ONE

The Greek City-State: Democratic Institutions in Athens

One of the claims made in the introduction to this book was that in order to avoid misinterpreting the ideas of a thinker, we have to place that thinker in his or her historical context. We have to be aware of the social and political conditions that the thinker is responding to. Since, in the next few chapters, we are going to study the political thought of the philosophical threesome of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, which has dominated for so long the study of Greek moral and political philosophy, we need to have a look at their historical context.

Socrates and Plato were Athenian citizens and even though there were times when they were severely critical of the social and political institutions of classical Athens,¹ to understand their works, we must have some idea of how those institutions functioned. Aristotle was not an Athenian citizen, but he spent more than half of his life there, first studying with Plato, and then setting up his own school and teaching there. The Athenian city-state formed the backdrop for the political thought of all three philosophers.

Ancient Greek history is usually divided into the following four periods: the Mycenaean period (1600–1100 bce), the ‘Dark Ages’ (1100–700 bce), the Archaic Age (700–480 bce) and the Classical Age (480–320 bce) We begin our story around 800–700 bce when the so-called Dark Ages were ending and the Archaic Age was beginning in Greece, with the rapid establishment of hundreds of Greek city-states. By 750 bce, the Greek peninsula was suffering from the effects of a population explosion, and many city-states of the Greek peninsula began sending out colonies to settle down in nearby coastal areas. First, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was colonized, followed by the southern coast of the Black Sea. Then, to the west, colonies were settled on the coast of Albania and southern Italy, in Sicily, on the southern coast of France, and even in north-eastern Spain. Greek colonies were also found in Egypt and Libya. ‘By the 6th century, Hellas had become a cultural and linguistic area much larger than the geographical area of Greece. Greek colonies were not politically controlled by their founding cities, although they often retained religious and commercial links with them.’² Some of the famous modern cities of the Mediterranean coast have their beginnings as new settlements of the Greek city-states, for instance, Marseilles (Massilia), Naples (Neapolis) and Istanbul (Byzantium). By the classical era, there were certainly more than 1,500 city-states in this region, even if some were little more than modern towns. Each city-state or polis consisted of the main city surrounded by an agricultural hinterland. Each city-state formed a separate and independent political unit.

The age of archaic and classical Greece was not only the age of the spread of the Greek city-states all over the Mediterranean coast, but it was also an age of transition in, and consolidation of political institutions in these city-states. Originally, each Greek city-state was ruled by a king, called the basileus, but gradually, by about 700 bce, the basileus was replaced in most Greek city-states by groups of three men, called archons. The archon eponymous functioned like a chief magistrate, the polemarch was the head of the armed forces and the archon basileus performed religious duties.³ In Athens, these three officials were elected from the ranks of the nobility for a term of ten years, but by 683 bce, their term had been reduced to just one year. Gradually the number of archons in Athens increased to about nine. After finishing their term, these archons became lifetime members of a body called the Council of Areopagus which was responsible for the city’s government. The government of Athens in the 7th century was thus in the hands of the aristocracy, in the form of the nine archons supported by the Council of the Areopagus. In most of the other city-states as well, kingship was replaced by oligarchic forms of government. Oligarchy, that is, rule by the few, usually the noble born, and the rich and wealthy, was the dominant form of government in the Greek city-states.

DEMOCRACY IN ATHENS

We said earlier that there were as many as 1,500 city-states at this time; yet, the city-state of Athens has received more historical attention than any other. There are several reasons which justify this concentrated attention. First of all, Athens was much larger than most other city-states, both territorially and in terms of population. In the 5th century, Athens is supposed to have had as many as 50,000 citizens, whereas Sparta, with the next largest citizen body, had only 10,000 citizens. Many Greek city-states had a citizen body of only about 400 to 900 citizens. Attica, with Athens at its centre, covered a territory of 2,650 sq. kms, whereas the average Greek city-state had a territory of only 50 to 100 sq. kms. The region of Boeotia, just north of Attica, for example, with about 2,600 sq. kms, contained several poleis.⁴ Politically too, Athens was an anomaly in Hellas given that from about 500 bce to around 300 bce, except for two brief interruptions, Athens remained a democracy. For 200 years or so, with hardly any real break, the city was under democratic institutions and these institutions must have influenced Athenian life a great deal.

