Democracy in the City-State of Athens, 632–500 B.C.E.

Athens, located at the southeastern corner of central Greece, became the most famous of the democratic city-states because its government gave political rights to the greatest number of people; financed magnificent temples and public buildings; and, in the fifth century B.C.E., became militarily strong enough to force numerous other city-states to follow Athenian leadership in a maritime empire. Athenian democracy did not reach its full development until the mid-fifth century B.C.E., but its first steps in the Archaic Age allowed all male citizens to participate in making laws and administering justice.

Athens’s early development of a large middle class was a crucial factor in opening this new path for Western civilization. The Athenian population apparently expanded at a phenomenal rate when economic conditions improved rapidly from about 800 to 700 B.C.E. The ready availability of good farmland in Athenian territory and opportunities for seaborne trade allowed many families to improve their standing. These hardworking entrepreneurs felt that their self-won economic success entitled them to a say in government. The democratic unity forged by the Athenian masses was evident as early as 632 B.C.E., when the people rallied to block an elite Athenian’s attempt to install a tyranny.

By the seventh century B.C.E., all freeborn adult Athenian male citizens had the right to vote on public matters in the assembly. They also elected officials called archons, who ran the judicial system by rendering verdicts in disputes and criminal accusations. Members of the elite dominated these offices; because archons received no pay, poor men could not afford to serve.

An extended economic crisis beginning in the late seventh century B.C.E. almost destroyed Athens’s infant democracy. The first attempt to solve the crisis was the emergency appointment around 621 B.C.E. of a man named Draco to revise the laws. Draco’s changes, which made death the penalty for even minor crimes, proved too harsh to work. Later Greeks said Draco (whose harshness inspired the word draconian) had written his laws in blood, not ink. By 600 B.C.E., economic conditions had become so terrible that poor farmers had to borrow constantly from richer neighbors and deeply mortgage their land. As the crisis grew worse, impoverished citizens were sold into slavery to pay off debts.

Desperate, Athenians appointed another emergency official in 594 B.C.E., a war hero named Solon. To head off violence, Solon gave both rich and poor something of what they wanted, a compromise called the “shaking off of obligations.” He canceled private debts, which helped the poor but displeased the rich; he decided not to redistribute land, which pleased the wealthy but disappointed the poor. He banned selling citizens into slavery to settle debts and liberated citizens who had become slaves in this way. His elimination of debt slavery was a significant recognition of citizen rights.

Solon balanced political power between rich and poor by reordering Athens’s traditional ranking of citizens into four groups. Most important, he made the top-ranking group depend solely on income, not birth. This change eliminated inherited aristocracy at Athens. The groupings did not affect a man’s treatment at law, only his eligibility for government office. The higher a man’s ranking, the higher the post to which he could be elected, but higher also was the contribution he was expected to make to the community with his service and his money. Men at the poorest level, called laborers, were not eligible for any office. Solon did, however, confirm the laborers’ right to vote in the legislative assembly. His classification scheme was consistent with democratic principles because it allowed for upward social mobility: a man who increased his income could move up the scale of eligibility for office.

The creation of a smaller council to prepare the agenda for the assembly was a crucial development in making Athenian democracy efficient. Four hundred council members were chosen annually from the adult male citizenry by lottery—the most democratic method possible—which prevented the social elite from capturing too many seats.

Solon’s two reforms in the judicial system promoted democratic principles of equality. First, he directed that any male citizen could start a prosecution on behalf of any crime victim. Second, he gave people the right to appeal an archon’s judgment to the assembly. With these two measures, Solon empowered ordinary citizens in the administration of justice. Characteristically, he balanced these democratic reforms by granting broader powers to the Areopagus Council (“council that meets on the hill of the god of war Ares”). This select body, limited to ex-archons, held great power because its members judged the most important cases—accusations against archons themselves.

Solon’s reforms extended power through the citizen body and created a system of law that applied more equally than before to all the community’s free men. A critic once challenged Solon, “Do you actually believe your fellow citizens’ injustice and greed can be kept in check this way? Written laws are more like spiders’ webs than anything else: they tie up the weak and the small fry who get stuck in them, but the rich and the powerful tear them to shreds.” Solon replied that communal values ensure the rule of law: “People abide by their agreements when neither side has anything to gain by breaking them. I am writing laws for the Athenians in such a way that they will clearly see it is to everyone’s advantage to obey the laws rather than to break them.”

Some elite Athenians wanted oligarchy and therefore bitterly disagreed with Solon. The unrest they caused opened the door to tyranny at Athens. Peisistratus, helped by his upper-class friends and the poor whose interests he championed, made himself tyrant in 546 B.C.E. Like the Corinthian tyrants, he promoted the economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens and bought the masses’ support. He helped poorer men, for example, by hiring them to build roads, a huge temple to Zeus, and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water. He boosted Athens’s economy and its image by minting new coins stamped with Athena’s owl (a symbol of the goddess of wisdom; see the Silver Coins of Athens) and organizing a great annual festival honoring the god Dionysus that attracted people from near and far to see its musical and dramatic performances.

Peisistratus’s eldest son, Hippias, ruled harshly and was denounced as unjust by a rival elite family. These rivals convinced the Spartans, the self-proclaimed champions of Greek freedom, to “liberate” Athens from tyranny by expelling Hippias and his family in 510 B.C.E.

Peisistratus’s support of ordinary people evidently had the unintended consequence of making them think that they deserved political equality. Tyranny at Athens thus opened the way to the most important step in developing Athenian democracy, the reforms of Cleisthenes. A member of the social elite, Cleisthenes found himself losing against rivals for election to office in 508 B.C.E. He turned his electoral campaign around by offering more political participation to the masses; he called his program “equality through law.” Ordinary people so strongly favored his plan that they spontaneously rallied to repel a Spartan army that Cleisthenes’ bitterest rival had convinced Sparta’s leaders to send to block his reforms.

By about 500 B.C.E., Cleisthenes had engineered direct participation in Athens’s democracy by as many adult male citizens as possible. First he created constituent units for the city-state’s new political organization by grouping country villages and urban neighborhoods into units called demes. The demes chose council members annually by lottery in proportion to the size of their populations. To allow for greater participation, Solon’s Council of Four Hundred was expanded to five hundred members. Finally, Cleisthenes required candidates for public office to be spread widely throughout the demes.

The creation of demes suggests that Greek democratic notions stemmed from traditions of small-community life, in which each man was entitled to his say in running local affairs and had to persuade—not force—others to agree. It took another fifty years of political struggle, however, before Athenian democracy reached its full development with the democratization of its judicial system.