Athenian democracy was one of the earliest well-documented governments of its kind in human history. It is hard to convey how radical and amazing it was in the context of the ancient Mediterranean world. Unfortunately, as a result of the significance it held in its historical context, today, people often misguidedly regard it as the ideal, original democracy that all modern democracies should strive to imitate. We should admire Athenian democracy as one important early step in the development of democratic government, but we should also recognize that it was not totally unique even in the Greek world for its time and that it was deeply flawed in ways that are, unfortunately, often overlooked in modern panegyrics of its greatness.
Contrary to popular belief, Athens was not the first Greek polis (i.e., city-state) to adopt a democratic constitution. Moreover, the vast majority of the Athenian population was formally excluded from participating in the democracy. Democratic Athens was also aggressively imperialistic and routinely sought to dominate and oppress other Greek poleis and, on multiple occasions, it even committed outright genocide. Finally, Athenian democracy was much shorter-lived than many people realize.
Athens: not the first democracy
First of all, I should debunk the popular misconception that Athens was the first democratic polity anywhere in the world. This is verifiably false. Even if we ignore the possible examples of democratic states in ancient Mesopotamia and ancient India, Athens was not even the first ancient Greek polis to adopt a democratic constitution.
The eminent classical historian Eric W. Robinson has written a couple of books specifically debunking the misconception that Athens was the first Greek democratic city-state: The First Democracies: Early Popular Government Outside Athens (which was first published in 1997 and is unfortunately now out of print) and Democracy Beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age (which was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press and is still in print).
Robinson concludes that, by the time the Athenian lawgiver Kleisthenes conducted his reforms in around 508 BCE that are generally considered to mark the beginning of full Athenian democracy, at least seventeen Greek poleis had probably already adopted democratic constitutions of their own: Achaia (and its colonies), Akragas, Ambrakia, Argos, Chalkis, Chios, Knidos, Kos, Kyrene, Elis, Herakleia Pontika, Mantineia, Megara, Naxos, Samos, and Syracuse.
While it may be possible to argue that some of the Greek poleis discussed by Robinson were not really democracies before 508 BCE, there can be no doubt that at least some of them really were. It is also worth emphasizing that some of the democratic poleis discussed by Robinson were very politically and culturally important—especially Syracuse and Argos.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of ruined portions of the ancient Greek polis of Argos, surrounded by the modern city
In other words, it seems that, compared to other ancient Greek poleis, Athens actually adopted democracy relatively late. Athenian democracy is not significant because Athens was the first polis to adopt democracy, but rather because it was one of the most populous, one of the most politically and militarily powerful, and by far the best documented.
In the fifth century BCE, the total population of Athens and the surrounding countryside was probably somewhere between roughly 250,000 and 300,000 people. This may not sound impressive by modern standards, but, by the standards of the ancient world, it was a sprawling megalopolis.
The only ancient Greek polis that rivalled Athens in terms of population size was probably Syracuse, which probably also had a population of between 250,000 and 300,000 people. For comparison, at the same time, Sparta (which is known today as Athens’ greatest rival) probably had a total population of somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 people.
In addition to being extremely populous by ancient standards, Athens was also arguably the most powerful polis in Greece in the fifth century BCE. I will talk in greater depth about Athenian military aggression later in this article, but it is important to note at this point that Athens managed to build hegemonic control over most of the Aegean Sea and maintained that control for a large portion of the fifth century BCE.
Finally, Athens is also the polis that produced the vast majority of surviving ancient Greek sources. This is partly a result of the fact that Athens was such a huge city and it had a thriving literary culture, so it naturally produced a lot more literature than other ancient Greek poleis. Even many famous writers who weren’t originally born in Athens moved to the city and lived there for many years, including the historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) and the philosopher Aristotle of Stageira (lived 384 – 322 BCE).
The overrepresentation of Athens in our sources is also, however, partly a result of the fact that, as I discuss in this article from January 2020, the vast majority of the texts that survive from classical Greece survive because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by the Greek-speaking Byzantine Romans, who, as it happens, preferred reading works that were written in the Classical Attic dialect—the dialect that was spoken in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The Byzantine Romans therefore tended to copy works that had been written in Athens while ignoring works that had been written by authors from other places.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Athenian Akropolis
Athenian citizen women
In addition to not being the first democracy, classical Athens was also not nearly as democratic as modern people often imagine it to have been. People often forget that the vast majority of the people living in Athens during classical antiquity had absolutely no voice in the democratic process. Only free adult male Athenian citizens were even allowed to participate.
All women—even free Athenian citizen women—were totally excluded from all official political processes. They were not allowed to take part in the Assembly; they were not allowed to hold any form of public office; and their rights were extremely limited. “Respectable” Athenian citizen women were traditionally expected to stay in the home at all times and take care of the household.
Of course, just because this was the ideal doesn’t mean that all women followed it. Many poor Athenian citizen families could not afford to own slaves, meaning the women of the household often had to leave the house as a matter of necessity simply to fulfill their daily tasks. Aristotle—who, as I discuss in this article from October 2020, was a rather notorious misogynist—notably remarks in his Politics 4.1300a that no one can keep the wives of poor men from doing things outside the home. This statement probably reflects reality.
Archaeological evidence also clearly demonstrates that, despite the expectation for Athenian citizen women to remain in the home, many women worked low-paying jobs outside the home to support their families. For instance, Attic vase paintings from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE sometimes depict ordinary women working as street vendors.
