Demochronos: The political time of the Athenian democracy (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Ancient Athens developed democracy to a higher level than any other state before modern times. It was the leading cultural innovator of the classical age. Classical Athens is rightly revered for these political and cultural achievements. Less well known is this state’s extraordinary record of military success. Athens was directly responsible for transforming Greek wars and for raising their scale tenfold. By the 450s it had emerged as the eastern Mediterranean’s superpower. The first major reason for this emergence was this state’s demographic advantage. With twenty times more citizens than an average Greek state Athens could field armies and fleets that were much larger than all but a few others. The second major reason was the immense income that Athens got from its empire. This allowed it to employ thousands of non-elite citizens on campaigns and to perfect new corps and combat modes. There is a strong case that democratic government was the third major reason. The military impact of Athenian democracy was twofold. The competition of elite performers before non-elite adjudicators resulted in a pro-war culture. This culture encouraged Athenians in ever-increasing numbers to join the armed forces and to vote for war. All this was offset by Athenian democracy’s rigorous debates about war. This debating reduced the risks of Athenian cultural militarism. It also made military reforms easier and developed the initiative of the state’s generals, hoplites and sailors. Political scientists have long viewed Athenian democracy as a source of fresh ideas. Presently they cannot satisfactorily explain the war-making of modern democracies. Consequently ancient history can provide political science with new lines of enquiry into how modern democracy impacts on international relations.
Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Study
History Compass, 2004
Democracy-or demokratia as the Greeks called it-first took shape in a few sixth-century BC city-states, arising from attitudes and conditions widespread in the Greek world. In the ensuing two centuries it became more common and continued to develop, especially in the city of Athens, where it attained its definitive and most influential form. (Other systems of rule, such as oligarchy and tyranny, remained common in Greek city-states, however). Democracy meant that the demos (the people) governed the state directly, controlling affairs through such institutions as jury courts and mass assembly meetings, in which all citizens were eligible to take part, as well as through numerous elected or allotted posts, each held for a brief term only. The political ideals of freedom and equality animated demokratia , though they did not extend to women and slaves. Historians and other intellectuals, after many centuries of hostility to the idea of democracy, have more recently embraced it and its study. A survey of publications by classicists of the last twenty years or so reveals a lively diversity of views and trends.
Comparing Democracies: A Spatial Method with Application to Ancient Athens
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009
A graphic method for specifying historians' judgments about political change, with special reference to the distance and the direction that Athenian democracy had moved from the era of Cleisthenes to that of Lycurgus. For Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard (eds.). Cleisthène et Lycurgue d'Athènes: Autour du politique dans la cité classique. Editions du Sorbonne, Paris.
Development and Political Theory in Classical Athens
Analyzing the birth of political thought in Greece uniquely as a response to democracy in Athens overlooks the economic, social and legal aspects of the profound transformation that Athens underwent in the classical period. That transformation did not merely affect political structures. Without understanding this larger transformation, we cannot adequately explain the development of Greek political thought. Between the late 6 th and 4 th centuries BC, Athens transitioned from an undeveloped limited access, "natural state" toward a developed open access society -a society characterized by impersonal, perpetual and inclusive political, economic, legal and social institutions that protected individual rights and sustained the polis' exceptional growth.
Athenian Democracy A User's Guide
JIHI 13 no. 26, 2024
Athenian democracy, with its emphasis on direct citizen participation and the practice of lottery-based selection, is often idealised as an innovative and counter-democratic model, offering alternatives to modern systems shaped by economic monopolies and global information networks. Ancient historians play a pivotal role in this discourse, not merely as observers but as active participants, tasked with providing historically informed insights to enhance public understanding. The reception of Athenian democracy has undergone significant evolution over centuries,adapting to meet the shifting needs of political ideologies and discourses. The article challenges the mythologization of iconic symbols such as Pericles’ FuneralOration and the kleroterion, emphasising the importance of contextualising thesewithin their true historical settings. Rather than a static or idealised system, Athenian democracy is better understood as a historically evolving process, comprising complex structures, procedures, and networks of social groupings that facilitated democratic engagement. It is in these elements—multiple, intersecting groups enabling collective governance—that Athenian democracy holds potential lessons for modern political systems.
The Athenian Democracy of Classical Period
Ever since Jacob Burckhardt's influential interpretation, it has become commonplace to hold that ancient Greek society, unlike our current consensus-seeking liberal democracies, was agonistic. 1 Competition, conflict, and disagreement, rather than cooperation, peace, and agreement, it is claimed, were the primary forces animating the political life of the Greek polis. Recently, this agonistic spirit is associated even with Greek democracies-to the effect that some scholars have suggested that the Greeks celebrated stasis (civic strife) as the defining characteristic of democracy. 2 It is also asserted that the agonistic character of Greek democracy rendered the Greek city-states eminently political-at least more political than today's "consensus-seeking" liberal democracies. In other words, the Greeks, unlike us, equated democracy, politics, and conflict, which is also why the origin of politics is often traced back to Greek democracy. This portrait of Greek democracy is not completely erroneous. Not all the Greeks were hostile to struggle or competition. Many of them probably subscribed to Hesiod's (11-26) famous distinction between two kinds of strife (Eris). While the destructive Eris is the cause of quarrel (neikos), fight (dêris), and war (polemos), the productive Eris is an impetus to strive for excellence: She [good Eris] stirs up even the shiftless to toil, for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order, and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. Furthermore, if we look at ancient Greek society, we find several institutionalized arenas of competition, most notably the Olympic Games, tragedy competitions (Dionysias), and musical contests (Pythian Games). Yet the portrait is not completely correct either. The most apparent error concerns the status of stasis in Greek political culture. In the surviving corpus of Greek literature, there is not even a hint of it that somebody would have celebrated stasis. The democrats and the anti-democrats alike conceived of stasis as the worst disaster that could befall a polis, "much worse than a war (polemos)" against foreign enemies, as Herodotus (8.3.1) put it. In a war, "the 1 Although already Ernst Curtius (1814-1896)-known for initiating the German excavations at Olympia-extended the role of competition beyond the Panhellenic festival to form a general principle, it was Burckhardt's Griechische Kulturgeschichte, probably influenced by Curtius' interpretation, that made ancient Greece as a culture of competition famous, at least among the scholars. Due to the impact of Friedrich Nietzsche, who believed that competition (Wettkamph) is the "eternal foundation of life (der ewige Lebensgrund) of the Greek state," this portrait of ancient Greece became prevalent more generally, particularly among the European radical conservatives. In the 1930s, according to Christopher Ulf, there was no longer debate about whether Greek culture was agonistic: the debate concerned the timing of the decline of proper agonism. Christopher Ulf, "Ancient Greek competition-a modern construct?" in Nick Fischer and Hans van Wees (eds.), Competition in the Ancient Word (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2011), 85-111. The agonistic spirit is associated with the democratic culture of Greece only recently.