Democratic Eukosmia and Athenian Sumptuary Legislation

• In Event: Ancient Greek Democracy, Aesthetics, and the Cultivation of the Political

Abstract

Well attested throughout ancient Greek, and more specifically Athenian, political history are instances of laws designed to curtail extravagance in citizens’ attire, feasting, processions, and funerals. Although ongoing philosophical debates about the moral dimensions of ἁβροσύνη (habrosune, ‘luxury, delicacy’) and τρυφή (truphe, ‘luxury, self-indulgence’) provide a meaningful context for a number of these regulations, the desire to limit luxury itself neither significantly accounts for, nor adequately explains, any particular set of sumptuary laws enacted in Athens. Nor does an equally attractive scholarly explanation—namely, the desire of the demos to curtail the political influence of the rich and impose a certain measure of ‘aesthetic’ arithmetic equality (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1132a)—play a role in the discourse surrounding the enactment of various sumptuary laws. Indeed, for the most part, democratic Athens instead prided itself that its citizens τὸ ζῆν ὡς βούλεταί τις (‘they live as they please,’ Arist. Pol. 1317a40-b13; cf. Thuc. 2.37). Yet, sumptuary laws were sporadically enacted and had their place within the working framework of Athenian law. In other words, they were not necessarily contrary to it. Neither the anti-luxury nor arithmetic explanation of sumptuary legislation is uniformly convincing to account for various lawmakers' particular interventions in, and broad discretionary power over, Athenians’ personal lives. The question is, then, how do sumptuary laws fit within the Athenian political landscape, considering the tension between democratic freedom and social order? In contrast to conventional explanations, this paper argues that sumptuary laws were introduced by lawmakers primarily as tools of regulating, preserving, and often recreating an “orderly” political system that had an acceptable consensual “ring” to it. The lawmakers, then, had only a superficial concern (if at all) for philosophical morality or aesthetic political equality. If this holds true for all nominally democratic regimes, in Athens, it was more specifically refracted through a concern for maintaining εὐκοσμία (eukosmia, ‘orderly behavior, good conduct, decency’) against sources of instability, e.g. aristocratic in-fighting, the socially useless noblesse oblige of the rich, or the transgressive burial practices of Athens’ elite. Yet, the intended targets of this restrictive legislation, namely, Athenian elite men, were, more often than not, not the ones who bore the brunt of said restrictions. Instead, it was women, who were seen as both a source of inherent ἀκοσμία (akosmia, ‘disorder’) and as external bearers of social value who could, as non-citizens, be subject to freedom-restricting legislation consistent with Athenian cultural and legal practice. Sumptuary laws, it will be argued, were only possible in Athenian democracy because women held the special status of bearing the moral hazard for men’s transgressive, though not law-breaking, behavior. Athenian sumptuary laws, I argue, offer a new way of understanding the relationship between democracy, aesthetics, and legalized forms of oppression.

Author

• Emily Salamanca, Princeton University