ABOVE: Detail of an Athenian red-figure pelike dating to between c. 480 and c. 470 BCE, depicting a woman working as a street vendor. Some Athenian women apparently did work outside the home.
It’s probably also a mistake to assume that Athenian women were completely politically irrelevant. In many cases, the wives and daughters of male Athenian citizens undoubtedly exercised some degree of unofficial influence over their husbands and fathers. In fact, in some cases, it was possible for certain women to gain substantial political influence behind the scenes.
The Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BCE) alludes in his comedy The Acharnians to the influence that the metoikos woman Aspasia of Miletos (lived c. 470 – c. 400 BCE) was believed to have possessed over her partner, the prominent politician Perikles. The philosopher Plato mentions Aspasia’s influence over Perikles in his dialogue Menexenos, even going so far as to claim that Aspasia personally wrote some of Perikles’s speeches for him.
As I have mentioned, though, women’s influences invariably took place outside the formal channels established by the Athenian democratic constitution. Women like Aspasia never had the opportunity to take part in formal debates in the Assembly, they never had the opportunity to cast votes on political matters, and they never had the opportunity to run for political office. The Athenian constitution denied them these rights.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of an earlier Greek herma depicting Aspasia of Miletos, the partner of Perikles who reportedly exerted substantial influence over Athenian politics in the late fifth century BCE
Enslaved people
Citizen women were not the only ones excluded from participating in Athenian democracy. At any given time, a very large proportion of all people living in the city of Athens were enslaved. These people had been brought to Athens from all regions; most of them were fellow Hellenes captured from neighboring poleis, but some of them were captured from the land of Thrake to the north, or even the far-off Skythian lands to the north of the Black Sea.
As I discuss in this article from August 2020, although conditions for enslaved people in ancient Greece varied considerably and some enslaved people were better off than others, life for them in general was quite brutal and unpleasant. The comedies of Aristophanes are full of jokes about slaves being beaten and abused. For instance, The Knights, which was first performed in Athens in 424 BCE, begins with a scene of two slaves complaining about how their new overseer sadistically beats them and tortures them.
In The Frogs, which was first performed in 405 BCE, two characters who are believed to be enslaved compete to see which of them can bear the most strokes of the whip. These jokes only make sense if the people in the audience were accustomed to seeing slaves beaten and tortured on a relatively routine basis.
Other slaves were even more brutally mistreated, such as the slaves who worked in the silver mines at Laurion at the end of the Attik peninsula. These people were forced to work long hours in unbearably hot, cramped, and unsafe conditions underground. Their lives were, by all accounts, short and miserable—far worse than even the lives of chattel slaves.
One thing that all ancient Athenian slaves had in common was that they had no say in the political process. Slaves were not allowed to participate in the Assembly or hold public office. Indeed, the testimony of a slave was not even legally admissible in court unless it had been extracted via torture, because it was thought that slaves were all inveterate liars who needed to have the truth tortured out of them. With only a few very rare exceptions, even if they managed to acquire their freedom, slaves could virtually never become citizens.
ABOVE: Attic black-figure neck-amphora depicting people (probably slaves) harvesting olives. At any given time, a very large proportion of Athens’ total population was enslaved.
Metoikoi
Athens also had a large population of resident foreigners who had come to Athens from abroad, mostly from other Greek poleis. These people were free, but they lacked citizenship. The Greek word that is used to describe members of this class of free non-citizens is μέτοικοι (métoikoi). The word is formed from the preposition μετά (metá), which indicates change, and the noun οἶκος (oîkos), which means “home.” The word therefore literally means “one who has changed their home.”
Athenian citizens and metoikoi freely associated with each other and there was no social disadvantage to being a metoikos. Nonetheless, as a result of not having Athenian citizenship, metoikoi had extremely limited legal rights. They were not allowed to participate in the Assembly, they were not allowed to run for any kind of political office, and they were not even allowed to own property unless they had an Athenian sponsor or a special dispensation from the Assembly. Some metoikoi were able to become very wealthy, but they lacked the political and economic security that came with citizenship.
Essentially the only way a non-citizen could acquire Athenian citizenship was by receiving a special dispensation from the Assembly—something which only happened on very rare occasions. Citizenship laws only grew more restrictive over time. In 451 BCE, with the support of the politician Perikles, the Athenians passed a law restricting Athenian citizenship to individuals who could prove that all their ancestors on both the paternal and maternal sides were Athenian citizens and that they had no foreigners in their family history whatsoever.
Under this new law, anyone in Athens who claimed to possess Athenian citizenship could have their ancestry questioned at any time and be required to prove that all their ancestors going back perhaps as far as five generations had been Athenian citizens. The law made it so that, even if a person had a parent who was an Athenian citizen, they had been born in Athens, and they had never lived anywhere outside Athens, they were still considered a metoikos.
Ironically, this law later came back to bite Perikles in the behind. Perikles cohabited with the metoikos woman Aspasia of Miletos for many years and possibly eventually married her. The couple had a son together named Perikles the Younger. Perikles the Younger, however, was not an Athenian citizen because his mother was not an Athenian citizen. Ultimately, after both of Perikles’s sons by his first wife, Paralos and Xanthippos, died during the Great Plague of Athens in 429 BCE, the Assembly granted a special dispensation to make Perikles the Younger—Perikles’s only surviving son at that point—an Athenian citizen.
ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BCE Greek bronze sculpture of the philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle was a metoikos, or resident foreigner, in Athens; he never had Athenian citizenship.
The makeup of the Athenian population
Unfortunately, there are no precise, reliable statistics of any kind pertaining to the demographic makeup of ancient Athens. Ancient people don’t seem to have kept track of that sort of information. Nonetheless, the classicist John Thorley estimates (Thorley 1996, 74), that out of Athens’ total population of between 250,000 and 300,000 people, somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people were enslaved. An additional 25,000 people were metoikoi. Of the people who were actually citizens, it is safe to estimate that roughly half were female.
Thorley estimates that Athens’ total population of adult male citizens was probably somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000. This means that, at the very best, fully enfranchised adult male Athenian citizens made up approximately one sixth of the overall population. It also means that, at any given time, there were always more people in Athens who were enslaved than people in Athens who could vote.
This really lays bare the problem of just how exclusive Athenian democracy really was. Athens was certainly more democratic than some other ancient Greek poleis, such as Sparta, which, as I discuss in this article from November 2019, was definitely not a democracy (although its constitution did include some democratic elements). All the same, if we were to judge Athens by contemporary standards, we might fairly question whether it was ever truly “democratic” at all.
Athens’ deeply flawed judicial system
In addition to excluding most of the population, Athenian democracy had a number of other serious flaws. One of the most serious problems with Athenian democracy was its judicial system, which often functioned as essentially nothing more than a tool that extremely elite male citizens could use to enact petty vendettas—mostly against their political rivals.
As I discuss in this article from August 2020, the closest thing to a police force in ancient Athens was a group of publicly-owned slaves of Skythian ethnic origin who were armed with bows and arrows. These people were known as τοξόται (toxótai), Σκύθαι (Skýthai), or Σπευσίνιοι (Speusínioi). Their job, however, was simply to maintain public order, prevent riots, and occasionally apprehend people who had already been identified as criminals; they did not investigate crimes or hunt down criminals.
Likewise, there were no professional attorneys whatsoever—not even a district attorney who could press charges against people who had been accused of crimes. Instead, all crimes had to be prosecuted in person by private citizens. In theory, any adult male Athenian citizen could accuse any person (including any woman or non-citizen) of any crime at any time and thereby bring the person to court.
This system naturally placed poorer citizens who had less personal knowledge of the legal system and less time available to spend on litigation at a massive disadvantage. It placed women and metoikoi at an even greater disadvantage, since these groups of people were not legally permitted to prosecute cases at all. If a woman or metoikos wanted to prosecute someone, they needed to convince a male Athenian citizen to prosecute the case for them. Enslaved people had no voice in the judicial system whatsoever.
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix depicting a Skythian archer, painted by Epiktetos, dating to between c. 520 and c. 500 BCE
There were two main kinds of court cases in ancient Athens. The more common kind was a private case, in which an adult male Athenian citizen would make a claim that someone else had personally wronged him. Only the victim of the crime himself was allowed to prosecute the case—unless, of course, the crime was murder, in which case the surviving family members of the victim were expected to prosecute.
The other kind of court case in ancient Athens was a public case, in which any adult male citizen could accuse someone of a crime and prosecute them on behalf of the state itself. The most famous surviving speech written for a public suit is probably Against Meidias, which was written by the famous orator Demosthenes in around 353 BCE for a planned lawsuit against his political rival Meidias.
The speech is extraordinarily longwinded even by the standards of Greek oratory. In it, Demosthenes accuses Meidias of the crime of hubris (i.e., wanton violence, usually committed out of arrogance) for having allegedly slapped him in the face publicly. He declares that this was a heinous crime of unspeakable proportions, that Meidias’s misdeeds are a threat to the entire Athenian state, and that Meidias deserves to be put to death. Ironically, for all this bloviating, Demosthenes seems to have settled the case out of court and may have never delivered his speech in court at all.
ABOVE: Roman marble statue of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, based on a Greek original from around 280 BCE or thereabouts
The Athenians didn’t have anything resembling modern forensic science, meaning court cases were forced to rely heavily on eyewitness testimony, which is notoriously unreliable. Speakers also routinely made use of hearsay and character evidence in ways that a modern court would never allow. Ancient sources frequently imply that jurors tended to decide guilt or innocence not on the basis of solid evidence, but rather on the basis of superficial factors, such as speaking ability or personal likeability.
Women were not allowed to speak for themselves in court, so, if a woman was brought to court, she had to be defended by one of her male relatives. Meanwhile, the testimony of a slave was only admissible in court if it had been extracted via torture, because it was believed that slaves were all inveterate liars who needed to have the truth tortured out of them.
All ancient Athenian juries were extraordinarily large by modern standards—far larger than any British or American jury in modern times. Private cases are generally thought to have had juries composed of between two hundred to four hundred jurors. Public cases were considered more important and therefore had much larger juries, which seem to have usually been composed of over five hundred jurors at the very least. We know of at least one ancient Athenian trial in which the jury was composed of no fewer than 1,501 members.
The Athenians preferred such outlandishly large juries because they believed that having so many jurors would make it impossible for anyone to bribe enough people to influence the outcome of the trial. Unfortunately, as a result of the fact that juries were so huge, verdicts were not required to be unanimous. In order for a defendant to be found guilty, it was only required for the majority of the jurors to vote in favor of conviction. This means that it was much easier for a person to be convicted in an ancient Athenian court than in a modern American court.
