A Short History of the Term Demagogue

Greek cartoon version of Knights

With loudmouthed ‘populist’ leaders everywhere in the news, we often hear the pejorative word demagogue. But the earliest instance of the compounded stems dēm- and agōg- in surviving literature occurs in Aristophanes’ Knights of 424 BCE (line 191) WITH NO ADVERSE NUANCE. The men who want to make a Sausage-Seller leader of Athens, instead of the (allegedly) uncouth Cleon now exerting power, say that ‘leading the people (demagogia) is no longer a job for the educated or well-mannered man’. 

In English texts until the Civil War, the term dispassionately describes leaders of popular factions within ancient republics.  It was the beheading of Charles I in January 1649 that irrevocably affected the meaning. In Charles’ purported spiritual autobiography, the Eikon Basilike published ten days after his execution, he says everyone knows who aroused the people against him: ‘Who were the chief Demagogues and Patrones of Tumults’ who had tried ‘to flatter and embolden them, to direct and tune their clamorous importunities?’ 

But Milton saw what this Royalist propaganda had done to the term demagogue. His response, Eikonoklastes¸ remarked on ‘the affrightment of this Goblin word’ and said that these Demagogues were actually ‘good Patriots’, ‘Men of some repute for parts and pietie’ for whom there was ‘urgent cause’. 

Paul Cartledge

Despite Milton’s protest, the word, with sneering associations, became standard currency in English thenceforward. This in turn affected the way historians read ancient Greek. So through a toxic, uncritical dialogue with Thucydides and Aristophanes, Cleon became not the archetypal leader of the people, but the archetypal ‘patron of tumult’, or as Don Marquis perceptively put it, any ‘person with whom we disagree as to which gang should mismanage the country’.   Men who have been accused of being ‘demagogues’ occur on all points of the political spectrum: Charles James Fox and Tom Paine, Robespierre and Boulanger, Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley, Adolf Hitler and Arthur Scargill.

A new book How to Do Things with History has just been published in honour of my friend of thirty years, Professor Paul Cartledge.* My own essay (of which I’m happy to send a pdf to anyone emailing me at my two names separated by a dot @kcl.ac.uk) argues that we have let our prejudiced sources on the Ur-demagogue Cleon, a resolute supporter of the poorest category of Athenian citizens (thetes), taint our picture of everyone who stands up for the rights of the under-classes ever since. Aristophanes and Thucydides do a hatchet job on him, but both had personal reasons to dislike him and his loyal following immensely.** 

By uncritically adopting their assessment, we forget (a) that Cleon’s supporters thought that ‘leader of the demos’ was an  honourable title and (b) that if any of their working-class views had survived they would have told another story. A proportion of them may have been newly emancipated slaves as well as those born into the thete class: Aristotle tells us that freedmen, if asked to whom they would choose to entrust their affairs, would automatically answer ‘Cleon’.***

There is also one precious source which shows that a much more positive picture of Cleon circulated even in mainstream, non-thetic citizen circles (Demosthenes 40.25).  Plato probably didn’t follow Aristophanes and Thucydides in attacking Cleon because Socrates respected Cleon and was loyal to his memory, having fought on Cleon’s successful campaign to retrieve Athens’ imperial territories in the north.  Socrates stood in the battle lines at Amphipolis, as he says in the Apology (28e).

It is possible to be a People-Leader with integrity. It is even possible to be a great orator with integrity. So let’s be very careful with this “goblin word”.

John Milton: Knew his Greek Better than Charles I

* OUP, ed. by Danielle Allen, Paul Christesen, and Paul Millett.
** I’m not the only or first person to argue this: see Neville Morley’s ‘Cleon the misunderstood?’ Omnibus 35 (1997) 4-6. 

*** Rhetoric 3.1408b25. 

Antony & Cleopatra in London and Aristotle in Oxford

As the heatwave grinds on, I found myself talking this week about two titans of the classical world, Mark Antony and Aristotle.  

