Origins: democracy in the ancient Greek world

INTRODUCTION

Democracy was introduced into the Athenian city-state with the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508–7 BC, reaching its height while Pericles was a leading political figure from around 461 to 429, before being suppressed briefly in the wake of the defeat of Athens by the oligarchic city-state Sparta in the Peloponnesian War in 404. Democracy was soon revived, however, in 403 and persisted in a modified form until 322–1.

There is doubt whether this constituted the first democratic city-state in history, since there is some evidence that democratic institutions, practices, and principles emerged even earlier in Sparta and amongst the Phoenicians (Hornblower, 1992: 1–2). Keane (2009: xi) confidently argues that democracy was certainly 'not a Greek invention.' But even if it is the case, as Keane (2009: xi) argues, that the bulk of existing historical scholarship is wrong in claiming that democracy was a Greek invention and in fact popular self-government originated in western Asia, invented by peoples and lands that 'geographically correspond to contemporary Syria, Iraq and Iran', there can be no doubt that Athenian democracy was easily the most significant, advanced and influential form of democratic governance to emerge in classical Antiquity. It is of world historic significance, among other things because since its suppression in 322 bc, it has been viewed by intellectuals, political rulers and advocates of participatory democracy as the first fully fledged and sustained system of democracy in history (Ste Croix, 1981: 284; Raaflaub, 2007a: 1–14).

THE HISTORICAL EMERGENCE OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Why did democracy emerge in the Greek city-states of classical Antiquity? Why did Attica, as the Athenian city-state was then known, rise to prominence in the fifth and fourth centuries BC as the most culturally, intellectually and politically advanced and democratic of these city-states? The background to the emergence of democracy in Attica was the prolonged re-emergence of Greek civilization from rudimentary peasant communities from 800 to 500 BC. There is insufficient evidence for us to be certain of the underlying causes of the revival and growth of Greek civilisation during these centuries, but there seem to be several interrelated and mutually reinforcing key factors. First, 'The eighth century is the period when iron replaces bronze as the main working metal in Greece' (Osborne, 2004: 24). Because iron can be produced much more cheaply than bronze, it makes possible the large-scale production of weapons and tools. In particular the scratch plough and other iron tools were used to cultivate 'lighter rain-watered soils', and this meant that 'settled agriculture, rain watered and not dependent on artificial irrigation, was boosted, and the peasant farmer grew as an economic and military power' (Mann, 1986: 185). This led to an expansion of trade and greater interaction with other societies, which might also have helped peasant farmers to discover, or rediscover, more effective agricultural tools and techniques. The absence of extensive irrigation, unreliability of rainfall in the Aegean zone, and existence of a wide range of microclimates due to the geographical location and hilly topography of the classical Greek city-states, meant that crop specialization was rare: a mixture of grains, pulses, olives and vines was typically planted (Millett, 2000: 27).

As Anderson observes, 'The classical world was massively, unalterably rural in its basic quantitative proportions. Agriculture represented throughout its history the absolutely dominant domain of production, invariably furnishing the main fortunes of the cities themselves' (1974a: 19). Consequently, increasing agricultural productivity was of crucial importance and a necessary precondition for urbanisation, because 'The Graeco-Roman towns were never predominantly communities of manufacturers, traders or craftsmen: they were, in origin and principle, urban congeries of landowners' (1974a: 19).

The second set of material factors that contributed to the revival of Greek civilisation arose from the strategic geographical location of the Greek city-states in general, and Attica in particular. As Mann (1986: 196) observes, 'What distinguished Greece was its marchland position between Europe and the Near East. The closest of the European ploughed lands to Near Eastern civilization, with its promontory and islands it was most likely to intercept trade and cultural exchange between the two.' As this suggests, the Greek city-states were predominantly coastal precisely because 'marine transport was the sole viable means of commodity exchange over medium or long distances' (Anderson, 1974a: 20). The growth of sea trade from the eighth to the fifth centuries stimulated the development of well-placed coastal cities, some of which came to enjoy periods of progressive growth. Athens had a seaport strategically located at the centre of the Aegean zone. As Raaflaub (2007b: 118) observes, by the mid-fifth century Athens had 'developed into a large, economically and demographically diverse community that became the economic centre of the Greek world. A vast infrastructure and a whole industry, encompassing many trades, was created to build and maintain three hundred ships and to support the required personnel.'

The growth of agricultural output in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean and an associated growth of sea trade underpinned the emergence of the urban pattern of classical civilization from 800 to 500 BC (Anderson, 1974a: 29). By the mid-sixth century 'there were some 1,500 Greek cities in the Hellenic homelands and abroad – virtually none of them more than 25 miles inland from the coastline' (1974a: 29). Essentially these cities were:

residential nodes of concentration for farmers and landowners: in the typical small town of this epoch, the cultivators lived within the walls of the city and went out to work in the fields every day, returning at night – although the territory of the cities always included an agrarian circumference with a wholly rural population settled in it.

(Anderson, 1974a: 29-30)

These cities not only acted as service centres for their rural hinterland, they were also nodal points for trade because Greek ships did not directly traverse the Mediterranean, but rather 'preferred to keep in sight of land for navigational and...