All trials were required to be completed within the span of a single day or less. As a result, trials were often rushed. Jurors were expected to cast their votes almost immediately and they were given very little time to think about the arguments they had just heard.
All votes were cast anonymously using tokens. A token with a hole signified that the juror believed that the defendant was guilty and a token without a hole signified that the juror believed that the defendant was innocent. Then, once all the jurors had placed their tokens, the tokens would be counted to decide whether the defendant would be convicted or acquitted.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of surviving ancient Athenian jurors’ tokens on display in the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens
An uneducated populace
In order for a democracy to be successful, the majority of members of the voting population must be adequately informed about the political issues and controversies. When voters are ignorant about the issues, they tend to make uninformed and dangerous decisions. Unfortunately, if the ancient sources are anything to judge by, most adult male citizens in ancient Athens were uneducated and many were ignorant of the political issues that were being discussed.
Allow me to give a famous example of this. The Athenians had a rather unusual custom known as ὀστρακισμός (ostrakismós). Every year, they would hold a vote in which every adult male citizen would write on a potsherd the name of an adult male citizen whom he wished to have banished from the city for ten years. The votes would then be counted and, if any single man received more than six thousand votes, he would be banished from the city for ten years.
The Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 CE) records an anecdote in his Life of Aristeides 7.5–6 about an incident that supposedly happened when the prominent aristocratic politician Aristeides (lived c. 530 – c. 468 BCE), who had a reputation as the most honorable man in Athens, was ostracized. Here is what Ploutarchos writes, as translated by Bernadotte Perrin for the Loeb Classical Library:
“Now at the time of which I was speaking, as the voters were inscribing their ostraka [i.e., potsherds], it is said that an unlettered and utterly boorish fellow handed his ostrakon to Aristeides, and asked him to write Aristeides on it. He, astonished, asked the man what possible wrong Aristeides had done him. ‘None whatever,’ was the answer, ‘I don’t even know the fellow, but I am tired of hearing him everywhere called “The Just.”’ On hearing this, Aristeides made no answer, but wrote his name on the ostrakon and handed it back.”
Whether this incident really happened or not is unclear; Ploutarchos was writing centuries after the events he describes allegedly occurred and, as a wealthy aristocrat himself, he naturally had a motive to portray Aristeides as an honorable and educated man who was hurt by the caprice and ignorance of the masses.
Nonetheless, even if this particular anecdote is apocryphal, elite male ancient Greek writers certainly believed that voter ignorance was a very real problem and I’m inclined to think that it probably really was. The ancient elite writers, of course, believed that people who are not rich are inherently ignorant and that the solution to voter ignorance is to prohibit people who are not rich from having any significant role in government.
I think that the real problem, however, is clearly not that people who are not wealthy are inherently ignorant, but rather that, in Athens in the fifth century BCE, people who were not wealthy were denied access to education. The solution, then, shouldn’t be to disenfranchise people who are not rich, but rather to democratize knowledge itself by ensuring that people who are not rich have access to education. The problem is too little democracy—never too much.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ostrakon with Aristeides’s name inscribed on it, on display in the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens
Athenian imperialism and brutality
Even if we leave aside the problems with democracy within Athens itself, even greater problems arise when we examine Athens’ conduct overseas. In 477 BCE, two years after the Greeks expelled the Persians from Europe, Athens and a group of other city-states founded the Delian League, a military alliance with three explicit purposes: to prevent the Achaemenid Empire from expanding, to gather Persian booty to rebuild the Greek cities, and to wreak revenge against the Persians for their invasion.
Initially, the treasury for the Delian League was kept on the island of Delos, which was sacred to the god Apollon. The League’s decision-making was to be handled by the Assembly of the Delian League, in which each member city-state had one vote. Athens, however, was designated the leader of the Delian League and Athens was assigned with the responsibility of handling the League’s treasury.
About 150 Greek city-states voluntarily joined the Delian League at the time of its founding. All members of the Delian League were required to either contribute a certain number of ships to the navy of the Delian League or pay a tribute of a certain number of silver talents to the treasury of the Delian League.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the extent of the Delian League at the time of the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. Athens itself is shown in pink; Athens’ “allies” (a.k.a. vassal states) are shown in yellow.
Unfortunately, it was not long before Athens started treating the other member states of the Delian League as subjects, rather than allies. In around 471 BCE, the island of Naxos attempted to leave the Delian League. The Athenians forced Naxos to rejoin the League, took away Naxos’s vote in the Assembly, and took away Naxos’s fleet of ships. Thus, it became apparent that joining the Delian League was a bit like joining the mafia; you could join voluntarily, but, once you were in, you weren’t allowed to leave.
In 465 BCE, the island of Thasos attempted to rebel against the Delian League. Athens laid siege to the island for two years and forced it to rejoin. The walls of Thasos were torn down and all of Thasos’s lands, mines, and ships were confiscated and given to Athens. Thasos also lost its vote in the Assembly and, from then on, it was forced to pay additional fines to the Delian League as punishment for its rebellion.
In 454 BCE, the Athenians moved the treasury of the Delian League to Athens. At this point, Athens was practically openly admitting that the Delian League was not really an alliance, but rather an empire ruled by Athens, and the members of the Delian League were not really allies, but rather Athenian vassal states.
