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CHAPTER 5 Aristocracy, Aristocratic Culture, and the Symposium

       Marek Węcowski

      What, in this chapter, is meant by aristocratic culture goes far beyond the traditional scholarly focus on aristocratic ideals, aristocratic artistic patronage, and aristocratic lifestyle in all its main manifestations. Instead, it is related to a more general notion of archaic and early classical Greek culture I will try to substantiate.¹ In a nutshell, I will argue that due to its universal appeal, aristocratic culture of the archaic period was a main integrative force of early Greek civilization—in both its social and its geographical dimension. Accordingly, Greek aristocracy was above all a cultural phenomenon. Meanwhile, we must start with definitions, since the very title of this essay is no longer self-explanatory.

      Defining Aristocracy

In recent scholarship, both the idea of the aristocratic symposium and the notion of Greek aristocracy have been challenged.² In their fine introduction to the collective volume on “Aristocracy” in Antiquity. Redefining Greek and Roman Elites, Nick Fisher and Hans van Wees suggest that “‘aristocracy’ is only rarely a helpful concept for the analysis of political struggles and historical developments or of ideological divisions and contested discourses in literary and material cultures in the ancient world” (Fisher and van Wees 2015: 1). In their own words, Fisher’s and van Wees’ suggestion was conceived in reaction to two fundamental errors of earlier scholarship, both resulting from excessive scholarly reliance on the claims of ancient aristocratic ideology. “In modern scholarship, these claims are often translated into a belief that a hereditary ‘aristocratic’ class is identifiable at most times and places in the ancient world […] and that deep ideological divisions existed between ‘aristocratic values’ and the norms and ideals of lower or ‘middling’ classes” (p. 1). When put in very general terms, these remarks are hardly controversial.³ Van Wees and Fisher persuasively argue that “the political and economic preconditions for the creation of hereditary aristocracies of the medieval and early modern European type (strong royal authority, stable transmission of wealth) did not exist in most parts of the ancient world, and we have much less evidence than we used to imagine for the importance of hereditary status and privilege in general and for the existence of closed hereditary elites in particular.” If anything, “[a]rguably the Bacchiadai in Corinth and the patricians [in Rome] at their most ‘closed’ are the only elites that deserve this label […]” (both quotes at p. 7).

      Consequently, H. van Wees and N. Fisher praise an approach that seems more and more common in current scholarship. This approach is well represented by Alain Duplouy, who banished “aristocracy” and “aristocrats” from his ground-breaking book (Duplouy 2006). Instead, he tried to conceive a “behavioral definition” of aristocracy studying diverse mechanisms of “social recognition” of those aspiring to, or enjoying, elite status. His work focuses rather on the activities and strategies adopted in order to achieve their aim by individuals who were in constant need of negotiating or confirming their “prestige.” In their introduction, van Wees and Fisher have recourse to the notion of “leisure class” (adapted from the classical sociological theory of Veblen 1899) to denote those who not only objectively belonged to propertied social groups, but also adopted a particularly ostentatious lifestyle.

      The conclusions reached by H. van Wees and N. Fisher look entirely logical in the light of modern definitions of aristocracy that universally emphasize—with some minor variations—the hereditary nature and a high degree of exclusivity of such groups alongside their high material status (cf. van Wees and Fisher 2015: 1–2). The problem, however, lies less in our inability to find such “closed hereditary elites” in the archaic period than in the fact that these very definitions miss the point when applied to the historical realities of the archaic Greek world. To prove this, it is enough to point out that such definitions excellently fit the entire citizenry of a given political community in this period.

      Before the rise of the first Greek democratic regimes and the concomitant enlargement of the citizen-body in Athens and elsewhere to include those, who did not own landed property (i.e., thētes, or poor free men working as hired laborers), the strictly hereditary group enjoying absolute exclusivity was no less than citizens at large. One must have been born into a family of citizen descent to be a citizen and only citizens had access to political rights, however we define them in each particular case. What is more, the civic status was obviously based on (relatively) substantial wealth, since the right to the ownership of land was limited to citizens only. I submit we should, and I am confident the archaic Greeks themselves most certainly did, view all the citizens of the archaic period as self-conscious elites of their own communities—hereditary, closed and privileged at the expense of all other inhabitants of their land. But can all citizens, following our contemporary definitions of “aristocracy,” be called aristocrats? Obviously not! And this is why, I would argue, we should look for other definitions rather than agree on the non-existence of the aristocracy in the archaic Greek world.

The definitions that provided the starting point for van Wees’ and Fisher’s analyses (Shorter Oxford Dictionary online; Oxford English Dictionary, definition 5) share a common weakness in that they systematically blend the notion of “aristocracy” with that of “nobility,” using both terms interchangeably. This is of course understandable given the British political tradition, but in many European countries the (so-called “titled”) aristocracy will historically stand out as a more or less exiguous “super-elite” of a broader social order of “nobility.” It so happens that the notions of heredity (of noble birth) and exclusivity (of political status), which feature

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