How to Create a Demos

Emphatic Exordium

The concept of a ‘people’ is a distinctly weird one. Everything about it seems tendentious and unclear; even grammatically, the expression “a people” appears to teeter uneasily between singular (“a person”) and plural (“people”). You can see then why it is a concept that has nearly fallen out of political discourse. It’s unlikely, for instance, that a real, serious-minded modern politician would be caught verbalising anything that explicitly invokes the ‘people’; it is even less likely that our current local political bantamweights (Shorten, Abbott, Di Natale, et cetera ad nauseam) would dare to even suggest that something called ‘the people’ exists, except perhaps as a slightly grandiloquent way of referring to something quantifiable, like ‘the electorate’ or ‘the average battler.’ Admittedly, there are some very good reasons for this. A brief look at the rather chequered history of ‘the people’[1] is enough to see why it’s so unsurprising that the concept has fallen by the politico-discursive wayside. However, notions of the people, and especially the people as a dēmos, are crucial to our understanding of democracy. The word ‘democracy,’ as we are all taught at one stage or another,[2] is formed by the combination of the Greek word kratos (‘power’) with the word dēmos (‘people’). However, this is a naive understanding of what dēmokratia truly meant to the Ancient Greeks. It obviously depends heavily for its meaning on what one understands by ‘a people,’ and as we have outlined above, this is in no way easy to ascertain. Moreover, dēmos is not the only possible word in ancient Greek for the ambiguous thing we call a people. The Greeks had many words that could all be potentially translated in this way, all of which had different overtones and connotations. In order to discover what we mean by dēmos, and thus, I think, what we mean by democracy, I have sketched out some of the ideas the Ancient Greeks had about what ‘the people’ could be.

A few caveats before launching off: all translations are mine, and have been done in order to bring out specific connotations of the words in question. It would be worth referencing them against more literal translations found elsewhere. Every time a word under question has been translated, the English word corresponding to it has been underlined. Additionally, Greek has a long and complex literary history; these words do not have totally fixed and stable meanings. They are constantly being re-appropriated and re-interpreted, and so my attempts to demonstrate certain differences in connotation between them should not be taken as rigid and well-defined conceptual distinctions upheld by all Greeks at all times. Rather, I have attempted just to limn certain fine differentiations of meaning that certain authors impart to these words, and to do so in a way that is useful to us, here, now.

Τὸ Γένος (Genos)

One possible translation of the word “people” into Greek would be genos (τὸ γένος).The word in Greek has a complex set of resonances, but they centre around notions of ancestry, race, and lineage. This can be seen clearly enough in the English words that are derived from the word genos and its cognates: genus, genealogy, genocide, etc. However, the Greek concept is more complex than that, as it is enclosed within the horizon of a foreign culture. Perhaps the only way to come to grips with it is by closely and carefully reading through the way it is used in the primary sources written by native speakers who are thoroughly enmeshed in the Greek culture. The best way to do this would be to carefully examine each of the several thousand instances it occurs in the historical record and see what they add up to. However, for reasons of time, space, patience and ability,[3] I won’t do that. One telling example will have to do. There is one particular passage from Book VI of the Iliad that springs to mind.

The context of this passage is crucial to understanding the complex play of notions of genos. Book VI opens in the middle of a pitched battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, and the Greeks most definitely have the upper hand. A warrior named Diomedes, in particular, has been filled with courage and skill by the goddess Athena, and is cutting a swathe through the Trojan fighters.[4] Diomedes is so ferocious, in fact, that the Trojans lose their nerve, and begin to refuse to fight him. It is at this point, however, that a young warrior steps forward to challenge him.[5] Diomedes pauses, and gives this man a rather blood-chilling warning, telling him that he (Diomedes) is going to kill him, but before he kills him, he would like to know the stranger’s name and what family he belongs to, as he does not recognise him. Unbeknownst to Diomedes, the stranger (whose name is Glaucus) belongs to a family that has always been close friends with Diomedes’ family; they are as closely related by family friendship as they would be if they were brothers. When he finds this out, Diomedes is shocked; he sets aside his spear, and the two soldiers promise to avoid each other in the fighting so they will not again run the risk of killing each other, and promise to visit each other as guests when the war is finally over.

