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INTRODUCTION
"The ancient Greeks first invented the word 'demagogue' to describe a new class of mob leaders who quickly evolved to fill a power vacuum left by the demise of a reigning class of elite statesmen."1 So proclaims a recent political analyst, echoing generations of students of the classics who have taken the opposition between statesman and demagogue to be a fundamental distinction in Athenian politics.2 The distinction is widely assumed to be exemplified in the veiled portrayals of Cleon in Aristophanes 's Knights and Progs, and in Thucydides's contrast between Pericles and his successors, above all Cleon (as well as similar portraits of figures like the probably invented Syracusan orator Athenagoras).3 This article argues that the assumption that Athenian political practice involved an evaluative distinction between terms signifying the good statesman and the bad demagogue (which I shall refer to as "the distinction" ) is mistaken. None of the historians, playwrights, and orators of classical Athens relied upon a pejorative term for demagogue in developing their analyses of bad political leadership, nor did they rely upon a positive term for statesman. Indeed, it was individual more than type that concerned them: Cleon mattered, rather than a schematic demagogue, and even Cleon mattered less than the potential tyrant Alcibiades. ("Tyranny" was indeed signified by a word as a negative type, whereas there was no word, I shall argue, signifying "demagogue" in the pejorative in common use before Plato.) It is a form of mental laziness when subsequent readers casually attribute the distinction between statesman and demagogue in the pejorative to democratic Athenian political practitioners, compounded when that attribution is assumed as justification for using the same distinction themselves.
The Athenians did have variegated concepts of bad political leadership, and they did have the idea of a form of political leadership appealing particularly to the common people as opposed to the elite. But the latter was a descriptive category which could apply to good and bad leaders alike, not an inevitable deduction from the bad types of the former. There simply was no single term used to sum up and condemn bad political leaders as demagogues. We should attend to the significance of that omission and its gradual alteration rather than reading back our later uses...