Military Service and Political Participation in the Ancient World

“..[T]he question,” Fergus Millar writes, “of the relation between citizenship and active military service is fundamental” (CR 43 [1993]: 123). Yet relations between military service and political participation remain contested. Historians used to consider military service a privilege of citizenship, excluding non-citizens from participation (e.g. Westermann, Slave Systems [1955]: 16), but Hunt (Slaves, Warfare and Ideology [1998]) and van Wees (Greek Warfare [2004]) have made this viewpoint untenable. Others define military service as an obligation of citizenship (e.g. Hansen, Athenian Democracy [1991] 99-100). In democratic Athens, citizen avoidance of military service was not uncommon—the duty was there to be circumvented (Christ, Bad Citizen [2006]). Theories of duties and privileges fail to account for the often massive presence of non-citizens in the successful military organizations of the Ancient world. Hence the view that citizen military participation determined political organization becomes suspect; and common cases-in-point such as the link between hoplites and moderate oligarchies (e.g. Hanson, Other Greeks [1999] 208-10) or between Athens’ navy and democracy (Hale, Lords of the Sea [2009] 75-121) have attracted criticism (van Wees 77-84). In seven twenty-minute papers, this panel challenges straightforward causal links between military service, political participation, and political organization by exploring the wide variety of relations between military service and political power in the Ancient world. In particular, the papers stress that military service did not so much justify political participation, as create demands for compensation and elicit corresponding responses that had far-reaching, though highly variable, political consequences. Panelist #1 sets the agenda by questioning the connection between economic and military capacity and political status in our earliest Greek sources. Panelist # 2 extends this critique to Classical Sparta, arguing that “arms did not make the man” but that Spartan society was more broadly based, and gradually incorporated outsiders into its military while retaining Spartiate military distinction as a path to personal political power. The next two panelists explore the effects of the monetization of military and political service. Panelist #3 examines mercenaries and allies in Greek armies whose payment precluded demands for further compensation. Their military service therefore bore no tangible relation to political power in the cities which they served. Moreover, the long-term absence of paid citizen-soldiers on campaign effectively disenfranchised them too. Panelist #4 argues that the availability of pay for mass political service served as a disincentive to thetes over 30 to row in the navy. Given the realities of direct democracy at Athens, where only those present could exercise political power, the evolution of a navy manned by significant numbers of non-citizens transformed the nature of political leadership and served the interests of long-term political stability. The final three panelist examine the military as a society of the disenfranchised that displaces political society. Panelist #5 explores warfare and the socio-political structures that underpinned it, particularly the incorporation of outsiders into the military but not into the political process in Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome, arguing that it transformed the dynamics of foreign and domestic political relations. Panelist #6 identifies the castra, rather than the comitium, as the locus of national identity and communal solidarity in the Roman Republic, arguing that the public processes of military groups were more inclusive and effective than the political rights of voters. Panelist #7 identifies frontier legions as the prop of the emperor’s power. Existing outside formal political institutions, these legions wielded more political power than those who participated in the largely symbolic action of civilian politics and served as the foundation of durable system. There will be 40 minutes for discussion to conclude the three-hour session. Panelists will field questions from the floor.