Did the flowering of culture in Athens at that time—in the form of the great philosophers like Plato and Socrates, the celebrated dramatists, like Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, and beautiful art—have something to do with its democratic practices? It has been pointed out that when the other Greek city-states, from the 8th to the mid-6th centuries, were establishing colonies, Athens was quiet; during the 7th and 6th centuries, Athens had no poets to boast of, except Solon; and there is no record of any visits of the famous 6th century Ionian philosophers to Athens. Suddenly, in the 5th century, Athens was at the forefront of everything. Did this have to do with the establishment of democratic institutions by Cleisthenes in 508/507 bce? Soon after democracy was firmly established in Athens, the Greco–Persian wars began and Athens helped the Ionian Greeks to throw off their recently acquired Persian yoke. The Persian king, Darius, sent a large army to Greece which was defeated by a much smaller Athenian force at Marathon in 490 bce. In 480 bce, a large Persian fleet of over 1,200 ships, sent by Xerxes, Darius’s son, was defeated by the Athenian navy, off the coast of the island of Salamis. In 478 bce, Athens established the Delian League under its leadership, ostensibly to protect the other Greek city-states, since skirmishes with Persian forces continued sporadically for another three decades, till the peace of Callias was finally declared in 449 bce, when Persia accepted the independence of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor.

Did Athens’s increase in power in the 4th and 5th centuries have to do with its new form of government? Questions such as these as well as our modern interest in democracy draw our attention specifically to the citystate of Athens. We began our discussion of the Athenian polis by referring to the argument that much of Western political thought is a response to Athenian democracy. This claim is often repeated: ‘The history of political thought in the West is largely the history of warnings about the hasty, greedy, and intemperate courses on which the masses are likely to embark if they ever get power in their hands.’⁵ If it is not just Plato and Aristotle who were reacting to Athenian democracy, but the entire tradition of Western political thought, then it seems all the more important for us to have some idea of this democratic regime.

When was democracy first established in Athens? This question continues to be debated extensively by historians. Many scholars take Cleisthenes’s reforms of 508/507 bce to be definitive, but some insist that Athenian democracy can only be said to be established much later with the reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles in the period 460–452 bce. Sidestepping this debate we can only note that there seem to be at least four important moments in the development of democracy in Athens: Solon’s economic reforms of the late 6th century, Cleisthenes’s reorganization of the tribes in the early 6th century, the reforms of 462–460 bce associated with Ephialtes and Pericles and finally, the changes of 404–403 bce.⁶ We can examine each of these transitions briefly.

Usually, accounts of Athenian democracy begin with Solon, who was appointed the archon eponymous in Athens in 594 bce. Solon is said to have started the story of Athenian democracy by undertaking some major economic reforms. As soon as he became the archon, Solon cancelled all outstanding debts and forbade any creditor from selling anyone who was in his debt, into slavery. In Attica which had an agrarian economy, poorer farmers who had taken loans from a richer neighbour to make ends meet were forced to mortgage their land to their creditor when they were unable to repay their loans. These debt-ridden farmers became the hektemorioi or tenant farmers bound now to pay one-sixth of their land’s produce to their creditor. Many of these hektemorioi had by the 7th century, finding themselves unable to even pay the sixth part of the produce to the creditor, been forced to sell their families and themselves as slaves to the creditor.⁷ When Solon decreed the cancellation of all debts and the return of their lands to the hektemorioi, and abolished all forms of debt-slavery, he took a major step towards reducing the stark inequalities that existed in Attica. Some fragments of Solon’s poems are still extant, in which he describes himself as freeing the land and liberating the farmers.⁸

