Athenian Assembly

“ During the Periclean period the Athenian democracy was supreme. Every matter that concerned the empire was discussed and decided by the popular assembly. Never before had any people enjoyed such perfect political liberty as did the citizens of Athens at this time, and never before were any people, through so intimate a knowledge of public affairs, so well able to direct the policies of state. ”

“ Hence we are not surprised that the use of the lot prevailed, not only in the election of the Athenian Council, but also in many oligarchies, and even in Plato's colony. The evil consequences of the lot are to a great extent avoided, if the magistrates so elected do not, like the dicasts at Athens, receive pay from the state.
Another parallel is that of the Popular Assembly, which at Athens was omnipotent, but in the Laws has only a faded and secondary existence. In Plato it was chiefly an elective body, having apparently no judicial and little political power entrusted to it. ”

“ In the Athenian Democracy we see a popular constitution taking the form which was natural for such a constitution to take when it was able to run its natural course in a common-wealth which consisted only of a single city. Wherever the Assembly really remains, in truth as well as in name, an Assembly of the whole people in their own persons, it must in its own nature be sovereign. It must, in the nature of things, delegate more or less of power to magistrates and generals ”

“ The Rule of Democracy in Athens.—The Ecclesia, or Public Assembly, of Athens is something more than the chief governmental organ in the state. It is the great leveling engine which makes Athens a true democracy, despite the great differences in wealth between her inhabitants, and the marked social pretensions of “the noble and the good”—the educated classes. At this time Athens is profoundly wedded to her democratic constitution. Founded by Solon and Clisthenes, developed by Themistocles and Pericles, it was temporarily overthrown at the end of the Peloponnesian War ”

“ Athens, it must be understood, was by far the largest of all the Greek city democracies. Flushed with victory and the sense of freedom fairly won, her people did for a time rise towards nobility. Under the guidance of a great demagogue, Pericles, the chief official of the Athenian general assembly, and a politician statesman rather of the calibre of Gladstone or Lincoln in modern history, they were set to the task of rebuilding their city and expanding their commerce. For a time they were capable of following a generous leader generously, and Fate gave them a generous leader. ”

“ Election to office was usually by lot. This arrangement did away with favoritism and helped to give the poor man a chance in politics, as well as the man of wealth or noble birth.
THE ASSEMBLY The center of Athenian democracy was the Assembly. Its membership included every citizen who had reached twenty years of age. Rarely, however, did the attendance number more than five thousand, since most of the citizens lived outside the walls in the country districts of Attica. Forty regular meetings were held every year. ”

“ Committee of 30: recommend Constituent Assembly of Five Thousand. So long as the fortune of the war continued even, the Athenians preserved the democracy; but after the disaster in Sicily, when the Lacedaemonians had gained the upper hand through their alliance with the king of Persia, they were compelled to abolish the democracy and establish in its place the constitution of the Four Hundred. The speech recommending this course before the vote was made by Melobius, and the motion was proposed by Pythodorus of Anaphlystus ”

“ Mitford informs us that the assembly of the people was the great foundation of evil in the Athenian constitution, it appears that to the capricious and unsatisfactory election of this council we may safely impute many of the inconsistencies and changes which that historian attributes entirely to the more popular assembly 211. ”

“ We can imagine the thoughts with which the old man came home from the Assembly which decreed his degradation and his punishment. He had made Athens what she was. He had guarded her from foes without, the people from their foe within, ever ready to rob them of their rights. It was in his mind that had first risen up the idea of a great Hellenic empire, 41one confederation, which should include all the self-governing states and towns of Greek origin, with Athens at its head. ”

“ The latter are elected in the Assembly by open vote, two from the general body of Athenians, one from the Eumolpidae, and one from the Ceryces. Next, he superintends the Lenaean Dionysia,163 which consists of a procession and a contest. The procession is ordered by the King and the Superintendents in conjunction; but the contest is managed by the King alone. He also manages all the contests of the torch-race; and to speak broadly, he administers all the ancestral sacrifices. Indictments for impiety come before him, or any disputes between parties concerning priestly rites ”

“ Athens built her glory on other foundations. She could not, indeed, lead countless armies into the field, but she knew how, with a little band, to defeat those who could. In the days of her freedom no human force could subdue her. To effect this, every man within the borders of Attica must have been exterminated; for so long as an Athenian was left, the indomitable spirit of democracy would have survived in him and sufficed to kindle up fresh contests. ”

“ Among the Greeks, Athens, the boldest pioneer of republican discovery, was the only democracy that prospered. It underwent the changes that were the common lot of Greek society, but it met them in a way that displayed a singular genius for politics. The struggle of competing classes for supremacy, almost everywhere a cause of oppression and bloodshed, became with them a genuine struggle for freedom; and the Athenian constitution grew, with little pressure from below, under the intelligent action of statesmen who were swayed by political reasoning more than by public opinion. ”

“ We are fully persuaded that the most thorough English Conservative may admire the Athenian republic; so far at least admire as to admit that it is impossible to conceive how, under any other form of government, the peculiar glories of Athens could have shone forth. And, indeed, an Athenian democracy differs so entirely from any political institution which the world sees at present, or will ever see again, that to carry the strife of our politics back into those times, in other than a quite general manner, is as futile as it is tasteless and vexatious. ”

