of a receipt tell us anything about literacy.

I have already given the reasons why Greeks preferred witnesses to documents. In the second type of transaction, there is a written document; we use two pieces of paper where the Greeks used one, but that does not mean that we are more literate than they. Admittedly, the Greek procedure could lead to embarrassment.

A speaker in the law-courts, for example, who wanted to show that a payment did not take place, could not say "Where is your receipt? It is thus, as Hasebroek says, a primitive system; but not an illiterate one. So much, then, for contracts and receipts. What about accounts? Did the average Athenian who handled money in the course of his daily life keep any record of how much he spent and how much he gained?

We know of one such Athenian who did- — a private citizen, not a trader- — and even though he is fictitious, he cannot be lightly dismissed. At the beginning of Aristophanes' Clouds, we find Strepsiades in bed, anxiously reckoning up his debts.

Let's see, how much do I owe? What for? What next? Admittedly, Strepsiades, with his extravagant wife and his spendthrift son, had every reason to keep accounts; but since he is made to go through his books at the beginning of a comedy, we can be pretty sure that this process would have been familiar to Aristophanes' audience 37 ; and if Strepsiades — -who, far from being a business man, is an uneducated old fellow living in the country — keeps accounts, then a fortiori we would expect a business man to do so.

Men naturally kept accounts of money spent on behalf of others.

Literacy in the Athenian Democracy

Thus one Diogiton kept — or invented — a record of the amounts he paid out, and where the money went so much on shoes, so much on hair-cuts, etc. Similarly, we know of one man who kept very detailed accounts. This must have been quite exceptional, or he would not have drawn attention to it.

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It was expenditure for the state, and very large sums were involved. There is, as far as I am aware, little other evidence to go on; we can only ask ourselves whether it was likely that business-men should keep accounts. There was nothing resembling income-tax, so that a man had no need to keep records for that purpose; and there was hardly any credit trading Yet common prudence.

Strepsiades did it, and I see no good reason to deny that the custom was widespread. Probably the accounts would not have been very full or regular; but at least men would have kept some note of debts owed or owing Closely connected with accounts are inventories and lists of stock; here again, memoranda may have been kept, though we have no certain evidence A broken piece of pottery, dated to the late fourth century, was found during the recent excavations of the Agora We can only guess why anyone should want to make a list like this; and my own guess is that it is some potter's list, a list of articles sold or for sale.

How frequently such lists were made it is impossible to say. Again, traders needed to correspond with their partners in distant. I do not intend to go into the technicalities of Greek banking By modern standards it was primitive. Nowadays, if someone wants to pay you money, he writes your name, the amount and his signature on a sheet of paper; you take this to your bank, and collect the money.

In Athens, he would have to go along to his bank and tell them verbally to pay you so much out his account. This order was entered into the banker's books. If the banker could recognize you, that was all; if not, he wrote down the name of the person who was to identify you It will, however, be quite clear from what I have already said, that it was not widespread illiteracy that was responsible for the oral character of this procedure, but the ease with which a Greek signature could be forged.

The bankers themselves, of course, had to be literate At this point, it is worth asking a closely allied question: was the average Athenian any good at arithmetic? The evidence is slight, but the answer seems to be yes. We have a speech, however, delivered before a law-court, in the course of which the speaker makes a financial calculation 48 ; a pointless procedure, if few of his audience could follow it.

So too in the assem-. Plato's remark that many Spartans could not even count 50 perhaps implies that most Athenians could.

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