THE FIRST DEMOCRACY - GREEK ORIGINS ,AFTER THE POLIS ,AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT AND REVOLUTION ,THREAT AND PROMISE OF MASS DEMOCRACY.DEMOCRACY IN ANCIENT GREECE WAS MORE LIKE A GENTLEMEN'S CLUB.AROUND 550 BC ,DEMOCRACY WAS ESTABLISHED IN ATHENS ,MARKING FROM PREVIOUS RULING SYSTEMS.

Democracy, a direct translation of the Greek dēmokratia, means rule (kratos) by the people (dēmos). Both as a political idea, and as a political institution, democracy originated in the thought and practice of the ancient Greeks. They understood democracy literally: the people, deliberating and acting together in an assembly, was both sovereign and legislator. The people was not only the source of legitimate authority, but also the wielder of political power. In modern times the role of the people is limited to the legitimation of political authority, and power is wielded by elected representative assemblies.Democracy is a system of government, where the whole population gets to vote for representatives that will represent their area. The area could be from a city, to a whole country. In different countries  such as Ancient Greece, only citizens that are men are allowed to vote for representatives for their country. Equality and freedom have both been identified as characteristics for democracy, since Ancient times. In many countries, democracy is the most popular form of government. We all know what we ought about the revolutionary practice of democracy in Ancient Greece. Here are seven facts you may not have known about democracy in Ancient Greece.In Ancient Greece, democracy helped to pick a leader among the citizens. For the reason that there was democracy, people couldn't just be a leader, they had to be elected by the citizens first. In Ancient Greece, democracy was the reason why they had no dictator or tyrant. People in Ancient Greece believed that citizens should choose rulers, and vote on matters themselves. Anyone could propose a new law in Ancient Greece.There was two types of democracy in Ancient Athens: Assembly & Council. The Assembly was made of male citizens, which made the laws of the land. They attended most meetings about making new laws. The Assembly could exile unpopular or dishonest leaders. The Assembly was made up of six thousand citizens. If there weren't exactly 6000 citizens, the police would round up more people. The police would use a rope dipped in red paint to indicate which men did not attend. The red paint would be dragged against the man's clothes. The Council was made up of five hundred citizens, chosen every year by lot names drawn from all Athenian citizens. Members of the Council serve for one year; they prepare laws for the Assembly to consider. In Ancient Greece, only citizens could vote. Children & slaves were not considered citizens, so they could not vote. All citizens have to take part in government. In old times, they believed all Greek men, rich or poor, had the right to vote. Women were citizens, but without political rights, so they could not vote. Slaves were not considered to be citizens, so they had only some basic rights. Democracy in Ancient Greece is a fair way of choosing a leader. It gives a chance for poor men to lead in the government. All men had the right to speak for themselves, be fairly treated, take part in the decisions, and vote. Democracy gave the Greek men these rights. It can cause fewer arguments about the laws being made in Ancient Greece. It prevented Ancient Greece from having any bad leaders that would not help the people in any way.For a long time, democracy in Athens was a sort of elitist political system, for only wealthy men (read: owners of properties) who had served in the military. Later on, the right of vote was extended to all Athenian men above the age of 20, which amounted to about 10 percent of the population. As such, slaves and women were never allowed a say in the matter.n fact, our modern democratic systems would be considered by Ancient Greeks as oligarchy, meaning, ruled by the few, as opposed to true democracy, which means “power, control by the people,” or the many. In our modern systems, we, the people, do not rule we elect people to represent us and entrust them to make decisions for the better good for all. But this, in fact, is what ancient democratic systems were against. Ancient Greeks thought elections systematically favored the few, or, in other words, the wealthy citizens. As such, Athenians actually met once every 10 days to run the city’s affairs by voting usually by a show of hands. The rule was simple: one citizen = one vote, regardless of age, wealth or rank.Known thinkers we praise for their intellectual and reflexional skills such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle actually hated democracy. For example, for Socrates, democracy was inherently corrupt, giving in to the will of the people who were inherently depraved. Plato concurred and stated that democracy, in a way, led to tyranny. His follower Aristotle was less hostile and even states the underlying principles of democracy in his work called Politics.

