Athenian democracy

• 1. Introduction

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  Athenian democracy was born in a city where, for most of its history, a handful of noble families held all the power. Around the 6th century BC, something shifted in Athens, the city at the heart of the region called Attica, and a new word entered the Greek language: dēmokratia, meaning "people power". It was a word cobbled together from dêmos, meaning "people" or "towns", and krátos, meaning "force" or "power". The question of who counted as "the people" would haunt the system for the rest of its life.

  What makes Athenian democracy so striking is not simply that it existed, but that it was contested from the very beginning. Philosophers attacked it. Playwrights mocked it. The city's own greatest general, Thucydides, thought the common people were too credulous to govern justly. And yet, by the late 4th century BC, as many as half of over a thousand existing Greek cities may have adopted some version of democratic government.

  This documentary follows the democracy that grew out of one city's experiment: the assemblies where citizens voted by stretching their arms, the courts where juries of hundreds decided cases in a single day, and the long argument over who deserved to belong.

• 2. Before the Demos

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  In 621 BC, a man named Draco replaced Athens's unwritten legal tradition with a written code enforced by courts. The laws bearing his name were largely harsh; almost all of them were later repealed. But the act of writing laws down, and giving a court rather than an aristocrat the power to enforce them, was itself a departure from what had come before.

  Before Draco, Athens was governed by archons, magistrates drawn from powerful noble families, and an elite council called the Areopagus, composed of ex-archons. A citizen assembly may have existed in some form, but the mass of people had no real voice. The written code Draco produced was one of the first of its kind and is counted among the earliest developments toward what Athens would eventually become.

  The deeper rupture came in 594 BC, when Solon was appointed premier archon. He cancelled existing debts, freed those who had been enslaved for debt, and banned the practice of borrowing against one's own person. He then reorganized the citizen body into four property classes: the pentakosiomedimnoi, the hippeis, the zeugitai, and the thetes, ranked by how many medimnoi of grain their estates produced each year. By anchoring civic status in property rather than birth alone, Solon widened who could participate in Athenian public life, and his creation of an Ecclesia, or Assembly, open to all male citizens, planted the institution that would become the beating heart of democracy. Even so, the archons and the Areopagus held on to substantial power for decades more.

• 3. Cleisthenes and the Tribal Revolution

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  In 561 BC, the tyrant Peisistratos overthrew the nascent democracy, and it was only after the expulsion of his son Hippias in 510 that Athens had another chance. The man who seized it was Cleisthenes, and his reforms of 508 and 507 BC cut deeper than anything Solon had attempted.

  Cleisthenes abolished the traditional four tribes, whose membership was tied to ancestry and social standing, and replaced them with ten new tribes. Each tribe was made up of about three trittyes, geographical divisions drawn from different parts of Attica, and each trittys contained several demes, the local communities where every male citizen over 18 had to register. The effect was to scramble old networks of noble patronage. A man's political identity was now tied to where he lived, not to who his ancestors were.

  Cleisthenes also expanded the council that prepared business for the Assembly. Solon had created a boule of 400; Cleisthenes enlarged it to 500, with 50 members drawn by lot from each of the ten new tribes. Members had to be at least 30 years old and could serve no more than twice in a lifetime. The tribal rotation system meant that fifty councilors from one tribe served as a standing committee, the prytaneis, for 36 days at a stretch, housed and fed in the tholos of the Prytaneion. One member was chosen by lot each day to chair any meeting of the boule or assembly in that 24-hour period. A democratic constitution that no single family could capture was taking shape, and its author, Cleisthenes, had himself been born to a non-Athenian mother.

• 4. The Assembly in Action

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  Any adult male citizen over 20 could walk into a meeting of the Ecclesia and cast a vote. He did not need to be elected, nominated, or approved; attendance was a right. In the 5th century BC, the assembly met ten times a year, one meeting per state month. By the 4th century, that had risen to forty meetings annually, with four per month, and one of each group designated the main meeting, kyria ekklesia.

