How Athenian democracy worked

The word democracy comes from Greek: δῆμος, “the people”, and κράτος, “power”. In ancient Athens, democracy meant that the citizens themselves made the big decisions. They did not elect a parliament to decide for them. They came together, listened to speeches and voted.

Athens began to work this way after the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508/7 BC. He divided the citizens into ten new tribes, mixing people from the city, the coast and the countryside, so that no single family or region could control the others. Each tribe sent fifty men to a new council.

This was a direct democracy: every citizen could take part in person. But a citizen, a πολίτης, meant only an adult man from an Athenian family. Women, foreigners living in Athens and enslaved people could not vote. So democracy in Athens was the rule of many of the people, but never of all of them.

The heart of the system was the assembly, the ἐκκλησία. From the 5th century BC it met on the Pnyx, a hill west of the Acropolis, where citizens sat on the slope and speakers stood on a stone platform, the βῆμα. In the 4th century BC, according to Aristotle’s school in the Constitution of the Athenians (43.3), it met four times in each tenth of the year, about forty times a year. Any citizen could speak and make a proposal, and decisions were usually taken by a show of hands.

The council, the βουλή, prepared the assembly’s business. It had 500 members, fifty from each tribe, chosen by lot for one year. The fifty men of each tribe took turns to run daily affairs for a tenth of the year.

Justice was also in the hands of ordinary citizens. In the 5th century BC Athens had 6,000 jurors (Constitution of the Athenians 24.3), and the courts, the δικαστήρια, had juries of hundreds. There were no professional judges: people spoke for themselves. At the end each juror secretly dropped a ballot, a ψῆφος (literally “pebble”), into an urn.

Many Athenians thought that elections favoured the rich and famous, so most officials were chosen by lot, κλήρωσις, from among the citizens who put their names forward. Archaeologists have found pieces of stone allotment machines, κληρωτήρια, in the Agora, of the kind the Constitution of the Athenians describes for choosing jurors. Posts that needed special skill, above all the ten generals, the στρατηγοί, were filled by election, and a general could be re-elected year after year, as Pericles was.

Taking part cost time, so Athens paid for it. Pericles introduced pay for jurors in the 5th century BC, and in the early 4th century citizens were also paid for attending the assembly: first one obol, later three (Constitution of the Athenians 27, 41.3).

Once a year the assembly could also vote to hold an ostracism. Each citizen scratched a name on a piece of broken pottery, an ὄστρακον. According to Plutarch (Aristides 7), at least 6,000 ballots were needed, and the man named most often had to leave Athens for ten years, but kept his property. The first ostracism took place in 488/7 BC.

Athenian democracy was remarkable, but it was not democracy as we know it today. After Pericles’ law of 451/0 BC, a citizen needed an Athenian father and an Athenian mother (Constitution of the Athenians 26.3). Historians estimate perhaps 30,000 adult male citizens in the late 4th century BC, though the figures are debated. Women, metics (free foreigners living in Athens) and the many enslaved people had no vote at all.

The system was also interrupted. In 411 BC and again in 404–403 BC, during and after the Peloponnesian War, small groups of oligarchs seized power; the second regime is remembered as the Thirty Tyrants. Both times the democracy was restored. It ended in 322 BC, after Athens lost a war against Macedon: the Macedonian general Antipater left full rights only to men owning more than 2,000 drachmas.

The words, however, survived. Greeks today still vote with a ψήφος, live in a δήμος, a municipality, and send their members of parliament to the Βουλή. And the country’s official name contains the oldest word of all: δημοκρατία.