Download The End of Athenian Democracy

The democratic government of Athens rested on three main institutions, and a few
others of lesser importance. The three pillars of democracy were: the Assembly of
the Demos, the Council of 500, and the People’s Court. These were supplemented by
the Council of the Areopagus, the Archons, and the Generals. Actual legislation
involved both the Assembly and the Council, and ad hoc boards of “Lawmakers.”
The Assembly (Ekklesia, ἐκκλησία) was the regular gathering of male Athenian citizens (women also
enjoyed a certain citizen status, but without political rights) to listen to, discuss, and vote on decrees that
affected every aspect of Athenian life, both public and private, from financial matters to religious ones,
from public festivals to war, from treaties with foreign powers to regulations governing ferry boats.
The Council of 500 represented the full-time government of Athens. It consisted of 500 citizens, 50 from
each of the ten tribes, who served for one year. The Council could issue decrees on its own, regarding
certain matters, but its main function was to prepare the agenda for meetings of the Assembly. The Council
would meet to discuss and vote on “Preliminary decrees” (probouleumata, προβουλεύματα), and any of
these that passed the Council’s vote went on for discussion and voting in the Assembly.
Of almost equal importance to the Assembly and Council, and probably of greater importance (if not
greater prestige) than the Areopagus was the People’s Court, the Heliaea and other courts where juries of
citizens would listen to cases, would vote on the guilt or innocence of their fellow citizens, and vote on
punishments for those found guilty.
http://www.stoa.org/projects/demos/article_democracy_overview?page=4&greek
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Democracy as news
It is only in this century that democracy has come to be seen by pretty much everybody as the
best form of government--even dictators say they are democrats today. Most people in most
places through most of human history have not lived in democracies. Most ancient Greeks, in
fact, didn't live in democracies; and the most famous ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and
Aristotle, weren't exactly big fans of the most important democracy Greece produced, that of
ancient Athens. So the appearance of democracy in one time and place--Athens around 500 BC--is
something exceptional, is a big deal. It has also had a tremendous impact on us. It is in large part
thanks to the Athenians--with the help in translation by the Romans, who have so often
translated Greek ideas to us--that our country is a democracy. We ought to care then, about the
appearance of democracy in Greece. Among other things, we will ask:
Why did the Athenians develop democracy when they did?
The nature of Athenian democracy
Direct, not representative
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.
A 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.
The 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 them off in DC; 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.
Reorganization
Deme, Trittys, 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 often clumped in regional groupings, as in the days of
Peisistratus, and this had let 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 when then put together into 30 somewhat larger
units called trittyes. Cleisthenes then formed his 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 Alaska and some from Alabama belong to the same congressional
district.
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 it's 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.
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, and
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, for
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.
Note that the two political bodies of Athens, the Assembly and the Council, had rather different
roles: the Council made proposals which the Assembly could vote upon and amend. They also
may have had somewhat different memberships. To get to the Assembly meeting you would
have to come to Athens; as many Athenians lived 15 or 20 miles out in the countryside, this
would have been quite a burden, and so it is possible that city-folks were over-represented
(rather the opposite of today). The Council, though, was automatically geographically diversified
by Cleisthenes' play, which ensured that people from the countryside at least had some say at
that stage of the deliberations.
Ostracism
Cleisthenes may also have been responsible for the curious Athenian procedure known as
ostracism. Under this procedure the Athenians would vote once a year in a sort of negative
election: the unlucky winner, assuming a minimum of 6000 votes had been cast, 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. The Athenians, one suspects, would
have ostracized both Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton: we only managed to get rid of one of them.
