Athenian law

“ In the fifth century B.C. Athens formed a system of relationships with a number of other Greek city states which is often spoken of by historians as the Athenian Empire. But all the other city states retained their own governments. One “new fact” added by the Athenian Empire was the complete and effective suppression of piracy; another was the institution of a sort of international law. The law, indeed, was Athenian law; but actions could now be brought and justice administered between citizens of the different states of the League, which of course had not been possible before. ”

“ The Athenian law, which condemns any man for speaking disrespectfully of his neighbour's trade, is most wise; and it augurs ill for Athens that some of her young equestrians begin to think it unbecoming to bring home provisions for their own dinner from the agoras. ”

“ Their masters are not to jest with them, lest they should increase the hardship of their lot. Some privileges were granted to them by Athenian law of which there is no mention in Plato; they were allowed to purchase their freedom from their master, and if they despaired of being liberated by him they could demand to be sold, on the chance of falling into better hands. ”

“ The Athenian seemed to realize, in unique fashion, that the hope and redress of a free people lies in the possession and use of its courts, and they were so eager to attend trials and serve on juries that the conservative Aristophanes satirized the typical Athenian disease of law-mania. ”

“ The Average Athenian’s Idea of the Gods.—The average intelligent citizen probably has views midway between the stupid rabble and the daring philosophers. To him the gods of Greece stand out in full divinity, honored and worshipped because they are protectors of the good, avengers of the evil, and guardians of the moral law. They punish crime and reward virtue, though the punishment may tarry long. They demand a pure heart and a holy mind of all that approach them, and woe to him who wantonly defies their eternal laws. ”

“ Any Athenian citizen in full possession of his rights, and over thirty years of age, was entitled to be placed on the list (Aristotle, u.s. c. 63. 3) . At the beginning of the year the whole body of jurors assembled on the hill of Ardēttos looking down on the Panathenaic Stadium, and there took a solemn oath to the effect that they would judge according to the laws and decrees of the Athenian people and of the council of the Five Hundred (Boulē) , and that, in cases where there were no laws, they would decide to the best of their judgment ”

“ Moreover, the laws in reference to tyrants at that time in force at Athens were very mild, especially the one which applies more particularly to the establishment of a tyranny. The law ran as follows: ‘These are the ancestral statutes of the Athenians; if any persons shall make an attempt to establish a tyranny, or if any person shall join in setting up a tyranny, he shall lose his civic rights, both himself and his whole house.’
17. Usurpation of Pisistratus: his death and family. ”

“ The ancients do not seem to have remembered the homely adage that, 'What is every man's business is no man's business,' or always to have thought of applying the principle of a division of labour to the administration of law and to government. Every Athenian was at some time or on some occasion in his life a magistrate, judge, advocate, soldier, sailor, policeman. He had not necessarily any private business; a good deal of his time was taken up with the duties of office and other public occupations. So, too, in Plato's Laws. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His constitution gave to the collective bodies—senate, ekklesia, and heliæa, or dikastery—a degree of power and importance such as they had never before known or imagined: and we may well suppose that the Athenian people of that day had no objection even to the proclaimed system and theory of being exclusively governed by men of wealth and station as individual magistrates,—especially since many of the newly-enfranchised citizens had been previously metics and slaves. ”

“ For the history of the Athenian Constitution The constitutions. down to the end of the 5th century B.C. Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens (q.v.) is our chief authority. The other Constitution of Athens, erroneously attributed to Xenophon, a tract of singular interest both on literary and historical grounds, throws a good deal of light on the internal condition of Athens, and on the system of government, both of the state and of the empire, in the age of the Peloponnesian War, during the earlier years of which it was composed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Assuming the dikasteries at Athens to be ever so defective as tribunals for administering justice, we must recollect that they were the same tribunals under which every Athenian citizen held his own fortune or reputation, and that the native of any subject city was admitted to the same chance of justice as the native of Athens. Accordingly, we find the Athenian envoy at Sparta, immediately before the Peloponnesian war, taking peculiar credit to the imperial city on this ground for equal dealing with her subject-allies. ”

“ 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. ”

“ History bears out the boast of the Athenian orator, both as to the time preceding and following the empire of Athens. [85] And an Athenian citizen, indeed, might well regard it, not as a hardship, but as a privilege, that subject-allies should be allowed to sue him before the dikastery, and to defend themselves before the same tribunal, either in case of wrong done to him, or in case of alleged treason to the imperial authority of Athens: they were thereby put upon a level with himself. ”

“ You know that there is yet a form of law by which it is enacted: ‘If any person hath aggrieved the people of Athens, he shall be imprisoned and brought to a trial before the people; and in case he be convicted, he shall be put to death and thrown into the pit, his goods and chattels to be confiscated to the state, reserving a tenth part for the goddess.’ By this law try the accused. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At Athens, a large part, it may have been half, or three-quarters or five-sixths, of the adult male population were slaves; and slaves, having lost their personal freedom, are of course incapable of political rights. If then we wish in speaking of the Athenian constitution to use terms in their modern sense and not in their Greek sense, we must say that the rulers of Athens were not a democracy but an aristocracy: it is true that they constituted a far larger part of the population than most aristocracies, but as compared with the whole they were but few. ”

“ But from the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason. The humblest and most numerous class of the Athenians united the legislative, the judicial, and, in part, the executive power. The philosophy that was then in the [Pg 12] ascendant taught them that there is no law superior to that of the State—the lawgiver is above the law.
It followed that the sovereign people had a right to do whatever was within its power, and was bound by no rule of right or wrong but its own judgment of expediency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet the Athenians did not reduce millions to a state of abject servitude, for the purpose of ministering to the wants of a few thousand persons. The object of their statesmen, such as Pericles, doubtless was, to make Athens the pride of the whole confederacy; that their allies should enjoy in common with them the productions of Athenian art, and especially should participate in the great festivals, the Panathenaea and Dionysia, on the embellishment of which all the treasures of wealth and art were lavished*. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Truth and Beauty; Knowledge, Virtue and Religion; and in the Greek world it was Athens who was the leader in all these things. [1]
And Athens realized this. The ideals set forth by Pericles in the Funeral Speech placed her in the position of a chosen people in the midst of a barbarian world, and it was to be her mission to save civilization for the world. Athens was a democracy, and her freedom, her thought and her art were not the special possession of a small privileged {288} group but of the whole body of citizens. Yet there was a flaw in the Athenian ideal of democracy ”

“ We have now to tell how Athens came to have a democratic government, under the laws of Solon. These formed the types of government for later Greece, some of whose nations became aristocracies, following the example of Sparta; others became democracies, and formed their governments on the model of that of Athens.
As before Lycurgus the Spartan commonwealth was largely without law, so was Athens before Solon. In those days the people of Attica—of which Athens was the capital city—were divided into three factions,—the rich, the middle class, and the poor. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 judicial alterations effected at Athens by Pericles and Ephialtes, described in a preceding chapter, gave to a large proportion of the citizens direct jury functions and an active interest in the constitution, such as they had never before enjoyed; the change being at once a mark of previous growth of democratical sentiment during the past, and a cause of its further development during the future. The Athenian people were at this time ready for any personal exertion. ”

“ We in Athens divided men only on lines of the greater or lesser political rights we gave them; but we never drew such lines in matters social and purely human. The freest Athenian readily shook hands with a metic or denizen ”