“ The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000, and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting, is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. ”

“ The Voting Population of Athens.—Nevertheless when we ask about this “whole folk,” and who the voters are, we soon discover that Athens is very far from being a pure democracy. The multitudes of slaves are of course without votes, and so is the numerous class of the important, cultivated, and often wealthy metics. To get Athenian citizenship is notoriously hard. For a stranger (say a metic who had done some conspicuous public service) to be given the franchise, a special vote must be passed by the Ecclesia itself ”

“ In most of them the kingship surrendered to an oligarchy,—the oligarchy in time, was overthrown by some bold adventurer, who led a rising of the people and snatched power in the turmoil to make himself a "tyrant,"—and the tyrant in his turn fell after no long reign. In Athens that course of revolution was run; but it did not end as with the rest. The Athenian tyranny gave way to the purest democracy that has ever had trial in the world. ”

“ There is no reason to doubt the general fact, that Athens, like so many other communities of Greece, was in its primitive times governed by an hereditary line of kings, and that it passed from that form of government into a commonwealth, first oligarchical, afterwards democratical.
We are in no condition to determine the civil classification and political constitution of Attica, even at the period of the archonship of Kreôn, 683 B. C., when authentic Athenian chronology first commences,—much less can we pretend to any knowledge of the anterior centuries. ”

“ Athens must never again seek “empire” in the sense which became odious under the influence of Cleon and Hyperbolus,—when, to use the image of Aristophanes, the allies were as Babylonian slaves grinding in the Athenian mill. Athens must never permit, if she could help it, the re-establishment of such a domination as Sparta exercised in Greece from the battle of Aegospotami to the battle of Leuctra. Athens must aim at leading a free confederacy, of which the members should be bound to her by their own truest interests. Athens must seek to deserve the confidence of all Greeks alike. ”

“ Another and more serious objection to the position that Athens was a typical democracy, and that its high culture was the direct result of its political institutions, he seems to me to have practically ignored. The Athenian citizen, however poor, had indeed equal rights with every other citizen, could succeed to the same high offices, and appeal to the same laws. ”

“ The government of Athens, after the abolition of monarchy, was truly democratick, and so much convulsed by those civil dissensions, which are the inevitable consequences of that kind of government, that of all the Grecian states, the Athenian may be the most strictly termed the seat of faction. ”

“ There is, on the one hand, no easy way of bringing to bear the ascendency of an energetic chief to improve the military organization,—as Athens found to her cost, when she was afterwards assailed by Philip, the successor after some interval, and in many respects the parallel, of Archelaus. But on the other hand, neither the personal tastes nor the appetites, of any individual Athenian, count as active causes in the march of public affairs, which is determined by the established law and by the pronounced sentiments of the body of citizens. ”

“ It was a great step in advance when, long before the dawn of Greek history, these tiny communities were united with Athens. The inhabitants of the Attic towns and villages gave up their separate governments and became members of the one city-state of Athens. Henceforth a man was a Athenian citizen, no matter in what part of Attica he lived.
OPPRESSIVE RULE OF THE NOBLES At an earlier period, perhaps, than elsewhere in Greece, monarchy at Athens disappeared before the rising power of the nobles. The rule of the nobility bore harshly on the common people. ”

“ Change in the Athenian constitution. During this period, a change was also made in the civil constitution of Athens. All citizens were rendered admissible to office. The State became still more democratic. The archons were withdrawn from military duties, and confined to civil functions. The stategi or generals gained greater power with the extending political relations, and upon them was placed the duty of superintending foreign affairs. Athens became more democratical and more military at the same time. ”

“ The Athenians, who had valued themselves on restoring liberty to Boeotia, and, for the first time since the Persian war, had honoured with burial at the public expense those who fell under Myronides, could not regard this attempt at counterrevolution with indifference. Policy aided their love of liberty; for it must never be forgotten that the change from democratic to oligarchic government in the Grecian states was the formal exchange of the Athenian for the Spartan alliance. ”

“ Stronger expressions cannot be found to depict the rapid improvement wrought in the Athenian people by their new democracy. Of course this did not arise merely from suspension of previous cruelties, or better laws, or better administration. These, indeed, were essential conditions, but the active transforming cause here was, the principle and system of which such amendments formed the detail: the grand and new idea of the sovereign People, composed of free and equal citizens,—or liberty and equality, to use words which so profoundly moved the French nation half a century ago. ”

“ The average ability of the Athenian and Magnesian councillors could not have been very high, considering there were so many of them. And yet they were entrusted with the performance of the most important executive duties. In these respects the constitution of the Laws resembles Athens far more than Sparta. All the citizens were to be, not merely soldiers, but politicians and administrators. ”

“ After such years of misery, it was an unspeakable relief to the Athenian population to regain possession of Athens and Attica; to exchange their domestic tyrants for a renovated democratical government; and to see their foreign enemies not merely evacuate the country, but even bind themselves by treaty to future friendly dealing. In respect of power, indeed, Athens was but the shadow of her former self. She had no empire, no tribute, no fleet, no fortifications at Piræus, no long walls, not a single fortified place in Attica except the city itself. ”