This, however, did not mean that the differences between the rich and the poor disappeared. To Solon also goes the credit of formalizing the Athenian population into four property classes: At the top were the pentakosiomedimnoi or the ‘five hundred measure men’, who obtained, every year, at least 500 measures of produce from their land. One measure or medimnos was approximately equivalent to 38 kgs or 50 litres. The next class was made up of the hippies whose estates produced between 300 and 500 measures annually, and who were able to provide a horse and be cavalrymen in times of war. They were followed by the zeugitai, with 200–300 measures, who could pay for their own armour and who became infantrymen during war. The last class was made up of the thetes, who could only produce less than 200 measures from their land. The thetes were manual labourers and did not pay taxes. It is estimated that more than half of the citizen population of the city-state of Athens was made up of thetes.⁹ What Solon did was to allow Athenian citizens from all four classes to participate in Athenian political institutions, unlike before, when political activity in Athens was only the preserve of the nobility, or of the wealthy.

To counteract the power of the nobility in the Areopagus, Solon decreed that the archons would no longer be purely from the members of the nobility; the nine archons could now be chosen from the first two property classes of the pentakosiomedimnoi and the hippies. Solon is also said to have established a new political institution, the boule, to advise the archons. Membership to the boule was open to the first three Athenian classes. Solon also increased the importance of another pre-existing advisory body, the ekklesia, by enacting a law that every Athenian citizen, including the thetes, could sit in the ekklesia where they would vote on governmental policy. Solon also reformed the judicial system. Whereas, earlier, the archons and the Areopagus performed all judicial functions, Solon now allowed members of all property classes to be included as jurors in a new system of courts. Any citizen could appeal to these new courts against the decisions of the archons.

Solon’s democratic reforms became the foundation on which later statesmen, who wanted to introduce democratic laws, based their policies. His reforms withstood the tyranny of Peisistratus, who was a younger associate of Solon, and who, presenting himself as the champion of the people, ruled as a tyrant, first from 559 to 556 bce and then from 546 to 528 bce. Even as a tyrant, however, Peisistratus kept the Solonian constitution in place. Finally, his sons were overthrown by Cleisthenes, who retained some of Solon’s changes and who is considered, due to his own revisions to the constitution in 508/507 bce, to be the real founder of Athenian democracy by most scholars. Like Solon, the first thing that Cleisthenes did was to modify the social structure of Attica. Bypassing the earlier four Ionian tribes which had been based on kinship, Cleisthenes reorganized the people of Attica into ten new tribes based on demes, or place of residence. Attica was divided into 139 demes; these demes were classified as belonging to the coast, to an inland area, or to the city. The demes or localities of the coast were divided into 10 groups or trittyes and the same was done with the inland and the city demes. One group or trittyes of demes from each region was assigned to one of the 10 new tribes. So each of the ten tribes was made up of three trittyes and through the trittyes of anywhere from six to twenty-one demes. Thus, the new tribes were dispersed over the entire geographical area of the polis. It was on the basis of these new tribes that the membership of citizens from all over Attica to Athens’s central political institutions was organized. ‘This was the first systematic attempt to establish binding institutional links between the centre and the periphery and incorporate all of Attica formally within the Athenian polis. The result was less the restructuring of an old political community than the creation of a new one’.¹⁰ Thus, Cleisthenes was the one responsible for integrating all the people who lived in Attica into one political community. By opening the highest political offices to all citizens, he made them feel that they were all a part of the same body. We will come to know more about his political reforms when we discuss the political institutions of Athenian democracy, in the next section. The following description of Athens’s main political organs will incorporate both Cleisthenes’s reforms as well as some of the changes made by later democratic leaders.

POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Let us look more closely at some of the central political institutions of democratic Athens. At the forefront was the ekklesia, which it was the right and duty of every male Athenian citizen, who was over 20 years old, to attend. Citizenship was restricted to free born Athenian males, and out of a population of about 300,000 in Athens, not more than 50,000 would have been citizens. The quorum of the ekklesia was set at 6,000, and it met about 40 times in a year, which means that there was a session of the ekklesia after about every nine days. Of the 40 annual meetings, at least 10 were extremely important. Each such session was called the main meeting or the ekklesia kyria, ‘in which there was always a vote of confidence for the officers of the state, discussions on the price of corn which was set by the state, the taking up of matters related to defence as well as to the confiscation of the property of various persons by the state’.¹¹ About a century after the reforms of Cleisthenes, when democracy was restored in Athens after the oligarchic coup failed in 403 bce, payment was also introduced for attending the meetings of the ekklesia and each citizen was paid around three obols (approximately one day’s earnings for manual labour) for attending.

Five days notice had to be given for a scheduled meeting of the ekklesia. Along with this notice, a placard announcing the proposals to be discussed at the meeting had to be put up in the agora (marketplace). On the day of the meeting, some police officers would descend on the marketplace with long ropes, dipped in red colouring, in their hands. With these ropes they would try to herd in all the citizens who were delaying going to the assembly. If a citizen got red colour on his clothes, he would be fined for attending the meeting late. The citizens at the assembly voted on the laws being proposed, or the policy being decided. A proposal would be announced, say, a proposition to increase the garrison of the allied city of Byzantium. After the proposal was introduced, the herald would ask loudly, ‘Who wishes to speak?’ After that, it was open to anyone and everyone to come up to the bema (podium) to put forth his views on the matter at hand, ‘When it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or ship owner, rich or poor, of good family or none.’¹² The Athenians saw free speech as integral to the proper functioning of their democracy. Not only was Athenian democracy based on isegoria—an equal opportunity to speak given to all citizens, irrespective of their status—but democracy in Athens also allowed parrhesia—frank and critical speech—to all its citizens.¹³ Whenever an important motion was being discussed in the assembly, there would usually be many speakers, both supporting and opposing the motion. Soon there would be a demand for closure through a vote and voting would take place by a show of hands. This is how important issues of war and peace, treaties with other city-states, as well as matters of domestic policy were decided by the Athenian citizens. Decisions of the assembly were recorded and published, and the more important ones were even carved in stone tablets, several of which have survived.

There were many mechanisms set in place to ensure that the citizens took the proceedings of the assembly seriously. The rules demanded that speakers stay on the subject at hand, and not slander anyone. Breaking this rule meant having to pay a penalty. There was also the interesting mechanism of graphe paranomon, which was a suit, or an accusation against a bill or proposal which was contrary to the law. If the assembly passed this accusation against any leader or against any of its members, that person would have to pay a fine. It was important that the deliberations of the assembly were conducted carefully, especially since it was an extremely powerful body. Along with passing laws and policymaking, the assembly also had the power to hear charges of eisangelia, which was an accusation of crimes against the state. At each ekklesia kyria, any citizen could bring charges of treason against any official or a private citizen. To bring these charges, no prior permission from the boule was needed. In the later years of Athenian democracy, from 403 bce to 322 bce, the Assembly prosecuted some 30 generals on charges of eisangelia.¹⁴

The second important political institution in Athens was the boule or the council, which was permanently in session throughout the year, and which was responsible both for preparing the agenda of each session of the assembly, as well as for implementing the decisions taken at these sessions. The council consisted of 500 citizens, with 50 citizens (all over 30 years of age) being assigned to it every year from each of the 10 tribes. Each group of 50 from a particular tribe acted as a standing committee or prytaneis of the boule for 36 consecutive days. This group of 50 was responsible for the work of the boule for those days. On each of those 36 days, one out of those 50 would be chosen by lot to become the chairman of the boule for that day, and would preside over its meetings on that day. If there was a meeting of the ekklesia set for that day as well, then he would also preside over that meeting. No citizen could serve on the boule more than two times in his lifetime. Anyone wanting to be a member of the boule had to be approved first by his deme. The demarch or head of the deme, who himself was chosen by lot for a year’s term, together with the deme’s assembly which met at least once a year, would consider his demesmen for membership to the boule. If there were more candidates than the deme’s allocation, then the members of the boule from that deme were chosen by lottery. Membership to the council was, however, restricted to the first three property classes.

