Abstract
When searching for the distant origins of population doctrines, after the inevitable reference to the Bible (“Go forth and multiply”), most books on the history of demographic thought and a number of textbooks devote a few lines or at most a few pages to ancient China (Confucius, Lao Tseu) and to the ancient Greek thinkers.1 In the case of Plato (428–347 B.C.), this quest for origins is supposedly justified by reflections on the “demography” of the ideal City. In Laws, his last dialogue, Plato specified the size of the City and more precisely the number of its citizens: it should be equal to 5,040 and remain constant. Towards this end, Plato suggested various ways of ensuring stationarity. These indications, especially the number 5040, have been interpreted as constitutive elements of a Platonic doctrine of population, and Plato has thus been hailed as one of the “precursors” of demography.2
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Notes
- 1.
A notable exception is Kraeger’s article on Aristotle (2008).
- 2.
A shorter version of this chapter was published in Population.
- 3.
The references to Plato’s dialogues have been included in the main text, and follow the Estienne system which is conventionally used.
- 4.
- 5.
1958: 142 (Citation from the 1827 edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population).
- 6.
1966: 22–23 and 25.
- 7.
1967: 11–13.
- 8.
1974: 24.
- 9.
1995: 12–15.
- 10.
Vilquin (1982: 1, 2–4, 5, 12, 14).
- 11.
As Cawkwell (1993) convincingly argued.
- 12.
- 13.
Jones (1955: 149).
- 14.
- 15.
Laws, 739d–e :“[the real City] took it as a model and tries to resemble it as far as possible”.
- 16.
- 17.
On this point, see Castel-Bouchouchi (2000; particularly 27, 30–31).
- 18.
On Clisthenes, see Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet (1984). Cylon, a young aristocrat, had tried to seize the Acropolis in 630 B.C. The archon (supreme judge in Athens) Megacles appealed to the people to remove Cylon and his accomplices. They were put to death in the sacred enclosure, however, an event that brought curse and exile upon Megacles and his family the Alcmaeonidae. This great family then reinforced its alliance with the people of Athens and the populations of the coastal villages. It also developed a policy of international alliances, particularly with Delphi. From 560 onwards, Clisthenes’s grandfather opposed the tyrant Pisistratus, head of the second of the three families that competed for power in fifth century Athens. After his death in 528, his two sons proclaimed themselves tyrants in turn. In 510, Clisthenes, the new leader of the Alcmaeonidae, was finally able to return from exile and seize power with the help of the king of Sparta. Such were the bitterness and temporal depth of political struggles between aristocratic families.
- 19.
The reference to the goddess Hestia is very significant. Hestia was the goddess of the domestic hearth, sacred in nature. This was where a welcome stranger was led, where sacrifices to the gods were performed. Hestia koiné, the communal hearth, possessed a sacred character that was symmetrical to that of the domestic household. On Hestia, see the three studies by Vernant (1991; particularly: 47, 76–83, 199–201, 206–207).
- 20.
Vernant (1991: 209–210) and Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet (1984, passim). Vernant (1991: 209–210) offers a second interpretation: “Perhaps there existed since the beginning of the sixth century a system of arcophonic numbering – conventionally called herodian – with a manifest decimal and quintal character. The use of this system may well have corresponded to a large extent to the diffusion of money and the need for a written system of accounting. Clisthenes’s preference for five and ten would then be explained quite naturally: the Athenian statesman uses the numbering system that writing has already imposed in the public sphere and that is opposed to the duodecimal system by its use in daily life and its secular nature.” Naturally this does not rule out the decision to break with the past, quite the contrary.
- 21.
Solon had been elected archon in 594 B.C. His reforms had consisted in suppressing the peasants’ debts and freeing citizens who had been reduced to slavery because of their insolvency. But he had not attempted to modify the unequal distribution of land. Tradition also credits him with organizing the citizens into four property classes and making these the basis of political rights. On the political and social dimensions of his reform, see French, 1956.
- 22.
On the inequality in socio-religious and political functions, Solon and the impact of Clisthenes’s reforms, and the functioning of democracy in Athens, see Mossé (1999: 21, 43, 75, 84–85, 114–119; 197: 1–61). Orrieux and Schmitt-Pantel (1995) are precise and well informed. Finley (1962) offers a stimulating analysis of the Athenian demagogues, especially with regard to the circumstances they encountered when exercising their political role.
- 23.
- 24.
For a discussion of time in Laws as compared to Republic, Timaeus or Critias see Balaudé (2000).
- 25.
Timarchy is a government in which the duties and rights of everyone (participation in the courts, in the assembly, religious functions, military service) depend on the taxes he pays (hence the name of “government of propertied classes”). Plato was opposed to it because it linked political power too closely to honorary offices.