In the week that marks the anniversary of the final defeat of Antony and Cleopatra by Octavian at the Battle of Alexandria on July 31, 30 BCE, I was asked to the rehearsal room to guide the cast of the National Theatre’s upcoming production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (directed by Simon Godwin) through the complexities of Mediterranean history during the preceding decade.  

The whole cast was impressed by how closely Shakespeare had followed the language and imagery in Plutarch's exquisite prose biography of Antony. The loudest ‘ooh’ greeted a coin found by the Sea of Galilee which shows how seriously Antony and Cleopatra had taken their plan for joint rule at least of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. But shock was expressed at the horrible propaganda images of Cleopatra as a strumpet churned out by Roman imperial publicity machines subsequently.

Cleopatra VII & Antony in flagrante in British Mudeum

Ralph Fiennes (Antony) wanted to know how torn Antony really was over parting ways with his former Triumvirs (unanswerable question!); and whether he was serious about marrying Octavian’s sister while carrying on a long-term affair with the Queen of Egypt (also unanswerable, although he had children that decade with both). 

Sophie Okenedo (Cleopatra) was fascinated by the artefacts that show the cultural hybridity of Cleopatra’s Egypt and wanted to know how much being a woman had proved an obstacle to a proud Ptolemy determined to retain independence for her ancestral realm.

Hybrid Monument to Cleopatra VII

Tim McMullan (Enobarbus, who gets the best poetry) seemed struck by the tragedy of Gnaius Domitius' Ahenobarbus’ career—he changed sides twice and died a lonely death, says Shakespeare's source Plutarch, out of shame at his own disloyalty.

Then to Oxford on Saturday, where Nigel Warburton, by miles the leading proponent of public philosophy in Britain, interviewed me on my book Aristotle’s Way for his Philosophy in the Bookshop series in Blackwell’s store on Broad Street.  Despite the searing heat, a wonderfully engaged audience of all ages gathered to ask penetrating questions about Aristotle’s relevance for the ethical and political issues we face today.

With Nigel Warburton in Oxford

Standing room only for Aristotle, even on a hot August morning

With audiences like this, despite all the reasons for gloom about the future, and the antics of our leaders on both domestic and world stages, I feel convinced that there are reasons for optimism. People want to make sense of our past, present and future, and I don't think that time is up for homo sapiens just yet.

Escape to Asclepieion! On Visiting Greece at the Right Time

With Dr L. Papadopoulos and Sarah Poynder

Despite unprecedented Brexit/Trump shithousery at home, or perhaps because I had escaped it physically, this was my best week of 2018 so far. The theatre at Epidauros as usual took my breath away, even though my scheduled lecture in the Small Theatre was doomed by a sudden thunderstorm to be relocated, inappropriately, to an indoor baseball stadium with a tin roof. 

Lecturing at 1000 Decibels

This meant I literally had to shout my lecture on Why are the Erinyes/Furies Gendered Female? at the very top of my voice. My international audience didn’t look as terrified as they should have. 

Then to Rhodes where hundreds of Australian lawyers of Greek ancestry had invited me, along with Profs. Paul Cartledge and Adriaan Lanni, to tell them about the Athenians’ amazingly democratic legal system. Up first, I chose the comedic tactic and enacted, solo, all the roles in the trial in Aristophanes’ Wasps in which one household hound prosecutes another for stealing a Sicilian cheese. 

Cleon-Dog accuses Labes-Dog in Wasps

The Chief Witness is the kitchen’s Cheesegrater, who witnessed the crime being perpetrated and is Chief of Household Accounts. This is actually our best evidence for procedure in fifth-century Athenian courts. Since the death of our wonderful cat Sam last month, which upset me far more than I anticipated, we now have only one cat and one dog, but I intend to reenact the scene upon return home tomorrow.

Hygieia with Head

Then a strange night in a demotic bar watching Croatian footballers hammer Englishmen. I was in company with a Croat, my English daughter, several Australians and many Greeks (a night in which I gradually started supporting the Croatians because of their True Grit). The fun started when I discovered the best thing in Rhodes Archaeological Museum: THE STATUES HAVE HEADS ON. Most were guillotined by iconoclastic early Christians, but on Rhodes they considerately left the heads lying around to be stuck on again later.

