The Governance of Athens
by Michael G. Heller
Published — Social Science Files; February 27, 2025
Introduction
What follows is an interim essay in a project to create a full typology of historical societies. I have labelled classical Rome and Athens as ‘participatory societies’. The process of creating ideal types is necessarily reductive. The purpose is to differentiate and compare types by accentuating the features that create the contrast. We try to get to the essence of a type by saying ‘this is the feature which the other types lack’. In the case of the participatory societies I find two subtypes, which complicates matters.
The complication of having two types of ‘participatory’ society escalates because they are differentiated on two dimensions — a) the difference between communalism (in Athens) and coordination (in Rome), which dates from prehistory and is not unique to Rome or Athens, and b) the difference between system and statute. On the meaning of ‘system’ in the Roman context I refer readers to an earlier essay. In the present essay titled Governance of Athens I introduce the subject matter relating to ‘statute’. A literal meaning of statute is written law passed by legislation. The predictability and solidity of interactions regulated by declaratory statutes can be contrasted with the abstract and exploratory nature of relatively invisible system interactions.
Whereas Rome had an unplanned and informal separation of powers, and lacked a ‘centre’ of governance, Athens had a planned and formal legally constituted ‘centre’ of governance sheathed in the distinctly Greek ideology of demokratia and manifested in a prevailing conceptualisation of a single unified demos. In order to demonstrate the validity of this claim I identify the relevant Athenian structures of decision making and their legal functioning and constitution, and explore the extent to which their modus operandi was deliberately and genuinely representative of a demos-in-action.
At a later stage I will integrate an analysis of economic conditions that incentivised and shaped the changes to their modes of governance. These were similar in Greece and Rome (up until Rome’s imperialism). The initial objective is only to differentiate both subtypes of participatory society in terms of how the decision making operated.
I emphasise the legalistic nature of Athenian governance. Before Athens and Rome societies were governed in four ways, and more or less according to their increasing size. Greater size accompanied greater complexity. There were four types of society governed either by 1) exceptional individuals who were elders, charismatics, warrior-hunters, or geniuses, or 2) the balancing of communal consensus, or 3) the directives of coordinators, or 4) administrative organisations and apex rulers who headed large administrations. There then came a time in the Mediterranean region when the size of societies remained small, administrative techniques were perfected, and complexity intensified greatly. In this time and this region there was a limited yet real reversal of prior evolutions, so that greater complexity now went hand in hand with smaller size.
More or less concurrently with Athens, Rome was governed through an informal system of clientelist relationships that crisscrossed formally constituted participatory forums. Athens, in contrast, was governed by rule of law that united its participatory forums. Since I am always defining societies according to their mode of governance, I will say the progressive Greek polities were ‘ruled by law’. The ideology associated with Greek governance-as-demokratia is ‘rule of the people’ or ‘rule by the people’.
The reality can be more accurately expressed as ‘the people ruled by their laws’.
One reason Greece did not evolve Rome-style ‘system governance’ is the comparative absence of systemic clientelism in ancient Greek society. It is accepted by specialists in these fields that patronage was widespread in Rome but relatively insignificant in Greek polities. Therefore clientelism was not systemic in Greece. Nor, of course, were most Greek polities governed by organisational rulership of the kind that had evolved in Mesopotamian estates. I have previously discussed the semi-participatory Homeric origins of Greek polities governed by elite assemblies of powerful householders.
Now I will show why mature Greek polities—in contrast to Rome—had a determinant and marked ‘centre’ of governance. The centre of the classical Greek polity was the legal construct of ‘demos’ (the people) represented in the assemblies and the courts.
Law was not invented in the first millennium BC. Earlier historical societies had laws. However, prior to Greece laws were never more significant than the individual rulers or ruling organisations that commissioned, used and overrode their laws at will.
