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Aristion executed citizens accused of favoring Rome and sent others to Mithridates as prisoners. In 621 BCE Draco wrote the law code in order to ease discontent in . Running a website with millions of readers every month is expensive. But what did the development of Athenian democracy actually involve? Intellectual anti-democrats such as Socrates and Plato, for instance, argued that the majority of the people, because they were by and large ignorant and unskilled, would always get it wrong. In the meantime, Mithridates used the respite to rebuild his strength. The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. Solon Put Athens on the Road to Democracy. This is a form of government which puts the power to rule in the hands of . Now all citizens could participate in government, not just aristocrats. It is a period of history that we would do well to think about a little more right now - and we ignore it at our peril.". Gloating over Roman misfortunes, he declared that Mithridates controlled all of Anatolia. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. When Athenion sent a force to seize control of Delos, a Roman unit swiftly defeated it. Read more. To the Greeks, he represented himself as a new Alexander, the champion of Greek culture against Rome. Its main function was to decide what matters would come before the ekklesia. By Professor Paul Cartledge Cleisthenes formally identified free inhabitants of Attica as citizens of Athens, which gave them power and a role in a sense of civic solidarity. 'What? This "slippery-fish diplomacy" helped it survive military defeats and widespread political turbulence, but at the expense of its political system. The third important institution was the popular courts, or dikasteria. 500 BC Athens decided to share decision making. 474 Words2 Pages. If you join your strength to me, my power shall reach the combined power of all of you. Then March 86 BC, shouts and trumpet blasts rend the night air as Roman soldiers, swords drawn, run through the city. First, was the citizens who ran the government and held property. The capital would be sending no more reinforcements or money. War between Pontus and Romethe First Mithridatic Warbroke out in 89 BC over the petty state of Bithynia in northwestern Anatolia. With the city starving, its leaders asked Aristion to negotiate with Sulla. Though Archelaus restored Delos to Athenian control, he turned over its treasury to Aristion, an Athenian citizen whom Mithridates had chosen to rule Athens. As soldiers carted away their prized and sacred possessions, the guardians of Delphi bitterly complained that Sulla was nothing like previous Roman commanders, who had come to Greece and made gifts to the temples. 2.37). About the same time that the Pontic army was sweeping across the province of Asia, Athens dispatched the philosopher Athenion as an envoy to Mithridates. As we have seen, only male citizens who were 18 years or over could speak (at least in theory) and vote in the assembly, whilst the positions such as magistrates and jurors were limited to those over 30 years of age. The city held festivals and presented nine plays each year, both comedies and tragedies. The Athenian statesman Pericles defined democracy as a system which protects the interests of all the people, not just a minority. The assembly could also vote to ostracise from Athens any citizen who had become too powerful and dangerous for the polis. Any member of the demosany one of those 40,000 adult male citizenswas welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. Inside Piraeus, Archelaus countered by building towers for his siege engines. The Greek idea of democracy was different from present-day democracy because, in Athens, all adult citizens were required to take an active part in the government. Less than two years separate these scenes. Cite This Work "There are grounds to consider whether we want to go down the same route that Athens did. Though he at first refused, he later relented and sent a delegation to meet with the Roman commander. Subscribe to receive our weekly newsletter with top stories from master historians. Fighting ensued, and the Athenians then took steps that explicitly violated the Thirty Years' Treaty. One unusual critic is an Athenian writer whom we know familiarly as the 'Old Oligarch'. Little more than a hundred years later it was governed by an emperor. Pericles knew Athens' strength was in their navy, so his strategy was to avoid Sparta on land, because he knew that on land, Athens would be no match for Sparta. One of the indispensable words we owe ultimately to the Greeks is criticism (derived from the Greek for judging, as in a court case or at a theatrical performance). 