TY - JOUR TI - Rise of the demagogues DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3QZ2FCB PY - 2018 AB - This dissertation explores the phenomenon of ‘demagogues’ in Classical Athens both through the Greek term dēmagōgos (and its cognates) and through scholarly theories about the evolution of political leadership during the Athenian democracy. An analysis of the usage of dēmagōgos by ancient sources reveals that it initially lacked the pejorative sense of the modern ‘demagogue’, instead serving as a neutral descriptive term to indicate a citizen whose political activity consists (at least in part) in providing policy advice to the assembly of voting citizens in its capacity as the ultimate decision-making body in the democracy. By its etymology and its function dēmagōgos affirmed the power of the mass of citizens in the democracy (and thence democracy itself), as well as highlighting the removal of the privilege of state leadership from the private preserve of a limited, self-defining group of established elite families. The members of this group, and later more broadly the ideological opponents of democracy, appropriated dēmagōgos to use as a pejorative term for a bad leader, colored by an implicit or explicit belief that the dēmos, the mass of citizens, were unworthy of the role of decision-making and incapable of fulfilling that role competently. Modern scholarship, drawing on the antagonistic assimilation of demagogues to the mass of non-elite citizens given a greater political voice in democracy and influenced by an overly literal and generalizing reading of the abuse of certain demagogues in the plays of Old Comedy, has posited that demagogues were men of self-made wealth who used (or misused) rhetorical training and the promise of their financial competence to influence citizens in the assembly and courts without undergoing the traditional steps for building a political career. This dissertation endeavors to promote a nascent reaction to that line of thought, demonstrating that we lack evidence for demagogues making appeals to the citizen body in any capacity on the basis of financial expertise, and that there is no reason to conclude that the process of building a political career at Athens was substantively less involved at the end of the fifth century than at its beginning. The Old Comic depiction of demagogues is also analyzed in detail, with the findings pointing toward the existence of a generic set of areas or characteristics with respect to which a politician might be mocked; these characteristics were not based on a ‘right-wing’ bias in Old Comedy or a desire to reveal the ‘reality’ about targeted politicians, but rather they exploited the prejudices and anxieties of the audience of Athenian citizens more generally. Through Old Comedy it may be possible to discern Athenian preoccupations about contemporary demagogues, but care should be taken in assimilating those preoccupations to a rounded portrait of political leadership based in reality. KW - Classics KW - Athens (Greece)--History KW - Democracy LA - eng ER -