From the Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone, pages 206-207;
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| The Trial of Socrates, by I. F. Stone |
In the fifth century Athens, Peitho had developed into a civic goddess of
democracy, a symbol of the transition to rule by popular consent and consensus, achieved by debate and persuasion.
Her political stature was reflected in the Athenian theater. "The unique character of Attic poetry,"
C.M. Bowra wrote, came "from the Athenian democracy itself. Tragedy was performed with religious solemnity
. . . before a vast, critical amazingly intelligent audience. Such a performance was, in every sense a public event.
In their personification of Peitho as a civic goddess of Persuasion, the
Athenians recast not only their religion but their mythology and history to suit the ideas of fifth-century democracy.
They even claimed according to that most famous of ancient travelers, Pausanias, that the cult of Persuasion was
first instituted by Theseus, the mythical first king of Athens. This venerable genealogy was, of course, quite
unhistorical.
Perhaps the most striking references to Peitho in Attic theater are the
Frogs of Aristophenes
in 405 B.C., six years before the trial of Socrates. In that comedy, Aristophanes staged a debate between Aeschylus
and Euripides in Hades. Euripides and Aeschylus (playwriters) hurl one-line quotations at each other about Persuasion
from their plays, some now lost. These must have been familiar or the points made would not have been appreciated
by the audience.
Euripides begins with a line from a lost play he wrote about Antigone.
In it Persuasion is associated with logos, reasoned speech. Euripides says that Persuasion needs no shrine except logos and adds that her "alter
is in the nature of man."
Aeschylus counters Euripides with a quotation from a lost play of his
own, the Niobe, in which he said that death alone is impervious to Persuasion. Even Aristophanes who jokes about
everything and makes Dionysus himself the butt of the coarsest humor in the same play, makes no jokes about Persuasion.
That must have been the most extraordinary tribute of all to Peitho.
A generation later the two greatest masters of fourth-century oratory
- Demosthenes and Isocrates - also list Peitho among the "gods of the city " and refer to annual sacrifices
in her honor. There was a stature of her near the Acropolis and an ancient inscription tells us that here priestess
had a special seat of honor in the Temple of Dionysus. She was commemorated in sculptures by Praxiteles and Pheidias.
It could be significant that there is no reference to Peitho as a divinity anywhere in Xenophon or in Plato. They
could hardly have venerated a civic goddess of the democracy they rejected. The Platonic contempt for persuasion
and oratory as practiced in a democratic polity is summed up by Phaedrus in the dialogue that bears his name, "I
have heard," he says, "that one who is to be an orator does not need to know what is really just, but
what would seem just to the multitude who are to pass judgment, and not what is really good or noble, but what
will seem to be so," and he adds sardonically that "persuasion comes from what seems to be true, not
from the truth." Of course oratory can be misleading as well as enlightening. the same is true of Philosophy
itself. Else why would philosophers so often - and so bitterly - disagree? But what better way to winnow out the
truth than by free debate?
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| Peitho - The Civic Goddess of Democracy |
How effectively the cult of Peitho - and of the Zeus of the assembly - could
have been invoked by Socrates in his own defense. To punish a philosopher for his opinions was no way to honor
the goddess of Persuasion or the Zeus who symbolized and fostered free debate in the assembly. These "gods
of the city," if appealed to, could have protected Socrates, too.
The Zeus Agoraios was the tutelary divinity which stood in the agora, the assembly, where the
ultimate decisions of government were made. The political significance of this tribute by Athena to the Zeus Agoraios
has often been lost in translation. It is sometimes rendered as the Zeus of the marketplace. An example turns up
- I am sorry to say - in Gilbert Murray's Oresteia. There it is translated "Zeus, whose Word is in the Mart, prevailed."
But the final victory in the Oresteia had nothing to do with the marketplace. It had to do with the agora as the place of assembly.
The LSJ lexicon describes the Zeus Agoraios as the "guardian of popular assemblies." The political inference
is also supported by Farnell in his Cults of the Greek States,
where he says that the Zeus Agoraios was "the god who resided
over assemblies and trials; it was he who, according to Aeschylus, awarded victory to Orestes in his trial for
matricide.
The earliest reference to a Zeus Agoraios is in Herodotus, where a despot
was slain by his rebellious people even though he took refuge at the altar of Zeus Agoraios, no doubt in the belief
that they would not violate the sanctity of a god who symbolized the freedoms he himself had violated. Agora, of course, can mean either
assembly or marketplace. But even if Homer it already meant place of assembly or trial. The word took on the meaning
of marketplace later, presumable as a market grew up around the place of assembly. Similarly there developed two
different kinds of gods termed agoraios. But the god of the assembly was a Zeus, the god of the marketplace was a Hermes. The same
distinction is drawn in Chantraine's Dictionmaire etymologique
de la langue grecque.
Athens also had a Zeus Boulaios as the tutelary divinity of its boule or council. According to
Pausanias, this was flanked by two other statues, one of Apollo, and the other of Demos or the People, perhaps as a reminder of where the final authority lay. Today in
the colonade of the Agora Museum in Athens there is a relief showing Democracy crowning Demos - an elderly bearded
man seated on a throne. Under the Relief is the text of an inscription dated 336 B.C., which safeguards the rights
of the people against tyranny.
there are two other passages in Pausanias about a deified Demos in Attica.
One reference describes statues of "a Zeus and a Demos" side by side. The other passage also refers to
a statue of Democracy itself. Was democracy at one time also personified as a civic goddess in Athens?
Neither Frazer's Golden
Bough nor Roescher's ausfuehrliches"
- and it is indeed "detailed" - German Lexicon of Greek and Roman Mythology mentions
such a cult. But the leine Pauly under
Demokratia says
that in the latter half of the fourth century at least Democracy was deified in Athens and that its priest had
a seat of honor in the theater of Dionysus next to the priest of Demos.
REFERENCES:
E pluribus unum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Retrieved
October 25, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum
Stone, I. (1992). The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues (Dover
Thrift Editions). New York: Dover Publications.
The U.S. National Mottos: Their history & constitutionality . (n.d.).
Retrieved October 24, 2009, from http://www.religioustolerance.org/nat_mott.htm