Similarly, sovereignty and self-governance, which some scholars identify with Greek legal governance, were the defining features of every prior historical society that had established its borders and created its rules. However, what can be proposed is that there never existed ‘rule of law’ prior to the Greek fifth century polities. No person or entity was above the law, and the law expressed ‘the will of the people’. In Michael Gagarin’s assessment, Athenian law largely conformed to modern conceptions of ‘rule of law’. What interests me is the far more literal notion of being ruled by the law:
Your real strength is when you are ruled by law and are not subverted by men who break them. … We should obey the laws in existence and punish those who disobey, if the city is to flourish. [4th century BCE Athenian orator Aeschines quoted in Gagarin 2020: 155]
The unique union of law and governance in Greece was a consequence of the nature of demokratia. Like all communalistic societies the Greeks tolerated no ruler. Earlier communalistic societies agitated internally to prevent any individual prepotency. In muting leadership, however, they never attained sufficient fitness to grow in size and complexity. Greek societies seem to have been the first to maintain communalistic governance through rule of law. They allowed themselves to be ruled only by law and legal process. This communalism-by-law, like Rome’s coordination-by-system, had some disadvantages. The requirement for participation and physical proximity made it impossible for polities to grow beyond a certain size. A compensation outweighed the size constraint. The Athenian form of communalism was extraordinarily creative. This creativity could be cross-pollinated between nearby polities that also practised demokratia. Combined with the legal requirements that regulated open and orderly debate, and which maintained political stability, this creativity fostered institutional complexity and unprecedented progress in philosophy and science. Aristotle was not enamoured of demokratia, but demokratia created the ambience for his sciences.
Litigious governance
The exercise of law and legal debate was the pivot around which all decision making relating to the governance of Athenian demokratia revolved. This is confirmed in recent literature on the nature and evolution of ancient Greek governance. There were at least three Athenian institutionalised instruments of decision making in which we may detect the predominance of legalistic logic and method. Leaving aside scholarly quibbles about which mechanism truly reflected the will of the people, I take it as given that in their functions and procedural characteristics each of the three central entities was intended to be representative and expressive of demos-centred society.
The Council, Assembly, and Courts were not separated powers. Rather they were divided and overlapping functions of governance. These organs for the negotiation and the making of decisions operated alongside the administrative officials—often referred to as ‘magistrates’—whose tasks were to implement or enforce decisions.
There is no doubt that Athens in the fourth century BCE should be classified as a participatory society. But when contrasting it with other participatory societies in terms of their mechanisms for governance it is important to be aware of the size of the society, the numbers of people eligible to participate, and the ‘representativeness’ of the direct participants. This is more important for Athens than it is for Rome.
It is clear that in Rome power was distributed across a number of forums and offices regardless of their unit size. In contrast, all Athenian power was concentrated in the ‘demos’. It is therefore important to know the size and composition of the groups and entities that represented demos. The total population of Athens in the fourth century may have been as large as 300,000 or more. Slaves, women and most foreigners were excluded from political activity. The term ‘citizen’ corresponds to ‘male citizen’. The generally accepted estimate of the total citizen population is 30,000, which, given the composition of the polity and the minimum age limits for participation, leads scholars to assume that most citizens were at various times and repeatedly engaged in decision making activities. In what follows I will explain how often—and how distributively—they participated over multiple domains of representational decision making activity.
In terms of the really consequential activities of whole governance, which in all societies determine possibilities for social order, creativity, and material wellbeing, I believe it is reasonable to conceptualise the Athenian polity as one single court of law wholly under the control of various types of paid and sworn ‘juror-voters’, assisted by magistrates, without judges, and nominally subdivided into function-specific courts.
This highly centralised participative dimension of Athenian governance should not hide the fact that most Athenian male citizens worked for a living. The daily payment for most jury positions was slightly more than the daily earnings of a labourer.
… political activity only occupied a fraction of the time of the individual citizen: direct democracy meant that most citizens took part in politics as amateurs and only very few as professionals. The number of citizens who spent all their time in political activity was tiny, probably not exceeding one in 1000. Most Athenians owned at least one slave, the possession of whom must have made political activity easier, and that is the sense in which there was a relation between slave labour and democracy. Whether slavery was a necessary precondition for the rise and existence of democracy is a question that we cannot at present answer. … [Hansen 1999:318]
The Council
The Council of 500 (boule) was the ‘supreme’ court of law in the sense that it had multiple roles of oversight over other entities of law and administration. It met most weekdays, and worked closely in concert with the Assembly (ratification of laws) and the Lawmakers (writing of laws). Unlike the very public and exhibitionist Assembly debates, policy discussions in the Council could be confidential. 500 members were randomly selected from within structured and representative municipal categories of Athenian citizenry, and each served for one year at a time. Hansen has described the Council as the highest “board of magistrates” and “more like a court with 501 jurors”.