In 428 BCE, the city of Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos attempted to secede from the Delian League, but the Athenians invaded and, in 427 BCE, forced Mytilene to issue an unconditional surrender. The Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c. 400 BCE) records in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 3.212–222 how, at the urging of the demagogue Kleon, the Athenians voted to slaughter all the male citizens of Mytilene and sell all the women and children into slavery. The Athenians sent out ships to execute these orders.
The next day, though, the Athenians realized how unprecedently brutal their previous decision had been, so they held another meeting to reconsider their decision. A man named Diodotos, son of Eukrates, spoke up in the Assembly and argued that it would be more beneficial to Athens to spare the people of Mytilene and instead only execute the leaders of the rebellion, because executing all the male citizens of Mytilene would permanently blacken Athens’ reputation.
Diodotos argued that, if they did such a thing, the Athenians would be seen as horrible tyrants, which would only prompt further rebellions. The Athenians held a vote in which the majority of the citizens voted to spare the Mytilenians. They therefore dispatched ships to recall the first set of ships they had sent out. Thus, the people of Mytilene were spared and only the leaders of the rebellion were executed.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the city of Mytilene as it looks today
The slaughter of the Melians
The Mytilenians lucked out, but, unfortunately, others did not. In summer of 416 BCE, the Athenians laid siege to the island of Melos, demanding that the Melians either pay tribute to Athens or face uttermost destruction. Their excuse for making this demand was that the Melians were a Doric people with cultural ties to the Spartans, with whom the Athenians were at war.
At the time, the Melians were not openly supporting the Spartans in the war and were instead remaining neutral. Nonetheless, the Athenians feared that the Melians might join the war effort. The Athenians also wanted to expand their hegemony. Melos made a prime target for Athenian aggression, since it was one of the very few Aegean islands that were not under Athenian authority.
In around January 415 BCE, the Melians surrendered. The Athenian democratic Assembly voted to slaughter all the Melian men and sell all the Melian women and children into slavery. This time, the Athenians did not back down; they slaughtered all the Melian men and took all the women and children as slaves. What the Athenians did to the Melians was a horrifying massacre that no doubt sent shockwaves across the Greek world. Modern commentators have described the slaughter of the Melians as nothing short of an act of genocide.
Even many Athenians seem to have been horrified by their own city’s cruelty. Just a few months after the slaughter of the Melians, the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BCE) staged his tragedy The Trojan Women in Athens at the City Dionysia. The play depicts the suffering of the women of the Trojan royal family after the fall of Troy. Their husbands, fathers, and sons have all been slaughtered and they themselves have been taken as slaves by the Greek victors.
The Trojan Women has traditionally been seen as a harsh condemnation of the Athenians’ brutality and cruelty towards the defeated Melians. This interpretation, however, has been questioned in recent years, with many scholars arguing that, by the time the slaughter of the Melians actually took place, the play must have already been fully written and in the late stages of rehearsal and production. Nonetheless, Euripides surely could have predicted what was going to happen to the Melians months in advance, since the siege of Melos had begun the previous summer.
ABOVE: Illustration of the killing of Astyanax, the infant son of the Trojan prince Hektor, an act portrayed in Euripides’s tragedy The Trojan Women
Thoukydides describes the events leading up to the slaughter of the Melians in his book The Histories of the Peloponnesian War 5.84–116. In a scene that has now become famous, Thoukydides attributes the following startling words to an Athenian emissary:
“…ἐπισταμένους πρὸς εἰδότας ὅτι δίκαια μὲν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρωπείῳ λόγῳ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης ἀνάγκης κρίνεται, δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.”
The most famous translation of this passage comes from the Welsh scholar Richard Crawley:
“…you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
We know from surviving ancient sources that many readers of Thoukydides’s history were greatly shocked by this passage. Notably, the later Greek historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – after c. 7 BCE) wrote a book review of The Histories of the Peloponnesian War, in which he declares that such words were the sort of thing one would expect to hear from an eastern despot seeking to subjugate Greeks, but not at all from the great democratic Athenians, who liberated the Greeks from Persian tyranny.
I strongly believe that Thoukydides wrote this passage with the intent to horrify his readers and to show them the extent to which the Athenians had fallen into depravity.
ABOVE: Fictional illustration intended to represent the historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos
Wait… it lasted how long?
Another thing that is often forgotten about Athenian democracy is how disappointingly short-lived it was. Athenian democracy is traditionally said to have been established in around 508 BCE by the lawgiver Kleisthenes. Athens had already had democratic tendencies before that, but, for our purposes we will take the reforms of Kleisthenes as the starting point for Athenian democracy.
Further democratic reforms took place in the late 460s BCE, under the leadership of the archon Ephialtes of Athens. Ephialtes greatly diminished the power of the Areios Pagos, the Athenian aristocratic court. He also reduced the requirements for property ownership for elected officeholders and introduced the practice of paying holders of public office, thereby allowing Athenians who were not as wealthy to hold those offices.
In 411 BCE, there was a coup in Athens and the democratic government was replaced with a short-lived oligarchy known as the “Oligarchy of the Four Hundred.” This oligarchy was swiftly replaced with another oligarchy which included more people, known as the “Oligarchy of the Five Thousand.” The Five Thousand ruled Athens until around summer of 410 BCE, when the oligarchy ended and democracy was restored.
