Why popular participation? Collective action, majoritarianism and solidarity in ancient Greece * Daniela Cammack July 9, 2024 Forthcoming in Popular Participation Beyond Athens, eds. Arjan Zuiderhoek and Thierry Oppeneer Abstract. This chapter argues that the ancient Greeks pursued popular political participation and public mass majority voting for the same reason: the indispensability of the plethos (‘mass’, ‘majority’, ‘multitude’) to collective action. That indispensability made it desirable to verify and ideally to maximize the numbers, enthusiasm, and solidarity of potential co-actors prior to embarking on action, both of which popular participation and public majoritarianism could do. It considers Canevaro’s recent challenge to the significance of majoritarianism within ancient Greek assemblies, then presents a selection of archaic and classical material touching the relationships between collective action, majoritarianism, and homonoia (‘unanimity’, ‘solidarity’). It concludes that Canevaro was right to emphasize the importance of unanimity to ancient Greek politics, but wrong to suppose that valuing unanimity should have made majoritarianism unappealing. To the contrary, it was their commitment to unanimity that made ancient Greeks value majoritarianism. Why did so many ancient Greek communities practise popular political participation? Its modern defenders have argued that it improves character, supports liberty and equality, and generates better laws and policies, whether owing to improved responsiveness from decision-makers or to the epistemic benefits of involving more people in decision-making. 1 Some of these themes appear in ancient Greek sources, but another is arguably more prominent. Aristotle (Pol. 1253a) famously described human beings as ‘political animals’, meaning animals whose nature it is to live in relatively complex communities, but less often discussed is his definition of such animals as those who engage in ‘some one common task’ (Hist. An. 488a). Aristotle also observed that assembly-goers ‘decide their own affairs’ (Rh. 1354b), and interpreted ‘deliberation’ (to bouleuesthai)—the specific task of assembly-goers—as choosing ‘actions within one’s own power’ (Eth. Nic. 1112a). 2 Moreover, when deliberating, assembly-goers aimed at to sumpheron, which is rightly interpreted as the beneficial, but literally implied ‘the jointly borne’. 3 These items reveal the significance of collective action and collective agency—that is, the relevant actors themselves deciding the actions they would undertake together—to ancient Greek polis-life. 4 Collective military action is an * For valuable comments, I thank the editors and other contributors to this volume; audiences at the University of Brasilia, Yale University, UCLA, and the University of Cambridge; and Eero Arum, Carol Atack, Paul Cammack, Paul Cartledge, Shterna Friedman, David Singh Grewal, Thornton Lockwood, Jane Mansbridge, Sean Messara, Josiah Ober, Jedediah Purdy, George Scialabba, Richard Tuck, and Warren Thimothe. I especially thank Kinch Hoekstra for his generosity in going slowly through every line. Translations are mine except where noted. 1 See e.g. Christiano and Bajaj (2022). 2 Further discussed in Cammack (2020a). 3 As suggested by Klonoski (1996: 315). 4 As spotted by Rathnam (2021) and Schwartz (2022).