REPRESENTATION IN ANCIENT GREEK DEMOCRACY Daniela Cammack 1,2 Abstract: Although modern ‘representative’ democracy is conventionally distin- guished from its ‘direct’ ancient Greek counterpart, the language of representation appears in many scholarly accounts of ancient Greek democratic institutions. This article explains why that language is apt. Ancient authors portrayed nearly all ancient Greek political actors as acting on behalf of and in the interests of others. The differ- ence between ancient and modern democracy is not the use of political representation but ancient democrats’ preference for synecdochical representation over the meta- phorical forms that predominate today, as well as the accountability measures that they applied to all (and only) metaphorical representatives. Introduction Virtually everyone who writes about the history of democracy distinguishes modern ‘representative’ democracy from its ‘direct’ ancient Greek counter- part. Supposedly, in ancient Greek democracies citizens made political deci- sions themselves rather than electing or otherwise allowing some members of the community to make decisions on their behalf. 3 Political representation of the latter kind is often portrayed as a necessary accommodation to the size and complexity of modern states, 4 although some authors have also argued that it HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XLII. No. 4. Winter 2021 1 Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of Califor- nia, Berkeley, USA. Email: daniela.cammack@berkeley.edu 2 I thank Frank Ankersmit, Mark Bevir, Konstantinos Bizos, Paul Cammack, Edwin Carawan, Paul Cartledge, Josh Cohen, Shterna Friedman, David Singh Grewal, Christo- pher Kutz, Matthew Landauer, Hélène Landemore, Jane Mansbridge, Isabella Mariani, Richard Tuck, George Scialabba, Wendy Salkin, Sam Stevens, Aaron Zielinski, the Political Theory Workshop at UC San Diego, the Kadish Workshop in Law, Politics and Philosophy at UC Berkeley, and participants in Wendy Salkin’s seminar on representa- tion at Stanford University for valuable comments and questions. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 3 E.g. M.I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (New Brunswick, 1985), p. 49; J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 1989), p. 8; M.H. Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (Norman, 1999), p. 1; P. Cartledge, Democracy: A Life (Oxford, 2016), p. 91. Cf., however, M.H. Hansen, Reflections on Aristotle’s Politics (Copenhagen, 2013), pp. 97–107. 4 E.g. ‘The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns’ (1819), in B. Constant, Selected Political Writings, ed. B. Fontana (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 307–28; ‘Considerations on Representative Government’ (1861), in J.S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. J. Gray (Oxford, 1991), pp. 203–468. Cf. H. Pitkin, ‘Representation and Democracy: An Uneasy Alliance’, Scandinavian Political Studies, 27 (2004), pp. 335–42. Copyright (c) Imprint Academic For personal use only -- not for reproduction