As well as overseeing all city administrative units its responsibilities included foreign affairs and control of public finances. However, the Council’s power to actually enact legislation was limited. Its function was to conduct the preliminary discussions and reach consensus on all proposed policies relating to city governance and military or foreign affairs, which then were forwarded to the Assembly for final approval and conversion to law. The Council’s supremacy lay in the fact that the Assembly could not discuss or ratify motions that had not first been formulated by the Council. The Council was empowered to summon officials and specialists from all parts of the polity, to question them, and to hold them to account for errors and misdeeds.
The Council’s status as a representation of the whole demos was considerable, since its rotative membership drew not only from the ten artificial tribes of Athens but also from a structured constituency of 139 administrative districts. Ten tribes (prytaneis) were represented as teams which took turns in holding the Presidency of the Council. Athenian political elites went to extreme lengths to engineer their representativity as agents of society’s central force, the demos. Every man could be President for one day.
… [The Council’s] five hundred members were divided by tribe into ten groups called prytaneis, each with fifty members, and each of these prytaneis served for one-tenth of the year as a kind of executive committee. In the fifth century, on each day during this period of about thirty-six days, one member of the prytany, selected by lot, would be the head of government for that day; he would keep the keys to public money, organize a meeting of the prytany if one were needed, and generally have charge of the administration of the city. In the fourth century, however, these duties were carried out by nine proedroi, selected by lot, one each from the nine tribes who were not holding the prytany in that period. At some point in their lives, therefore, most Athenians would spend one day as head of the government, though with very limited power. [Gagarin 2020:14]
The Council as a whole was supported administratively by a specialised civil service staffed by skilled slaves with access to an extensive legal archive. It was often difficult to find 500 councillors on a daily basis. There may have been some conscription. The minimum age for service on the Council was 30 years. By one estimate two thirds of Athenian citizens over forty years of age became councillors for a year, and sometimes twice in their lifetime. Service on the Council was a source of social prestige and a practical means of high-level networking that maximised their access to expertise.
Although the Council was the main ‘legislative’ body and regulator of administrative agencies during the fourth century, it had originally functioned like a criminal court, and never entirely ceased to do so. During the fifth century it possessed full judicial authority to prosecute crimes and imprison citizens. The constraint on its spheres of action in the fourth century was that its decrees had to be ratified by the Assembly. Yet the Assembly often then delegated back to the Council some of the enforcement. The Council also retained powers to imprison citizens and impose fines for crimes like treason or fraudulent tax collection. It could in some cases impose a death penalty.
There is no doubt the Council had a “judicial function” and “heard expert testimony” (Ober 2022:273). But the fact that it was also the entity that regulated and called to account the officials who managed the business of government is an indication of the extent to which the governance of Athens operated as and like a court of law. It was characteristic of Athens that all of the three entities of governance incorporated some executive, legislative and judicial functions, with slight differences of emphasis. Each operated procedurally like a court of law populated with jurors and devoid of judges.
The Assembly
The Assembly enacted the legislation proposed and drafted by the Council. It was “summoned” to do so by Council. As such the Assembly was the ultimate source of Athenian decision-making authority. It follows, in theory, that the ultimate source of individual political power in Athens was one’s speechmaking ability to sway members of the Assembly in favour of a proposal. In reality, proposals submitted by the Council were rarely if ever rejected outright. Nevertheless, especially if a proposal had proved controversial in Council, it was important to have it persuasively justified, rhetorically and empirically, in the Assembly. Moreover, all Assemblies were presided over by the individual municipal and ‘tribal’ representatives who might earlier have presided over the Council meetings. It must be stressed, therefore, that it was normal for additional expert or administrative advice to be submitted and debated at the Assembly. As a result, it was not uncommon to have the Council’s recommendation revised.
From a political perspective the Assembly’s legitimacy depended on the witnessing of lively debate. It was vital for a consensus to be achieved—seen and heard—by noisy acclamation. The atmosphere of an Assembly as participatory entertainment, emotion and conflict mattered, even if, as the evidence suggests, the exchange of information was genuinely and rationally pursued. Final votes of approval were usually unanimous.