The boule set the agenda of the assembly. Mostly, no proposal could be discussed in the ekklesia unless it had already been vetted and debated in the Boule. The draft proposals or probouleumata of the boule were ‘either in the form of recommendations or simply as open questions for the assembly to decide on’.¹⁵ Decisions taken at the assembly were recorded as decisions of the boule and the assembly, for example in the form of ‘Resolution of the boule and the Demos’.

The boule was helped in its executive functions by magistrates, and there were as many as 600 of them in Athens, each appointed for an annual term. The most important magistrates were the ten generals or the strategoi, appointed annually; one from each tribe. Each tribe selected its own general and there was no bar on repeated appointments of the same person for generalship. Pericles, for example, was a strategoi continuously from 443 bce to 429 bce. Since Athens was almost always at war, the strategoi were very important officials. About 90 other magistrates were also elected, including the most important financial officers and some religious functionaries. The other 500 magistrates—the superintendents of the market and of weights and measures, those responsible for the maintenance of roads and for cleaning the streets, those in charge of the prisons, the record keepers, etc.—were chosen by lottery, and usually worked in committees of ten, with one member from each tribe. One particular magistracy could be held only once in a lifetime, and all magistrates had to submit to an audit of their euthynai (accounts) on leaving office. Under this procedure, auditors looked at the accounts of the funds under the officer, and brought charges of corruption, if any. If the officer was convicted, he had to pay back 10 times the amount that he had defrauded.

Like the assembly, the Athenian court system allowed for a maximum of participation by the citizens. The courts were known as the dikasteria and the jurors who served in them were the dikasts. Under Cleisthenes’s reforms, every year 6000 Athenian citizens aged 30 or over were chosen and registered as a pool of jurors. These 6,000 were chosen by lot from those willing to stand, 600 being selected from each tribe. The majority of the jurors, after the introduction of pay for the dikasts in 451 bce, actually came from the poorer classes. The courts ranged in size from 201 to 501 jurors to even larger sizes depending on the kind of case being heard. There were basically 10 kinds of courts differentiated by the type of offences they could hear. Each of these 10 courts was assigned 600 dikasts, and on the days on which one particular kind of court was in session, the dikasts assigned to it would turn up at dawn, and the court would begin as soon as the required number of jurors had turned up. These courts were in session for about 200 days in a year. At each session, the petitioner and the defendant were assigned an equal amount of time to make their case; there were no lawyers in the Athenian system. The jury heard both sides but did not deliberate. The members of the jury would, after listening to both sides, cast their vote anonymously.¹⁶

Finally, the nine archons and the Areopagus continued from earlier times, but their powers were much curtailed. From 487/486 bce, the archons began to be chosen by lot from a list of 500, put forward by the tribes, and this made their position weaker. They were left with some judicial duties and the Areopagus, of which they still became members after their year was over, became a body with mainly religious duties. By the reforms of 460–452 bce, the Areopagus lost its powers of the scrutiny of and control over office holders, such powers being transferred to the assembly. The archonship was also opened to the zeugitai class in 457 bce.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL BASIS OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

It has often been pointed out that when, in a population of 250,000 to 300,000, about 80,000 to 100,000 were slaves, 25,000 were metics or resident aliens with no political rights, not to mention all the Athenian women who were not given any rights, and only up to a maximum of 50,000 Athenian males were considered citizens, it is difficult to call such a system democratic. The non-participation of the majority of the population cancels out the active participation and self-rule of a minority of the population. Even if we accept that Athens was a democracy in comparison with the form of government prevalent in other city-states, the received opinion is that it was slavery that was the basis of this ancient democracy. Both Hannah Arendt and the Marxists, for example, agree on this one fact, although one views it positively and the other negatively. For Arendt, since the slaves did all the work, ordinary Greek citizens could remove themselves from the sphere of production and devote their energies to politics, the life of action. Labour confines us to the realm of necessity; the slaves made it possible for Athenian citizens to do something more reflective of human freedom, that is, political action. Marx and Engels decried this same fact; the slaves did all the work and the citizens, specially the richer ones, reaped all the fruits thereof. For Marx and Engels furthermore, it is labour that expresses all human creativity, and so the Greeks lost out not only because of inequality, but also because they were idle.

