As explained above, we know Athenian democracy best in the form that emerged in the early fourth century, after a comprehensive revision of laws (410-399, Hansen 1999: 162-5), and is described in the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. By then it could be understood as a system approaching a ‘‘constitution’’ consisting of defined institutions that operated according to legally determined rules (Bleicken 1994; Hansen 1999). The assembly (Hansen 1987) met at least forty times a year, usually for less than the entire day, often to deal with an agenda that was partly prescribed by law {Ath. Pol. 43.4-6). The presidents of assembly and council, selected by lot, served for only one day (44.1-3). The assembly place on the Pnyx hill, opposite the Akropolis, had space for about 6,000 citizens {Hansen 1999: 128-32); the number 6,000 apparently was considered representative, although the citizen body comprised at least 50,000-60,000 adult men in 431, some 30,000 in the fourth century after the terrible losses of the Peloponnesian War. Hence 6,000 jurors were selected annually to staff the dikasteria and the quorum for important decisions {such as ostracism or decrees on naturalization and remission of debt) was 6,000. Attendance thus probably quite often reached this level.
The 500 members of the boule were selected by lot {Ath. Pol. 43.2) and limited to two (non-successive) years of service. On the basis of a sophisticated formula devised in the late sixth century, they represented the population of 139 districts in Attika {demoi, demes, consisting of villages and sections of towns and of the city of Athens) that were divided into three regions {city and central plain, hills, and coast) and combined into thirty ‘‘Thirds’’ (trittyes) and ten tribes {phylai) {Traill 1975; 1986). Each tribe thus comprised citizens from various regions of Attika; their collaboration in the army {organized into tribal regiments, Siewert 1982), in festivals {where tribal contingents competed with each other), in cults, and in politics was decisive for integrating Athens’ unusually large polis territory {Anderson 2003). In the boule a tribe’s fifty members formed the council’s executive committee for a tenth of the year, while those of one trittys {called a prytany) were continuously present during one third of that time in the round Tholos adjacent to the council building {bouleuterion) on the west side of the Agora {Camp 1986: 52-3, 90-7). The council broadly supervised the officials and administrative committees and heard their reports and accounts {Ath. Pol. 45-9), dealt with foreign policy issues, and prepared the agenda and motions for the assembly {Rhodes 1985). The ekklesia deliberated such motions and accepted them with or without amendments, referred them back to the council for further deliberation, or rejected and replaced them with different ones. On specific policy issues it adopted psephismata {decrees), while it passed nomoi {laws with general validity, Ostwald 1969) in a procedure that resembled a trial; the latter were drafted by a board of nomothetai {lawgivers) and could be challenged in the people’s court {Hansen 1999: ch. 7). These distinctions and procedures were introduced in the early fourth century, which has prompted the suggestion that by then the Athenian political system had made the transition ‘‘from popular sovereignty to the sovereignty of the law’’ {thus the title of Ostwald 1986; cf. Sealey 1987 and the comments by Eder 1998).
Assisted by the boule and the law courts {dikasteria), the ekklesia made policy decisions, supervised their execution, and tightly controlled the officials in charge of realizing them. Whether in administration, religion, or the maintenance of public order, professional personnel was minimal; most conspicuous were a few hundred state-owned slaves who served in specific functions at the disposal of various officials or as a rudimentary police force {Hunter 1994: 3). Numerous committees of various sizes {serving for one year and totaling about 700 members) handled virtually all administrative business; they assisted the council and various officials and were in turn supervised by both. Several hundred other officials served in various functions throughout the empire {Aristotle Ath. Pol. 24.3; Hansen 1999: 239-40; Meiggs 1979: ch. 11). Of all these ofificials only a few, holding major financial and military responsibility (such as the generals and cavalry commanders), were elected (Aristotle Ath. Pol. 43.1; 44.4); all others were selected by lot (43.1; 47-8; 50-5.1). This applies as well to the chief magistrates (archons) who emerged from a double sortition procedure (8.1) and to the thousands of jurors who were needed on every court day to staff variously large juries (or rather, assemblies of jurors) in several cases tried simultaneously in various locations (Todd 1993; Boegehold 1995; Hansen 1999: ch. 8). These jurors were chosen in a sophisticated mechanical procedure (by an allotment machine, kleroterion) that eliminated tampering and made bribery virtually impossible (Ath. Pol. 63-66; Boegehold 1995: 58, 230-4; Demont 2003). Democracy was famous for the litigiousness of its citizens. The law courts were an important part of democratic life and procedures: much political business was conducted there, one might say, in a continuation of politics by different means. In fact, Aristotle thought that the people’s power in democracy rested essentially in the courts (Ath. Pol. 9.1; Hansen 1990).
Clearly, then, several thousand citizens - a remarkably large proportion of a surprisingly limited population of adult male citizens - were politically active every year in ways that far exceeded occasional attendance at the assembly, and many of them probably did this quite regularly year after year (Hansen 1999: 90-4, 313, 350). Rotation of offices (‘‘ruling and being ruled in turn,’’ Euripides Suppliants 406-7; Aristotle Politics 1317b2-7) made sure that those not involved in one year would be in another (if they wished to) and that through their varied involvement the citizens achieved a high level of familiarity with the administration of their community and its policies. Most impressively, as Hansen states (1999: 249), ‘‘over a third of all citizens over eighteen, and about two thirds of all citizens over forty’’ served at least one year-long term in the boule, a time-consuming office. To facilitate participation by lower-class citizens who were not financially independent, pay for certain political and judicial functions was introduced between 462 and 450 and expanded later, to include, by the early fourth century, even the ekklesia (Markle 1985; Hansen 1999: 240-2). This democracy, we conclude, was not only ‘‘direct’’ but the ‘‘most direct’’ imaginable in the sense both of active participation and of exertion of power: the people not only made decisions but through assembly, council, offices, and law courts controlled the entire political process. Moreover, these same citizens also regularly served in their polis’ infantry army or helped row its fleet, even if mercenaries played a more significant role in naval and fourth-century infantry warfare than they did earlier (Burckhardt 1996).
Because of the distribution of evidence described above we do not know how much of all this was realized already in the fifth century. Some offices or committees did not yet exist, others had different functions, while others (those connected with controlling the empire) disappeared with the empire; assembly meetings were perhaps less frequent and not yet fixed in number, and before the Peloponnesian War the number of adult male citizens was much larger. Despite much debate about the differences between fifth-century and fourth-century democracy (Rhodes 1980; Bleicken 1987; Eder 1995b; 1998), in the fifth century the citizens were hardly less involved in running their democracy than in the fourth. This probably was especially true during those periods in the Peloponnesian War when a large number of the rural population were evacuated to the confined space between the Long Walls, were unable to work on their fields, and thus lived close to the political center. In fact, if one of the goals of the reforms at the turn of the century was to make the political process more objective, transparent, and subject to the law, we might conclude, as elite complaints seem to confirm, that before then the citizens’ control over this process was even more immediate and intense.
World History