The Assembly met forty times a year. Its agenda was publicly displayed beforehand. Any citizen who was registered as a member of a municipal ‘deme’ and had reached the age of eighteen could attend. The quorum of six thousand for each meeting might have represented as many as a quarter of all eligible citizens. Assemblies of eight thousand were usual. All attendees were paid a nominal sum for their service, at least roughly equivalent to the daily public welfare payment for physical incapacity. There is no real evidence that Assemblies were exclusive in terms of social class. In principle every attendee could speak on any matter. In practice, meetings were organised so as to ensure that senior attendees (‘politicians’ or ‘professional’ rhetores) spoke first, and the agenda of priorities for public discussion (submitted by Council) was completed in one day. Seating and platform arrangements may have been designed to deter hecklers.
The most important insight into the function of the Assembly is that it was believed by Athenians to be representative of the demos regardless of whether it was attended by a fifth or a quarter of the adult male citizens. In Hansen’s words “it is in any case a fact unique in history that the Athenians were able, forty times a year, to get a fifth of all those with civic rights to participate in the Assembly”. Hansen argues over the ‘true’ location of the demos, as we will see shortly. Nevertheless, he concedes that in Athenian sources “the demos in its ekklesia [Assembly] is often conceived of as the whole Athenian people assembled”. Clearly Athenians went to the Assembly for the purpose of judging for or against policy proposals. In order to compare Athens with other historical societies, and identify its essence, I am inclined to include the Council and Assembly among all the ‘courts’ of Athens. We turn now to the main ‘others’.
People’s Courts
Whereas the Council quietly designed the rules of governance, and the Assembly noisily ratified the rules, the routine processes of exercising judgements about the application of rules and legal praxis were the purview of the People’s Courts. These courts made the practical judgements concerning the worthiness of policies for the governance of Athenian society, but they did so mainly retrospectively by judging the worthiness of the judgements and motives of those individuals who had participated in prior processes of decision making. In this manner, whereas Council and Assembly were procedurally depersonalised, the People’s Courts allowed for the personalisation of political life. Ordinary crime that related to property and obligations was usually dealt with by arbitration or by the administrative magistrates who were accountable to the ‘courts’ of Council, Assembly, and People. The functions of the People’s Courts, usually operated by hundreds of unskilled sworn jurors massed together for each trial, were far more explicitly political in their procedures and ramifications. The Popular Courts were the ‘third’ demos-centred unit of governance. Their power was derived from holding to account the individuals who were most active in decision making.
The courts had unlimited power to control the Assembly, the Council, the magistrates and the political leaders: political trials were the largest part of the business that came before them. … [Athenian] sources treat the People’s Court as a political organ on a par with the Assembly … Another singular feature … is the complete absence from their working of professionals or experts … [If] all citizens were to be able to take part, the whole legal system must be designed to be run by amateurs, and, if all citizens were in principle to have equal influence, it was necessary to inhibit the growth of a professional corps of advocates or magistrates, since if some are amateurs and others professionals the professionals will always get the upper hand … This fundamental principle was applied to everyone involved in a lawsuit or trial… [Hansen 1999:179-180]
Thus, there were no judges or public prosecutors in Athens. In Athens the jury were the ‘judges’. The ‘prosecutor’ was the citizen who brought an action against another. In the demos of demokratia it made no institutional sense to separate the public from the private sphere. In the People’s Court every single prosecution of justice had to be conducted by a single individual directly against another single individual. And, in order to level the playing field, prosecution must be done without any legal assistance.
In this sense the prevailing form of law in Athens was ‘accusatorial’. The process of initiating a prosecution could, in fact, be dauntingly complex because of the maze of bureaucratic procedures that had to be gone through in order to categorise the nature of the trial. But the trial itself, once begun, followed a predictable and simple pattern.
The legal process was administered from start to finish by amateur magistrates who, like the jurors, were drawn by lot each year. Their authority was limited to deciding whether there was a legal basis for a trial, reading out the written legal statues and statements, and ensuring the validity of the proceedings. There was, at this time, no such thing as forensic evidence. The outcome depended on the personal credibility of the prosecutor and the defendant. It was common to hire an expert legal speech writer to prepare a convincing case, to be memorised before the trial. Speeches on both sides were strictly time-limited. Judgement was immediate at the end of the day allotted for each trial. Verdicts and penalties depended on a simple majority outcome arrived at by secret written vote. Unlike in the Assembly, no effort was made to reach consensus.