Hippocrates, Asclepius, a Koan on Kos

In Kos, founded by Asclepios-worshipping Epidaurians long ago, I took my arthritic left knee to show to the Healing God in his magnificent sanctuary, where Hippocrates, the great medic of the Greek Enlightenment, practised his craft. I did not have time to sleep over ("incubate") in the Asclepieion and experience visitations from gods in my dreams, but my knee has felt better today. 

Kitten under Hippocrates' Plane Tree in Kos

Nor did I have a cock to sacrifice there, like the women in a little-known poem (no. 4) by the Koan poet Herodas who describe Asclepios’ Koan altar, but my conversation with one of many local ginger tomcats seems to have done the trick.

Now watching the World Cup final in Fiumicino Airport, Rome, before returning to Blighty and Brexit Blues later tonight. I have suspended Reality for nine whole days. “It” may not be coming home, but I am, albeit reluctantly. 

Enlisting Lucian in the Aristotle vs. Neo-Stoic Debate

I marked the publication of my book Aristotle’s Way with an article on his route to happiness in the excellent free online magazine Aeon recently. My inbox has since been crammed with protests from people who call themselves Stoics.

I argued that Aristotle’s Peripatetic ethics and natural science stress that humans are animals, even if advanced ones, who need to live together in communities, solve problems, figure out how to live well, respect other life forms, and (in appropriate contexts and degrees) embrace rather than renounce pleasure, physical appetites and emotions like anger. This makes Peripatetic thought better suited to the lives of normal modern homines sapientes facing social-political dissolution and environmental crisis than the austere, self-focussed and pessimistic worldview of the Stoics.

The behavioural-therapy methods that today’s self-styled Stoics recommend on their websites and courses to their adherents are harmless. But this is a branding issue. I just can’t locate these ideas in any of the ancient texts and fragments of the dozen major Stoics. This applies all the way from Stoicism’s founder Zeno of Citium and Cleanthes his successor (perhaps the most anti-joy of them all) to Marcus Aurelius and Gaius Musonius Rufus, who recommended withdrawing from society altogether.

I’ve just found an ally in Lucian, the Syrian who wrote satire in Greek. His neglected satire Philosophies for Sale describes how ordinary people in the 2nd century CE saw each famous school of philosophy. Zeus and Hermes organise an auction of personifications of these schools.

Pythagorean Man is vegetarian, hairy, and silent. He propounds reincarnation, the music of the spheres, and numerology. The Cynic practises scathing humour and asceticism while renouncing home, family, society and material goods. The Epicurean also retreats from the world of affairs but devotes his life to the maximisation of pleasure experienced at leisure. These philosophies are presented as daft and inapplicable to everyday life.

Hairy Pythagorean

Democritean belief points to the atomic basis of the physical world; Heraclitans stress fire, flux and change; Socratic thought assumes that our world is a material copy of an eternal world of ideal forms; Sceptics question every assumption, including the belief that we exist. These schools of thought are useless for ‘regular folk’ as well.

Stoicism receives a longer treatment. You can spot a Stoic because he looks miserable, is self-regarding, claims to hold the monopoly on wisdom, courage and justice and that he alone is fitted to be ‘king, orator, millionaire’ (it was the favoured philosophy of fabulously rich Romans such as Seneca): Stoicism works less well for workers who don’t aim to be Top Dog, such as the cook, tanner and carpenter. Stoics are often found in financial industries; they argue that men have little control over fate and that the universe will self-combust. Stoics welcome hardship and endure it rather than pursuing solutions. Stoics teach using deliberate obscurantism in logic to foil opponents' arguments.

But the last school to be studied is presented in a radically different, positive light. Peripatetic philosophy encompasses all branches of knowledge. The Peripatetic is ‘temperate, good-natured, easy to get on with’ and publishes his thoughts in two modes: both ‘esoteric’ specialist treatises and ‘exoteric’ popular pamphlets written so that non-philosophers can understand. 