'So', persists Alcibiades, 'democracy is really just another form of tyranny?' To the Persians, he emphasized his descent from ancient Persian kings. Archelaus in turn built a tower that he brought up directly opposite its Roman counterpart. Chiefly because of a fatal ambiguity: to its opponents democracy was no more, and no better, than mob-rule, since for them it meant the political power of the masses exercised over and at the expense of the elite. By Athenian democratic standards of justice, which are not ours, the guilt of Socrates was sufficiently proven. Athens' democracy in fact recovered from these injuries within years. Other reputations are also taken to task: The "heroic" Spartans of Thermopylae, immortalised in the film 300, are unmasked as warmongering bullies of the ancient world. ', replies Alcibiades; 'even when it decrees by fiat, acting like a tyrant and riding roughshod over the views of the minority - is that still "law"?' Apparently, some Roman stones had missed the gate and crashed into the Pompeion next door. When that failed, the Romans settled in for a long siege. In the dark early morning of March 1, 86 BC, the Romans opened an attack there, launching large catapult stones. Now, Roman senators and Athenian exiles in Sullas entourage asked him to show mercy for the city. A year after their defeat of Athens in 404 BC, the Spartans allowed the Athenians to replace the government of the Thirty Tyrants with a new democracy. Unlike the ekklesia, the boule met every day and did most of the hands-on work of governance. "use strict";(function(){var insertion=document.getElementById("citation-access-date");var date=new Date().toLocaleDateString(undefined,{month:"long",day:"numeric",year:"numeric"});insertion.parentElement.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(date),insertion)})(); FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. Sulla called a halt to the pillage and slaughter. In 133 BC, Rome was a democracy. After suitable discussion, temporary or specific decrees (psphismata) were adopted and laws (nomoi) defined. Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process. At last, Archelaus saw that the game was up and skillfully evacuated his army by sea. Most of the Greek cities there welcomed the Pontic forces, and by early 88, Mithridates was firmly in control of western Anatolia. Attacking into the half circle of the lunette, they were hit by missiles from the front and both flanks. In tandem with all these political institutions were the law courts (dikasteria) which were composed of 6,000 jurors and a body of chief magistrates (archai) chosen annually by lot. The mass involvement of all male citizens and the expectation that they should participate actively in the running of the polis is clear in this quote from Thucydides: We alone consider a citizen who does not partake in politics not only one who minds his own business but useless. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. I was not sent to Athens by the Romans to learn its history, but to subdue its rebels, he declared. Archelaus was to seize Delos, then solidify Pontic control of Athens and as much of Greece as possible. World History Encyclopedia. It supervised government workers and was in charge of things like navy ships (triremes) and army horses. Sulla arrived in Greece early in 87 with five legions (approximately 25,000 men) and some mounted auxiliaries. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. This being the case, the following remarks on democracy are focussed on the Athenians. In this case there was a secret ballot where voters wrote a name on a piece of broken pottery (ostrakon). The Thirty Tyrants ( ) is a term first used Cleisthenes (b. late 570s BCE) was an Athenian statesman who famously Ostracism was a political process used in 5th-century BCE Athens Pericles (l. 495429 BCE) was a prominent Greek statesman, orator Themistocles (c. 524 - c. 460 BCE) was an Athenian statesman and Solon (c. 640 c. 560 BCE) was an Athenian statesman, lawmaker What did democracy really mean in Athens? All Rights Reserved. Read more. That at any rate is the assumed situation. Athenions fate is not clear. BBC 2014 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Immediately following the Bronze Age collapse and at the start of the Dark . People of power or influence weren't concerned with the rights of such non-citizens. Solon ended exclusive aristocratic control of the government, substituted a system of control by the wealthy, and introduced a new and more humane . The Romans were extorting as much revenue as possible from their new province of Asia. He also said that the ability to govern and participate in government was more important than one's class. Antiphon's regime lasted only a few months, and after a brief experiment with a more moderate form of oligarchy the Athenians restored the old democratic institutions pretty much as they had been. When a Roman ram breached part of the walls of Piraeus, Sulla directed fire-bearing missiles against a nearby Pontic tower, sending it up in flames like a monstrous torch. Sulla circulated among his men and cheered them on, promising that their ordeal was almost over. Any male citizen could, then, participate in the main democratic body of Athens, the assembly (ekklsia). However, more difficult was the fact that Athens now had to recognize and accept Sparta as the leader of Greece. