power," was a startling success. As expected, the Spartans attacked the citystate in 506 B.C., but the Athenian army, mustered under the new political regime, faced down the invaders. Herodotus was impressed by this event and noted that before the revolution the Athenians were not a major power in the Greek world, but after the liberation, they were unstoppable. Indeed, democratic Athens went on to become the most powerful state in Greece, playing a key role in the successful Greek resistance to the great Persian invasion of 480 B.C. and subsequently creating the first and only great classical Greek empire in the Aegean. There is no doubt that Herodotus was right; this tremendous surge in Athens's ability to play a leading role in international affairs was quite directly a result of the democratic political order.

In the century following the reforms, Athens extended its power well beyond its borders and from mid-century experienced a peak of glory, prosperity, and renewal under the leadership of the statesman Perikles. Athens built up a powerful army and navy, which in organization and administration reflected the new political system. The ekklesia elected one general from each tribe per year, and at least in the early fifth century, the army as a whole was managed by the polemarch, or chief commander. The majority of the army consisted of armed hoplites, infantry soldiers wearing helmets, breastplates, and greaves (armor for the lower legs) and fighting with a shield and thrusting spear. The cavalry formed a smaller elite unit because of the expense of maintaining a mount, although the state itself paid a maintenance allowance to the owners after an annual inspection. The Athenian navy, compris ing as many as four hundred ships and eighty thousand sailors during its peak, helped Athens dominate the eastern Mediterranean in the fifth century B.C. Many of the sailors, while citizens, were drawn from the poorer ranks of society. They served principally as oarsmen for the wooden warships known as triremes,

Although Athens and Sparta had cooperated against the Persians, the two citystates remained locked in a bitter rivalry. Peace was declared between Athens and Sparta in 446, giving Athens a chance to rebuild. The city and its temples had been burned by the Persians in 480 B.C., and the truce as well as additional funds provided from the opening of the silver mines and the seizure of the Delos Treasury gave Perikles the chance not only to repair the damage, but also to erect the Parthenon, Propylaea, and other buildings throughout the city. The peace, however, was short lived, and the renewed power struggle with Sparta would test the resiliency of the democracy.

In 431 B.C. war again erupted between Athens and Sparta; both city-states were by this time leaders of large confederacies; it was not just Athens versus Sparta but the Athenian empire versus the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. The stakes were high; it soon became clear that the winner would dominate the whole of Greece. The Peloponnesian War, which lasted twenty-seven years, took a terrible toll on the Athenians; at

wiped out in a few years by wartime plague, and battle deaths numbered in the tens of thousands. Modern estimates suggest that, by the end of the war, the male population of Athens may have been cut in half.

The war, which Athens eventually lost, also put a tremendous strain on the democracy. In 411 B.C., Soon after Athens had suffered a ghastly reverse in Sicily, concerted terrorism by pro-oligarchy Athenians led to the temporary overthrow of the democracy. But the oligarchic government soon collapsed, and the democracy was restored. After the Spartan victory in 404 B.C., the victors imposed a new government administered by "The Thirty," a band of democracyhating Athenian aristocrats, whose leader, Kritias, was a well-known follower of Sokrates. Once again, the democrats fought back successfully. A band of prodemocracy Athenians gathered a guerrilla army outside the city, challenged and defeated the military forces of The Thirty, took back the city, and in 403 B.C. reinstituted the democracy. For the next eight decades, the Athenians enjoyed a stable democratic government

and maintained their independence against various external threats. The democracy was finally extinguished in 322 B.C., after Athens had been repeatedly defeated by the vastly superior military forces of Macedon-an imperial nationstate in northern Greece that was gigantic by the standards of the polis. Yet for centuries thereafter the memory of democracy contributed to periodic revolts by the Athenians against a succession of foreign masters. Whenever the Athenians managed to free themselves, they reinstated a democratic government.

A modern admirer of democratic Athens can point to a number of signal accomplishments. The Athenians created the first known complex society that proclaimed and actively maintained significant political equality. When Athenians entered the assembly or sat on a jury, the rich and the poor, the scion of the oldest family and the "nobody, son of nobody," were equals. When they raised their hands or dropped their juror's ballots, their votes had identical weight. Notably, this equality was achieved without the need to resort to an oppressive statist enforcement of social equality; there was no push by the democratic government to equalize property or wealth. Moreover, Athenian citizen society was famous for having the highest level of freedom of thought, speech, and behavior in the Greek world. Everybody knew that, as the orator Demosthenes put it, "you can praise Sparta in Athens, but not Athens in Sparta." As that comment suggests, freedom of speech extended to the freedom to criticize the Athenian form of government. Among the most outstanding products of Athenian literature produced under the democracy are works by Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, many of which are profoundly critical of the workings of democracy. Finally, although there was no formal Athenian bill of rights, the practical workings of the democracy served to protect the essential dignity of the lowliest citizen from insult or violent outrage by those who were his superiors in strength, wealth, or political influence. Any Athenian could be tried

for the crime of committing hubris against one of his fellows. Hubris generally meant verbal or physical assault but was never defined in the law code. Because it was up to the jurymen themselves to decide if some member of the aristocracy was using his influence in an unacceptable manner, elite Athenians were careful to avoid any sort of public arrogance that could be interpreted by a hostile jury as hubris. And so, Athenian citizenship provided security against the types of personal indignity that social inequality has often.

visited upon the poor and undistinguished elsewhere.

