There were also other more intangible effects of Cleisthenes’s reforms. We shall have more to say later about developments in the concepts of law, justice and equality; but it is worth mentioning here that Cleisthenes has been credited with a significant change in Greek political vocabulary, the application of the word nomos, instead of the traditional thesmos, to designate statutory law.7 What is significant about this change is that, while thesmos implies the imposition of law from above and has a distinctly religious flavour, nomos – a word that suggests something held in common, whether pasture or custom – implies a law to which there is common agreement, something that people who are subject to it themselves regard as a binding norm. The application of nomos to statute became common usage in Athens, which had thereby adopted ‘the most democratic word for “law” in any language.’8
Was the Democracy Democratic?
After Cleisthenes, popular power continued to evolve, with the Areopagus losing its exclusive jurisdiction in political cases, with popular juries playing an ever greater role (pay for attendance was introduced in the 450s under Pericles), and the Assembly gaining strength (though pay for attendance was introduced only in the late 390s). Since much of what we might regard as political business was dealt with in Athens by means of judicial proceedings, the power of popular juries was particularly important, and Aristotle – or whoever wrote the Constitution of Athens commonly attributed to him – would later describe it as one of the three most democratic features of the Athenian polis. Athens’s victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC or, more especially, the naval victory at Salamis in 480 ushered in the golden age of the democracy, a new age of democratic self-confidence. When the historian Thucydides a few decades later depicted the most famous democratic leader, Pericles, he was able to put into his mouth a glowing account of democracy in his famous Funeral Oration. For all its rose-tinted prose, this speech tells us much about the realities, and even more about the aspirations, of Athenian political life.
Pericles, himself an aristocrat, tells us that Athens is called a democracy
because its administration is in the hands, not of the few, but of the many; yet while as regards the law all men are on an equality for the settlement of their private disputes, yet . . . it is as each man is in any way distinguished that he is preferred to public honours, not because he belongs to a particular class, but because of personal merits; nor, again, on the ground of poverty is a man barred from a public career by obscurity of rank if he but has it in him to do the state a service . . . and we Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavour to arrive at a sound understanding of them, in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.9
And indeed the Assembly, which all citizens were entitled to attend, deliberated and decided on every kind of public question, while legal cases were commonly tried in popular courts. The council which set the agenda for the Assembly was now chosen by lot annually from among all citizens. Although election was regarded as an oligarchic practice, it was used for some positions, typically military and financial, which required a specialized skill. But in general public offices, which tended to be ad hoc, were not treated as specialized professional employments; and many officials were chosen by lot. In principle, then, and to a great extent in practice, all citizens could be involved in all government functions – executive, legislative and judicial. To be sure, aristocrats like Pericles (who reached his influential position in the democracy as a military leader chosen by the people) still enjoyed great influence, while wealthy and well-born citizens probably still had disproportionate weight in the assembly. Yet (as anti-democrats like Plato make very clear) we should not underestimate the day-to-day role of popular power in juries and assemblies, nor the significance of democratic practices like sortition (selection by lot) for various public positions.
Nevertheless, even taking into account the historically unprecedented, and in many ways still unequalled, power of the Athenian people, we must pause here to ask whether, or in what sense, it is appropriate to call the Athenian polis a democracy. After all, this was a society in which slavery played a major role, and in which women had no political rights. In fact, the evolution of democracy increased the role of slavery and in some ways diminished the status of women, especially in respect to the disposition of property. It can hardly be denied that the imperatives of preserving property had a great deal to do with restrictions on the freedom of women, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the position of smallholders, the peasant-citizens of Athens, generated particularly strong pressures for the conservation of family property. It is even more obvious that the liberation of the peasantry and its unavailability as dependent labour created new incentives for enslavement of non-Greeks. So, while slavery was relatively unimportant in the days of Solon, in the golden age of the democracy, according to some estimates, there may have been as many as 110,000 slaves out of a total Attic population of 310,000, of which 172,000 were free citizens and their families (the number of citizens with full political rights would then have been somewhere in the region of 30,000), with another 28,500 metics or resident aliens, free but without political rights.10
Athens was a democracy in the sense – and only in the sense – that the Greeks understood the term, which they themselves invented. It had to do with the power of the demos, not only as a political category but as a social one: the poor and common people. Aristotle defined democracy as a constitution in which ‘the free-born and poor control the government – being at the same time a majority’, and distinguished it from oligarchy, in which ‘the rich and better-born control the government – being at the same time a minority’. The social criteria – poverty in one case, wealth and high birth in the other – play a central role in these definitions and even in the end outweigh the numerical criterion. This notion of democracy as a form of class rule – rule by the poor – certainly reflected the views of those who opposed it, who may even have invented the word as a term of abuse; but supporters of the democracy, even moderates like Pericles, regarded the political position of the poor as essential to the definition of democracy.
The enemies of the democracy hated it above all because it gave political power to working people and the poor. It can even be said that the main issue dividing democrats from anti-democrats – as it divided Theseus and the Theban herald in The Suppliant Women – was whether the labouring multitude, the banausic or menial classes, should have political rights, whether such people are able to make political judgments. This is a recurring theme not only in ancient Greece, where it emerges very clearly in Plato’s philosophy, but in debates about democracy throughout most of Western history.
The question raised by critics of democracy is not only whether people who have to work for a living have time for political reflection, but also whether those who are bound to the necessity of working in order to survive can be free enough in mind and spirit to make political judgments. For Athenian democrats, the answer is, of course, in the affirmative. For them, one of the main principles of democracy, as we saw in Theseus’s speech, was the capacity and the right of such people to make political judgments and speak about them in public assemblies. The Athenians even had a word for it, isegoria, which means not just freedom of speech in the sense we understand it in modern democracies but rather equality of public speech. This may, in fact, be the most distinctive idea to come out of the democracy, and it has no parallel in our own political vocabulary.