From thesmos to nomos
The Athenian vocabulary for "law" changed in an interesting way in Cleisthenes' day, and
Cleisthenes himself may have been responsible for the change. Solon's laws were known as
"thesmoi"; the word is related to the Greek verb meaning to put or place, and refers to the process
by which law is imposed by a law-giver or other authority. Solon was a good and wise man, and
was given his power by the people; but he was still imposing laws on the people. Nomos, by
contrast, refers to custom and tradition, customs and traditions already present in the society
rather than being imposed from on high. Thus by referring to statues as "nomoi" rather than
"thesmoi" one gives law an entirely different meaning. No longer are laws imposed on "us" by
someone else: "we" make our own laws. Thus the Athenians were beginning to take charge of
their own government. And just in time; for they would need all their strength to meet the
challenges of the 5th century.
http://languages.siu.edu/classics/Johnson/HTML/L10.html
Demokratia and the Demos
“In a democracy,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, “there is, first, that most splendid of virtues,
equality before the law.” It was true that Cleisthenes’ demokratia abolished the political distinctions
between the Athenian aristocrats who had long monopolized the political decision-making process and the
middle- and working-class people who made up the army and the navy (and whose incipient discontent was
the reason Cleisthenes introduced his reforms in the first place). However, the “equality” Herodotus
described was limited to a small segment of the Athenian population. For example, in Athens in the middle
of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women
whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or “resident foreigners” and
150,000 slaves. Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the
demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process.
The Ekklesia
Athenian democracy was made up of three important institutions. The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly,
the sovereign governing body of Athens. Any member of the demos--any one of those 40,000 adult male
citizens--was welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a
hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. (Only about 5,000 men attended each session of
the Assembly; the rest were serving in the army or navy or working to support their families.) At the
meetings, the ekklesia made decisions about war and foreign policy, wrote and revised laws and approved
or condemned the conduct of public officials. (Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from the
Athenian city-state for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia.) The group made decisions by
simple majority vote.
The Boule
The second important institution was the boule, or Council of Five Hundred. The boule was a group of 500
men, 50 from each of ten Athenian tribes, who served on the Council for one year. Unlike the ekklesia, the
boule met every day and did most of the hands-on work of governance. It supervised government workers
and was in charge of things like navy ships (triremes) and army horses. It dealt with ambassadors and
representatives from other city-states. Its main function was to decide what matters would come before the
ekklesia. In this way, the 500 members of the boule dictated how the entire democracy would work.
Positions on the boule were chosen by lot and not by election. This was because, in theory, a random
lottery was more democratic than an election: pure chance, after all, could not be influenced by things like
money or popularity. The lottery system also prevented the establishment of a permanent class of civil
servants who might be tempted to use the government to advance or enrich themselves. However,
historians argue that selection to the boule was not always just a matter of chance. They note that wealthy
and influential people--and their relatives--served on the Council much more frequently than would be
likely in a truly random lottery.
The Dikasteria
The third important institution was the popular courts, or dikasteria. Every day, more than 500 jurors were
chosen by lot from a pool of male citizens older than 30. Of all the democratic institutions, Aristotle argued
that the dikasteria “contributed most to the strength of democracy” because the jury had almost unlimited
power. There were no police in Athens, so it was the demos themselves who brought court cases, argued
for the prosecution and the defense, and delivered verdicts and sentences by majority rule. (There were also
no rules about what kinds of cases could be prosecuted or what could and could not be said at trial, and so
Athenian citizens frequently used the dikasteria to punish or embarrass their enemies.)
Jurors were paid a wage for their work, so that the job could be accessible to everyone and not just the
wealthy (but, since the wage was less than what the average worker earned in a day, the typical juror was
an elderly retiree). Since Athenians did not pay taxes, the money for these payments came from customs
duties, contributions from allies and taxes levied on the metoikoi. The one exception to this rule was the
leitourgia, or liturgy, which was a kind of tax that wealthy people volunteered to pay to sponsor major civic
undertakings such as the maintenance of a navy ship (this liturgy was called the trierarchia) or the
production of a play or choral performance at the city’s annual festival.
The End of Athenian Democracy
Around 460 B.C., under the rule of the general Pericles (generals were among the only public officials who
were elected, not appointed) Athenian democracy began to evolve into something that we would call an
aristocracy: the rule of what Herodotus called “the one man, the best.” Though democratic ideals and
processes did not survive in ancient Greece, they have been influencing politicians and governments ever
since.
http://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece-democracy