Why, to start with, does he not use the word democracy, when democracy of an Athenian radical kind is clearly what he's advocating? In an effort to remain a major player in world affairs, it abandoned its ideology and values to ditch past allies while maintaining special relationships with emerging powers like Macedonia and supporting old enemies like the Persian King. HistoryNet.com contains daily features, photo galleries and over 25,000 articles originally published in our nine magazines. The competition of elite performers before non-elite adjudicators resulted in a pro-war culture, which encouraged Athenians in . Athenian Democracy. Athens remains a posterchild for democracies worldwide, but it was not a pure democracy. Of this group, perhaps as few as 100 citizens - the wealthiest, most influential, and the best speakers - dominated the political arena both in front of the assembly and behind the scenes in private conspiratorial political meetings (xynomosiai) and groups (hetaireiai). But - a big 'but' - it works: that is, it delivers the goods - for the masses. Sulla, lacking ships, could not give chase. ', replies Alcibiades; 'even when it decrees by fiat, acting like a tyrant and riding roughshod over the views of the minority - is that still "law"?' "Athenian Democracy." BBC 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Sulla ordered another retreat, and turned his attention to Athens, which by now was a softer target than Piraeus. Greek myths explained everything from religious rituals to the weather, and read more, The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years 700-480 B.C., not the Classical Age (480-323 B.C.) In 229, when the Macedonian King Demetrius II died, leaving nine-year-old Philip V as his heir, the Athenians took advantage of the power vacuum and negotiated the removal of the garrison at Piraeus. It dealt with ambassadors and representatives from other city-states. In a democracy, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, there is, first, that most splendid of virtues, equality before the law. It was true that Cleisthenes demokratia abolished the political distinctions between the Athenian aristocrats who had long monopolized the political decision-making process and the middle- and working-class people who made up the army and the navy (and whose incipient discontent was the reason Cleisthenes introduced his reforms in the first place). Cleisthenes issued reforms in 508 and 507 BC that undermined the domination of the aristocratic families and connected every Athenian to the city's rule. His influence and that of his best pupil Aristotle were such that it was not until the 18th century that democracy's fortunes began seriously to revive, and the form of democracy that was then implemented tentatively in the United States and, briefly, France was far from its original Athenian model. The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. Athens, therefore, had a direct democracy. All Rights Reserved. This executive of the executive had a chairman (epistates) who was chosen by lot each day. Modern representative democracies, in contrast to direct democracies, have citizens who vote for representatives who create and enact laws on their behalf. The Athenian defenders, weakened by hunger, fled. Athenian democracy was a direct democracy made up of three important institutions. known for its art, architecture and philosophy. Please support World History Encyclopedia. The Pontic troops had built other lunettes inside, but the Romans attacked each wall with manic energy. In 146, they ruthlessly destroyed the city-state of Corinth and established their authority over much of Greece. Throughout the siege, Sulla got regular reports from spies inside Piraeustwo Athenian slaves who inscribed notes on lead balls that they shot with slings into the Roman lines. But geometry worked against him. In 411 and again in 404 Athens experienced two, equally radical counter-coups and the establishment of narrow oligarchic regimes, first of the 400 led by the formidable intellectual Antiphon, and then of the 30, led by Plato's relative Critias. World History Encyclopedia, 03 Apr 2018. And its denouement is the Roman sack of Athens, a bloody day that effectively marked the end of Athens as an independent state. Nine presidents (proedroi), elected by lot and holding the office one time only, organised the proceedings and assessed the voting. Re-enactment of fighting 'hoplites' After all, at the time of writing, Athens was the greatest single power in the entire Greek world, and that fact could not be totally unconnected with the fact that Athens was a democracy. 'So', persists Alcibiades, 'democracy is really just another form of tyranny?' More loosely, it alludes to the entire range of democratic reforms that proceeded alongside the Jacksonians read more, The Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. Sulla had siege engines built on the spot, cutting down the groves of trees in the Athenian suburb of the Academy, where Plato had taught some three centuries earlier. They therefore in a sense deserved the political pay-off of mass-biased democracy as a reward for their crucial naval role. Athens in the early first century had energy and culture. Archelaus in turn built a tower that he brought up directly opposite its Roman counterpart. If we are all democrats today, we are not - and it is importantly because we are not - Athenian-style democrats. Any member of the demosany one of those 40,000 adult male citizenswas welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. The king probably wished to engage the Romans far to the west, away from his core territories in Anatolia. Realizing the citys defenses were broken, Aristion burned the Odeon of Pericles, on the south side of the Acropolis, to prevent the Romans from using its timbers to construct more siege engines. What mattered was whether or not the unusual system was any good. Since Athenians did not pay taxes, the money for these payments came from customs duties, contributions from allies and taxes levied on the metoikoi. Inevitably, there was some fallout, and one of the victims of the simmering personal and ideological tensions was Socrates. Web. Athens, too, should throw in with this rising power, he asserted. He was chief historical