Aristotle & Peripatetic Colleague Theophrastus invent Zoology

The Peripatetic divides good things into three categories: those internal to the mind/soul (the most important), bodily and circumstantial. He promotes wonderful books on the natural world, especially the environment and zoology, biological reproduction, and what distinguishes man from other animals—all knowledge which is ‘as useful as it is ornamental’. 

Lucian of Samosata had no vested interest, as far as I know, in promoting Peripatetic thought. But he was an informed, lucid and perceptive thinker. I am excited to find him in agreement with me as I try to make the surviving, advanced treatises of Aristotle as accessible to every cook, tanner and carpenter—that is, as ‘exoteric’—as possible.

  

The Sudden Topicality of Shakespeare's BREXIT Cymbeline

Coin of Cynobelinus King of Britain

How about writing a play about a British leader manipulated into leaving a peaceful alliance with Europe and go it alone in barbarous isolation? Oh, hang on—Shakespeare did one. As the Brexit negotiations descend into pandemonium (my own in-the-wrong-party MP Heidi Allen is a leading Tory rebel), I hereby beg my theatre friends to stage Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, topical as never before, more than 400 years since it premiered.

Shakespeare based Cymbeline on the historical British King Cynobelinus, whose reign began in the first decade CE. The bard admired Cynobelinus’ coins as drawn in the 1607 edition of William Camden’s Britannia, before which the historical Roman province of Britannia had never before been understood as a physical, material reality. When James I/VIth came to the throne in 1603, he projected himself as the Roman Emperor Augustus, who, after a long period of civil war, brought Rome to peace, alliances, and unity.

Brexiteers Cloten (left) & his mum work on intuitive Remainer Cymbeline

Cymbeline, educated on the Continent, is a happy ally of Rome. His xenophobic new wife wants to secure Brexit, kill him and Assume Total Power with her yobbish son Cloten. In the prescient Act III scene 1, she goads Cymbeline into insulting Caius Lucius, the virtuous and polite Roman ambassador. Anglo-European war is declared.

Fortunately, Queen and Cloten meet premature ends. Cymbeline realises in the nick of time that Britain will be happier Remaining. He closes by inviting his Roman allies to a feast in London, 'Lud's-town':

Publish we this peace

To all our subjects. Set we forward: let

A Roman and a British ensign wave

Friendly together: so through Lud’s-town march:

And in the temple of great Jupiter

Our peace we’ll ratify; seal it with feasts.

Set on there! Never was a war did cease,

Ere bloody hands were wash’d, with such a peace.

Self as Caius Lucius, Steve Mastin as Cymbeline

At the annual conference of the Historical Association in Stratford on Avon  last month, I was honoured to be invited to give a keynote lecture on Shakespeare’s later Roman plays. Along with wonderful colleagues working with me to persuadeHistory teachers to introduce Ancient History to their schools/sixth-formcolleges, we performed parts of this play substituting EU flags and Union Jacks for the insignia of Augustus and Cynobelinus Rex. Cynical laughter abounded.

A recent Hollywood movie tries to topicalise Cymbeline by representing Rome and Britannia as two rival motorcycle gangs. Despite the usually superb Ed Harris as Cymbeline, it is dismally bad. But contemporary Britain has stumbled into providing this classic drama with a painful sudden relevance. I wish we could follow Shakespeare, put the 2016 referendum behind us in Act III, and move on to the joyous, cosmopolitan finale.

A Deadly Serious Blog about Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide

Two high-profile suicides in a week have left many of us rattled. I know nothing of fashion and hadn’t heard of Kate Spade. I was scarcely aware of Anthony Bourdain, despite enjoying cookery shows. But I’ve been shocked to find myself compulsively reading about their close relationships.

A suicide in the family (and I am not including deliberated euthanasia by the terminally ill) inflicts a lasting community wound. My maternal grandmother committed suicide when I was three and a half. I do not believe that my mother, who died a natural death in 2016, ever recovered.

