7. On the borderline between Greeks and non-
Greeks there are the Macedonians. It has been sug-
gested, but it is a suggestion of doubtful value, that
the Macedonians preserved features of the “Homeric”
institutions. Their kings considered themselves Greek
in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., but the ordinary
Macedonians never seem to have shared the ambitions
of their kings in this matter. They had a national,
perhaps a military, assembly and we know that
Philip II and Alexander spoke before it. For the rest, all
our evidence concerns the exceptional period when
Alexander's generals had to take responsibility for the
succession. It has been asserted that every Macedonian
soldier was entitled to speak freely in that assembly,
and Polybius has been quoted as an authority for this
statement. Polybius tells us apropos of the condem-
nation of Leontius in 218 B.C. that the soldiers sent
a deputation to Philip V, begging him not to try the
case in their absence. Polybius' comment on the sol-
diers' message to the king is: “with such freedom
(isegoria) did the Macedonians always address their
kings” (Polybius, 5, 27, 6). Now Polybius mentions
Macedonian freedom of speech, not on the occasion
of an assembly, but in connection with a deputation.
He seems to emphasize the directness with which the
Macedonian soldiers treated their kings, not what
happened in the Macedonian assembly.
In Spartan political life not all was crude. It has
indeed been suggested that with the so-called Rhetra
of Lycurgus (Plutarch, Lycurgus 6), which somehow
defined the powers of the gerousia (the council of 28
life members to whom the two kings were added), the
rule that council should take the responsibility and the
initiative for presenting measures to the assembly was
introduced into Greek political life for the first time.
This would have happened in the eighth or seventh
century B.C. The same Rhetra gave the assembly power
to approve or reject proposals. Even by the beginning
of the Peloponnesian war shouting was still the ordi-
nary method of the assembly for the election of magis-
trates and for the voting on formal proposals (which
might involve peace and war). The candidate who got
the loudest shout at elections was deemed to have been
chosen; and the proposal which had the loudest
applause was deemed to have been approved. But at
least in the case of voting decrees the extent of the
approval represented by the applause could be checked
by subsequent division, as happened in 432 B.C.
In a disputed passage, Aristotle seems to tell us that
there was no freedom of discussion in the assemblies
of Sparta and Crete (Politics II, 1272a). We cannot say
anything very definite about Crete, but in the case of
Sparta there is enough evidence to show that, whatever
Aristotle may have meant, private individuals could
speak in the assembly even in Aristotle's time.
Aeschines (I, 180-81) has a story about a disreputable
man who spoke in the Spartan assembly and was
listened to with attention. Then an elder warned the
Spartans that the city could not survive for long if they
listened to such advisers. The possibility of speeches
by private individuals seems always to have been
contemplated by the Spartan constitution. The famous
rider to the Rhetra in Plutarch (Lycurgus 6) enjoins
that if the demos formulates crooked decisions the
gerontes and the kings shall decline to accept them.
This rider was already known to Tyrtaeus (frag. 3a).
Its natural interpretation seems to be that it gives the
kings and the gerontes power of veto, limiting preexist-
ing rights of the assembly. The veto controls, but does
not abolish, the powers of initiative of the assembly.
There is, furthermore, evidence in Thucydides and
Xenophon that the assembly was an important decision-
making body in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.,
though it must be emphasized that deciding after
listening to opposite opinions is not the same as taking
part in the debate. What we really do not know is
who at a given time took the initiative and controlled
decisions behind the screen of theoretical equality of
the Spartiates.
It is a pity that we have so little information about
the limits of freedom of speech in other Greek cities
for the period in which they were not yet likely to
have been influenced by Athens. We know from
Thucydides that at Syracuse a magistrate could stop
discussion in a way which seems different from
Athenian practice. But the archaic assemblies of Ionia
remain a mystery, and as long as they remain a mystery
it is possible to overrate Athens' contribution to politi-
cal freedom of speech. It is true, however, as we shall
presently see, that at least one of the two technical
terms for freedom of speech, parrhesia, spread from
Athens.
In the matter of freedom of speech much of the
constitutional development of Athens is obscure. The
rule that people over fifty had priority in speaking is
attributed to Solon, and was already obsolete by the
fourth century. It shows that private individuals were
allowed to speak in the Solonian assembly, which seems
to have been open to the fourth class, the thetes. It
is uncertain when the meetings of the assembly became
regular in Athens and when the ordinary citizen was
allowed to propose amendments and new resolutions.
