The World’s Earliest Democrats

The land is mountainous, deeply indented mass thrusting south into Mediterranean.

The climate is benign , but arable soil is scarce and scattered as a result, early settlements developed as small, independent communities, isolated by the difficult terrain from their neighbors – which whom they were often at loggerhead.

Often the only means of communication was by sea.

The factor gave a strongly individual identity to the converging towns of Ancient Greece.

In its early days of Athens was ruled by kings and tyrants but in 510 BC, Cleisthenes drove out the last of them and established the world’s first democratic government.

The word comes from the Greek demos, ‘the common people’, and kratos, ‘the power’.

This was not however, a democracy in the modern sense. Only a minority of the population was allowed to vote – the freedom Athenian males.

Women were not regarded as citizens, and therefore had no vote; neither did foreigners or their descendants, or slaves and their descendants, even if they had become free.

The city was divided into ten blocks, called tribes. Each tribe elected 50 men over the age of 30 to a 500 strong Council which carried out the daily function of government.

The councilors served in turn on a committee which produced ideas for discussion by the Assembly of all the citizens.

During the service, for which they were paid, the councilors took their meals at the state’s expense in the administrative headquarters, the Tholos, a round building on the west side of the agora, or market.

It was assembly, or ekklesia, that made laws and decided on great issues such as whether to go to war.

All the thousands of citizens could attend, paying a small admission fee, and could speak and vote.

Promptness was encouraged, slaves holding a rope dipped in red paint rounded on late comers, and anyone found with red paint on his clothes was fined.

The assembly met about 40 times a year on the Pnyx, a hill near the Acropolis, or ‘high city’ – the rocky plateau which was the birthplace of the Athenian city state.

Men seat on the ground, or on folding stools they brought with them. After prayers and the sacrifice of a black pig the debates began, members voting by a show of hands.

Order was kept by a police force or Scythian archers, whose original homeland was north of the Black Sea.

Officials called archons, who were selected by lot, prepared legal cases for trial in the Assembly, and also organized religious ceremonies.

The highest ranking officials were the ten strategoi, or generals, elected form ten tribes by the people.

Holding office for the year, they wielded immense power over both the army and the economy, and made far reaching decisions on behalf of the state.
The World’s Earliest Democrats