The Democracy of Ancient Athens

It is commonly claimed that the story of democracy begins in ancient Athens, but this is pretty clearly false.  Generalizing from technically simpler cultures still existing or having been recorded before their destruction by Europeans, democracy in various direct forms was probably pretty widespread in early human history.  The turn towards authoritarianism in human societies has been speculated to have been the result of sudden shifts in the material basis of that society.  The ways and means of getting what is needed to live were rapidly eroded, perhaps due to various changes in local ecosystems.  But I’m no anthropologist.  What is important about Athens is that it is one of the best recorded democracies available, and one of the most extensive.  The ancient polis is the paradigmatic democracy.

You can find a thorough overview of Athenian democracy here, with all the primary resources you’d ever need, but I’ll give you the rundown.

A Very Brief History of Ancient Athens

Athenian democracy is thought to begin with the commissioning of Solon, in 594 BC, by the city’s oligarchs to save the city from its economic and political troubles.  The polis was awash with uncollectible debt among its lower classes, mostly in the form of the ancient Athenian version of mortgages.  That sounds familiar.  Apparently wiser than most leaders in history, Solon realized that this was a problem.  This great democratic experiment began with the annulment of debts and mortgages.  Solon also introduced the first democratic elements into the constitution, including right to trial by jury, an Assembly for all citizens, and the use of lotteries to fill offices.  Oligarchic elements remained, for example the officers called archons, the “Council of the Areopagus,” and property qualifications among the four classes codified by Solon, but these too were more open to the citizenry at large.  But Athens was still a class society, which is incompatible in the long-run with a viable democracy.  Thus by 546 the Constitution of Solon had fallen to the tyrant Pisistratus.  The tyranny was finally brought to an end in 510 by Cleisthenes, another populist aristocrat, who restored the democracy, probably to prevent the ascension of another aristocratic family over his own.  Cleisthenes reorganized the entirety of Athenian territory to break up traditional loyalties with artificial tribes and ‘demes’.  A subsequent reformer, Ephialtes, further opened magistracies and the Council of the Areopagus to popular participation.  More tyrannies and oligarchic ambitions followed the Periclean Age, in which Athens reached the height of its power and achievements.  Finally, Athenian democracy reached its maturity with the reforms of Demosthenes, until the city was finally conquered by the Macedonians in 338 BC.

The Instruments of Democracy

All citizens of the polis were entitled to come and participate in its famous Assembly. The collective citizenry itself was the seat of power in the city.  Every man was entitled to speak, but only the Council (“of 500,” more or less the executive of the Assembly) could introduce agendas to be discussed.  The Assembly is usually portrayed as being able to make any decision at the whim of the crowd, but Athens was governed under the rule of law.  It was, in fact, a punishable offense to propose the Assembly perform some action that was contrary to existing laws.  And, as with modern Anglo-American law, the courts could strike down illegal decrees.  However, until the introduction of the nomothetae, the distinction between law and executive decrees doesn’t seem to be clear, at least to us.  In the time of Demosthenes, a body of nomothetae (“legislators”), hundreds of citizens selected by lottery like jurors, was commissioned to compile the laws of Athens.  Soon such a commission was called for every law proposed in the Assembly, with each law debated before nomothetae as if the law itself were on trial.

The laws and decrees of the Assembly were executed by the Council of Five Hundred (originally Four Hundred) and about sixty commissions of ten magistrates each.  The Council itself had a rotating presidium of fifty men, with one of the ten tribes taking a turn for one of each month (on a lunar calendar).  That presidium itself had a president who sat for one day and one night.  Furthermore, the citizenry directly applied its laws in its participatory court system.  Unlike the small courts of the English tradition that we continue to enjoy, Athenian juries numbered in the hundreds.  Like the English tradition though, cases proceeded by ‘adversarial’ means, the word of the accused argued against the word of the accuser.  The Athenians passed sentence by a kind of barter, with each side proposing punishment, and letting the jury decide.  The “prosecutor” – not a public official but merely the accuser – could find himself fined if less than one-fifth of the jury found in his favor.  This was to keep citizens from bringing flimsy criminal charges against one another for personal gain.

All of these offices and juries were filled by lot, and the Athenians made the purpose of this clear.  Aristotle claimed that to be free was for all to rule all, and failing that, for each to rule and be ruled in turn. In other words, democracy achieves the freedom of each individual (free, male citizens) by the distribution of political power as widely as possible.  Democratic lottery breaks the “iron law of oligarchy” that prevails in organization, the general tendency of leaders to continue to be leaders long after their desirability has ended.  Lottery makes such retention impossible and the formation of ruling cliques within the government very unlikely.  If there are to be such cliques, they would be tenuous, temporary, and easily broken – and, indeed, in the conspiracies that would bubble up, this was the case.

Criticisms of Athenian Democracy

Such conspiratorial disruptions have been said ever since to be the hallmarks of democracy.  If we just take a look back at the little history I provided above, Athens clearly had a lot of ups and downs.  Just as clear are the causes of these disorders.  Athenian democracy, though exclusive to free men, nevertheless eventually included all free men, rich and poor.  And, of course, the poor were more numerous and passed laws in their favor, such as, the government paying for the poor to attend Assemblies.  When Aristotle and other anti-democratic philosophers put it like this – that the poor pass laws in their favor – it sounds unfair, doesn’t it?  Of course, the poor could do this because they were the majority.  Another way of putting the same proposition would be that the majority passed laws in the interests of the majority.  But Aristotle claimed, rightly, that the source of democratic instability was that the poor (the majority) would take the wealth of the rich for their own use (public use), which they often did.  Thus the rich would seek to establish oligarchies or tyrannies, which they often did.  So what is the real problem here – that the majority passes laws in the interests of the majority, or that the rich do not like to have their wealth taken for public use?  Regardless of which you choose, the source of democratic instability is class conflict. Thus, political philosophers from Aristotle to Madison have been seeking the institutional means to balance the classes.  Others, like Rousseau (or Madison in his later years), realize that the freedom of the individual is more important, and that social equality simply becomes a prerequisite for democratic liberty as well as stability.

The more modern concern with Athenian democracy is that it is not only exclusive of women and its slaves, but that it is necessarily exclusive of women and its slaves.  Athenian democracy could not have operated – men could not have left for Assemblies and juries, magistracies and councils – without the free labor of women and slaves to produce the material basis of the city – the things the city needed to persist.  It is undoubtedly true that democracies cannot exist without the existence of free time for its participants to exercise their political power.  But it is ancient societies that require the support of economic and gendered slavery; in modern society, the need for labor is mitigated for all people by the machine, potentially at least.  It is possible to cut the working day in half and maintain a standard of living in value equal to fifty years ago, leaving time for democratic activities.  In fact, I would say that such progressive shortening of the workday is necessary to expanding modern democratic practice.

Let us dispense with the usual objection that historical democracies were small, and people could meet easily.  No one is suggesting a resurrection of city-states.  We are suggesting that we examine the means by which we might transplant such principles to the modern state.  Such principles as mass jury courts, election by lot, plural executives, and widespread participatory responsibilities do not depend on the size of nations.  We ought to compare the relevant results of ancient democracy with the relevant results of modern (supposed) democracy.  The assumptions and principles of Athenian democracy present a stark contrast with the practice of the supposed democracy of the modern age.  Modern democracy owes more to the anti-democratic, class-conscious republican tradition exemplified by ancient Rome, Renaissance Italy, and modern England and the United States.  Ancient Athens, on the other hand, exemplifies the institutions of actual democracy.