ABOVE: Modern fictional bust intended to represent the ancient Athenian lawgiver Kleisthenes, from the Ohio Statehouse
After the Spartans defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE, they ended the Athenian democratic government and imposed a brutal, pro-Spartan oligarchic regime, under which the highest authority belonged to a group of thirty pro-Spartan Athenian aristocrats, who eventually became known as οἱ τριάκοντα τύραννοι (hoi triákonta týrannoi), which means “the Thirty Tyrants.” The leader of the Thirty Tyrants was Kritias, who was a former student of the philosopher Socrates and a maternal relative of the philosopher Plato.
During their roughly eight-month-long rule over Athens, the Thirty Tyrants executed anyone whom they suspected of dissent. It is estimated that, during their brief reign of terror, they executed somewhere around 1,500 Athenian citizens without trial—amounting to perhaps as much as one twentieth of the total adult male citizen population. It was a horrific bloodbath.
Eventually, in 403 BCE, an army of pro-democratic exiles led by the general Thrasyboulos invaded and overthrew the Thirty Tyrants and restored democracy. Immediately after the restoration of democracy, the archon Eukleides initiated a series of reforms. Athens remained an independent democracy until early August of 338 BCE, when the forces of King Philippos II of Makedonia defeated an alliance of Greek city-states led by Athens and Thebes in the fateful Battle of Chaironeia.
Although Philippos allowed Athens to remain nominally a democracy at first, he did force it to join the League of Corinth, which was led by Makedonia, making it effectively a Makedonian subject. Ultimately, in 322 BCE, a governor appointed by Antipatros, the regent of Makedonia, brought the city under his rule and suppressed Athenian democracy for the last time.
All in all, from the reforms of Kleisthenes until the suppression of democracy under Antipatros, Athenian democracy only lasted 186 years—and that’s not even considering the brief impositions of oligarchic rule I just mentioned or the fact that, for the last sixteen years of that time, Athens was basically ruled by Makedonia.
For comparison, the present Constitution of the United States went into effect on 4 March 1789, meaning, as of January 2021, the United States Constitution has been in force for nearly 232 years—nearly half a century longer than Athenian democracy existed. Also, the United States has never had the government successfully overthrown and an oligarchy imposed—unlike democratic Athens, which had three different oligarchies imposed over the course of a much shorter time period.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble copy of a Greek bronze portrait head of King Philippos II, the king of Makedonia who defeated Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaironeia and imposed Makedonian rule over Athens
Conclusion
Classical Athenian democracy was unoriginal, incomplete, deeply flawed, and ultimately short-lived; we should not regard it as an ideal, perfect model for us to imitate, but we should not dismiss it as entirely worthless and irrelevant for the current age either. Instead, I think that we should see Athenian democracy as one of many flawed early prototypes for democracy—a system of government which still has not yet been perfected.
The thing about democracy is that it is never perfect. It is never complete. There is always something left to fix, something left to improve—and I would argue that democracy’s ability to improve itself is one of its greatest strengths. Many other forms of government tend to encourage, if not outright demand, conformity and conservativism, but democracy allows for progress and social change. So here, after all I’ve said, is an ode to Greek democracies, the democracies that have arisen from them, and the democracies that will hopefully continue to flourish in the future.
Works cited
- Robinson, Eric W. 1997. The First Democracies: Early Popular Government Outside of Athens. Historia Einzelschriften 107. F. Steiner.
- — 2011. Democracy beyond Athens: Popular Government in the Greek Classical Age. Cambridge University Press.
- Thorley, John. 1996. Athenian Democracy. Lancaster Palimpsests. Routledge.
As usual a good essay with a much-needed corrective to the common misconception. It appears the main thing the United States has inherited from Athens is a penchant for cognitive dissonance. I spot a couple of typos you might want to change. In the first paragraph of the section on Women, you have left the very important word “no” out of the sentence, “People often forget that the vast majority of the people living in Athens during classical antiquity had absolutely voice in the democratic process.” Also you have “bear” instead of “bare” in the last paragraph above the section on Athens’ legal system: “This really lays bear the problem of just how exclusive Athenian democracy really was.” I wish there was quieter way to send this, more to preserve myself from exposure as a mindless pedant with OCD than because the typos mar in any degree your excellent work to educate the public. Inserting the key word “no” that changes the meaning is the change that convinced me to mention anything at all about it. Your work is worth proofreading. Thanks for continuing your interesting and always educational blog.
I sincerely apologize. I have no idea how I managed to miss so many typos. I read the whole article aloud to myself multiple times before I published it, but yet it appears I missed some really obvious ones, including the ones you have noticed here. I have now corrected all the typos you have pointed out, as well as some others that were pointed out to me by someone else.
In any case, thank you so much for your kind words! I’m always glad to hear that people are enjoying my work.
Hi Spencer,
A nice piece of work, as is customary for your writings, BUT you are falling into the trap of judging things of the past through present day eyes…
When did present day states/countries give the right to vote to women ? Greece 1952, Switzerland 1951, US 1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage)…
When was slavery abolished ? Athens city state early 6th (Solon), finally 1926 Slavery Convention ratified by the US in 1956 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom).
