Accountability is a major issue in modern democracies. This well-written and closely argued book is aimed primarily at political theorists, but it offers much of interest for Greek historians and classical philosophers. Matthew Landauer’s thesis is, first, that Greeks thought of the tyrant and the demos (in a democracy) as similarly unaccountable rulers and, next, that those rulers depended on accountable counsellors for advice. Landauer employs the ordinary contemporary meaning of ‘accountable’, as being expected to give reasons for one’s words or deeds and being held responsible, and potentially blamed and/or punished, for them. He notes that Athenian procedures for holding individuals accountable were remarkable in their scope and intensity: like magistrates, proposers of legislation were legally accountable. The book traces the asymmetry of power and risk between rulers, accountable to no one, and the counsellor, who must offer reasons for his recommendation and risked being punished by those he advised. Landauer asks how the asymmetry could have been justified by the Athenian demos. The question arises, however: justified to whom? In modern democracies lawmakers are, in principle, accountable to the citizenry, who can, via elections, ‘throw the bums out’. In Athens, the citizens themselves were the lawmakers and, as dikastai, legal judges of advisers. Notably, while hupeuthunos was a common Greek term for ‘accountable person’, there was no equivalent Greek term for the abstraction ‘accountability’.
Advisers were held to account by rulers, individual and collective. Landauer cites, as a limit case, the bouleutēs (‘counsellor’) Lycides, stoned to death (along with his family) by his fellow Athenians for advising surrender to Persia. Ordinarily, however, speakers who proposed legislation in the Athenian assembly were punished either informally, by loss of reputation and influence, or by formal legal process. So, unlike counsellors to tyrants, Athenian advisers worked within established norms and procedural rules and they took their chances accordingly. The degree of adviser/ruler asymmetry is, as Landauer notes with reference to the Sicilian expedition, limited, when we think of accountability as liability to suffering: counsel could be dangerous to the advised as well as to advisers. Tyrants, like most modern lawmakers, might insulate their persons from the worst effects of bad policy choices. But Athenian citizens risked suffering (in some cases, as in Sicily, terribly) when they followed advice about policies involving mortal risks. Accountable advisers, at risk of punishment, had incentives to reveal the potential costs as well as potential benefits of their policies. Moreover, asymmetric power was counterbalanced by asymmetric reward: the accountable counsellor gave advice in anticipation not only of possible costs to himself, but also of benefits. Successful advisers were amply rewarded, materially and with honours. The ruler might be rewarded with flattery but, as Landauer points out, flattery was dangerous when rulers came to overestimate their capacities.
The book’s chapters can be read as stand-alone essays, but form a coherent whole: chapter 1 concerns accountability and unaccountability in democratic Athens, as noted above. Chapter 2 turns to the unaccountable tyrant, noting the association between tyrants and the Athenian demos in Aristophanes and in Xenophon’s narrative of the affair of the Arginousai generals. Chapter 3 argues that Herodotus portrays power asymmetries between advisers and rulers as even more politically salient than the distinction between freedom and slavery. Chapter 4 centres on the Mytilenean Debate in Thucydides: Cleon emphasizes the irresponsibility of advisers and the fecklessness of the demos that neglects to punish them; Diodotus by contrast urges moderation in calling advisers to account and emphasizes that the demos is not accountable for its decisions. Chapter 5 considers parrhēsia (‘freedom of speech’) across regime types, showing that frank speech is not uniquely associated with democracy. Chapter 6 addresses expert advice in Plato’s Gorgias, arguing that Plato subverts the positions both of Gorgias, Polus and Callicles (the orator is powerful in being able to get whatever he wants) and of Socrates (the orator is controlled by the powerful demos). Landauer rightly points out that, for Plato, neither orators nor demos were truly powerful in that neither knew nor, consequently, aimed at what is truly beneficial to themselves. He also argues, Ithink less convincingly, that Plato had a practical purpose: helping the Athenian demos to learn from its errors and teaching non-philosophical readers to moderate their desire for power. Landauer’s Plato, then, shares with other Greek writers an ‘insistence on a kind of political realism’ (184–85). Plato certainly does insist on a certain psychological realism, in taking self-interest and strategic behaviour as given, but his political philosophy seems to me to be fundamentally critical on the one hand and idealizing on the other.
Whatever quibbles classical historians or philosophers might have with specific arguments, Dangerous Counsel does a great service by demonstrating how reading classical texts in the light of a salient modern political concept highlights neglected features of the texts and contributes to democratic theory.