consultant for the BBC TV series 'The Greeks'. How did Athens swing so quickly from euphoria to catastrophe? Immediately following the Bronze Age collapse and at the start of the Dark . In these intellectuals' view, government was an art, craft or skill, and should be entrusted only to the skilled and intelligent, who were by definition a minority. The battle was fought on the Marathon plain of northeastern Attica and marked the first blows of the Greco-Persian War. Ancient Greece is often referred to as "the cradle of democracy.". World History Encyclopedia is a non-profit organization. The book, entitled From Democrats To Kings, aims to overhaul Athens' traditional image as the ancient world's "golden city", arguing that its early successes have obscured a darker history of blood-lust and mob rule. The opposing forces clashed bitterly for a long timeAppian records that both Sulla and Archelaus held forth in the thick of the action, cheering on their men and bringing up fresh troops. From the story of the rise and fall of Athens, it is clear that the concept of democracy was abused to the point that only the city's citizens had rights and the rest of the allies were considered as subjects. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. Indeed, for the Athenian democrats, elections would have struck at the heart of democracy: They would have allowed some people to assert themselves, arrogantly and unjustly, against the others. Thank you! It argues that it was not the loss of its empire and defeat in war against Sparta at the end of the 5th century that heralded the death knell of Athenian democracy - as it is traditionally perceived. As we have seen, only male citizens who were 18 years or over could speak (at least in theory) and vote in the assembly, whilst the positions such as magistrates and jurors were limited to those over 30 years of age. It reached its peak between 480 and 404BC, when Athens was undeniably the master of the Greek world. In 399 he was charged with impiety (through not duly recognising the gods the city recognised, and introducing new, unrecognised divinities) and, a separate alleged offence, corrupting the young. When the fleet reached the city, Aristion quickly seized power, thanks in part to a personal guard of 2,000 Pontic soldiers. To the Persians, he emphasized his descent from ancient Persian kings. The classical period was an era of war and conflictfirst between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the read more. But in 200, Philip, having come of age and claimed the crown, dispatched an army toward Athens to regain the port. If they did not fulfill their duty they would be fined and sometimes marked with red paint. Ancient Athenian democracy differs from the democracy that we are familiar with in the present day. The generals' collective crime, so it was alleged by Theramenes (formerly one of the 400) and others with suspiciously un- or anti-democratic credentials, was to have failed to rescue several thousands of Athenian citizen survivors. Though Archelaus restored Delos to Athenian control, he turned over its treasury to Aristion, an Athenian citizen whom Mithridates had chosen to rule Athens. In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, not only were children denied the vote (an exception we still consider acceptable), but so were women, foreigners, and enslaved people. Archelaus, who had more men than Sulla at the outset, tried to make use of his numerical superiority in an all-out attack on the besiegers. The heart of this story is a months-long battle featuring treachery and clever siege warfare. Archaeologists discovered these caches thousands of years later and found bronze coins minted during the siege, when Aristion and King Mithridates jointly held the title of master of the mint. By Athenian democratic standards of justice, which are not ours, the guilt of Socrates was sufficiently proven. Athens was forced to destroy its main defenses, abolish the Delian League and its fleet was handed over to the Spartans. Others were rather more subtly expressed. License. But what form of government, what constitution, should the restored Persian empire enjoy for the future? The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens. With the Persians closing in on the Greek capitol, Athenian general read more, The story of the Trojan Warthe Bronze Age conflict between the kingdoms of Troy and Mycenaean Greecestraddles the history and mythology of ancient Greece and inspired the greatest writers of antiquity, from Homer, Herodotus and Sophocles to Virgil. Into this dangerous situation stepped Solon, a moderate man the Athenians trusted to bring justice for all. 474 Words2 Pages. Centuries later, archaeologists discovered some of these in the ruins of the Pompeion, a gathering place for the start of processions. There was in Athens (and also Elis, Tegea, and Thasos) a smaller body, the boul, which decided or prioritised the topics which were discussed in the assembly. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe. Archaeologists have found no inscriptions with decrees from the Assembly that date within 40 years of the end of the siege. Not all anti-democrats, however, saw only democracy's weaknesses and were entirely blind to democracy's strengths. Fighting ensued, and the Athenians then took steps that explicitly violated the Thirty Years' Treaty. They are also, however, reminders of the human capacity for disagreement, read more, An ambiguous, controversial concept, Jacksonian Democracy in the strictest sense refers simply to the ascendancy of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic party after 1828. Sulla had logistical problems of his own. Less than two years separate these scenes. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. Athenian democracy developed around the fifth century B.C.E. Why Greece Is Considered the Birthplace of Democracy. If you join your strength to me, my power shall reach the combined power of all of you. Then March 86 BC, shouts and trumpet blasts rend the night air as Roman soldiers, swords drawn, run through the city. Then there was the view that the mob, the poor majority, were nothing but a collective tyrant. Please note that some of these recommendations are listed under our old name, Ancient History Encyclopedia. A very clever example of this line of oligarchic attack is contained in a fictitious dialogue included by Xenophon - a former pupil of Socrates, and, like Plato, an anti-democrat - in his work entitled 'Memoirs of Socrates'. 