Finally, I would put more trust in the collective wisdom of the ASCSA than in that of your dear professor, admirable though his academic achievement may be. BTW do try for some study time with the ASCSA here in Greece, it will do you a world of good.
Athenian democracy was far far from perfect, but then again even present day democracies are not yet anywhere near perfect, especially when unbridled capitalism messes everything up (remember people before profits? what about “islamic republics” and their version of “democracy”?)
I can’t remember which modern politician said it but “democracy sucks but we have nothing better to replace it” or some such saying…
Have you or are you planning to write something on the argument Republic vs Democracy ?
Have a nice day.
My purpose in writing this article is not to argue that Athenian democracy or democracy in general is bad; my purpose is merely to counter the popular narrative that portrays Athenian democracy as a unique and glorious achievement that we should all try to recreate in the present.
Some of the dates you list in your comment above aren’t accurate. For instance, you state that women only gained the right to vote in the United States in 1965, but that’s definitely not correct. Some women in the state of New Jersey who owned property were eligible to vote in local, state, and national elections between the year 1776 and the year 1807. The first United States territory to guarantee women the right to vote was Wyoming in 1869. The territory of Utah guaranteed women the right to vote shortly thereafter in 1870. When Wyoming was admitted as a state in 1890, its state constitution formally guaranteed women the right to vote. Other states and territories followed suit over the course of the next few decades. The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which officially guaranteed the right to vote to all women nationwide, was passed in 1920.
Your statement that Solon abolished slavery in Athens in the sixth century BCE is not accurate either. Solon only abolished debt slavery, which is only one very specific kind of slavery; he did not abolish slavery chattel slavery, which was by far the most common form of slavery in the ancient Greek world.
Slavery was abolished in the United States through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which was ratified on 6 December 1865 and went into effect on 18 December of that same year.
I published an article about the debate over whether the United States is a republic or a democracy in May 2020, but I have changed my mind about some of the conclusions since then.
😀😀
I know that my dates are off… but 20some centuries still makes a difference when it is important to NOT judge the past by today’s standards.
AND yes the Athenian democrasy is only so famous because much more written about and the other reasons you mention.
Thanks for the link to your other article.
So which state was the first to have equal voting rights for all adult citizens then, and why is that one not nearly as well known as the Athenian democracy?
Question: Is the Sumerian Empire the same as the Mesopotamian primitive democracy with democratic forms?
Did not Mesopotamia have slaves? What was the proportion of slaves to citizens?
Wasn’t slavery very different in ancient Athens compared to colonial slavery? It still was evil and gross misjustices took place. Think of Aristophones’ Frogs. For instance, in Ancient Greece it was not based on race; anyone could end up being a slave, even the Greeks by the “barbarians” and later by other Greeks. Slaves were educated and trained and worked alongside citizens for the same pay, and they could buy their freedom. They couldn’t be re-enslaved. According to Yvon Garlan, they were welcomed into homes showered with gifts and took part of the household. The Sophists and Plato both condemned slavery. Historian Theopompus stated the Chios were the first Greeks to buy and sell slaves; Athenaeus: god “punished the people of Chios for this.” Comedy and tragedy both depicted the humanity of slaves, including the misery; thus suggest they were attempting to elicit sympathy for slaves. Heracleitus: “War has made some slaves, others free.” Weren’t the Athenians required to treat their slaves decently? Think of Euthyphro. When I read Aristotle’s thoughts on slavery, I took it to mean that not all people are leaders; there are some people by nature who are followers.
The ancient slavery historian Moses Finley stated, “Slavery is a great evil; there is no reason why a historian should not say that, but to say only that, no matter with how much factual backing, is a cheap way to score a point on a dead society to the advantage of our own.”
Wasn’t it the ideals of the Enlightenment that brought about individual human rights? What about the scientific revolution? modern healthcare?
I think many modern-day historians unfairly vilify Ancient Greek on many different levels. Let’s chat about women: Didn’t Sophocles describe Aphrodite as beautiful? What about the nobleness of Antigone? or Aristophanes’ Lysistrata? What about Plato’s defense of women being equal to men in education and as guardians? The Sophists defended women. What about the city being named after Athena instead of Poseidon? Doesn’t Pandora’s box reveal the sexual power that men fear, her ambiguous power, volatile forces of nature, duplicity? What about Euripides’ plays Trojan Women, Andromache, and Medea? I see them as commentaries on community, power, marriage – does he suggest that these justice-driven women deserve sympathy by the men? What about Aristotle’s statement about the complementary nature of male and female? The same with Socrates Oeconomicus. Does it not show the essential part of the household that women held? It was a very different time. My readings have led me to believe that women revered their position of authority in the household which she oversaw. As do some current-day women. What about all the grave stones that attest a man’s love for his wife? Hesiod, Semonides, and Theognis: “nothing is better [or sweeter] than a good wife.” Sophocles: “But what house among mortals was never thought happy / without a good wife, though it was loaded with luxury?” Euripides Alcestis: “When you die, nothing is left.” Penelope in the Odyssey is described as having the ideal qualities of a wife – rational, self-control, loyalty, virtuous, clever, cunning, very much the equal of Odysseus. What about Semonides’ praising of the bee woman and how she enhances the household? What about the magnificence of Corinna and Telesilla? What about the most beautiful woman Helen? Many modern-day women like to be sexually attractive. Some don’t, and they don’t have to participate. But I think all of these examples illustrate that despite some of the oppressions of women in Athens, they were also cherished and held in high esteem. I’m clearly not saying that the Greeks treated women as they should have. I’m saying you’re not telling the whole story.