But one point is clear. From the end of the sixth cen-
tury B.C. five hundred Athenian citizens were chosen
by lot every year to be members of the Council (Boule).
Members of this Council were bound to discuss matters
freely and in detail during their meetings. After such
an experience they could not be expected to keep silent
when they returned to the assembly as ordinary citi-
zens. Freedom of speech in the Athenian assembly
cannot have been more recent than the reforms of
Cleisthenes. It may of course have preceded them.
What we know well enough is the state of affairs in
the second half of the fifth century B.C.
In the second part of the fifth century and during
the greater part of the fourth century every Athenian
citizen had the right to speak unless he disqualified
himself by certain specified crimes (such as having been
a deserter or having beaten his own parents, or having
been found guilty three times of illegal proposals). Any
citizen could defend his own proposals already submit-
ted to the boule and introduced to the ecclesia by
probouleuma, or could submit proposals direct to the
ecclesia. No citizen could speak more than once in a
meeting on the same topic. The only risk a speaker had
to face was the possibility of being prosecuted later for
having misled the people, a remote possibility even for
professional politicians.
We need hardly add that this extraordinary amount
of freedom of speech in the assemblies was accompa-
nied by an exceptional amount of freedom of speech
in the theater and generally speaking in ordinary life.
A fifth-century law which made it illegal to attack
people by name in comedies can have been enforced
only by fits and starts because our information on it
is both vague and contradictory. But there are two
remarks which we should like to make about freedom
of speech in Athens outside the ecclesia. First, personal
reputations were protected by various laws against
slander. In the fourth century it was an offense even
to sneer at any citizen for having worked in the
marketplace. Secondly, about 432 B.C., Diopeithes'
decree, making it an offense to deny the gods of the
city and to teach new doctrines about meteorological
phenomena, showed that Athens cared more for politi-
cal liberty than for intellectual liberty. Anaxagoras,
Protagoras, Diagoras, and perhaps Diogenes of
Apollonia had to run for their lives. Socrates did not
go away and was killed. The suspicion that democracy
and philosophy were incompatible could never be
dispelled again, with the consequences that are evident
in Plato's works.
With this background of political institutions in
mind, we shall not be surprised if the notion of freedom
of speech turns out to be an Athenian fifth-century
idea. In earlier times the notion of liberty (eleutheria)
did not include freedom of speech: indeed, another
important notion of Greek archaic ethics,
aidos
(“modesty, respect”), implied that silence and reticence
were characteristic of the good man.
Since Homer (and probably even earlier, in the
Mycenaean age) the free man (eleutheros) is the oppo-
site of a slave. For Homer the event that stood out
as the cause of transition from freedom to slavery was
defeat in war, the end of “the free day.” This, of course,
was a gross simplification of real life with its many
varieties of freedom and of slavery. Some archaic poets
restricted the meaning of eleutheros to indicate the
generous man. They paved the way to the later notion
cherished by Aristotle that there is an inborn aristo-
cratic quality of the mind which distinguishes the free
man from the slave.
On the other hand, Solon perceived that debts can
be worse than war in affecting the freedom of the
individual. He also associated the notion of eleutheros
with the notion of law (nomos) and regarded tyrants
as the enemies of freedom because tyrants do not
respect the law. During the Persian Wars, the Persian
king appeared as an especially dangerous and powerful
tyrant. Liberty—eleutheria (now used in the ab-
stract)—came to indicate a collective Greek attitude
to political life as opposed to Persian despotism. We
do not know where and by whom freedom was first
associated with democracy. The connection appears to
be current in Athens during the fifth century: it is
hinted at by Aeschylus and loudly proclaimed by
Euripides; it is clearly familiar to Thucydides who uses
it in Pericles' speeches. In democratic thinking freedom
of speech appears to be one of the most important
and necessary ingredients of eleutheria. Aeschylus in
the Suppliants (now dated after 468 B.C.) names the
free mouth as a sign of freedom, whereas Herodotus
uses the word isegoria (equality in freedom of speech)
to indicate Athenian democracy (V, 78).
