Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The first part consists of three papers which in different ways try to estab-
lish how classical Athenian democracy worked, not in the sense of the insti-
tutions and officials and their relations to one another, but in the sense
of how –, citizens managed to run an effective government when
there was so little continuity of office and no permanent civil service of any
size or significance. Discussions of Athenian democracy have traditionally
paid little attention to anything other than the central institutions firmly
based in the town – above all the Council and Assembly. Chapters and ,
which are closely linked, attempt to draw into the picture the sub-groups
of the Athenian citizen body that were rooted not in the town but in the
countryside. Chapter outlines my view of the way in which the different
institutions related to one another. Chapter looks more particularly at one
aspect of Athenian constitutional arrangements, the way in which meet-
ings were organised. It brings the demes and other associations of Athens
into consideration in terms of their part in making Athenians accustomed
to expect the patterns of decision-making employed in the Council and the
Assembly, and it takes advantage of the unusually rich epigraphic material
from one particular deme, Rhamnous, to show how easily different corpor-
ate bodies could interlock and how unproblematic decision-making by new
and temporary combinations of Athenians could be.
The picture painted in chapters and depends particularly upon epi-
graphic evidence and upon an assumption about the relationship between
what is recorded in inscriptions and what happened on the ground.
Chapter puts pressure on that assumption to look at the gaps between
what was performed in the Assembly or other corporate bodies and what
was recorded on stone. It argues that close examination of what is not said
in documents can reveal not only the presence of editing of the record, but
also the political importance of that editing for ensuring that issues were
not reopened and that what Athenians took away from the record was not
a reminder of debate and division but confirmation of decisions taken.
How did Athenian democracy work? How do you run a state where all
important decisions are made at meetings open to all citizens, where most
of the magistrates are elected by lot, and where there is no civil service of
which to speak? How, more particularly, do you manage this when the citi-
zen body is , to , strong and spread over , sq. km – about
the area of Derbyshire? The referenda in Denmark in and , and
the riots in Copenhagen which followed the second, have drawn attention
to the difficulties attendant on opening up even a single issue to decision
by the whole enfranchised population. How then did Athens manage to
put all its business through meetings open to any citizen without creating
impossible tensions and frustrations or ending up always taking the course
of action which would cause everybody least trouble?
In proposing an answer to this question, I shall draw attention not sim-
ply to the institutions of government, and the rules, explicit or tacit, under
which they operated, although I believe those to be important, but also
to the nature of the Athenian community more generally. I shall argue
that Athenian democracy depended crucially on the homogeneity of the
citizen population, a homogeneity which was consciously cultivated – and
cultivated at the expense of individual freedom – and which created not
just the context for the effective working of democracy but also the unique
environment for the production of classical tragedy and comedy.
The institutional key to Athenian democracy does not lie in the
Assembly, for all that the Assembly was the prime democratic body. It
seems very unlikely that a change in the precise rules governing attend-
ance at the Assembly – increasing or decreasing the number of people who
could be accommodated in the assembly place on the Pnyx hill, raising
the age from eighteen to twenty-five or thirty, changing the arrangements
On all Athenian institutions and the way they operated, in theory and practice, see Hansen ();
on the non-institutional background to democracy, see Ober ().
See Rhodes ().
Thus the very badly drafted decree (ML /OR ) establishing a priesthood of Athena Nike
and building works in her sanctuary, which seems to have been formulated in the Assembly, is
amended in the Assembly to ensure that members of the Council have oversight of the detailed
building decisions. And when an individual gets on his hind legs about some particular matters of
detail in relation to a recommendation from the Council, the Assembly sends him back to sort it
out with the Council and then bring it back at a later date to the Assembly (cf. ML /OR and
ML /OR ).
On this issue I disagree somewhat with the classic paper by Finley ().
On demes see Osborne (a) and Whitehead (a)
For the line of argument rehearsed here, see ch. below.
On this see ch. below, and cf. Millett ().
On the distribution of land-ownership at Athens, see ch. below.
Cf. Whitehead (). See Vidal-Naquet ().
See Loraux (), Hall () and ch. .
As is apparent from Xenophon’s Poroi, written in the s.
The fundamental revisionist work here is Farrar ().
Protagoras’ theory of knowledge is best known from Plato’s Theaitetos, his theory of human
nature from Plato’s Protagoras.
For an argument specific to the courts which points in the same direction, see Todd (a).
On the political aspects of drama, see especially the contributions to Winkler and Zeitlin ().
Since this paper was written, various aspects of Athenian life as discussed
here have been further illuminated by other scholars. On the Athenian
phratry, see Lambert (); on women’s rituals at Athens, see Parker (a)
esp. chapters and ; on Protagoras and political theory, see Balot ()
–, –; on the audience of Athenian drama, see Wilson (b).
The thesis advanced in this paper, that the success of Athenian democ-
racy depended upon not upon some integral virtues of direct democracy
Th is paper originated as a contribution to a double-act with the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell on
Democracy Ancient and Modern organised by the Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s London
and the Anglo-Hellenic League. I am very grateful to Averil Cameron for the invitation to speak,
to Enoch Powell for stimulus on that occasion, to Paul Cartledge and the Editors of Dialogos for
improving the written text, and to Arnd Kerkhecker for making me think about the implications
of this for literary critics.