La pizia
CLEONIMUS OF ATHENS
TRAITOR TO THE COUNTRY
According to Thucydides, in its internal political life
Athens saw, between the death of Pericles and the end of the
war, men and events so petty that they were first of all
omitted because they were worthless and already generically included in
summary judgments of bad government: every additional word spent would
have been, in the historian's judgment, useless for the understanding of the
facts of war and an unjust mention of characters that it was better
to forget rather than remember, good as they were for comic satire
rather than for historical "truth".
One of these characters, all the same and so petty
as to be only a cause of discord and ruin, was certainly
Cleonymus: around this name in fact numerous sources are condensed, very different in typology and chronology, which surely
attest in the second half of the fifth century the existence
of an Athenian citizen who bore this name and was a protagonist in the political and social life of Athens. Modern historiography
has certainly not ignored the character, driven by three main documentary nuclei that attest to the name Cleonymus: a) comic satire, which makes him the object of mockery, funny and ridiculous, but at the same time winks at political judgments in the evaluation of the character; b) epigraphic testimonies, which connect Cleonymus to decrees that are decisive for our understanding of Athenian
“imperialism”; c) the Andocidean citation, which involves
Cleonymus in the management of the scandal that overwhelmed Alcibiades.
As is well understood, these elements are of such certain
historical value that they cannot allow the character of Cleonymus to be left in the shade
in the modern historiographical debate.
The high historical weight of the testimonies in which the name of Cleonymus is cited contrasts, however, with an almost total absence of information on the citizen; the result is that the citizen himself has ended up having a mostly unitary image, largely stereotyped, very coherent, but only because it has coagulated around a few traits, or perhaps a single trait: a pro-Cleonian character, therefore a radical democrat, therefore a demagogue, but of a second rank, a supporter and militant of that political line that Thucydides wanted to indicate as degenerate and massified and which here we want to verify, as already said, with the examination of the specific case of Cleonymus. For this reason, we intend to first of all consider in
this work the exact value of the flattening of the character Cleonymus on the leader Cleone: we will do so by starting from the name,
which is certainly the element that connects, in an almost shameless way, the
two Athenian political figures.
In fact, Cleonimo and Cleone share etymologically the
same origin: if Cleone derives from klšoj, Cleonimo
contains the same root strengthened by the union with Ônoma. The
two names also belong to a widespread and also large onomastic group, which also includes toponyms: Klewnaί is a city
of Argolis (but also of Athos and Phocis) and Klew-
na‹oi are its inhabitants. Also significant is the large
number of personal names that share the same etymological origin. There is also the name of a herbaceous plant with medicinal properties, the cleonia.
Overall, we are faced with an onomastic choice that
reveals the ambition of a name that indicates the aspiration to
an important role and above all, in anthroponomastics, to a social position recognized by the entire community.
With reference to the term klšoj the proper name refers
therefore to an indispensable value for the Athenian citizen and in
particular for those who carry out political activity in a
democratic context, in which the exercise of government and power is
subject to the indispensable support of public opinion. It is
thus that this quality is signaled as the specific objective of
those who aim to help their own polis with political participation and the assumption of a government role. Its codification is
recognizable in some verses of Solon transmitted by Plutarch, where the poet, archon and legislator, expresses his
conviction of being able to win in political action:
… if I have spared my native land and have not touched
tyranny and bitter violence by contaminating and dishonoring my fame, I am not ashamed: I think
in fact that in this way I will conquer with all men