Ancient Democracy

What It Meant

The Greek word for democracy was demokratia, involving the root words demos, or people, and kratos, power. The Greeks conceived of demokratia as that form of city-state constitution in which the people—especially the masses of ordinary citizens (the demos) rather than the wealthy elite—controlled the deliberative process and held decisive political authority. Ancient writers usually contrasted demokratia with forms of government involving rule by a small class of privileged citizens (oligarchy, aristocracy) or rule by one man (monarchy, tyranny).

The demos expressed its control in the democratic city-state in various ways. Most directly, the demos ruled through meetings of a popular assembly, a body to which all citizens were invited. Most Greek city-states (or poleis, as the Greeks called them) regularly held assembly meetings of some kind. However, assemblies in democratic states

• required little or no property for attendance and in some city-states even offered payments to encourage poorer citizens to join in;
• allowed anyone to speak at the meetings, not just designated officials;
• had essentially unlimited purview and decisive authority, so that decrees of the assembly carried the full force of law.

The demos expressed further control in the citystate through the court system: Juries were manned by ordinary citizens and often ruled on political matters, not just narrow issues of civil or criminal law. In addition, democracies kept governing officials and councils on a short leash, with brief terms of office (typically a year or even less) and multiple mechanisms for oversight and discipline by the demos. Many officials were chosen by lot from citizen volunteers; others were elected in designated meetings of the assembly.

The concepts of freedom (eleutheria) and equality (various Greek terms typically with the prefix iso-) animated Greek democracy, and both appear prominently in discussions of demokratia by ancient authors. Freedom meant not only freedom from oppressive internal or external political control, but also freedom in the positive sense of the ability to live as one wishes. Equality expressed itself in the idea that people in a democracy should [Page 46]rule themselves in turn because all citizens were capable of making contributions to the public welfare and all deserved a voice in public matters.

How It Worked

Ancient critics of demokratia—who far outnumbered its supporters in the surviving literature—judged that too much freedom and equality existed in democracy, leading to licentious behavior, social upset, and poorly considered decisions from a poorly educated collective citizenry. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all had serious doubts about the wisdom of democratic government (although Aristotle not as implacably as Plato), and they bequeathed their concerns to later theorists. Historical writers such as Thucydides and Xenophon also portrayed demokratia in largely negative terms. The historian Herodotus, however, wrote somewhat more favorably of the constitutional form and its ideals of freedom and equality, extolling the power it gave Athens and contrasting it with the ugly despotism of the Persian king.

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