In the late Archaic, the dominance of aristocracies in the city-states of Southern Greece (south of Thessaly) was frequently challenged through a combination of internal conflict between leading families, and pressure from the middle and lower classes in society (the hoplite and thetes/peltast groups respectively), who had varied grievances and ambitions. Disputes over political and legal rights, and over rights to land, were central, and historical sources indicate that radical changes occurred as a result, leading to a widespread creation of moderate democracies. However in Northern Greece city-states remained rare, and here confederacies of towns or even tribal non-urbanized peoples were dominant throughout the Classical era, led by aristocrats or kings, or a combination of both. Even within the city-state world of Southern Greece there were regions such as Laconia-Messenia (the territorial state of Sparta) and Crete, where power remained till the end of the Classical era in the hands of a dominant ruling class who controlled a numerous serf population.
Unsurprisingly, modern interest has focused on those poleis (city-states) where pressure induced a broadening of power to include significant political rights for the lower class. Symptomatic of late Archaic political turmoil were either coups by a “tyrant,” generally an aristocrat who took sole control of the state, or invitations to outside “lawgivers” (rarely insiders) to legislate to resolve civil strife. In Athens the final expulsion of the Peisistratid dynasty at the end of the sixth century ushered in a wide-ranging democracy, which by the mid-fifth century experimented not only with voting and jury rights for all freeborn males, but allowed citizens of any wealth-status to stand for the highest offices. In Athens, the richest citizens were
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Exploited through “liturgies,” requirements to subsidize warships (triremes) or dramatic choruses, yet allowed thereby to achieve public acclaim and influence. On the other hand, whereas the Aegean “Normalpolis,” stretching, on average, over a radius of 5—6 km from city to state border, gave opportunities for every male citizen to be active in democratic processes, Athens’ much larger hinterland (Attica) meant that it was city-dwellers and those living in the immediate rural suburbs (the “Asty” region) who effectively participated in the Assembly and lawcourts.
The democratic tide, which was happening in other city-states and was also stimulated by Athens wherever its power reached throughout the Aegean, survived and even extended its influence after Athens fell from imperial preeminence at the end of the fifth century BC. In the early fourth century, one of the successors to military hegemony on the Greek Mainland, the city of Thebes, spread such concepts through regions of Greece hitherto lacking such a constitution.
Significantly, in Sparta and Crete, and other “serf” societies, the class in power was wide enough to be comparable to the upper and middle class in more democratic city-states, so the real differences lie in the emancipation and empowerment of the other half of society, the lower class. Athens experimented with total suffrage of freeborn male citizens, an example inspiring all subsequent democratic movements throughout the world. Historians suggest that roughly half the 600—700 Classical city-states in the Aegean had at some stage a moderately democratic constitution. This means that political control over the state was shared between the upper-class and middle-class males, with usually lesser but significant legal and some political rights for the lower class.
Michael Jameson (1977—1978) has reminded us that a society like Athens was able to achieve a very broad participation in the political assembly and law-courts from adult male citizens, regardless of income, through two compensatory mechanisms. Firstly the state gradually introduced payment for public service. It also could count on the fact that work on the family farm and in the home was assisted by household slaves, whilst much of the commercial economy was left to disenfranchised but free resident aliens (metics).
Slave plus metic numbers were large enough in Athens to almost represent the equivalent of the large serf populations in the “less advanced” societies of Sparta and the like. For Jameson, in a Marxist sense, both the “democratic” and the “serf” societies sustained plentiful free time for citizens’ political activity, military training, and leisure, through similar substructures of unfree or disenfranchised classes. Exceptionally in Athens the creation of a tributepaying empire, also without political representation, added yet another layer of undemocratic exploitation to sustain a special lifestyle for the small body of Athenian citizens.
Apart from the monumental constructions for law-courts and the different political assembly-buildings which we saw being widely erected in city-states from the end of the Archaic era onwards, the broadening of citizen participation can be followed in greater detail in the placing of stone inscriptions to record the state’s decisions, both in temple precincts and the agora/civic center. Not surprisingly, hyperdemocratic Athens’ share of known inscriptions dwarfs those of other poleis.
World History