- 26.
Three cities of Sicily had appealed to Athens to free them from the hegemony of Syracuse. Alcibiades led the expedition. Most of the 40,000 men who participated perished. Alcibiades abandoned his command and took refuge in Sparta, in order to avoid appearing before the judges.
- 27.
As quoted by Thucydides, Peloponnesian War, Book II, 38.
- 28.
Popper (1966: 43; 224–225, note 29; 278, note 48; 297, note 18).
- 29.
Redfield (2000: 236–241) and Cambiano (2000: 160–161). On this point see Pradeau (1997: 29–30). Women’s capacity for being guardians of the City: Republic, 452a, 455c. More generally, women may exercise the same activities as men (454–457). Community of women and children: 457c–d, 451a–d. The parallel drawn by Saxonhouse (1976) between the woman and the philosopher in Plato’s political theory is unpersuasive. She apparently conflates the female and the philosopher (1976: 202, 206), on the grounds that weaving is a female duty (208) and that the philosopher is the “royal weaver”, who should be the ruler of the city, (Politicus, 308e). In her reading of Book 6 she completely misses the purely allegorical dimension conveyed by the image of the “royal weaver”, who unites individuals in a common social fabric. Her whole argument of an alleged contradiction between Book 5 “The female de-sexed” and Book 6 “The sexual female” of Republic rests upon her misreading of Book 6. For a more serious analysis of the position of women in Athenian society, see Mossé (1999: 28–40).
- 30.
- 31.
For example Wahl: “Is the subject of the Republic moral or political? Is it justice or the ideal State? Such a distinction does not exist for Plato. Ethics and politics are founded at the same time” (1969: 492).
- 32.
- 33.
The formula is that of Balaudé.
- 34.
As Vernant (1991: 167) put it, “What characterises philosophy is that it substitutes an appropriate intellectual training, a mental drill that stresses a discipline of memory, as in the poetical melete, for ritual observance (practiced in the Pythagorean religious sects) and for military exercise.”
- 35.
- 36.
Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet (1984: 146).
- 37.
On debts and the issue of landed property, see Finley (1953).
- 38.
See Vidal-Naquet: “The city whose foundations are described in the Republic is the paradigm which inspired the constitution of primitive Athens; the history of Atlantis, of its empire and of the final catastrophe in which it disappeared are thus determined in relation to the fixed point constituted by the City” (1990: 148).
- 39.
On the relationship between the circular form of the City and the cosmological spherical representation invented by the first Ionian thinkers, Anaximander and Anaximenes, and on the links with the exercise of politics on the agora, see Vernant (1991: 194). On how archaic Athens corresponds to our present archeological knowledge, see Brooner (1949).
- 40.
For a brief but penetrating discussion of how self-sufficiency was understood by Aristotle and Plato, see Wheeler (1955: 416–417). Plato refers at length to the fact that water was abundant there (111b, 112d), much more than today, he specifies. It is however unlikely that, as asserted by Pradeau (1997: 83, note 1), the chronic paucity of water from which Athens suffered had inspired in Plato the idea of restraining the population number to 5,040.
- 41.
On irrigation works, see Vidal-Naquet (1990: 155): “The oriental king appeared to Greek eyes as the lord of water.”
- 42.
For a discussion of Athenian imperialism and how Athens used the league of Delos for her own benefit, see for instance Starr (1988).
- 43.
Peloponnesian War, Book VIII, 66, 3.
- 44.
- 45.
“Le mythe hésiodique des races. Essai d’analyse structurale”, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet (1991: 13–43; particularly 13–17, 21, 34, 35 and 39).
- 46.
- 47.
Vernant (1991: 218).
- 48.
Vilquin (1982: 8, 17–18).
- 49.
This statement is exaggerated. For Plato, change was acceptable when it respected hierarchies, particularly social ones.
- 50.
Popper (1966). Supreme interest of the City: 89, 106, 138; leadership: 103; social conservatism: 89, 107; theory of sovereignty, construction of politics and education: 125–127, 166; selection of leaders: 133.
- 51.
1969: 23.
- 52.
Cf. Popper (1966: 136, note 25).
- 53.
Châtelet (197: 72–73). Or in Pradeau’s words: “Plato’s dialogues […] always reveal and evoke the same exemplar of a perfect arrangement of the body: the heaven”, the word “kosmos designates order as well as the world, precisely because it is well-ordered” (1997: 79–81).
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Charbit, Y. (2011). History and Utopia. In: The Classical Foundations of Population Thought. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9298-4_2
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