Before this, however, when Glaucus is still unknown and everything points to him being killed very shortly by Diomedes, there is a moment that is as achingly beautiful as it is interesting for our purposes:

“The young son of Hippolochus then spoke, and said:

“Proud son of Tydeus, why ask about my ancestry?

The families of men are no different to those of leaves;

The wind comes and scatters them, but when

Spring comes, the tree will grow again and flourish.

With the generations of men too: we die only to be born anew.”[6]

This passage represents a highly sophisticated manipulation of the Greek concept of genos by Homer. It is immediately noticeable that he calls the warriors by their patronymics. Although this is a standard formula in Homer (‘x, the son of y’), in this particular passage it is deployed in order to achieve an unusually poignant effect. Although the context of this entire passage is dedicated to the characters (Diomedes and Glaucus) attempting to ascertain a genealogy, the poet in effect prefaces this discussion by giving us (the audience) knowledge of their (the characters’) lineage. There is a clear point to this: a man’s genos, in Homer, is the way in which he is identified. A man, in a certain sense, literally is his genos. A man is who his father was, and who his father’s father was, and so on. The warriors in the Iliad have not come to the battlefield at Troy alone; they bring with them their families, at least in spirit, and their ancestors live and breathe only through them, as their reputations rise and fall according to how they conduct themselves as soldiers. The warriors at Troy fight explicitly as sons, brothers, and husbands; when they fight, they do so only as representatives of a specific lineage, tribe or clan. Thus, when Glaucus denies that his genos is important, he is in a way attempting to efface himself altogether, to withdraw his own proper self from the combat and thus deny Diomedes the possibility of a complete victory before the fight has even begun. However, the fact that Homer signals Glaucus’ genos, despite his apparent refusal to reveal it to Diomedes, lends the full emotional weight of genea[7] to the imminent combat. We are suddenly filled with horror at the prospect that Diomedes will unknowingly kill someone so intimately bound up in his own genos.

There is also a certain irony in Glaucus’ claim that his genos is irrelevant which hinges on the complexity of what genos means. Genos is both specific to an individual, and a more general notion of family or generations, and it is in the name of this broader conception of genos that Glaucus denies the importance of his own unique and individual genealogy. His own genos is unimportant, he claims, because it is in the nature of genea that one’s own genos will only ever be an infinitesimally small and brief moment in an ineluctable process – but of course the only name Glaucus has for this process is also genos. One’s genos is irrelevant because of the very immensity of what genos is. This broader notion of genos, indeed, is not bound by the limits of the human, as Glaucus makes clear. It is the process of life. The leaves of a tree pass through generations; all forms of life grow, blossom, and wither away according to their own rhythms. The queen bee dies as her young daughters take flight; the birds in the field fly south as the cold Greek winter begins to gather; men and women are born, they learn and grow tall and strong, they marry, they celebrate as their children come into the world, they mourn as their relatives die, they grow old and lean and frail, and pass away themselves. All of this, too, is genos.

Ο Λαός (Laos)

When you turn to the lexicon and look up a translation for ‘people,’ however, genos is not the only translation that it will suggest. An alternative to genos is the word laos (ὁ λαός), which is a word equally rich in meaning and connotation. Once more, the concept of laos is a crucial Homeric notion, and Homer once more plays upon its complex network of meanings as skilfully as if he were a virtuoso musician summoning up the full range of tones of which his instrument is capable. If genos, for the Greeks, is bound up in origins and family, laos carries with it associations of hierarchy and social order. Laos can be used to describe armies on the march, sailors aboard a ship, or farmers as they work the land and produce the food that will become the city-dweller’s daily fare. Laos is related to our (English) word ‘lay’ (as it is used in the expression ‘lay people’). This relation is a distant one, and this faint echo of the word laos is heard in English only after being filtered through the theological jargon of Church Latin. Thus the term ‘lay people,’ in English, carries a lot of specifically Catholic connotations that are not at all present in the pre-Christian Greek, and especially not in Homer.[8] Despite this, the expression ‘lay people’ is worth bearing in mind when hearing what Homer has to say about laos, however faint the echoes of that very old word are in our modern one.[9]

