Death to Tyrants! (7 page)

Resolution of the council and the
dēmos
. The Aiantis tribe were presidents, Kleigenes was secretary, Boethos was chairman. Demophantos drew up the following proposal. This decree dates from the council of five hundred appointed by lot, for whom Kleigenes was the first secretary. If anyone overthrows the democracy at Athens, or holds any office when the democracy has been overthrown, he shall be an enemy of the Athenians and shall be killed with impunity, and his property shall be confiscated and a tenth part of it devoted to the goddess; and he who kills or helps to plan the killing of such a man shall be pure and free from guilt. All Athenians shall swear over perfect victims by tribes and by demes to kill such a man. The oath shall be as follows: “I shall kill, by word and deed, by vote and by my own hand, if I can, anyone who overthrows the democracy at Athens, and anyone who, when the democracy has been overthrown, holds any office thereafter, and anyone who aims to rule tyrannically or helps to set up the tyrant. And if anyone else kills him, I shall consider that man to be pure in the sight of both gods and spirits, because he has killed an enemy of the Athenians, and I will sell all the property of the dead man and give half to the killer and not keep any back. And if anyone dies while killing or attempting to kill any such man, I shall care both for him and for his children, just as for Harmodios and Aristogeiton and their descendants. And all oaths that have been sworn against the people of Athens, at Athens or on campaigns or anywhere else, I declare null and void.” All Athenians shall swear this oath over perfect victims, in the customary manner, before the Dionysia, and they shall pray that he who keeps his oath may have many blessings, but that for him who breaks it destruction may befall himself and his family.
³²

There are two parts to this decree. The first part states that anyone who overthrows the democracy at Athens or holds any office while the democracy is overthrown shall be considered to be an enemy of the Athenians and thus may be killed with impunity. It further states that the assassinated person's property is to be confiscated and that not only the assassin but also anyone who might assist in the assassination shall be deemed pure and guiltless. The second part of the decree contains the text of a loyalty oath that all Athenians were required to swear before the next Dionysia. The oath echoes and amplifies the content of the first part of the decree and concludes with an annulment of all other oaths that individuals may have sworn against the democracy.

Two features of the oath of Demophantos are particularly important to the arguments presented in this section and thus require some discussion. First, the oath taker pledged to kill tyrants and reward tyrant killers. Athenian democrats believed that Harmodios and Aristogeiton, their paradigmatic tyrannicides, had killed a tyrant (Hipparchos) in broad daylight at the Panathenaia and that that assassination, despite the fact that Harmodios and Aristogeiton died, was the founding act of the Athenian democracy.
³³
It is thus reasonable to suppose that, in the minds of those who swore the oath of Demophantos, an act of tyrannicide had two constituent elements. First, it must be a highly public first strike against a nondemocratic regime. Second, the act must be committed in order to usher in a democratic regime. Tyrannicide was the act of a committed democrat who was unwilling to wait for others to liberate his fellow citizens. A tyrant killer, on his own initiative, “goes first.”
³⁴

In recognition of the inherent danger involved in tyrannicide, the oath of Demophantos states that a would-be tyrant killer will be rewarded
substantially for his act of individual bravery. Should he survive, he would receive one-half the sale price of the victim's property. And since the “tyrant” would almost certainly be a member of the economic elite, the monetary reward could be considerable. Perhaps more importantly, he no doubt would be honored as a liberator in his lifetime, and if he should die, he and his children would be treated “just like Harmodios and Aristogeiton and their descendants.” It is not entirely clear what that would have entailed. But, based on what is known about late-fifth-century practice, two things seem likely: a statue of the slain tyrant killer would be erected in the agora and he would be the object of a hero cult,
³⁵
and his oldest living descendant would receive
sitēsis
in the Prytaneion in perpetuity.
³⁶
It is also quite likely that, if he had young children, they, like war orphans, would be provided for by the state.
³⁷
Whatever the exact contents of the “tyrannicide incentive package,” it clearly represents a serious attempt to alter an individual's calculus of risk versus reward so as to benefit the democratic collective—in other words, to increase the likelihood that, should the democracy be overthrown, a brave individual would take the risk to go first and “kill a tyrant.”

Figure 1.1.
Roman copy of the Kritios and Nesiotes statue group. Photo by permission of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut-Rom.

The second significant feature of the oath of Demophantos is the fact that “all Athenians” were required to swear it. It is well known that the Athenians relied heavily on oaths both in the performance of public, political acts (e.g., serving as archon, a council member, or jury member) and their private, personal interactions (e.g., contracts).
³⁸
Andokides (
Myst
. 9) even went so far as
to assert that it was the oath that “alone holds the city together.” The only known possible precedent for all citizens swearing the same oath, however, took place in the early sixth century, when, according to Herodotos, “the Athenians” swore to follow Solon's laws for ten years.
³⁹
But that was nearly two centuries prior to the promulgation of the decree of Demophantos; and it is not entirely clear who would have sworn that oath at such an early date; perhaps only men above a certain property class participated in the ceremony. For all practical purposes, then, the decree of Demophantos appears to have mandated an unprecedented act: that all Athenians, organized according to the Kleisthenic (and therefore democratic) system of tribes and demes, swear the very same oath. The oath would thus have been a significant and highly memorable moment in late-fifth-century Athens.