I starkly remember the day the news arrived, my mother’s howls, and how much I missed her when she disappeared to Scotland for what seemed an eternity. But most of all I remember her saying, when I was older, how bitterly she regretted giving me her mother’s name, even though one motive had been to try to alleviate Edith Henderson’s depression.

The ancient Greeks had the concept of an inherited curse to help them understand how suicide and other violence runs in families. I am sure Antigone found it easier to put that noose round her neck because her mother Jocasta had done so before her.  Suicide seems a more feasible option where there are precedents close to home. My grandmother had previously lost several relations to suicide.

I have experienced three periods of acute depression myself. One was post-natal and the symptoms were not self-destructive. But I did consider suicide during two depressions as a young woman, before I'd identified my life’s project and when I still believed, partly because of my own tense relationship with my mother, that I was psychologically incapable of good-enough parenting.

Allowing myself to have a child required seven years of therapy, Aristotelian Ethics and a tolerant boyfriend. I feel desperately sorry for everyone who suffers from depression. It’s just that I feel even sorrier for those they leave behind.

Aristotle disapproved of suicide because we are all part of communities and the violent death of a member of any group, whether by suicide or murder, is in a sense an assault on the other members. He can’t have fully understood the torment that depression can inflict. The pain can be as bad as physical agony and the need to escape it just as urgent.

But I do think that the survivors of suicide by loved ones need far more support than in my experience they are offered. Otherwise the repercussions may be felt across the generations. In the UK there is an admirable organisation Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide. It is just as important that we spread this information as it is to help people in suicidal crisis. 

The Cynical Spin-Doctoring behind the British Museum's Rodin Exhibition

I’m pleased by Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement that he supports the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles in their rightful Athenian home. I vote Labour but I’m also a proud member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, and have blogged about this issue before.

I’ve been saddened by the gushing responses across press and media to the current Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece exhibition at the British Museum.  Few journalists have seen the cynical motives underlying the jamboree.

Suspicions that opinion-management was at work should have been aroused by the mounting pressure on museums worldwide to acknowledge the colonial rapine involved in amassing their collections. Even louder alarm bells should have been rung by the identity of the financial sponsor, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. BAML has its own desperate PR offensive at the moment—a bid to mend its ravaged reputation only weeks after having to hand over $42 million in settlement for defrauding customers between 2008 and 2013.

The two premises the Museum’s spin doctors ask its viewers to accept are contentious: (1) that without a visit to the British Museum’s amputated fragments of the art of the Parthenon and Acropolis Rodin might not have become the great sculptor he was (why couldn’t he have gone to Greece? He visited Italy to study Michelangelo); (2) that ‘sculpture’ always means freestanding individual works conceived, displayed and revered as autonomous works of art, like Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ or ‘The Thinker’. 

The category apparently excludes magnificent public monuments like the Parthenon and the other temples of the Acropolis, which combine serial images in different material media aesthetically celebrating an entire community’s aspirations, spirituality and political identity.

Cast from Rodin's Design for Gates of Hell at Stanford Uni

Alas poor Rodin—I am sure he would have been appalled at such blatant ideological abuse of his own work, especially given that many of his most famous statues, including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Thinker’, were originally designed as part of a public monument, ‘The Gates of Hell’, inspired by Dante’s Inferno. They were commissioned by the French State as the portal to a new museum of the decorative arts which was in the event never built.

"Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone"

My own favourite Rodin sculpture is his ‘Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone’, originally designed for the top of the left pilaster of ‘The Gates of Hell’. I like to think that that the shocking sense of deracination and lapsarian despair she induces in the viewer was Rodin’s response to the miserable isolation of the solitary Caryatid from the Athenian Erechtheion stranded in London’s British Museum.

She's two thousand miles away from her sisters in the Acropolis Museum, named the The Best Museum of the World in a 2010 British poll. 

Let’s look beyond the media hype so expertly engineered by the Rodin exhibition, and use it instead as an opportunity for a serious public conversation about allowing her and the rest of the Athenians’ Acropolis sculptures to be reunited at last and seen as part of the Gesamtkunstwerk for which Pheidias & Co. originally designed them.