But if we honor Athens's successes, it is at the same time important to remember that the ideals and institutions on which Athenian society was based were far removed from those assumed by contemporary American society. Democratic Athens proved no less willing than other Greek states to commit ugly atrocities in times of war, and the Athenian empire of the fifth century was frankly exploitative. Many resident foreigners (metics) lived in Athens and were quite welcome to do so, yet few of them ever had the opportunity to become citizens. After 451 B.C., when Perikles' law restricting citizenship was passed, only those with both an Athenian father and mother could be brought before a deme assembly for consideration of membership. Before this decree, only the father was required to be an Athenian. Ironically, this law would later affect Perikles' own son, who was born of a foreign mother. Only with the express permission of the ekklesia could citizenship be granted to foreigners or the children of foreigners. And even then, to ensure that no rules had been bent or broken, "cleansings" were occasionally held in the demes, stripping some people of their ever-tenuous citizenship.

Athenian women enjoyed none of the equality and little of the freedom and dignity cherished by their citizen husbands. An Athenian woman was normally expected to avoid frequenting public places. Women who were forced by economic hardship into occupations such as ribbonselling in the Agora were objects of scorn to others and shame to their families. Women had little or no voice in the choice of their husbands; a father or male guardian would arrange a suitable match, and the girl might see her husband for the first time at the betrothal. Further, she had only indirect control (at best) over her property, but if her husband divorced her, he was forced to return her dowry.

Slave ownership was legal and probably quite common (although exact figures do not exist) in the democratic state. Slaves were brought to Athens from all

over the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. Some were Greeks taken by the Athenians as prisoners of war. Others were bought up by professional slave dealers from various peoples of eastern Europe, Asia, and northern Africa and sold on the open market in Athens and other Greek poleis. The conditions under which slaves worked, especially those purchased for the silver mines, were miserable to the extreme. Although there were laws against killing or hitting slaves, they were hardly free from abuse. A slave's testimony was allowed in an Athenian courtroom only on the condition that it had been given under torture; slaves who gave information without torture were assumed to be liars.

When celebrating the remarkable equality, openness, and dignity enjoyed by Athenian citizens, we must not forget that those citizens were a relatively small minority who jealously guarded their privileges against a more numerous and oppressed majority of noncitizens. To claim, however, that we have nothing to learn from this early, and in many ways still unique, experiment in direct democracy because Athenians had the moral standards of classical Greeks rather than of twentieth-century Americans, is at once anachronistic and ethnocentric.

Athenian democracy was a great political experiment, acknowledged by America's Founding Fathers and ultimately re

NOTES

1993 by Josiah Ober and Catherine Vanderpool 'There were a total of nine archons, or state magistrates, selected (by various means) each year. The first was "the" archon, sometimes called the "eponymous" archon because he gave his name to the year. For clarity, we have called this officer "chief archon." This was clearly a very powerful office before 508 B.C. (much less so afterwards and largely ceremonial by the time of Perikles). It was the office of "the" archon that some of the other aristocrats held under the Peisistratids. The second magistrate was the "king" archon. He was not actually a king but rather the head of the state religion. The third archon was the polemarch, or military leader. The remaining six archons were thesmothetes, or legal officials.

We do not know why ostracism was abandoned after the late fifth century B.C. Presumably it fell into disuse at least in part because its function was replaced by the legal action of graphe paranomon, which was the indictment of the proposer of an illegal or "uncustomary" decree.

The issue of pay in Athens is very complex; some workers

the shared knowledge of the community and its inner workings permitted the citizens, in Aristotle's words, "to rule and be ruled in turns." The differences are easy to see; remarkable is the fact that 2,500 years later we can still recognize some common ground and respond (even if with mixed emotions) to the words of Perikles, who declared his city "an education to Greece," indeed, to the world.

could make a drachma for the days they worked, which may suggest to the modern mind that the workers would not give up a day's wage for lower-paying jury service. But the laborers did not work 365 days a year. We should also not immediately make the modernizing assumption that all Athenian actions were governed solely by "rational" economic motives. Serving on a jury was regarded as vitally important in protecting basic rights, was empowering, and probably was often a lot of fun. If we say that only the leisured citizens (nonworkers) served as jurors because the poorer men could not afford to, we must throw out the number six thousand potential jurors (for which there is good textual support), since there cannot have been that many leisure-class Athenians. All the evidence (gathered especially by M. M. Markle) suggests that we have every reason to suppose that most jurors fell between the leisured and the genuinely impoverished. There may have been an overrepresentation by elderly men, but this cannot be proved. The dread that the wealthy felt of the courts is good evidence that poorer Athenians did in fact dominate the courts.