Against both these positions, E.M. Wood puts forward her interesting thesis that it was the ordinary peasant citizens and the craftsmen citizens who formed the basis of Athenian democracy. Wood convincingly shows how the ordinary Greek citizen was a farmer or craftsman, who had to do his own manual work himself. When Solon came to power in 594 bce, many of the farmers were, as we have already seen earlier, in debt-bond-age to large landowners, and Solon laid the foundations of Athenian democracy by his one sweeping reform of abolishing debt-bondage. Wood suggests that debt bondage be interpreted not only as bonded labour because of unpaid debts, but as many other forms of tributary labour as well. Due to this reform, by the 5th century, the Athenian land tenure system was characterized by a mass of small independent producers.¹⁷ These small farmers who lived in the villages of Attica, did own one or two slaves, but that did not enable them to earn their living without doing any work themselves. These citizen farmers and craftsmen had to work quite hard at cultivating their farms, or at their crafts, to support their families. They also had to find the time to attend the meetings of the assembly and the sessions of the courts. One of the reasons why payment for attending the assembly was introduced in later years, both for the dikasts as well as assembly members, was because, for these ordinary citizens, taking a day off from work to fulfil their political duties meant a loss of their earnings. It was to encourage these small farmers to be part of Athenian democracy that payment was introduced. ‘The Athenian countryman had a close and direct relationship with the city, he voted in its assembly, bought and sold in its markets, took part in its religious festivals, sued in its courts, had the same political rights and obligations—including that of military service—as the urban population.’¹⁸

Here we must also point out the bearing of the Athenian citizen army on the kind of democracy that existed in Athens. If every citizen in Athens could attend the ekklesia and discuss and vote on matters of state, every citizen over 18 years of age was also to serve in the army. The Athenian army was a citizen army. Those who fought for Athens—and we have to remember that Athens was almost always at war—were citizens, and not the slaves or the women. We have seen earlier that Solon’s classification of Athenians into different property groups foregrounded a citizen’s ability to serve in the army. Those who could provide a horse were the cavalrymen of the army, belonging to the hippies class and citizens of the zeugitai class, who could provide their own armour, were the hoplites or the infantrymen of the army. The thetes, who were the poorer citizens, who made up more than half of the citizen-population of the city-state, had not the resources to be either cavalrymen or infantrymen. Instead, they manned the triremes or the ships, which formed the backbone of the Athenian navy. If 9,000 Athenian hoplites fought against the Persians at Marathon, the sea battle of Salamis in 480 bce saw the use of 180 Athenian triremes, with at least 200 men being needed to man each trireme. Athens ran the Delian League on the basis of its all powerful navy, and this navy would not have been able to function without the ordinary rowers of the triremes. If these rowers, comprising of thetes, were the basis of the might of the Athenian empire, they had to have a say in the decisions of this empire, which they did through their role in the assembly and the dikasteria. It was during these years that Athens became so powerful that its imperial behaviour sparked off a war with Sparta in 459 bce. The second Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens lasted for nearly 30 years, from 431 bce to 404 bce, ending in Athens’s defeat, for which it was its democratic regime that was held responsible.

So, according to many scholars, including Wood, it is not true to say that politics in Athens was the preserve of the rich and that democracy was a pure sham. There really was wide spread participation in politics, irrespective of one’s class position. Irrespective of one’s ‘ancestry, education, or wealth’, that is, in spite of not belonging to ‘the old and new upper classes’,¹⁹ any Athenian male citizen could express his opinion at any given time, on any subject. Politics, in Athens, however, was the preserve of men. Women were cloistered and kept indoors. It is said that a girl would not recognize her grown-up brother because women and men occupied, and grew up in different spaces in the house. Women looked after the home and the men looked after the affairs of the city. Athenian men lived a public life, spending all their time in the gymnasia (exercise halls), the agora and in the ekklesia with other men. The private sphere was looked down upon, and even the emotion of love or eros denoted, not a relationship between a man and a woman, but a homosexual relation between an older man and his younger male lover. Homosexuality was acceptable in Greece, and women were seen as necessary only for child-bearing.