  Voting was usually done by show of hands, a practice the Greeks called kheirotonia, meaning "arm stretching". Officials judged the outcome by sight, which could cause difficulties when it grew too dark to see. Any member could demand a recount. For a narrower set of votes, mostly grants of citizenship, a quorum of 6,000 was required, and here citizens cast small colored stones: white for yes, black for no, dropped into a large clay jar that was cracked open for the count.

  Attendance was not always voluntary. In the 5th century, public slaves with a red-stained rope herded citizens from the agora toward the assembly place on the Pnyx, and those caught with red dye on their clothes were fined. After democracy was restored in 403 BC, pay was introduced for attending the assembly, and enthusiasm rose sharply. Only the first 6,000 to arrive were admitted and paid; the red rope was now used to keep latecomers out rather than to push people in.

  The assembly's powers were sweeping. It declared war, granted citizenship, elected some officials, and tried political crimes. In the 5th century, there were scarcely any limits on what it could decide. If it made a mistake, the prevailing view was that someone must have misled it, and that person could be held to account. The assembly was the demos, and no authority stood above it, at least in theory.

• 5. Courts, Juries, and Justice in a Day

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  Payment for sitting on a jury was introduced around 462 BC, a reform ascribed to Pericles and described by Aristotle as fundamental to radical democracy. Cleon later raised the pay from two to three obols during the Peloponnesian War.

  Juries in Athens bore no resemblance to the small panels of modern legal systems. For a minor private suit, the minimum was 200 jurors; for a public suit, 501. The most serious cases could draw 1,500 jurors, and on at least one occasion, when a new type of case was brought for the first time, all 6,000 members of the annual jury pool attended a single proceeding. Jurors were drawn by lot from that pool of 6,000, selected from all ten tribes.

  No judges presided. No lawyers argued on behalf of clients. Litigants spoke for themselves, their speeches timed by a water clock called a clepsydra. In a public suit, each side had three hours. Once the speeches ended, the jury voted immediately, without any formal deliberation period, though jurors talked among themselves during the count and could be noisy in their reactions to testimony. The verdict was final. No appeal was possible. And every case had to be resolved before sundown.

  The courts evolved into something like a constitutional check on the assembly. Starting in 355 BC, political trials left the assembly altogether and moved to the courts. From 416 BC, under a procedure called the graphe paranomon, any law passed by the assembly could be challenged before a jury; if the jury annulled it, the proposer could face punishment. By the 4th century, a new class of lawmakers called nomothetai, drawn from the jury pool of 6,000, had taken over the creation of new laws entirely.

• 6. Who Was Left Out

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  Adult male citizens probably made up no more than 30 percent of the total adult population of Athens. In the 4th century BC, Attica may have held 250,000 to 300,000 people; of those, perhaps 30,000 were adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly. The number had been as high as 60,000 in the mid-5th century, before the Peloponnesian War permanently reduced it.

  Excluded entirely were slaves, freed slaves, children, women, and metics, the resident foreigners who could live and work in Athens for generations without ever gaining political standing. The orator Hyperides, writing in the late 4th century, estimated there were 150,000 slaves in Attica; he acknowledged the figure was an impression rather than a census count. The widespread ownership of slaves extended well below the wealthy classes, and scholars have noted that it may have given even poorer citizens time for political participation that they could not otherwise have afforded.

  Women were barred from all formal participation in government. They were rarely referred to as citizens at all; instead, terms like astē, meaning "a woman belonging to the city", or Attike gune, meaning "an Attic woman or wife", were used. Orators routinely avoided mentioning the names of wives and daughters in public speeches. Women's lives were largely confined to the household, and Athenian men's stated rationales for this exclusion ranged from claims about sexual temperament to doubts about women's capacity for political reasoning.

