Download DEVELOPMENT OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

DEVELOPMENT OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY
Around 590 BCE, the Athenians were in the middle of an economic, social, and political crisis.
On the economic side, Athens had grown to such a scale that it was barely able to feed itself. Small farmers found
themselves buried in debt, represented by a stone pillar erected on the debtor's field called a horos.
On the social side, the only way for a poor person to obtain a loan was for him to put himself and his family down as
collateral. As a result, more and more people were finding themselves in debt slavery.
On the political side, the vying of aristocratic families was tearing the city-state apart. The city of Athens was run by
nine archons. These archons were elected for one-year terms by a council of former archons called the Areopagus.
Archonships were available only to members of the aristocracy. These aristocrats used their position and power to
benefit only their own family. The only political body capable of calling these people to task was the Areopagus. Since the
only check on aristocratic power was other aristocrats, the needs of the rest of the population went unnoticed.
Solon's Government
To overcome these problems, the city of Athens elected a man named Solon to serve as tyrant. Solon acted decisively.
To improve Athens' economic woes, he encouraged the planting and export of olive oil, and forbade the sale of other
foodstuffs abroad.
To improve the social problems, Solon abolished debt slavery and declared it illegal for one Athenian to own another.
He also went a step further and wiped the slate clean, canceling all former debts and doing away with the hated horos.
Yet it was Solon's political solutions that really made an impact.
To improve the political inequality, he worked to undermine the power of aristocratic families.
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Solon changed the qualifications for political power from lineage to wealth
o you no longer had to be of a noble family to run for office, so long as you were rich.
o this did not disenfranchise the aristocratic families, as they were usually wealthy, but it did extend political
power to a much larger group.
To ensure that the poor had a voice in politics as well, Solon expanded membership to the Athenian General
Assembly
o he allowed all citizens of the realm to vote, whereas before the vote had been limited to the citizens of the
city of Athens itself.
o he also gave the general assembly real power.
 he gave them the final decision of electing public officials and created a council of citizens to act
as judges.
o finally, the citizens of Athens had a way to call their politicians to account.
Having completed his reforms, Solon relinquished his power and left the city, making the Athenians promise to hold to his
system for 10 years before making any changes.
Yet in less than five years, the Athenian aristocrats had managed to undermine this system once again, and Solon's
cousin Peisistratos seized control. Though Peisistratos ruled fairly, shared wealth and power and generally tried to
protect the poor from the rich, his son, Hippias, ruled harshly and began a reign of terror.
In 510 BCE, Cleisthenes with the help of the Spartans drove Hippias from Athens. Cleisthenes was a member of the most
famous political family in Athens, the Alcmaeonids (they would compare to the Kennedy family). Like Solon, Cleisthenes
was more interested in reforming the system than in increasing his own power. His program of reform and justice for the
common people upset the aristocratic families and the aristocrats looked for opportunities to reassert their control.
Cleisthenes, according to Herodotus, turned to the commoners of Athens for support. He was originally working for a
government of “unity” to benefit rich and poor, in hopes of unifying the people of Athens. The Athenian aristocrats, led by
Isagoras, with the support of Sparta, rose up against Cleisthenes and drove him and his allies from the city.
Isagoras and the aristocrats ignored the reforms of Solon. He did away with the general assembly and imposed a new and
decidedly un-Athenian system of government, in which a few aristocratic families held absolute power.
Robbed of their assembly, the Athenian people were furious and took matters into their own hands. For the first time in
history, commoners successfully revolted, besieged their leaders, and executed them.
To form a new government, the Athenian commoners called Cleisthenes from his exile, and gave him free reign to
complete his interrupted reforms. With the people of Athens behind him, Cleisthenes began to create the first world's first
democracy - a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Cleisthenes' Establishes the Athenian Democracy
Organized into New Groups: Deme, Trittyes, Tribe
Athens, like most Greek cities, had been divided into tribes based on descent. This gave aristocratic families a natural way
of securing influence, because relatives tended to stick together. The people of Attica had also been clumped in regional
groupings, as in the days when Peisistratus ruled, and this had led to dangerous internal disorder, with people from one part
of Attica set against those from another.
Cleisthenes completely reorganized the Athenian state into a new, artificial, and rather complicated system. In his system
the basic unit was the deme, the village or neighborhood in which one lived. These demes where then put together into 30
somewhat larger units called trittyes. Cleisthenes then formed 10 new tribes by combining one trittyes from different parts
of Attica, one from the coastal region, one from the city, and one from inland.
These tribes would form the units in the Athenian army, and the Athenian Council. The result was to put Athenians from
different parts of Attica together into the same political units; it's a bit like having some people from Indiana, Kentucky,
Florida, Hawaii, and Alaska belong to the same Congressional district.
Athenian Assembly
The most important body in the Athenian democracy was the popular assembly, in which all male citizens could participate.