Once the trial began the voluntary paid-jurors were effectively in full control. Jurors were over the age of thirty (unlike the more youthful Assembly attendees), and were selected at random for one year from an annual pool of 6000 registered jurors. They were representative of the demos, i.e. from different backgrounds, and rules of service ensured bribery of jurors was rare. It should be noted, however, that many jurors were poor and depended on their payment. The jurors’ oath reminded them that law was the foundation of demokratia, and swore them to be ‘just’ and ‘impartial’. Athenians themselves gave the oath as a reason for placing more trust in the opinions of the People’s Courts than in the Assembly. Nevertheless, given the secrecy of their votes, jurors were unaccountable. However, the ‘politicians’ they judged were accountable. It is for these reasons that People’s Courts could prevail over the Assembly, and it was commonplace for politicians and officials to be convicted and severely sentenced.
Procedural politics
Aristotle believed the People’s Court gave the demos its ultimate power, since “when the people are in charge of the [vote] verdict, they are in charge of the government” (quoted in Gagarin 2020:20). It is important from a conceptual perspective to see the elision of ‘verdict’ and ‘vote’ in Aristotle’s passage, and also in the relevant secondary literature. This elision exemplifies the feature of demokratia I highlight here, namely the legalistic court-like functions of all the political mechanisms, and, conversely, the political functions of all the juridical mechanisms and juries. In fact, in the most important ‘political trials’ the People’s Courts the court was deliberately enlarged. Hansen reports that for one serious case the entire pool of 6000 jurors was summoned.
Leaving aside the crime of murder which in the fourth century was still judged by the old sixth century governmental Council of the Areopagos, the powers of the People’s Courts in controlling the mechanisms of Athenian governance were almost unlimited.
Of special interest is the form of the political indictment, the mechanism for overt and usually retrospective control of the central decision making processes pertaining mainly to the Assembly. These allegations of illegality are in Hansen’s words “public prosecutions for offences against the polis as such” or unconstitutional actions that damaged the interests of the people, such as by deception or by conferring privileges on undeserving persons. From this we may deduce the fact of a single demos taking action against betrayals of demos which constitute violations of the public interest.
The name for most common procedure was the ‘graphe paranomon’. The usual targets in a political trial were particular proposals or decrees discussed and ratified by the Assembly. As noted, each case was framed by one complainant—a citizen of Athens—accusing a defendant, another individual citizen, whom he holds responsible for the violation that is alleged to constitute a serious ‘crime’ against the demos. A risk was run by the complainant ‘prosecutor’, who could fined if jurors rejected his case.
[These] legal procedures gave the demos an institutionalised means of holding public speakers to account and to punish those who were regarded as having misused their powers of persuasion. The man whose name was attached to the law or decree was now held legally liable for its consistency with existing law and potentially for its bad effects. [Ober 2022:282]
Mogens Hansen dwells on this seemingly perverse feature of the policing of Athenian governance. It is worth quoting at length because of what it reveals about the juridical dynamics of the demos, and the ideological function of demokratia in classical Athens.
A graphe paranomon against a decree was often brought after the Assembly had passed it: there seems something absurd about punishing a political leader for a proposal that the people had accepted, possibly unanimously. The philosophy behind the penalty was, however, that the people are never wrong, and will indubitably reach the right decision if a matter is properly put to them, but they can be misled by cunning and corrupt orators and make erroneous decisions against their better judgement. The graphe paranomon was actually the procedure by which the People’s Court could overthrow decisions of the People’s Assembly; but the procedure was directed not against the people but against the orators who had misled them. It was a bulwark against corrupt demagogues and sycophants, so a proposer must actually be punished the more savagely, the more people he had persuaded to vote for an unconstitutional decree. Unfortunately, these severe sanctions seem merely to have brought into being a new kind of corruption. If a proposer risked being punished for his decree he naturally preferred to get someone else to make the proposal in that person’s name, and then the real proposer could recommend the proposal in the Assembly without being technically responsible for it. [Hansen 199:207-208]
To adequately round off this discussion of the classical Greek procedures for politics, it is important also to take note of Michael Gagarin’s unique and very strongly stated insight into the relationship between Athenian demokratia and the rule of law.