  Citizenship itself became harder to inherit over time. Under Pericles's law of 450 BC, a person now needed both an Athenian father and an Athenian mother to qualify, a tightening that had striking implications: Cleisthenes, the founder of the democratic constitution, had a non-Athenian mother, and the mothers of both Cimon and Themistocles were Thracian, not Greek at all. Five years after the new citizenship law passed, a gift of grain from an Egyptian king triggered a review of the citizen rolls, and many people of mixed parentage were removed.

• 7. The Critics

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  Thucydides the historian argued that democratic citizens were too willing to accept ready-made accounts of events rather than investigating carefully. As a specific example, he noted that Athenians wrongly believed Sparta's kings each had two votes in their ruling council, and that a Spartan battalion called the Pitanate lochos existed. These were factual errors about a neighboring city that any serious inquirer could have corrected.

  Plato and Aristotle framed the objection differently. Both saw democracy as the numerically preponderant poor tyrannizing the rich. Aristotle distinguished between "arithmetic" equality, where every citizen counts the same, and "geometric" or proportional equality, where those of greater virtue should hold greater power. Plato's The Republic, The Statesman, and Laws all argued for a narrower form of government, one entrusted to those with the knowledge to cultivate virtue in their fellow citizens.

  The ancient critics also pointed to specific catastrophes. In 406 BC, after a naval victory at Arginusae, the assembly tried six of the eight commanding generals together and sentenced them to death for failing to rescue survivors after a storm. The collective trial was illegal under Athenian law, which required individual proceedings; Socrates, presiding over the assembly that day, refused to cooperate but was overruled. The demos later concluded it had been misled, and prosecuted those who had proposed the illegal procedure. In 399 BC, Socrates himself was tried and executed for corrupting the young and introducing strange gods. The scholar Loren Samons observed that the democratic Athenians left behind almost nothing but criticism of their own system of government on the philosophical level, and that many of Athens's worst acts occurred not merely during the democratic period but in part because of it.

  A writer known only as the Old Oligarch added a structural critique: that democracy, by spreading political responsibility among all citizens, made it easy to scapegoat individuals when decisions went badly, and that an imperial democracy would inevitably export its appetite for power along with its ideals.

• 8. Aftermath and Long Shadow

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  The Macedonian army of Philip II conquered Athens in 338 BC, and in 322 BC democracy was suppressed altogether. What survived under Macedonian-appointed governors like Demetrius of Phalerum was, in the view of the Athenian public, little more than a puppet administration dressed in the old forms. When Demetrius Poliorcetes ended Cassander's rule, Demetrius of Phalerum went into exile and democracy was nominally restored in 307 BC. By then, Athens had become, in the words recorded about that period, "politically impotent". New tribes were created to honor Macedonian and Egyptian rulers; old ones were abolished or renamed as the political winds shifted.

  Under Roman rule, archons continued to be elected, and even figures such as Domitian and Hadrian held the archonship as a mark of honor. The council fluctuated between 300 and 750 members, appointed by lot. The Areopagus, recruited from elected archons, took on an aristocratic character and was entrusted with wide powers. After Rome became an empire under Augustus, Athens converged toward the normal structure of a Roman municipality. The shadow of the old constitution, as one account describes it, lingered on.

  For most of the period between Athens's defeat and the 18th century, democracy was consistently condemned. Plato's and Aristotle's negative accounts went largely unanswered. It was Rome, not Athens, that inspired the American Founders who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787; they built a Senate modeled on Roman precedent, not a Council of the Areopagus. Following Rousseau, democracy came to be associated with popular sovereignty rather than direct popular participation. Only in the 19th century did thinkers like Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, and George Grote argue that the high level of civic cultivation among Athenian citizens represented a genuine strength. The question of what Athenian democracy was and was not, whether it deserves to be called democracy at all given who it excluded, remains an active argument, one that the philosopher Takis Fotopoulos framed as a failure not of democracy itself but of Athens's particular version to ever become fully inclusive.