Athenian politician Pericles delivering his famous funeral oration in front of the Assembly.In Athenian democracy, every citizen was required to participate or suffer punishment. This practice stands in stark contrast to modern democratic governments in which citizens can choose whether or not they wish to participate. In Athenian democracy, all citizens pulled their weight.Not everyone in Athens was considered a citizen. Only free, adult men enjoyed the rights and responsibility of citizenship. Only about 20 percent of the population of Athens were citizens.

The famous Athenian, Pericles, said: "It is true that we (Athenians) are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not the few, with equal justice to all alike in their private disputes."Athens was far from the first Greek city-state to try to implement democracy. The city-state of Sparta also functioned as a form of democracy, between 50 to 200 years before its Athenian rival. However, Sparta was a monarchy with two kings ruling at the same time, but its constitution limited their powers. Furthermore, the Peloponnesian city-state has a Council of Elders as well as a lower governing house established to represent the interests of the people. Women also enjoyed rights that were unheard of elsewhere, although they couldn’t vote. Of course, the city-state’s infamous harsh military regime and its cruel slavery system are what we remember most today.During Antiquity, Greece was composed of roughly 1,000 city-states and communities. Some were monarchies, such as Macedonia in the north, and some were oligarchies or even constitutional governments. Others had more or less moderate democracies like in Athens. Several historical records show other city-states had democratic regimes, such as in Argos (although short-lived), Megara, Corinth, or even in Rhodes. However, in the case of Rhodes, its long history of conquests and unfortunate alliances caused a decline in its democracy. Outside Greece, other Greek ‘colonies’ such as Syracuse in Sicily or in Metapontum, in the south of Italy operated under democracies.In ancient Greece, tyrants were rulers who overthrew local oligarchies with the backing of the people. While they are considered to be the complete opposite of democracy, several well-known tyrants actually did more good than democratic regimes. For example, Athenian statesman and poet Solon during 600BC, introduced regulations that freed many slaves and tried to rebalance political power between the poor and the wealthy. He is responsible for the creation of the boule, or vouli in modern Greek, a council of 400 men that operates much like a senate.Around 550BC, democracy was established in Athens, marking a clear shift from previous ruling systems. It reached its peak between 480 and 404BC, when Athens was undeniably the master of the Greek world. But this Golden Age was short lived, and after suffering considerable loss during the Peloponnesian War, Athens, and the rest of Greece, was conquered by the kingdom of Macedonia in the 4th century BC, leading to the decline of its democratic regime.Direct Democracy: A form of direct democracy in ancient Greece was practiced in ancient city-state of Athens for about 100 years. It was an experiment. The people really liked it. How it worked is that all adult citizens had to take an active part in government (rule by many) if called on to do so. At this time, citizens were free men. Women, children, and slaves were not citizens, and thus could not participate or vote.Each year, there was a drawing. Five hundred (500) names were drawn from a pool of all the citizens of ancient Athens. Those 500 citizens had to serve for one year. During that year, they were responsible for making new laws and for changing old laws as they saw fit. But, nothing they did became law until all the citizens of Athens had a chance to vote yes or no. To vote, citizens had to attend the assembly on the day the vote was taken. The date was posted. It was not a secret, but you had to be present to vote. Majority ruled.This form of government is called a direct democracy. Athens experiment with democracy came an end after Athens lost a war with Sparta. This was the Peloponnesian War. For a while, Athens was ruled by a small group of Spartans.Ancient Greece’s most famous export to this day is arguably democracy. America, alongside many nations, recently celebrated the 2500th ‘anniversary’ of the invention of democracy in ancient Athens and its links with today’s democracies in America and around the globe. But was ancient Athenian democracy as alike to democracies of today as we may like to think?The more you look at the facts, the more the ancient democracy of Athens and the democracies of today look different. Ancient Athens only allowed a very small group of men resident in Athens the vote. Women and foreigners were excluded.Athens’ democracy also demanded a lot of time: adult male citizens who had the vote had to put a halt to their jobs and take up positions of authority within the democratic system on a rota system. They also had to go to the Athenian assembly (the Pnyx) on a regular basis to debate and vote on important issues like going to war.This dedication of so much time to the democratic system was made easier because many of these citizens had a good number of slaves working for them, and Athens also eventually decided to encourage citizens further by paying them to come to the assembly and to undertake other democratic duties like acting as jurors in the law courts.

Nevertheless, the idea of democratic government is one of the most significant contributions of the ancient Greeks. The city-state of Athens had one of the largest democracies in terms of population.The courts, too, were usually in the agora. The juries in court cases were very large, often numbering in the hundreds and sometimes in the thousands. To be fair, Athenians wanted their juries to reflect the general population. There were no lawyers. Each citizen was expected to make his own case.