A laos is a group of people[10] united together by a common cause. They are almost always united together under some kind of powerful leader; the laos are contrasted with their leader in the same way that ‘lay people’ are always implicitly contrasted with ‘experts’ or ‘specialists.’ There is, however, no implication that the laos are unwilling to follow this leader or have been coerced into accepting the leader’s authority; rather, the laos have seized on a common cause with such passion that they willingly submit themselves to the authority of a single person or group of people in order to achieve the goal they have set themselves. The laos has bound itself to its commander in order to do what they need to do with the utmost efficiency. It has surrendered its will and made a contract with its commanders, so that both laos and leader can weld themselves into a single articulated unit, capable of much more than the sum of their respective abilities. Some things are only achievable with teamwork, and for the laos, teamwork cannot but imply a hierarchy. In the Iliad, the goal the laos impose on themselves is to win the war at Troy, and so the archetypal laos of the Iliad is the army. The armies of the Iliad are always intricately ordered and structured; they have commanders, generals and common soldiers; chariots and foot-soldiers; ranks, files, lines, formations, and above all, order. It is a commonplace belief that it is often only by submitting oneself to a greater goal that one discovers who one really is. Homer is aware of this when he has a councillor tell the king of the Greeks, Agamemnon, to divide his force into regiments and battalions lead by commanders. If Agamemnon tries to forge his dispirited army into a true laos, the counsellor advises, he will see how determined his army is in the war against Troy:

“When you divide them, depending on who obeys you

You will know for certain which of the people

And the commanders are wavering, and in the same stroke,

Which are resolute.”[11]

Based solely on this picture of laos, it would be understandable if you were beginning to hear something repressive, proto-fascistic even, in its connotations of individual submission in the name of martial group cohesion. However, this would be too hasty a judgement. The concept of laos is not exclusively militaristic. It applies anywhere where people must work together, both in peace and in war. In the Odyssey, Odysseus speaks about the great sea-voyage to Troy, and in doing so, he says:

“I equipped nine ships, and quickly mustered their crew.”[12]

In classical times, sailing a vessel on the open sea was a dangerous undertaking. It took great courage and preparation to dare to journey by sea, and it was a common and well-recognised fact that not all of the men who depart on such voyages would return home. In order to stand a chance of success, the men of a fleet must form themselves into a laos, committed to the goal of navigating the treacherous seas and returning to their homes safely. Most of Odysseus’ many troubles in his long sea-journey are the direct result of moments when his crew’s willingness to obey his authority faltered, and the laos formed by the men on-board dissolves into a motley crew of individuals, whose fractured set of competing wills and desires collapses into unmanageable confusion.[13] Close attention to a shared object of care is what is connoted by this use of laos, not anything militaristic. In fact, in a different context, laos is the word Aristophanes, the comic dramatist, uses to address a very different group of people, viz. the audience of a play.[14] This audience, like an army or a crew of a ship, are united in a common cause; this cause, however, is not to defeat an enemy or to overcome the dangerous ocean, but rather to enjoy the performance of a comedy. The Greek understanding of laos is therefore broad enough to be used of a people whose shared object of care is laughter, and the abandonment of care itself.

Ο Δήμος (Dēmos) 

Of course, in this context the notions of genos and laos are useful to us insofar as they illuminate, by means of contrast, exactly what the Greeks meant when they used the word dēmos. Genos has connotations of a natural, almost biological process; laos is a group of people when they all decide to pull together in the name of something greater than any one person. The word dēmos has neither of these overtones. A dēmos is political and self-reflexive in a way that neither a laos nor a genos is capable of being. The concept of a dēmos is (and always has been) at the heart of the complicated mode of conducting politics that we call democracy. It is important to note the difference between a truly democratic moment and other ways of organising a people. A genos can never be the basis of a democracy. Your family and your ethnic identity cannot be chosen; you necessarily possess a determinate lineage from the moment you are born. You are enmeshed in the history of a family and the culture of a people, and this belongs to you indelibly, regardless of whether you attempt to conform to or rebel against that inheritance. Likewise, there is little choice involved in a laos. The kind of common goal that a laos coheres around must always be forced upon it; only a task that is unavoidable and pressing can cause people to abandon their own individual projects and goals and submit themselves to a leader’s direction. By contrast to this, the very life-blood of a democracy is choice. A dēmos is the political unit by which people deal with uncertainty. A dēmos is what the people become, and must be, when they venture into the unknown.