The Assembly would meet a number of times each month. The first 6000 or so Athenians citizens to arrive (all that could fit
in the meeting place of the Assembly) would deliberate and vote on all important state actions. The assembly had the
powers of our Congress and was not checked by any powerful executive or judicial branches. Public officials became
progressively less important at Athens and the judicial branch consisted of large juries of citizens who had interests similar
to those of the members of the Assembly. Cleisthenes increased the power of the Assembly largely by making use of it to
push through his reforms. By this precedent he ensured that all important laws had to be passed by a vote of the people as
a whole. It is now fair to call Athens a democracy--so long as we note that women, slaves, and immigrants were not allowed
to vote.
Athenian Council
Solon may already have set up a council: but we know nothing about it. It is under Cleisthenes that the Council or Boule
(sometimes translated by its Latin equivalent and called a Senate) became important. It would consist of 50 members
chosen by lot from each of the 10 tribes. The Council would thus be a geographically balanced body, one of whose
functions was to tie Athenians together regardless of where they lived or who they were related to. The Council's main task
was to prepare legislation for the Athenian Assembly, but it also had certain functions we would associate with the executive
branch of government. Each tribe's group of 50 would be on duty for one tenth of the year to oversee any business that
needed immediate attention.
Ostracism
Cleisthenes may also have been responsible for the curious Athenian procedure known as ostracism. Once a year, the
Athenian citizens could exile a single politician if it felt they were becoming too powerful, dangerous, or just too unpopular. A
minimum of 6000 votes had to be cast, if the votes were cast, the politician was sent into exile for 10 years. His property
was not confiscated, and he was not convicted of any crime; when the 10 years were up he was free to return. Apparently
the procedure was designed to prevent any one man from becoming too powerful. As a matter of practice it seems
sometimes to have cost the Athenians some of their best leaders. But it also produced a long term conclusion to what
otherwise might be a prolonged debate between two leaders.
Nature and Limitations of Athenian Democracy
Direct, not Representative form of Democracy
The biggest difference between Athenian democracy and almost all subsequent democracies is that the Athenian version
was remarkably direct rather than being representative. With a few exceptions, Athenians didn't vote for politicians to
represent them; all Athenians voted on just about every law or policy the city was to adopt. Shall we fight the Spartans? The
people vote and decide. Raise taxes? Build a navy? The people decide.
Limited Role for Officials
To make the government run, the Athenians did have to have public officials, of course. But they took radical measures to
limit their power. Most public offices in the developed Athenian democracy were chose by lot, i.e., were chosen randomly.
All those citizens willing to serve in a certain office put their names forward, and the winner was chosen rather like we
choose lottery numbers. The Greeks considered this the most democratic way of choosing officials, for it ensured that all
citizens, whether prominent, popular, rich, or not, had an equal chance to serve. (It may also have been considered a way of
letting the gods pick the right people for the right jobs.) There were thousands of public offices chosen this way; and in
almost all cases, an individual could hold a given office only once. Most offices were relatively unimportant, and far from full
time work. But the sheer number of offices ensured that not only did the Athenians vote directly on most issues of state;
most of them served many times during their lives as public officials.
It would be very hard indeed for an Athenian to speak of the government as "them" or speak of the bureaucrats off in
Washington or "Inside the Beltway." The Athenians were their government: there was no "us" versus "them." And the
Athenians were, in fact, remarkably satisfied with their government; there was little of the alienation many Americans today
feel about our rather different form of democracy.
Problem of Stability
Athens was a state run almost entirely by amateurs. There were no professional politicians; no professional lawyers or
judges, no professional civil service. The people could do what they pleased and, during much of Athenian history,
whenever they wanted to do it. The Athenian people could vote one day to raise taxes by 50%, one day to cut them by that
much; they could outlaw something one day, approve it the next; give citizens of Athens a right one day, take it away the
next. This all must have been terribly inefficient. There was no constitution to keep them in check, and no lifetime judges to
tell them what to do: a right you had one day could be taken away tomorrow. All this resulted in certain problems of stability;
and, as we will see, the Athenians themselves took certain steps to limit the instability of their government without
compromising its direct connection with the people. We can learn something from the strain between direct citizen
involvement, on the one hand, and stability on the other. Americans today often feel that the government is a big thing off in
Washington D.C.; we often think that the cure is more citizen involvement, and this must be right in an important sense. But
a more direct form of democracy--even if it were possible in a country as large and diverse as our own--would also bring
along problems not unlike those faced by Athens.
By, for, and of male citizens
But the greatest flaw with Athenian democracy, from our prospective, is the fact that while it was remarkably direct, it was
also limited: no women could vote; nor could the large number of slaves in Attica, of course, have any say; and, by the
middle of the 400's, no one moving to Athens could hope to ever gain citizen rights: you had to be born both to an Athenian
father and an Athenian mother. So there is a sense in which Athens was both more and less democratic than our
government is. It was, arguably, more democratic if you were lucky enough to be a male citizen; it wasn't democratic at all if
you weren't.