The discussion of the oath that follows has three parts. In the first, I attempt to reconstruct the oath ritual to the extent possible. The second part draws on the insights of Michael Chwe to demonstrate that, as a result of having sworn the oath, the Athenians generated common knowledge of widespread credible commitment to kill tyrants and reward tyrant killers. In the third part, I argue that the Athenians would have been better able to solve a revolutionary coordination problem and thus mobilize en masse against a nondemocratic regime if such a commitment were in fact common knowledge.

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE OATH RITUAL

The ritual requirements articulated in the decree of Demophantos provide the primary information upon which must rest any reconstruction of the oath ceremony. Two of those requirements are more or less straightforward. First, the decree explicitly states that “all Athenians” (
Ἀθηναῖοι πάντες
) must
swear the oath. As fantastic as it might appear, this must be taken literally: it is stated twice in the decree, one time with the emphatic form of the adjective (
ἅπαντας
). Second, the oath had to be sworn “over perfect victims” (
καθ᾿ ἱερῶν τελείων
), that is, over fully grown sacrificial animals.
⁴⁰
The preposition
κατά
perhaps means that the participants performed some sort of downward motion during the ritual.
⁴¹

Two other ritual requirements of the decree are ambiguous, but of considerable importance for the reconstruction of the oath ritual. The first is that the oath be taken “by tribes and by demes” (
κατὰ φυλὰς καὶ κατὰ δήμους
). This does not mean that all Athenians swore the oath twice, once with their tribe and once with their deme. Rather, the members of a given tribe were required to swear the oath together, deme by deme.
⁴²
Thus, for example, when the members of tribe Pandionis swore the oath, it was sworn eleven times—once by the members of each of its eleven demes. The text of the decree does not make clear, however, whether or not the members of all ten tribes swore the oath together and at the same time.

The second ambiguous requirement is that the Athenians swear the oath “before the Dionysia” (
πρὸ Διονυσίων
). The City Dionysia was held annually in the month of Elaphebolion. The Athenian
dēmos
promulgated the decree of Demophantos in the month of Hekatombaion, eight months before the festival. The text does not make clear whether the oath had to be sworn more or less immediately before the festival or sometime within the eight-month period between the promulgation of the decree and the beginning of the festival.

It is tempting to suppose that all Athenians swore the oath at the same time, but that is very unlikely.
⁴³
It simply would take too much time to do so. There were 139 demes in Athens. If one assumes that it took ten minutes for the members of a deme to make their way to a specified location, organize themselves, and swear the oath, the whole oath ritual, if run without interruptions, would take nearly twenty-four hours to complete. Other objections might also be raised. Even if “all Athenians” could have congregated in one place, for example, the resulting crowd would surely have been chaotic and
distracting, and this might have called into question the seriousness of the oath and Athenians' commitment to it.

It is thus more reasonable to conclude that the members of each of the ten tribes organized their own, separate oath ceremony. Four simple points support that conclusion. First, under such circumstances, the oath ritual would not take too long to complete. Tribe Aigeis had the greatest number of demes at twenty-one. If we assume again that it took ten minutes for each deme to swear the oath, the entire tribe could have completed the ritual in three and a half hours. Second, the members of each tribe were accustomed to working together to achieve certain objectives and each had a sanctuary where the members met to conduct tribal business.
⁴⁴
Third, such a decentralized oath ritual would make sense of the fact that the
dēmos
provided a text of the oath eight months before the Athenians had to swear it: such advance notice would be necessary if the members of each tribe were to figure out all the specifics (when, where, how) and complete the ritual before the beginning of the Dionysia. Fourth, a decentralized oath ritual would conform to the requirement that “all Athenians” had to swear the oath “by tribe and by deme.”

In light of these considerations, I offer the following as a plausible, if somewhat schematic, depiction of the oath ceremony. The members of a given tribe gathered together at a specified location (probably a theater, perhaps the theater of Dionysos at Mounichia) at a time chosen beforehand.
⁴⁵
The members of the first deme of that tribe—the order might also have been determined in earlier tribal meetings—proceeded as a group to some sort of stage. One or more of the deme members then struck a sacrificial victim and all the deme members, facing the audience and perhaps making some sort of downward motion, swore the oath of Demophantos in unison. Upon completing the oath, the members of the first deme returned as a group to the audience, while the members of the next deme came forward and followed the same steps. Thus the members of the tribe Pandionis, for example, saw and heard the oath sworn eleven times.

COMMON KNOWLEDGE

By swearing the oath of Demophantos, the Athenians generated common knowledge of a credible commitment to kill tyrants and reward tyrant killers. In the following discussion of this concept, I draw heavily on the work of the
modern social scientist Michael Chwe, and in particular on two ideas that are especially relevant to this study.

The first point is that the generation of common knowledge of credible commitment is virtually a necessary condition for solving coordination problems.
⁴⁶
Contrary to what one might initially expect, common knowledge of fact
x
does not exist simply because everybody knows fact
x
. Nor does common knowledge of fact
x
exist if everybody knows that everybody knows fact
x
. Instead, common knowledge of fact
x
exists only if everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows fact
x
. Thus common knowledge of a widespread credible commitment to participate in an action exists only if everybody knows that everybody knows that everybody knows that many individuals are, in fact, set on participating in that action. Only given the existence of such complete metaknowledge (i.e., knowledge of other people's knowledge) can people coordinate.