I also think you’re projecting current-day values on the past, which is wholly inappropriate and does a disservice to history. I recommend “Greek Ways; How the Greeks Created Western Civilization.” Many of the examples above I gleaned from this book.
As I read your writings, I see a leftist tendency to bash all things Western.
Tell me what civilization didn’t have slavery. Wasn’t it in the Western Civilization where slavery was brought to extinction? Why do the Muslims still enslave people today? Why is there brazen persecutions of Christians, gays in parts of the world? I personally would like to see you address those atrocities.
Yeah, I know you won’t publish my comments. My guess is you don’t like anything that doesn’t fit your leftist agenda narratives.
@Deborah
I think that Spencer is not bashing ancient greek society on the whole, nor the entire western civilization. He’s studying to become a classicist, so you can guess he really loves the classical era. The fact is, greeks and romans have been overly-idolized for the last three centuries and considered demi-gods or something. They laid the foundations of our society in many fields, and they reached very high level of civilization. There is no doubt. But their evils have been too much overlooked, or not even talked about. Of course we can’t go to the extreme opposite and say ‘ugh, the vilest civilization ever’, because then every civilization ever existed should be considered disgusting. Spencer does rarely address the problem of other parts of the world because he doesn’t want to talk bout things far from his area of expertise, something that unfortunately many do (cough.. scientists..cough). Of course, comparison of different civilizations is important to understand history. I mean, in the last 5000 years, at least 60-70% of world population has lived in Asia. A historian cannot forget that people existed outside Europe, only to remember when these people encounters westerners (often with lethal consequences). And your list of rhetorical questions frankly leaves me stoned. Your fanciful allegorical interpretation of Aristotle’s unambiguous defence of slavery is, take no offence, quite ludicrous. And by the way, he was a terrible mysogynist, and he even said that women didn’t have any role in the conception of children. So much for complementary nature. And, like Spencer said in this article, slaves were tortured during judiciary trial. I don’t think greek torture was more delicate than Early modern period torture. And no, slaves were not educated, *some* were. Why a mine worker should have been literate? And you’re talking about athenians slaves: in Sparta helots were treated like ****; spartiate boys had to kill a helot gratuitously to become a full adult and citizen. And your list of supposed feminists? Hesiod? Semonides (really? Maybe you meant Simonides)? You could have added Hipponax and you’d have me lead to believe it was an autoparody. Theognis wasn’t into women, because he preferred to practice old-style colonoscopy to 14yo boys, like Sophocles. Plus, he was obsessed with eugenics, and loathed the inbreeding of nobles with lowborn plebeians. Not a good example of good guy. Plato was not a mysogynist, but neither a feminist: read his works attentively, or the excellent article on this blog by Spencer, Was Plato a feminist?. If women were highly esteemed and cherished, just tell me why they were never given any rights and had to go around with their face veiled. And Draco’s law on adultery? In Sparta things were a little better (except for female helots), but they hadn’t any political right. Look at the list of Spartan monarchs. No, not even in the gherousia, or the ephorate. You can also search in vain for female Roman consuls (or any other magistrature) from 509 bc to 476 ac. None. Yes, some women managed to exercise some political influence, but that happened because of their personal charisma, not for legally granted political rights. I think i made my point. Every historical period has seen atrocities. Now we westerners live in an era of unseen welfare (except, you know, the pandemic), but many other people in the world don’t. An impartial study of history can help us to understand our present problems better.
Thank, of all the post i read, i enjoyed this the most. Thanks a lot for our efford
Your efford of course
Some thoughts about your statement “The problem is too little democracy—never too much”. I can see how others might see that as an endorsement of unbridled “pure democracy”, which I do not believe was your intent. I think that I can assume that you are familiar with Polybius’ theory that mob rule is the “evil twin” (to use a modern phrase) of democracy, and thus “never too much” may not be an accurate expression of your ideas without clarification. In the context your statement -“In order for a democracy to be successful, the majority of members of the voting population must be adequately informed about the political issues and controversies.”- I can agree that there is “never too much democracy”. How to achieve greater democracy, by providing adequate information, involves a more complicated examination, as an ill educated population cannot use tools (information) that they haven’t been adequately prepared to utilize.
On a entirely different note, “I strongly believe that Thoukydides wrote this passage with the intent to horrify his readers and to show them the extent to which the Athenians had fallen into depravity.” I totally agree with, and am surprised that anyone would think otherwise. I am enough of a geek to appreciate your defense of his motive. Thank you.
After reading this article I became curious: how much do you learn baout ancient Athens in America?
I’m from Europe and we covered most of this stuff in school: the ostrakismos, the fact that women, metoikoi and slaves had no voting rights, the Delian League… we didn’t learn about the legal system, though.
Anyway, thanks for another great article!
O used to like your blog in the past and shared a lot of articles in my social media profiles. But lately it seems to me that you are trying to ride the “everything is racist” wave. Nobody ever said that Athenian democracy was perfect! And everything else you write about women and slaves has already been said thousands of times.
Athenian democracy introduced some small changes and lasted more than the other Greek city States. As per the the democrasies in Mesopotamian I really have no words! Which ones were these and hundreds of historians missed? Except your professor of course 😄.