2.37). They denied specifically that the sort of knowledge available to and used by ordinary people, popular knowledge if you like, was really knowledge at all. In ancient Athens, hatred between the rich and poor threatened the city-state with civil war and tyranny. In 83 BC, Sulla and his army returned to Italy, kicking off the Roman Republics first all-out civil war, which he won. It survived the period through slippery-fish diplomacy, at the cost of a clear democratic conscience, a policy which, in the end, led it to accept a dictator King and make him a God.". (Only about 5,000 men attended each session of the Assembly; the rest were serving in the army or navy or working to support their families.). As the new Alexander, he may also have seen the conquest of Greece as a natural move. Many of its economic problems were gradually solved by attracting wealthy immigrants to Athens - which as a name still carried considerable prestige. For example, in Athens in the middle of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or resident foreigners, and 150,000 slaves. Neither side gained an advantage until a group of Romans who had been gathering wood returned and charged into battle. This complex system was, no doubt, to ensure a suitable degree of checks and balances to any potential abuse of power, and to ensure each traditional region was equally represented and given equal powers. Cartwright, Mark. Ultimately, the Romans grew exhausted, and Sulla ordered a retreat. His short and vehement pamphlet was produced probably in the 420s, during the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, and makes the following case: democracy is appalling, since it represents the rule of the poor, ignorant, fickle and stupid majority over the socially and intellectually superior minority, the world turned upside down. Yet, with the advent of new technology, it would actually be possible to reinvent today a form of indirect but participatory tele-democracy. The Athenian Democracy existed from the early 7th century BC up until Athens was conquered by the Macedonians in 322 BC. The first concrete evidence for this crucial invention comes in the Histories of Herodotus, a brilliant work composed over several years, delivered orally to a variety of audiences all round the enormously extended Greek world, and published in some sense as a whole perhaps in the 420s BC. With the city starving, its leaders asked Aristion to negotiate with Sulla. While I was in training, my motivation was to get these wings and I wear them today proudly, the airman recalled in 2015. Though Mithridates had to withdraw from territories he had conquered and pay an indemnity, he remained in power in Pontus. Ultimately, the city was to respond positively to some of these challenges. The tyranny had been a terrible and. Since the 19th-century read more, The term classical Greece refers to the period between the Persian Wars at the beginning of the fifth century B.C. (Thuc. In despair, many Athenians kill themselves. Critics of democracy, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes, pointed out that not only were proceedings dominated by an elite, but that the dmos could be too often swayed by a good orator or popular leaders (the demagogues), get carried away with their emotions, or lack the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions. Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process. Ostrakon for PericlesMark Cartwright (CC BY-NC-SA). Apparently, some Roman stones had missed the gate and crashed into the Pompeion next door. Democracy in Ancient Greece is most frequently associated with Athens where a complex system allowed for broad political participation by the free male citizens of the city-state. World History Publishing is a non-profit company registered in the United Kingdom. These challenges to democracy include the paradoxical existence of an Athenian empire. Plato realized why democracy failed - even in ideal conditions, such as the direct democracy of ancient Athens. Aristion didnt hold out long: He surrendered when he ran out of drinking water. Democracy itself, however, buckled under the strain. Most of the Greek cities there welcomed the Pontic forces, and by early 88, Mithridates was firmly in control of western Anatolia. In 621 BCE Draco wrote the law code in order to ease discontent in . The capital would be sending no more reinforcements or money. From Democrats To Kings is published by Icon Books. However, in reality, it was actually Persia who had won the war. He and his allies then retreated to the Acropolis, which the Romans promptly surrounded. The World History Encyclopedia logo is a registered trademark. The Greek idea of democracy was different from present-day democracy because, in Athens, all adult citizens were required to take an active part in the government. With Athens under his thumb, Sulla turned back to Piraeus. The assembly could also vote to ostracise from Athens any citizen who had become too powerful and dangerous for the polis. Nor did he do anything to help defend his own cause, so that more of the 501 jurors voted for the death penalty than had voted him guilty as charged in the first place. As winter stretched on, Athenians began to starve. Athens is a city-state, while today we are familiar with the primary unit of governance . Meanwhile, the siege of Piraeus continued, with each side matching the others moves. In 590 BCE Athenians were suffering from debt and famine throughout Athens. Any citizen could speak to the assembly and vote on decisions by simply holding up their hands. So what we have in Herodotus is a Greek debate in Persian dress. In 129 BC, after Rome established its province of Asia, in western Anatolia across the Aegean, Delos became a trade hub for goods shipped between Anatolia and Italy. At the kings order, the locals slaughtered tens of thousands of Romans and Italians who lived among them. At the start of the century Athens, contrary to traditional reports, was a flourishing democracy.
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