BMCR 2009.04.05, J. L. Marr, The 'Old Oligarch': The Constitution

J. L. Marr, P. J.  Rhodes (trans.), The 'Old Oligarch': The
Constitution of the Athenians Attributed to Xenophon. Aris & Phillips
Classical Texts.  Oxford:  Aris & Phillips, 2008.  Pp. 178.  ISBN
9780856687815.  $36.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Delfim F. Lea^o, University of Coimbra, Portugal
([email protected])
Word count:  1752 words
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As stated in the "Preface" (ix), this edition of the 'Old Oligarch' was
begun by J. L. Marr, who discussed previous drafts with P. J. Rhodes,
and finally asked the latter to join him in finishing the book. The
final version of the volume was produced by Rhodes, although both
authors share joint responsibility for the book as whole (including
Greek text, English translation and the various interpretations
expressed along the work). The result is a very complete approach to
this small treatise, too often neglected by literary critics and
ancient historians, thus providing an analysis capable of attracting
the attention of specialists, students and general public as well. This
kind of balance is not easy to maintain, but Marr and Rhodes
(henceforth M&R) have managed to achieve it, by combining an incisive
introduction with an easily readable translation (without betraying the
recognized immaturity of the anonymous author) and an illuminating
commentary that usually refers the reader to the English version, but
does not disregard the Greek original.

The Introduction (pp. 1-29), although fairly short, is divided by M&R
into eleven smaller sections which offer an easy and well-informed
approach to the main lines of discussion concerning the treatise. In
the first (The Name 'Old Oligarch'), they address the problem of  an
expression which , although widely used by English-language speakers,
may nevertheless lead to  error, by suggesting that the author is an
old person and a traditional oligarch. In fact, the reality is probably
the opposite: the author is almost certainly a young (and relatively
immature) person who, although being opposed to the democratic regime,
does not express the opinions of a conventional oligarch (whose
arguments he partially discredits in his discussion). Nevertheless, the
expression reflects the difficulty, felt already in antiquity, of
attributing this work to Xenophon and is thereby a practical way of
dealing with the problem of authorship implied by the traditional
title, 'the Pseudo-Xenophontic Athenaion Politeia'. M&R have chosen to
refer to the author as 'X' (following Gomme), meaning that the author
is unknown rather than that they are using an abbreviation for
Xenophon. M&R tend to share the standard position among scholars that
Xenophon is not the author of the treatise, but correctly call
attention to the fact that the arguments (discussed at length in
section 4) are not as conclusive as some scholars usually maintain they
are.

In the second section (The Title of the Work), the authors discuss the
pertinence of attributing to the treatise the title 'Constitution of
the Athenians' ('Athenaion Politeia'), rightly considering it to be no
less misleading than the expression analysed in the previous section,
because it may suggest a kind of objective constitutional and
institutional history of Athens (somehow comparable to the Aristotelian
'Athenaion Politeia'), when the treatise is, on the contrary, a
generalising work, with a strong argumentative character, with almost
no factual details such as might reasonably  be expected from a
constitutional historian (e.g. dates, facts and names). This title
probably results from a misappropriation of the first five words of the
opening sentence and is due to a later commentator and not to the
author of the treatise. This generalising nature of the work also makes
it hard to fix the date which should be assigned to it (as discussed in
section three: The Date of the Work), because the lack of internal and
external evidence makes it very hard to establish both a date after and
a date before which the treatise must have been written. The dates
assigned by scholarship oscillate from the 440s to the fourth century
(a conspectus is given in pp. 31-32); M&R give preference to 425-424, a
possibility first proposed by W. Roscher. As they pertinently assert
(p. 6), one important consequence of this date is that it turns the
treatise into "the earliest surviving example of a literary text in
Attic prose, and the earliest prose critique of Athenian democracy".

The next section, 'The Authorship of the work', is the longest.
Diogenes Laertius (II.57) makes it clear that its attribution to
Xenophon was already disputed in antiquity. Modern scholars tend to
consider the two short pieces of the 'Constitutions of the Athenians
and of the Lacedaemonians' as separate works, and to identify Xenophon
as the author of the 'Constitution of the Lacedaemonians', but not of
the 'Constitution of the Athenians'. In reviewing the arguments
generally used by scholars to justify this opinion (concerning style
and chronology), M&R do not challenge that perspective, because they
too find Xenophontic authorship highly improbable, but their analysis
has the undeniable advantage of showing that the grounds for denying
that authorship are neither irrefutable nor self-evident.

