In the emerging poleis ofDark Age Greece, here and there a person with the title of basileus held a monarchical position, but he was always first among equals, that is, among other aristocrats, and was never an absolute monarch. In course of time, when the aristocratic elites became richer and more powerful, this ancient kingship disappeared practically everywhere. Only in Sparta, which preserved some older institutions, did kingship survive—and there, in the remarkable form of a double kingship in which two kings from two different families always reigned side by side. But even in Sparta, the kings did not have very much more authority than to command the army. In other places, we hear sometimes of an annually chosen basileus, a magistrate with certain priestly functions. Magistrates were persons who had been chosen for a fixed term, usually one year, to perform certain government functions for the community. The Greek polis was a form of political organization that was characterized by a cooperative collective of magistrates, the council, and the assembly of the people.
The assembly of the people had very ancient roots, almost certainly going back to assemblies of warriors, that is, of all able-bodied and armed men of the community. Such warrior assemblies were not unknown among other peoples, both among Semitic peoples in the Near East—at least, the oldest history of the Israelites provides some glimpses of that institution—and among various Indo-European peoples, such as Italic and Germanic tribes. In many cases, this ancient warrior assembly disappeared in the course of time, certainly when the people involved came to inhabit an ever larger territory. In Greece, the epics of Homer refer to such assemblies of men at arms. They did not have much power: the men could not do very much more than shout approval or disapproval of decisions made by the aristocratic lords—and in cases of disapproval, it is not clear that the latter acted on public sentiment. In Sparta, in any case, it was laid down in a rudimentary “constitution” of the 7th century BC that when the assembly of the people voted “the wrong way,” it was the kings and the council who made the final decision. Still, the mere fact that practically everywhere in Greece an assembly of the people was preserved in one form or another would prove to be of great significance. The preservation of people’s assemblies was, of course, made easier by the small size of the poleis: these were “states” where the political center that made the decisions was practically always at walking distance. In the Archaic period, the powers of the assembly became more formalized, mainly where the election of magistrates was concerned. The growth in power of the aristocracies that monopolized the magistracies did indeed threaten the position of the assemblies, but a formal abolishment of the assembly seldom, if ever, occurred. There was, however, a tendency to limit access to the people’s assembly to those citizens in possession of a certain minimum property: since the 6th century BC, those who could afford hoplite equipment. In some city-states, this must have been introduced as a formal requirement. In Athens, on the other had, since Solon, the assembly of the people was open to even the poorest citizens, the thetes, and this would facilitate the emergence, toward the end of the 6th century BC, of a real democracy.
Every year, in the poleis, magistrates were chosen to perform functions such as army commanders, judges, and priests of certain important deities of the city. There were not that many functions to perform, and the number of magistrates, therefore, always remained small. In Athens, they were called archontes, and there were nine in all, although only three of them had administrative tasks to perform. One of them gave his name to the year; the list of such so-called eponymous archons came to be used for dating events in the past and would thus provide a chronological base for later historiography. Possibly already in the 6th century BC, that list was put into writing in the form of an inscription in stone—in any case, such an inscription existed in the later 5th century BC—and that was a decision that in many ways was typical of the Greek polis. Already in the second half of the 7th century BC, some decisions of the polis were preserved in writing. The oldest epigraphic document of such a decision that has come down to us is the decision of a small polis in Crete at around 630 BC concerning the election of magistrates, laying down the rule that one could not hold the same magistracy twice within ten years. After Solon had acquired the authority to introduce far-reaching reforms in Athens around 590 BC, his enactments were written down on wooden tablets that were preserved on the Acropolis. In this manner, an important principle was realized: the laws of the community should be written laws that could be looked up and verified, so that the decisions of magistrates could be examined in the light of the laws. Thereby, not only was the subjectivity of magisterial decisions limited to some degree, but also the idea was fostered that the laws might be fixed in writing but could also be amended; that, in principle, laws were not unchangeable and that new laws could replace older ones, in short, that the organization of the polis was not something established for eternity but could be shaped by the politai, the citizens, themselves. Thus, ultimately, “politics” came into being. In the Archaic period, that remained rudimentary at best, but its foundation was nonetheless laid in the poleis of that period.
Whereas the magistrates mostly held their positions for one year and the assemblies of the people usually met only a few times in a year at the most, the various councils in the Greek states were more permanent governing bodies. As a rule, membership was for life. In the Archaic period, their composition was usually aristocratic in that only persons of some prestige were admitted to them. In Athens, this meant that after Solon, ex-archons, who were always citizens belonging to one of the two highest property classes, automatically became members of the council called Areopagus. In Sparta, it was 28 citizens aged over 60 and enjoying enough public esteem to be chosen by acclamation—hence its name gerousia or “council of elders”—that together with the two kings formed a permanent council of 30. In other poleis, the councils were of a more or less similar composition: their members were former magistrates and/or of a certain minimum age. These councils often functioned in an informal way, but in some cases it was laid down that decisions of the assembly of the people should first have the approval of the council, while the council also acted sometimes as a court in serious cases such as high treason. In fact, the power of the council in an aristocracy was always considerable; since the short-tenured magistrates came from the same social background as the councilors and were looking forward to becoming members of the council themselves, they did not often oppose the wishes of the latter.
Thus, in the archaic poleis the aristocracy retained its political power by its dominance of the magistracies and the councils. Yet, in the 6th century BC, in some poleis the idea was voiced that the demos, meaning the “common people” as opposed to the aristocracy, should have more of a say in politics. Sometimes, the powers of the people’s assembly were indeed expanded, and/or a new council was introduced, democratically selected from among all citizens or at least from a much larger segment of the population than the aristocratic councils were. These councils had hundreds of citizens as members, often selected on the basis of the fulai, and were much larger than most aristocratic councils. Perhaps Athens, since the time of Solon, had such a council of 400—a hundred from each fule—but this is uncertain. In any case, even with such a council, Athens still was not a full democracy. Very little is unknown about early forms of democracy in other states. When Athens in 508/7 BC received a truly democratic constitution, it was indeed based on both an extension of the powers of the assembly and on the introduction of a new and large council side by side with the existing Areopagus.
The period of aristocratic dominance in the Greek poleis was also characterized by the phenomenon of the turannis. The turannoi were ambitious aristocrats who by using force managed to arrogate power to themselves and thus turned their fellow aristocrats into their political enemies. In order to maintain their position, the turannoi employed mercenary soldiers from abroad and presumably also equipped some members of the lower classes of their own states as soldiers. Moreover, they often sought political support from the non-aristocratic segments of their population. As a result, they generally undermined the grip of the aristocracy on politics and society. The turannis was in the Greek context an abnormal form of monarchy that as a rule lasted only a couple of years or decades. After the expulsion of the “tyrants,” practically everywhere the aristocrats returned to power. But they had henceforth to reckon with a demos that had acquired new strength, especially because the spread of hoplite tactics made it advisable to accept citizens into the army who could afford hoplite equipment, so that toward the end of the 6th century BC, a large part of the demos was politically much more empowered than it had ever been. Several poleis in this way developed into moderate oligarchies, that is, literally, constitutions in which only “few” ruled. It was a form of government that could be distinguished from an aristocracy in that the ruling few were selected not on the basis of birth or prestige, but exclusively on the basis of property. In such oligarchies, the actual citizenship, and with it admittance to the people’s assembly, was reserved for those who could serve as hoplites. In Athens, on the other hand, the fall of the turannis of Hippias, the son and successor of Pisistratus, in 510 BC led after a short power struggle between aristocratic factions not to an oligarchy but to the introduction of democracy.
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