Democracy, in its full Athenian sense of a government controlled at every level by the dēmos, the ordinary citizens, lies at the heart of Athenian law. Not only did Athenian democracy differ from democracy today in being fully participatory, but the Athenians’ conviction that law should be similarly democratic led them to create a legal system that was also fully participatory, controlled by ordinary citizens, not trained experts or legal professionals. … The Athenians deliberately shaped their law to be democratic—to be a fundamental pillar of their democratic political system … The Athenians’ commitment to the democratic participatory process precluded any thought of requiring special training or expertise in this body. Legislative power thus remained entirely in the hands of ordinary citizens. [Gagarin 2020: 6, 10, 14]
Demos as society
I have left out consideration of lawmakers (Nomothetai) and administrators, but neither omission seriously affects the general conclusions. Within the administrative apparatuses the semi-permanent civil service with skills and expertise was staffed by foreigners and slaves. Citizen administrators who supervised specialist slaves were amateurs selected by lot on a yearly basis. These magistrates had authority to enforce laws and advise on procedural matters, but they did not constitute a parallel power base. According to Hansen (1999:226), Aristotle was emphatic that “administration of the magistrates must be under the control of the decision-making organs and the magistrates must always be under a duty to account to the Assembly and the courts”.
My reason for not discussing the role of Nomothetai—the lawgivers or lawmakers who wrote and revised the laws—as a potential ‘fourth’ branch of Athenian governance is that there is now considerable ambiguity about their institutional status. Rather than being semi-autonomous experts in law who regularly met in authoritative ‘panels’ to draft and even approve laws without Council or Assembly oversight, it is possible that they were, in fact, a form of subcommittee or special session of the Assembly.
The conclusions I will end on relate to the demos as a unit for rule by law. The notion of ‘demos’ was not a misty-eyed unity dreamt up by poets and romantics. The concrete definitions of a unit of governance recorded in seventh, sixth, and fifth century Greek laws and political manifestos frequently referred to the ‘kratos’ (power) of the ‘damos’ (the community of people). It is legitimate and useful for a social scientist to speculate objectively about where the real demos power resided in the Athenian polity.
After identifying six potentially conflicting meanings of ‘demos’, Mogens Hansen (2010) decided that, relatively-speaking, representative power was concentrated in the People’s Courts (dikasteria). The “bulwark of the democracy” and “the crucial body of government” was the People’s Court. Hansen wrote these words in response to Josiah Ober’s 1989 (1996:Chapter 8) criticism of Hansen’s formulations of the argument that jurors of the courts (rather than the Council or Assembly) had been a superior power in Athens, and the true ‘embodiment’ of the demos. On this point I agree with Ober:
Each of the various institutional ‘parts’ of the citizen body could stand for and refer to the whole citizen body. Orators could speak of jurors as having made decisions in Assembly because both a jury and an Assembly were parts of the whole. … But without the concept of Demos as the implied authority behind all democratic bodies, an entity that transcended and undergirded all public institutions, Athenian political life is incomprehensible. … [People’s Courts] were reminded by the speakers of their duties to Demos both as jurors and as Assemblymen. The graphe paranomon procedure gave Demos a chance to consider at a remove decisions made in Assembly. … [The] will of the many was the will of Demos and that Demos was the legitimate political authority. … Polis cannot be characterised as a political agent distinct from ‘the will of the citizen body’. [Ober 1996:118-120]
These passages seem to support my argument about the singularity and unity of Demos. Nevertheless, I do not share Ober’s belief that the demos was an “imagined community”, or a purely “ideological construct”. Nor do I believe that the “demos could not be perceived by the senses”, or that “no one had ever seen Demos” because “it was too big ever to gather in any one place”. Anyone who has attended a Rolling Stones concert of between 60 to 300 thousand people knows the sensation and spatial perception of being bordered, bonded, and bound. Athens was small. If Athens had been large it could not have enjoyed participatory governance. It may be possible to find a demos-centred polity only when the population is small enough to be engaged directly in decision making at all levels. Every Athenian man was actively encouraged to engage in multiple consequential participations across multiple entities. It was in the theory of demokratia rather than in demos praxis that one finds the ‘symbolism’ and ‘representation'. Demokratia ruled the thoughts. The demos was ruled by laws.