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. In 83 BC, Sulla and his army returned to Italy, kicking off the Roman Republics first all-out civil war, which he won. Because of his reforming compromises and other legislation, posterity refers to him as Solon the lawgiver. Few areas of the world have been as hotly contested as the India-Pakistan border. These challenges to democracy include the paradoxical existence of an Athenian empire. Rome, which was preoccupied fighting its former Italian allies in the Social War (9188), failed to step in to settle matters, increasing resentment in Athens. He disappears from the historical record; Aristion must have deposed him. But where Athenion failed, Mithridates was determined to succeed. While Eli Sagan believes Athenian democracy can be divided into seven chapters, classicist and political scientist Josiah Ober has a different view. Traditionally, the concept of democracy is believed to have originated in Athens in c508 BC, although there is evidence to suggest that democratic systems of government may have existed elsewhere in the world before then, albeit on a smaller scale. This system was comprised of three separate institutions: the ekklesia, a sovereign governing body that wrote laws and dictated foreign policy; the boule, a council of representatives from the ten Athenian tribes and the dikasteria, the popular courts in which citizens argued cases before a group of lottery-selected jurors. It is understandable why Plato would despise democracy, considering that his friend and mentor, Socrates, was condemned to death by the policy makers of Athens in 399 BCE. The Italian Social War ended in 88, freeing the Romans to meet the Pontic threat in the east. Re-enactment of fighting 'hoplites' The terms of the 85 BC peace agreement with Sulla were surprisingly mild considering that Mithridates had slaughtered thousands of Romans. (Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from the Athenian city-state for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia.) After his speech, the excited throng rushes to the theater of Dionysus, where official assemblies are held, and elects Athenion as hoplite general, the citys most important executive position. Draco writing the first written law code in Athens was the initiating event that brought democracy to Athens. (According to Plutarchs Life of Sulla, the tyrant Aristion and his cronies were drinking and reveling even as famine spread. The competition of elite performers before non-elite adjudicators resulted in a pro-war culture, which encouraged Athenians in . Why Greece Is Considered the Birthplace of Democracy. The contemporary sources which describe the workings of democracy typically relate to Athens and include such texts as the Constitution of the Athenians from the School of Aristotle; the works of the Greek historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; texts of over 150 speeches by such figures as Demosthenes; inscriptions in stone of decrees, laws, contracts, public honours and more; and Greek Comedy plays such as those by Aristophanes. Cartwright, Mark. Sulla had reason to let Mithridates off easyhe was anxious to deal with his political opponents back in Rome. Under this system, all male citizens - the dmos - had equal political rights, freedom of speech, and the opportunity to participate directly in the political arena. City residents who had cheered lustily for Athenion, the demagogic envoy, now found themselves ruled by a tyrant. Athenian democracy was a direct democracy made up of three important institutions. However, in reality, it was actually Persia who had won the war. Buildings in the Agora and on the south side of the Acropolis remained damaged for decades, monuments to the poverty in postwar Athens. Not only do we pay for our servers, but also for related services such as our content delivery network, Google Workspace, email, and much more. This demokratia, as it became known, was a direct democracy that gave political power to free male Athenian citizens rather than a ruling aristocratic read more, The amazing works of art and architecture known as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World serve as a testament to the ingenuity, imagination and sheer hard work of which human beings are capable. With the help of bodyguards, Athenion pushed through the crowd to the front of the Stoa of Attalos, a long, colonnaded commercial building among the most impressive in the Agora. a unique and truly revolutionary system that realized its basic principle to an unprecedented and quite extreme extent: no polis had ever dared to give all its citizens equal political rights, regardless of their descent, wealth, social standing, education, personal qualities, and any other factors that usually determined status in a community. According to a fragmentary account by the historian Posidonius, Athenion's letters persuaded Athens that "the Roman supremacy was broken." The prospect of the Anatolian Greeks throwing off Roman rule also sparked pan-Hellenic solidarity. