Glossary – Arcadian Law

The Life and Death of Democracy refers at one point to an ‘Arcadian Law’. It shows how the earliest experiments with democracy involved the creation of unions of democratic governments co-ordinated through a joint assembly. The Arcadian League, founded in 370 BCE, was an example. It was designed to bring peace to a region that had previously been dominated by Spartan power. The League resembled a small and simplified version of today’s European Union, in that it tried to achieve something never before attempted: to fashion a two-tiered confederacy bound by the rules of democratic negotiation and compromise. It maintained a standing army based at its newly founded capital, Megalopolis.

The Arcadians invented a co-ordinating council known (as in Athens) as the boule and manned at any one time by 50 officials, called damiourgoi. Remarkably, the League also established a regional assembly called the myrioi, or ‘˜ten thousand’. It is uncertain whether that name should be taken literally, so that the actual size of the assembly was restricted to the middling class of hoplite property holders, and to those above them. It is just possible that the name myrioi was not literally meant, in which case it would have had the more figurative meaning of ‘˜a very large number’ of citizens, perhaps even all free adult males – so making it the first-ever recorded experiment in cross-border democracy.

The Arcadian League was to run aground on the reefs of wider regional struggles for power led by shifty alliances under the thumbs of Athens and Sparta and Thebes. The League suffered invasion and, at one point (in 362 BCE), it split apart. Differences were patched up, and the League in fact survived as long as did the democracy of Athens, probably until the 230s. It is significant that it did so, for a vital reason. The whole Arcadian experiment in protecting democratic states on a regional basis by democratically negotiating their integration rested on a working principle that remains as rock-solid today as it did then. Stated simply, the principle is that democracies, in order to survive and flourish, must tame the political and military pressures on their borders. Perhaps in this context we might speak of an Arcadian Law: the viability of any democracy is inversely proportional to the quantity of outside (geopolitical’) threats to its existence. The Arcadian Law had a gloomy corollary: a warning that democracy could kill off democracy by misusing its military power on its neighbours. The Arcadian experiment was a brave effort to deal with the grave danger posed by Athens for the plurality of democracies of the region – to prevent the Athenian empire from gobbling up democracies in the name of democracy. The Arcadian League experiment showed that democracies had a strong self-interest in banding together, peacefully, to ensure their survival through politics, so as to avoid their massacre through rivalry, expansion and armed conflict.