Aeschylus’ tragedy, the Seven Against Thebes, is often held up alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as an example of the classical tradition of staging and examining the core problems of politics in the theatre. Aeschylus’ play centres on a dispute between the two sons of the king of Thebes over who is to inherit the throne. A civil war breaks out, and one prince (Polyneikes) is exiled from Thebes. He raises an army and leads it back against his brother (Eteokles), in effect besieging his own city. The brothers end up casting aside their close family ties[15] and fighting each other. Each brother kills the other in the ensuing duel, which only exacerbates the crisis of illegitimate government that has convulsed the city from the play’s opening lines. Typically, this plot is read in terms of what it demonstrates about the aristocratic politics that dominated Greece at the time; however, it is just as interesting when one follows the hints of a more popular, democratic politics that are scattered through the play like bread-crumbs in a dark forest, almost covertly. It is worth remembering that, although Aeschylus is writing a play set in the mythic, Homeric past, he is living in the middle of the brief but intense flowering of Athenian democracy,[16] which democracy was to lay the foundation for all subsequent democracies.

The dēmos is referred to twice in the body of the play. The first time the dēmos is mentioned, it is Eteocles who invokes it. His citizens, under siege and scared, are panicking, and the king must intervene to bring about order.

“If anyone fails to listen to my orders

Any man, woman, or indeed anything else,

A deadly vote will be cast against them,

And they will not be able to escape their fate:

To be stoned to death by the people.”[17]

The king invokes the people as the arbiters of justice, which is a strange thing for a king to do. It is the people, as a dēmos, who hold the power of assigning penalties and regulating their own affairs according to their own sense of justice. Eteocles realises that he cannot issue orders ex cathedra in such a time of panic and disorder; he does not have command of a laos. He must rely on the people to negotiate and navigate with uncertainty; in a democracy, the responsibility lies with the people to decide the fate of their citizens. Aristocratic duels have no currency here; it is only by voting, and thus entrusting yourself to the vote of your neighbours, that the difficult question of life and death can be decided. There is a nuance of the Greek that does not come through in the English; the word for a vote (psēphos) is the same word used for a pebble, which harmonises sinisterly with the ‘stoning’ referred to in the final line quoted. Votes are always radically uncertain, however: despite the royal injunction, the play does not refer to anyone who is actually sentenced to die by the dēmos.

The second reference to dēmos occurs toward the very end of the play. Eteocles and his brother are dead, and the city is left with no king, a grieving royal family, and a power vacuum. A messenger comes on-stage, and decrees what is to be done with the bodies of the dead princes: Eteocles is to be buried in a consecrated grave in the city, and Polyneikes’ body is to be left outside the city limits, unburied, to rot. It is the very first words of the messenger’s speech that capture our attention:

“I must announce the decrees and expectations

Of the council of citizens of this Cadmean city”[18]

It is here that the dēmos comes into its own.. The princes have killed each other, their sisters are stricken with grief, and the royal family more generally is paralysed with indecision. It is at this moment of uncertainty and danger that the dēmos emerges, and takes charge. As before, it is the dēmos that decides matters of justice; it is the only body capable of apportioning blame and praise, of resolving the business of life and death. The moment when the bonds of family breakdown and the traditional leaders are unable to inspire a sense of purpose, beyond genos and laos: this is the moment of democracy, of decision, of choice, of judgement. It is in this moment that the people make themselves heard, and that, I claim, is the moment in which they become a dēmos. The people gathered at the threshold of decision: that is what is meant when the Greeks say dēmos.

Hesitant Peroration

All of these Greek notions are bound up in our idea of a people, but it takes care and disciplined analysis to unpick them. In different circumstances, we need to think about who we are as a people differently; we must be clearly aware of the nuances of what a people can be. There are times in which we must acknowledge and celebrate our people as genos, and there are times in which the task lying before us is too important for us to approach it as anything but a laos. However, perhaps the title of this nascent journal, however it was chosen, indicates something important about where we are at the moment, as a people. Perhaps, with everything that confronts us now – climate change, political desertification, the erosion of the traditional university, the silting up of much contemporary culture – we are being presented with a situation very much like that which faced the people of Thebes at the end of the Seven. Perhaps this is what the democratic moment looks like, and so perhaps this is what is calling on us to remember this strange, ancient, and difficult word: dēmos.