How Democracy Really Worked in Ancient Athens

We owe the word democracy to the Athenians: demos, the people, and kratos, power. But the system they invented some 2,500 years ago would look strange to most modern voters. There was no elected parliament and there were no political parties. Instead, ordinary citizens voted directly on laws and on war and peace, and many public offices were filled by drawing lots.

From Solon to Cleisthenes

Athens did not become a democracy overnight. In 594 BC the lawgiver Solon cancelled debts that had reduced poor farmers to slavery and opened some offices to men on the basis of wealth rather than birth. After a period of rule by tyrants, the reformer Cleisthenes reorganised the citizen body in 508 BC into ten new tribes that mixed people from the city, the coast and the countryside, breaking the power of the old aristocratic families. Further reforms in the 460s BC handed even more power to the people.

The Assembly

At the heart of the system was the Assembly, or ekklesia, which met around forty times a year on the hill of the Pnyx. Any male citizen over eighteen could attend, speak and vote, usually by a show of hands. The Assembly decided on war and peace, alliances, finances and laws, and it could hold leaders to account.

Government by lot

The agenda for the Assembly was prepared by the Council of Five Hundred, fifty men from each tribe, chosen by lot every year. Most officials were also chosen by lot, because the Athenians believed that elections favoured the rich and famous. Only a few posts that needed real expertise, above all the ten generals, were elected. Large juries, often of several hundred citizens, decided court cases, and from the time of Pericles jurors were paid so that poorer men could take part.

Ostracism

One of the most unusual features of the system was ostracism. Once a year the Assembly voted on whether to hold one. If it did, each citizen scratched the name of a man he considered a danger to the state on a piece of broken pottery, an ostrakon. Provided at least six thousand votes were cast, the man named most often was sent into exile for ten years, though he kept his property. Thousands of these sherds have been found, some bearing the names of famous politicians such as Themistocles.

Who was left out

For all its boldness, Athenian democracy was limited to adult male citizens, perhaps thirty to fifty thousand men in a population of a quarter of a million or more. Women, enslaved people and resident foreigners, known as metics, had no political rights. Critics such as Plato thought it was rule by an ignorant mob, and the trial of Socrates seemed to prove their point.

Yet the Athenian experiment lasted, with brief interruptions, for nearly two centuries, and it introduced a radical idea: that ordinary people could govern themselves. Every modern democracy, for all its differences, is part of the conversation the Athenians began.