I have argued here that the demos was an empirical community joined as a unity by rule of law. Demokratia was a political ideology, a participatory ideal that even in the small Greek polities could only be practised at one remove, by representation rather than by direct engagement. This was precisely why officials were recruited, rotated, paid and made accountable from the earliest Greek conceptualisations of demos-in-law. Unlike demokratia, the demos did not have to be either represented or imagined in order to be conceptualised and activated as the means in pursuit of common ends.
Every Athenian citizen could locate the borders, feel the bond of citizenship, see (if not read) the binding written laws, and also comprehend the gendered and racial or tribal differences between citizens and slaves, and between men and women.
The very fact that the Athenian tribes were artificial, and the municipalities (demes) were geographic, demonstrates that the demos was constructed rather than imagined. Any effort to identify a polity ‘part’ where the ‘true’ demos resided is a fool’s errand.
The three organs of governance (Council, Assembly, Courts) worked in unison. The condition of their unity was that, taken together, they became the body of demos. I believe this is easily proved by the fact that some of the very same thirty thousand individuals travelled routinely between these three organs of governance. Even over a single week, they might conceivably be found in three courts ‘simultaneously’. They were the paid communalistic labourers recruited for the political production of the demos. The labour of administration was subcontracted to magistrates who had specialised zones of limited authority. The demos had begun long before when the common people appointed and controlled specialised officials to work on their behalf. This seventh century practice continued into the constitutional complexity of Athens.
Jurors, voters and judges melted into one individual citizen. Three courts of law melted into one giant court of law. The entire polity operated as a coherent court of law obedient to one law. The Council designed rules, the Assembly ratified rules, and the People’s Courts corrected rules by trial and error. Often the very same individuals could be found sitting on the benches or standing on the platforms in one or the other venue. This was the evolved mode of governance. If Athenians had rationally designed their governance from scratch they might well have arrived at the same outcome — three complementary, coexisting and interacting bodies with separate, more or less delineated functions. They checked and balanced one another, but were not separated powers. One power unit constituted the central demos. Demokratia was its ideology. Yet the demos was ruled by law. This, unlike in Rome, was the constructed statute of the communalistic and participatory society of Athens in the fourth century BCE.
Author’s note
For reasons of space and style I have not included my 28 footnotes in the published online version of this essay! However, I would be pleased to respond to enquiries about references, and would also welcome any comments on the arguments and the claims. I think readers can now reply to the emails. Or write to heller.files@gmail.com
Bibliography
Mirko Canevaro On Dem. 24.20–23 and the So-Called ἐπιχειροτονία τῶν νόμων: Some Final Clarifications in Response to M. H. Hansen, https://doi.org/10.1515/klio-2020-0002
Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science, edited by Mirko Canevaro, Andrew Erskine, Benjamin Gray, Edinburgh University Press 2018
Paul Cartledge, Democracy: A Life, Oxford University Press 2016
Michael Gagarin, Democratic Law in Classical Athens, University of Texas Press 2020
Mogens Herman Hansen, Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, Bristol Classical Press 1999
Hansen, M. H. 2010. ‘The Concepts of Demos, Ekklesia, and Dikasterion in Classical Athens’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 50 , 2010 499–536
Danielle Kellog, ‘Population and Social Structure’, in Jenifer Neils, Dylan Rogers, The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Athens, Cambridge University Press 2021
Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution, Princeton University Press 1996
Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Princeton University Press 2015
Josiah Ober, The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason, University of California Press 2022
Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200-469 B.C, Routledge 2009
Martin Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens, University of California Press 1986
P.J. Rhodes, What is a Constitution, in Canevaro et al 2018 DOI: 10.7359/852-2018-rhod
P. J. Rhodes - A History of the Classical Greek World, 478 - 323 BC, Blackwell History of the Ancient World, Wiley-Blackwell 2005
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Patronage in Ancient Society, Routledge 1989
Fish Magic by Paul Klee, 1925 Germany