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! I wish to receive a weekly Cambridge research news summary by email. In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or "rule by the people" (from demos, "the people," and kratos, or. We contribute a share of our revenue to remove carbon from the atmosphere and we offset our team's carbon footprint. Sulla ordered another retreat, and turned his attention to Athens, which by now was a softer target than Piraeus. A demagogue, a treacherous ally, and a brutal Roman general destroyed the city-stateand democracyin the first-century BC. At the start of the century Athens, contrary to traditional reports, was a flourishing democracy. The effect on the citys model democracy was also staggering. Ostrakon for PericlesMark Cartwright (CC BY-NC-SA). He detached a force to surround Athens, then struck at Piraeus, where Archelaus and his troops were stationed. Actor posing as Socrates The masses were, in brief, shortsighted, selfish and fickle, an easy prey to unscrupulous orators who came to be known as demagogues. When the Romans destroyed the Macedonian Kingdom in 168, the Senate awarded Athens the Aegean island of Delos. However, Plutarch drew on Sullas memoirs as a source, so these anecdotes may be unreliable; Sulla had an interest in denigrating his opponent.). Mithridates, who came from a Persian dynasty, ruled a culturally mixed kingdom that included both Persians and Greeks. Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from Athens for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia. An early example of the Greek genius for applied critical theory was their invention of political theory, probably some time during the first half of the fifth century BC. At the kings order, the locals slaughtered tens of thousands of Romans and Italians who lived among them. The stalemate continued. Thanks to Sullas ruthlessness, Athenions demagoguery, and the Athenians manic enthusiasm for the proposed alliance with Mithridates, Athenss days as an autonomous city-state were all but over. A small number of families came to dominate the leading political offices and ruled almost as an oligarchyone that was careful not to provoke the Romans. With few military resources of its own, the city turned for help to the Roman Republic, the rising power of the day. Meanwhile, our democratically elected representatives are holding on to the fuse in one hand and a box of matches in the other. In practice, this assembly usually involved a maximum of 6000 citizens. Athenian democracy developed around the fifth century B.C.E. In the furious fighting that followed, he kept his army close to Piraeus to ensure that his archers and slingers on the wall could still wreak havoc on the Romans. Although the 4th century was one of critical transition, the era has been overlooked by many ancient historians in favour of those which bookend it - the glory days of Athenian democracy in the 5th century and the supremacy of Alexander the Great from 336 to 323 BC. Only around 30% of the total population of Athens and Attica could have voted. The 50-man prytany met in the building known as the Bouleuterion in the Athenian agora and safe-guarded the sacred treasuries. Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/Athenian_Democracy/. Our selection of the week's biggest Cambridge research news and features sent directlyto your inbox. Following standard Roman procedure, Sullas men made a quick assault on the walls of the port, trying to catch the defenders by surprise. The classical period was an era of war and conflictfirst between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the read more. This complex system was, no doubt, to ensure a suitable degree of checks and balances to any potential abuse of power, and to ensure each traditional region was equally represented and given equal powers. What mattered was whether or not the unusual system was any good. (Thuc. Cleisthenes changed Athenian democracy becuase he redefined what it was to be a citizen and so removed the influence of traditional clan groups. As below ground, so above. Athens was already a waning star on the international stage resting on past imperial glories, and the book argues that it struggled to keep pace with a world in a state of fast-paced globalisation and political transition. We would much rather spend this money on producing more free history content for the world. "It is profoundly dangerous when a politician takes a step to undercut or ignore a political norm, it's extremely dangerous whenever anyone introduces violent rhetoric or actual violence into a. After all, at the time of writing, Athens was the greatest single power in the entire Greek world, and that fact could not be totally unconnected with the fact that Athens was a democracy. The heart of this story is a months-long battle featuring treachery and clever siege warfare. HistoryNet.com is brought to you by HistoryNet LLC, the worlds largest publisher of history magazines. Theophilus even hacked off the hands of Romans clinging to statues inside a temple. The majority won the day and the decision was final. Indeed, there was a specially designed machine of coloured tokens (kleroterion) to ensure those selected were chosen randomly, a process magistrates had to go through twice. He holds an MA in Political Philosophy and is the WHE Publishing Director. As the year 87 drew on, Mithridates sent additional troops. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter! These groups had to meet secretly because although there was freedom of speech, persistent criticism of individuals and institutions could lead to accusations of conspiring tyranny and so lead to ostracism. The word democracy (dmokratia) derives from dmos, which refers to the entire citizen body, and kratos, meaning rule. Terrified Romans fled to temples for sanctuary, but to no avail; they were butchered anyway. In 411 and again in 404 Athens experienced two, equally radical counter-coups and the establishment of narrow oligarchic regimes, first of the 400 led by the formidable intellectual Antiphon, and then of the 30, led by Plato's relative Critias. S2 ep 5: What is the future of artificial intelligence. Last updated 2011-02-17. Any citizen could speak to the assembly and vote on decisions by simply holding up their hands. Indeed, for the Athenian democrats, elections would have struck at the heart of democracy: They would have allowed some people to assert themselves, arrogantly and unjustly, against the others. Athenian democracy was short-lived Around 550BC, democracy was established in Athens, marking a clear shift from previous ruling systems. The Pompeion was ravaged beyond repair and left to decay. Democracy in Ancient Greece is most frequently associated with Athens where a complex system allowed for broad political participation by the free male citizens of the city-state. The main interest for us centres on the arguments of the first speaker, in favour of what he calls isonomy, or equality under the laws. Second, was the metics who were foreign residents of Athens. When the fleet reached the city, Aristion quickly seized power, thanks in part to a personal guard of 2,000 Pontic soldiers. We are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold. Archaic Greece saw advances in art, poetry and technology, but is known as the age in which the polis, or city-state, was read more, In the late 6th century B.C., the Greek city-state of Athens began to lay the foundations for a new kind of political system. Alexander the Great, for all his achievements, is described as a "mummy's boy" whose success rested in many ways on the more pragmatic foundations laid by his father, Philip II. The group made decisions by simple majority vote. During the 600s B.C., Athens was a small city-state. Appian, the historian who wrote in the second century AD, records that the Bithynians were terrified at seeing men cut in halves and still breathing, or mangled in fragments, or hanging on the scythes.. Some 2,000 of Archelauss men were killed. At the meetings, the ekklesia made decisions about war and foreign policy, wrote and revised laws and approved or condemned the conduct of public officials. They denied specifically that the sort of knowledge available to and used by ordinary people, popular knowledge if you like, was really knowledge at all. He was chief historical consultant for the BBC TV series 'The Greeks'. Throughout the siege, Sulla got regular reports from spies inside Piraeustwo Athenian slaves who inscribed notes on lead balls that they shot with slings into the Roman lines. Eventually Archelaus realized someone was divulging his plans, but turned it to his advantage. Hes just returned to the city-state from a mission across the Aegean Sea to Anatolia, where he forged an alliance with a great king. History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. However, historians argue that selection to the boule was not always just a matter of chance. The evidence comes in the form of what is known as the Persian Debate in Book 3. Two scenes from Athens in the first-century BC: Early summer, 88 BC, a cheering crowd surrounds the envoy Athenion as he makes a rousing speech. A Greek trireme One of the main reasons why ancient Athens was not a true democracy was because only about 30% of the population could vote. That was definitely the opinion of ancient critics of the idea. Suffering dearly, the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast went looking for help and found a deliverer in Mithridates VI, king of Pontus in northeastern Anatolia. A further variant on this view was that the masses or the mob, being ignorant and stupid for the most part, were easily swayed by specious rhetoric - so easily swayed that they were incapable of taking longer views or of sticking resolutely to one, good view once that had been adopted. Our word demagogue -- that is, an irresponsible "rabble rousing" populist politician -- is lifted directly from Athenian debates about the nature of democracy. Greek myths explained everything from religious rituals to the weather, and read more, The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years 700-480 B.C., not the Classical Age (480-323 B.C.) Athens was forced to destroy its main defenses, abolish the Delian League and its fleet was handed over to the Spartans. Other city-states had, at one time or another, systems of democracy, notably Argos, Syracuse, Rhodes, and Erythrai. This newfound alliance initially benefited Athens. The first concrete evidence for this crucial invention comes in the Histories of Herodotus, a brilliant work composed over several years, delivered orally to a variety of audiences all round the enormously extended Greek world, and published in some sense as a whole perhaps in the 420s BC. World History Publishing is a non-profit company registered in the United Kingdom. Sulla eventually gained the upper hand, thanks to large devices that Appian said discharged twenty of the heaviest leaden balls at one volley. These missiles killed a large number of Pontic men and damaged their tower, forcing Archelaus to pull it back.