Now that you have some idea of what the Athenian city-state looked like, in terms of its social structure and its political organization, this might help you to better understand the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and the reported dialogues of Socrates. These thinkers were obviously responding to the practice of democracy in Athens. Socrates’s insistence on speaking his mind on any and every occasion mirrors the democratic practice of parrhesia. Plato is famous for comparing a democratic assembly to an out of control ‘great beast’ in Republic, and Aristotle’s very definition of political rule as a continuous alternation between ruling and being ruled in turn captures the status of Athenian men as citizen-subjects.

NOTES

1. For the argument that much of Western political thought is basically an attempt to contain the shock of Athenian political democracy, see Jennifer T. Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
2. http://www.crystalinks.com/greeksocial.html.
3. The term ‘anarchy’ literally means ‘no archon’.
4. Greg Anderson, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508–490 bce, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
5. Jeremy Waldron’s ‘Precommitment and Disagreement’, in Larry Alexander (ed.), Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 282.
6. See Kurt A. Raaflaub, Josiah Ober, and Robert W. Wallace (eds), Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 163–167.
7. John Thorley, Athenian Democracy, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 10.
8. Kurt A. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 45–46.
9. See John Thorley, Athenian Democracy, pp. 13–14.
10. Greg Anderson, The Athenian Experiment, p. 40.
11. John Thorley, Athenian Democracy, p. 33.
12. Plato, Protagoras in Plato: The Collected Dialogues Including the Letters, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series LXXI, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 317.
13. See Arlene W. Saxonhouse Chapter 4 in Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
14. Jon Elster, ‘Accountability in Athenian Politics’ in Adam Przeworski eds, Democracy, Accountability and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 268–70.
15. John Thorley, Athenian Democracy, p. 31.
16. David L. Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
17. Ellen M. Wood, Peasant, Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, London: Verso, 1989.
18. Ellen M. Wood, Peasant, Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, London: Verso, 1997.
19. Kurt A. Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, p. 276.

READING LIST

Anderson, Greg, The Athenian Experiment: Building an Imagined Political Community in Ancient Attica, 508–490 bce, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

Finley, M.I., Politics in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Raaflaub, Kurt A., The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Raaflaub, Kurt A., Josiah Ober and Robert W. Wallace (eds), Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Roberts, Jennifer T., Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Saxonhouse, Arlene W., Chapter 4 in Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Stockton, David L., The Classical Athenian Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Thorley, John, Athenian Democracy, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2004.

Wood, Ellen M., Peasant, Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy, London: Verso, 1989.

CENTRAL THEMES

1. The theory of Athenian ‘exceptionalism’: Out of the hundreds of city-states that existed in classical Greece, why is it that the city-state of Athens has attracted so much scholarly attention? Which features of the Athenian polis continue to draw our modern imagination and why?
2. The political institutions of Athenian democracy: Between the 5th and the 3rd centuries bce, Athenian democracy operated through a set of political institutions which were modified and strengthened during these 200 years. How did the Assembly, the Council and the Courts function? What were the democratic features of these institutions?
3. The Athenian social structure: The scholarly debate about the strengths and shortcomings of Athenian democracy is based, to a large extent, on claims about the participation of different social groups in Athens in the Assembly, the Council and the Courts. What is your understanding of the social structure of Athens, and of its impact on Athenian democratic institutions?
4. The importance of warfare in Athenian politics: The Persian wars, and the Peloponnesian wars had a major impact on Athenian history. Should the role of Athenian citizens in their democratic institutions be understood in complement with the manning of the Athenian army and navy by these same citizens? How are the effects of war to be understood in the story of Athenian democracy?