| 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. | |
| From Solon to Cleisthenes | |
| Solon's reforms of 594 BC may have helped; but for the middle years of the 500's Athens was torn by civic strife which led to the tyranny of Peisistratus and then his son Hippias. The Peisistratid tyranny may have allowed Athens to make economic progress; but it became increasingly unpopular and when Hippias was deposed on 510 BC the old problems of faction in unrest among the citizens resurfaced. | |
| Cleisthenes | |
| Alcmaeonid: Pericles; Alcibiades | |
| Cleisthenes was a member of the most famous political family in Athens, the Alcmaeonids. Pericles, the most famous leader of Athens, we will meet later, as we will Alcibiades, the most controversial Athenian leader of all time: both were Alcmaeonids. Note, then, that powerful families continue to count even in a more democratic society, and that the most prominent democrats are themselves members of a prominent aristocratic family. Compare, perhaps, the Kennedy family, which, like the Alcmaeonids, is rich, controversial, and liberal. | |
| Cleisthenes' reforms (507) | |
| In 510 Cleisthenes had managed to get the sons of Peisistratus kicked out of Athens with Spartan help. But now the old internal divisions which had plagued Athens since Solon's time reasserted themselves. Cleisthenes found himself faced by an internal rival who had the backing of most Athenian aristocrats. Cleisthenes, the historian Herodotus tells us, decided to turn to the people. Perhaps he did so solely out of practical political reasons: he needed a powerful force on his side now that the Spartans were against him. But this, I think, probably sells Cleisthenes short. I suspect that his major motivation was more a matter of principle. I'm not certain, though, that his idea, at least at the outset, was to produce a full-fledged fully democratic society. My guess is that he was acting to produce a government that would unify Athenians by giving all, rich and poor alike, some say in how the government worked. Unity, perhaps, rather than democracy, was his immediate goal. But it was democracy that he would prove to be the means to the unification of the people of Athens. | |
| 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. |