Abstract
That there were at least two modes of persuading, with words and with gifts, in classical Athens has widely been accepted since Buxton(1982). It should be noted, as Harvey has suggested(1985), that neither mode was necessarily considered more improper than the other : monetary persuasion, expressed as χρημασι(δωροι&b.sigmav;, δου&b.sigmav; χρηματα etc.) πειθειν, coexisted with verbal, for which λογοι&b.sigmav; πειθειν was the usual phrase. In this paper the author's principal aim is to examine how and by which mode the Athenian citizens could be persuaded by their leaders under the regime of democracy, and to show what kind of social values underlay each of the two modes of persuading. Persuasion with gifts including bribes, mainly used in more or less private spheres, was firmly rooted in the traditional and rather aristocratic values according to which reciprocity should play an essential role in forming social relationships, whereas persuasion with words-and rhetoric-, normally employed in public speeches before a large body of citizens, i. e., assembly, council or popular court, was underpinned by a new, democratic ideology. The author attempts to argue that there can be observed a shift from the former toward the latter mode of persuasion in the course of the development of Athenian Democracy during the fifth century B. C, where three politicians are relevant : Miltiades, Cimon and Pericles. Miltiades, the victorious general at Marathon, and his son Cimon both represented the traditional norms concerning reciprocity, exercising their leaderships characteristically by means of persuasion with gifts : Miltiades promised the Athenian citizens 'to make them rich if they followed him' (Hdt. VI 132) , thus offering a gift in the future, when he persuaded them into setting out on an expedition against Paros in an assembly in 489 ; Cimon could likewise obtain much support from them and be elected general many times in the 470s and 460s only by lavishly expending his funds in giving his private patronage to the lower-class people. Persuading the demos with gift, however, was crucially checked by Pericles, who was well conscious of the power of oratory and fully exploited it as a political weapon to persuade the demos ; furthermore, he drove a wedge into the tradition of the political culture based on the reciprocity principle, himself adopting an extremely incorruptible life-style as a politician, for which he was praised by Thucydides as 'αδωροτατο&b.sigmav;'(II 65,8). It is also worth noting that there is much evidence that a system of accountability to detect and prosecute financial crimes including bribery was remarkably evolved under Pericles' leadership by the third quarter of the fifth century. The development of Athenian Democracy, therefore, can be described in a way as a process of conflict between the two opposing attitudes toward reciprocity, old and new, which eventually caused an inevitable change from persuasion with gift to that with words as a means of moving the demos in the symbouleutic and jurisdictional bodies : persuasion by words and rhetoric, not by gift and wealth, was more suited to the democratic principle that all male citizens were equally allowed to participate in the government regardless of the amount of their property.
