Evolution of Athenian Democracy

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 6.3

kleroterion

The democracy of Athens evolved over time. It is common to imagine Athenian democracy persisting as it existed in the time of Pericles for some 200 years. In fact there were counter-revolutions and brief periods of oligarchy followed by democratic restoration. 

Many scholars link the birth of democracy in Athens to the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/7 BCE. After he led the overthrow of the tyrant Hippias, Cleisthenes was exiled by a competitor, Isagoras with the help of the Spartan army. The people rose up against Isagoras and his Spartan allies, in what appears to have been a spontaneous revolution, and welcomed back Cleisthenes. Perhaps in order to shore up his position as leader against Isagoras and other potential aristocratic rivals, Cleisthenes launched an astonishingly comprehensive social re-engineering project. He divided the former four classes of Athens, based on wealth, into ten new tribes based on geography. Each tribe consisted of residents from an assortment of 139 geographic villages or neighborhoods (demes) from across Attica (the 700 square mile area surrounding Athens proper) such that each tribe included residents from inland, coastal and urban communities. These demes and tribes became the basis for organizing a lottery system of government — the creation of legislative bodies and the courts. The Council of Four Hundred was changed to the Council of Five Hundred, with fifty members selected by lot from each tribe. The Council was now roughly proportional to the class makeup of Athenian citizenship. Cleisthenes also extended full rights, including the right to serve in office to the lower classes, including the un-propertied rowers of the war ships. As in the Greek mythology of “the law-giver,” Cleisthenes seems to disappear from the history at this point, leaving the foundation for a self-governing democratic state.

Following the defeat of Athens in the  Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century BCE a pro-Sparta oligarchy was installed. The “Thirty Tyrants” appointed a new council of 500 to carry out the legislative function. Corruption, massacres and expropriation of property led to revolution, an overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants, and the construction of a new democracy. Paul Woodruff writes in his slim volume, First Democracy: the Challenge of an Ancient Idea, that

“After civil war or a great military failure, the Athenians would adjust their system to conform better with the goals of democracy.”

The ultimate democratic system that Athens landed on following the reforms of 403 BCE, is often referred to by scholars as Athens’s fourth century democracy, or “second democracy,” to distinguish it from its earlier fifth century constitution. Historian Mogens Hansen designates it by the title of his authoritative book, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. The workings of this reformed “second democracy” was essentially unknown to political writers like Rousseau, Montesquieu and Madison, since a papyrus copy of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens was only rediscovered in the late nineteenth century in Egypt.

The reforms of the Athenian democracy stripped the power to adopt laws from the Assembly and gave that power to large, randomly selected representative panels of citizens  (nomothetai). The Assembly retained final authority on certain matters such as foreign policy, short-term decrees and decisions about war and peace.  The Assembly could only order that a legislative body be impaneled to consider a particular law. The Council of Five Hundred, the courts, and most administrative magistrates were also filled by lot (as they had been in the first Athenian democracy). Athens even instituted compensation for participating in government meetings. Equality meant that all male citizens had the actual, rather than merely theoretical opportunity to govern and be governed in turn. The random selection, short terms and rotation of office holders helped protect against concentration of power and ensuing corruption and risk of tyranny by an elite. 

The Athenians limited the use of elections to a few unique offices for which there were special qualifications, such as military generals (strategoi), and certain financial offices. As noted earlier, elections were deemed inherently oligarchic, because only those with wealth or exceptional celebrity could realistically win an election. Most magistrates were selected by lot, usually in panels of ten, likely so they could avoid the risk of individual incompetence or corruption.

Each village or neighborhood (deme) was authorized a number of seats roughly proportional to the number of citizens over the age of 30 who resided there, to fill out a “jury pool” (dikastai) of 6,000 for one year. From that randomly selected jury pool a second tier lottery was conducted on the day of a trial, since a case might require only 201 or up to 1,5001 or more, depending on the importance of the case. The Greeks even invented a machine called a kleroterion that could randomly and transparently make the lottery drawing in public. The original devices were probably made of wood, but some remnants of later stone models still survive today. Those members of the  jury pool who were available on any given day would insert metal tabs inscribed with their names into a slot in the appropriate tribe column of a grid with slots on the face of the kleroterion (see the image at the top of this post). A large number of two different colored balls (one meaning “yes” and one “no”) were then fed down randomly from a hopper at the top of the machine into a selection column along side the grid of names (not included in the image above). If a “yes” ball in the selection column was in line with your name, then you and all of the other jurors (one from each tribe) in that particular row of names would serve on a court that day. If the ball that landed in line with the row of names that yours was in was a “no” ball, you wouldn’t be serving that day. This was done on the day of the trial to assure there could be no manipulation or pre-trial influence. Trials were not merely criminal or civil. They could also be political, for example, cases on whether a decision of the Assembly was contrary to basic law (unconstitutional) and should be overturned. And, as stated above, they could also be constituted as a legislative panel to decide whether to adopt a new proposed law. 

Since terms of service were brief — a single day for a juror, and a single year for a magistrate, it is apparent that the Athenians were willing to accept some inefficiency to preserve an essentially amateur group of temporary rulers that protected against corruption and assured nobody could become a tyrant. The astonishing economic and cultural thriving of Athens in this period of democracy shows that this system of governance worked. The renowned classics scholar Josiah Ober argues in his book Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens that, rather than being an encumbrance, the Athenian system of democracy was largely responsible for the dramatic flourishing of Athens.