Section five (The Author and his Immediate Audience) addresses the
confrontational character of the work. In fact, throughout the treatise
the author gives the impression of quarrelling with a group of
antagonists and interlocutors, whose argumentation he anticipates and
responds to, thus achieving a certain vivacity. The presence of
imaginary opponents can be detected some twenty times all through this
short work. These interlocutors are sometimes referred to in the
singular and other times in the plural, and, unlike the author of the
treatise, who is Athenian, they are perceived as being foreigners
(primarily Spartans), because although they share an anti-democratic
perspective, their understanding of democracy is superficial, as can be
inferred from the answers given to their somewhat nai+ve criticism of
Athenian democracy. As for the place where the 'debate' took place, it
has sometimes been suggested that the author was in exile when he wrote
it, but M&R argue convincingly that the treatise was produced in
Athens, by an Athenian, perhaps in the context of a rhetorical
classroom exercise. This possibility would be consistent with the
theory that the author is still very young and rooted in an oligarchic
circle of family and friends. M&R speculate (commentary on 2.20) that
he may have been a pupil of Antiphon, the orator and sophist, and this
a conjecture is not improbable, on chronological, political and social
grounds.

The analysis of the way the author of the work responds to his
imaginary interlocutors, made in section six (The Author's Argument:
the Self-interest Theory), shows that he considers their
anti-democratic criticism to be pertinent, although objecting that this
regime was effective as a whole in Athens, because the demos managed to
pursue its own self-interest successfully. Consequently even if the
author shares the oligarchic and aristocratic idea that democracy is a
bad form of government, he recognises nevertheless that the system is
effective, owing precisely to the self-interest theory. Acknowledgement
of this fact enables him to have a deeper and more realistic
understanding of the democratic regime, unlike his antagonists, who
follow the traditional oligarchic perspective, which proves in the end
to be more superficial.

In section seven (The Two-fold Class Division: the Demos versus the
Oligoi), M&R note that throughout the treatise the term demos is used
over forty times, usually in the political narrow sense of 'lower
class', because for the author democracy is the rule of the poor
(majority) over the rich (minority) in order to preserve their mainly
economic self-interest. M&R correctly call attention to the fact that
this two-fold class division and the restricted and pejorative sense
given to the word demos, together with the idea that it corresponded
essentially to the urban and landless poor, are a too simplistic way of
perceiving Athenian society around 424 and therefore a fantasy--even if
this fantasy is occasionally shared  by modern scholars. Section eight
(Class Designations and Class Labels) adds some further elements to
this analysis, by discussing the several terms used to describe the two
opposing political classes in which the Athenian citizen body was
divided. As expected from the partial author's perspective, the words
with a positive connotation are always applied to the members of his
own class (the oligoi), and the opposite to the demos.

The last three sections are devoted to other stylistic features of the
work, to its structure and finally to the facing Greek text. The
critical apparatus supplied in this edition is highly selective and
aims at including mainly different readings of the text, especially
when it differs from that of Bowersock.[[1]] Before beginning the
treatise, M&R present a very useful conspectus of the dates assigned to
it by different scholars (pp. 31-32) and a Select Bibliography (pp.
33-34) of twenty four titles, with a section on Xenophon, another on
the 'Constitution of the Athenians', and Rhodes' commentary on the
Aristotelian 'Athenaion Politeia'.[[2]] Some readers will perhaps miss
a more extensive list; certainly other works could easily be suggested.
On the other hand, throughout the commentary many other studies are
mentioned and considered, some of which discuss the treatise directly
(e.g. p. 78, on Bechtle). This clearly shows that the first intention
of M&R has been to provide a guiding select bibliography, and the works
indicated by them are in fact important.

As already remarked, the English translation is easily readable; indeed
it is so elegant that the immature style of the author is concealed.
However, the most important and certainly most useful part of this book
is the extensive (pp. 59-168) commentary provided by M&R. The
perspective adopted is mainly historical and political, although there
are also frequent philological and stylistic comments. M&R have
pertinently chosen to direct their approach first to the treatise in
itself, second to comparison with other ancient testimonies and finally
to discussion of modern scholarship. It is a principle of the series in
which this volume was published that the lemmata in the commentary
refer to the English text of the translation and not to the original,
and this corresponds to M&R's pedagogic intentions. Even though a full
Greek text is provided, a very positive consequence of this option is
that the regular non-classicist reader is also capable of following the
commentary with no serious difficulties.

The volume includes in addition seven short appendixes (pp. 169-175).
These usefully complement the Introduction and further elucidate the
stylistic and ideological characterization of the author.

M&R's volume is not of course as monumental as Rhodes' commentary on
the Aristotelian 'Athenaion Politeia', nor could it be, because the
Greek original treatise now analysed is not comparable in importance to
that fourth-century work. At any rate, it should be asserted that M&R's
book has all the qualities necessary to become a standard work of
reference among the studies that deal with the 'Old Oligarch'--and it
is also fair to recognise that it will not be easy to improve on it.

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Notes:


1.   Bowersock, G. W., 'Constitution of the Athenians', in reissue of
Xenophon, vol. vii. Scripta Minora [text and translation] (Loeb.
London: Heinemann / Harvard UP, 1968), 459-507 and 515.

2.   Rhodes, P. J., A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion
Politeia. (OUP, 1981; reiussed with addenda 1993).