The world used to be primarily ruled by kings and tyrants, who reigned with a singular opinion that did not always benefit the population as a whole. But in 507 BCE, a Greek leader in the city-state of Athens named Cleisthenes changed the course of history by introducing a new form of government that featured greater representation. He called his idea demokratia, which means rule by the people. So, Athenian democracy was not our ideal of equal freedom and rights, but more like a select club, facilitated to some extent by a slave population and in addition only really made possible, many scholars argue, by Athens’ control over a large and profitable empire which kept money pouring into the city.But at the same time we should not be too complacent as to think that we are more ‘democratic’ now. It is my bet that just as we may not want to recognize Athens’ democracy as properly democratic, so too an ancient Athenian would not recognize many of our democratic systems today as ‘true’ democracies.Ancient Athenians participated in a direct democracy: every citizen went to the assembly and voted on the issues. Moreover, if they were voting on whether or not to go to war, the voters did not go home afterwards to put their feet up while professional soldiers carried out their orders, they went home to pick up their armour and go off to fight.To a democrat of ancient Athens, today’s democracies, where the majority of voters elect representatives to make most of the decisions for them (and who then rely on professionals to carry out those decisions), wouldn’t merit the label of democracy either.Many of the Greek city-states were oligarchies, or governments ruled by a small, select group, usually aristocrats. Cleisthenes came from an aristocratic family, but understood that even greater power could be amassed by gaining the support of the people. His first step in doing so was to emphasize where people were from over their family name. By prioritizing villages, and Athens as a whole, the community became more important than the aristocracy. To govern Athens in a more equitable manner, Cleisthenes created a system that was made up of three components:Ekklesia (Assembly) -- Adult male citizens of Athens were eligible to participate in the governing body of the city-state. Thousands met occasionally throughout the year to write laws, decide on foreign policy, and vote on Ostracism, in which citizens (typically powerful men who posed a threat to democracy) were banished from Athens for 10 years. Cleisthenes helped to overthrow the harsh and tyrannical rule of Hippias but was driven from Athens by the aristocrats, who were unwilling to relinquish absolute power. The poorer citizens, however, were determined to have a greater say in how the city was run. They revolted, executed their leaders and called Cleisthenes back from exile to form the first government of the people. Democracy lasted through most of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. but in 321 B.C., when Athens was conquered by its more powerful neighbor to the north, Macedonia, power went back to the elite. The egalitarian system would last in other parts of the Greek world until the Romans extinguished it more than a century later.The three key elements of Athenian democracy were the Ekklesia, the Bouleterion and the Dikasteria. The Ekklesia, or assembly, was the key governing body and any one of the city’s 40,000 adult male citizens could attend its 40 annual meetings, though only around 5,000 did each time. The assembly made decisions about war, foreign policy and laws by majority vote. The Bouleterion, or senate house, was a council of 500 men selected by lottery, 50 for each of the ten Athenian tribes, who met every day to conduct the daily work of government and decide what matters would go before the Ekklesia. The Dikasteria comprised the courts, where 500 male jurors picked daily by lottery would decide on prosecutions and deliver verdicts.Modern-day governments may have evolved from this original democracy in ancient Greece but there are several key differences. The Greeks invented the concept of one man, one vote but its system was deeply flawed by today's standards, as only adult males of Athenian descent were allowed to vote; women, foreigners and slaves were excluded from participation. As such, just 40,000 men of a population of 260,000 men, women and children held any power. It was also a direct democracy, with people voting for their own laws, whereas today voters in most countries elect representatives to make the laws and govern.Overall, one can say that democracy paved the way for a lot of new ideas. Not least in the form of a philosophy that was centred around the human being and which abolished the eternal truths, pointing out that everything is relative. However, not everyone shared the perspective on the human being expressed by these philosophers and there were many who had doubts about democracy.Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were looking for absolute and eternal truths, as well as a sustainable morality, and didn't accept relativism, even though Athens was still a democracy in their time.When democracy disappeared, there was also a considerable thinning out among the ranks of the Greek philosophers. Freedom of thought, reflection on the individual, relativism and democracy were contemporaries and, when they disappeared, much of Greek thinking and creativity disappeared too, along with their material prosperity. 

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