Radical Democracy and Pericles’ Leadership, 461–431 B.C.E.

In the late 460s B.C.E., the trireme rowers decided that in their own interest they should make Athens’s court system as democratic as its legislative assembly, in which all free adult male citizens could already participate. They wanted to be free of unfair verdicts rendered by the elite in legal cases. Hoping to win popular support for election to high office, members of the elite pushed this judicial reform, which was accomplished in 461 B.C.E. Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.), a member of one of Athens’s most distinguished families, became Golden Age Athens’s dominant politician by spearheading reforms to democratize its judicial system and provide pay for many public offices.

Historians have labeled the changes to Athenian democracy in the 460s and 450s B.C.E. radical (“from the roots”) because the new system gave direct political and judicial power to all adult male citizens (the “roots” of democracy, in the Greek view). The government consisted of the assembly, the Council of Five Hundred chosen annually by lottery, the Council of the Areopagus of ex-archons serving for life, an executive board of ten “generals” elected annually, nine archons chosen by lottery, hundreds of other annual minor officials (most chosen by lottery), and the court system.

Athens’s radical democracy balanced two competing goals: (1) participation by as many ordinary male citizens as possible in direct (not representative) democracy with term limits on service in office and (2) selective leadership by elite citizens. To achieve the second goal, the highest-level officials were elected and received no pay. A successful general could be reelected indefinitely.

The changes in the judicial system did the most to create radical democracy. Previously, archons (high officials in the city-state) and the ex-archons serving in the Council of the Areopagus, who tended to be members of the elite, had decided most legal cases. As with Cleisthenes (see “Democracy in the City-State of Athens, 632–500 B.C.E.” in Chapter 2), reform took place when an elite man proposed it to support ordinary men’s political rights and simultaneously win their votes against his rivals: in 461 B.C.E., Ephialtes won popular support by getting the assembly to establish a new system that took away jurisdiction from the archons and gave it to courts manned by citizen jurors. To make it more democratic and prevent bribery, jurors were selected by lottery from male citizens over thirty years old. They received pay to serve on juries numbering from several hundred to several thousand members. No judges or lawyers existed, and jurors voted by secret ballot after hearing speeches from the persons involved. As in the assembly, a majority vote decided matters; no appeals of verdicts were allowed.

In Athenian radical democracy the majority could overrule the legal protections for individuals. In ostracism, all male citizens could cast a ballot on which they scratched the name of one man they thought should be exiled for ten years. If at least six thousand ballots were cast, the man whose name appeared on the greatest number was expelled from Athens. He suffered no other penalty; his family and property remained undisturbed. Usually a man was ostracized because a majority feared he would overthrow the democracy to rule as a tyrant. There was no guarantee of voters’ motives in an ostracism, as a story about Aristides illustrates. He was nicknamed “the Just” because he had proved himself so fair-minded in setting the original level of dues for Delian League members. On the day of an ostracism, an illiterate citizen handed him a pottery fragment and asked him to scratch a name on it:

True or not, this tale demonstrates that most Athenians believed the right way to support democracy was to trust a majority vote.

Some socially elite citizens bitterly criticized Athens’s democracy for giving political power to the poor. These critics insisted that oligarchy—the rule of the few—was morally superior to radical democracy because they believed that the poor lacked the education and moral values needed for leadership and would use their majority rule to strip the rich of their wealth by making them provide benefits to poorer citizens.

Pericles convinced the assembly to pass reforms to strengthen citizens’ equality, making him the most influential leader of his era. He introduced pay for the offices filled by lottery and for jury service so that the poor could serve as well as the wealthy. In 451 B.C.E., Pericles sponsored a law restricting citizenship to those whose mother and father were both Athenian by birth. Previously, wealthy men had often married foreign women from elite families. This change both increased the status of Athenian women, rich or poor, as potential mothers of citizens and made Athenian citizenship more valuable by reducing the number of people eligible for its legal and financial benefits. Thousands had their citizenship revoked.

Pericles also convinced the assembly to launch naval campaigns when war with Sparta broke out in the 450s B.C.E. The assembly was so eager to compete for power and plunder against other Greeks and against Persians in the eastern Mediterranean that it voted for up to three major expeditions at once. These efforts slowed in the late 450s B.C.E. after a large naval force sent to aid an Egyptian rebellion against Persian rule suffered a horrendous defeat, losing tens of thousands of oarsmen. In 446–445 B.C.E., Pericles arranged a peace treaty with Sparta for thirty years, to preserve Athenian control of the Delian League.