why did athenian democracy fail

why did athenian democracy fail

Our latest articles delivered to your inbox, once a week: Our mission is to engage people with cultural heritage and to improve history education worldwide. Sulla had the tyrant and his bodyguard executed. Athens, humbled in recent years by the Romans, can seize control of its destiny, Athenion declares. His achievements included the construction of the Acropolis, begun in 447. At last, Archelaus saw that the game was up and skillfully evacuated his army by sea. Athenion had the mob eating out of his hand. Athens declared the Delos harbor duty-free, and the island prospered as a major trading center. Any citizen could speak to the assembly and vote on decisions by simply holding up their hands. Archelaus in turn built a tower that he brought up directly opposite its Roman counterpart. In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earharts disappearance. I wish to receive a weekly Cambridge research news summary by email. This, the study says, has led to a two-dimensional view of the intervening decades as a period of unimportant decline. The answer lies in a dramatic tale starring the demagogue Athenion, a mindless mob, a tyrant, and a brutal Roman general. It reached its peak between 480 and 404BC, when Athens was undeniably the master of the Greek world. Dr Scott's study also marks an attempt to recognise figures such as Isocrates and Phocion - sage political advisers who tried to steer it away from crippling confrontations with other Greek states and Macedonia. Another is theory (from the Greek word meaning contemplation, itself based on the root for seeing). By the end, it was hailing its latest ruler, Demetrius, as both a king and a living God. In addition, in times of crisis and war, this body could also take decisions without the assembly meeting. Aristion didnt hold out long: He surrendered when he ran out of drinking water. Following standard Roman procedure, Sullas men made a quick assault on the walls of the port, trying to catch the defenders by surprise. The name of "democracy" became an excuse to turn on anyone regarded as an enemy of the state, even good politicians who have, as a result, almost been forgotten. Web. Seven noble Persians conspire to overthrow the usurper and restore legitimate government. He and his allies then retreated to the Acropolis, which the Romans promptly surrounded. In 590 BCE Athenians were suffering from debt and famine throughout Athens. "It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded. City residents who had cheered lustily for Athenion, the demagogic envoy, now found themselves ruled by a tyrant. The Romans drove the rest back into Piraeus so swiftly that Archelaus was left outside the walls and had to be hauled up by rope. Becoming more desperate, they gathered wild plants on the slopes of the Acropolis and boiled shoes and leather oil-flasks. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. With Athens running short of food, Archelaus one night dispatched troops from Piraeus with a supply of wheat. The one exception to this rule was the leitourgia, or liturgy, which was a kind of tax that wealthy people volunteered to pay to sponsor major civic undertakings such as the maintenance of a navy ship (this liturgy was called the trierarchia) or the production of a play or choral performance at the citys annual festival. Cleisthenes changed Athenian democracy becuase he redefined what it was to be a citizen and so removed the influence of traditional clan groups. This was a democratic form of government where the people or 'demos' had real political power. The majority won the day and the decision was final. And its denouement is the Roman sack of Athens, a bloody day that effectively marked the end of Athens as an independent state. They butchered and ate all their cattle, then boiled the hides. Read more. The heart of this story is a months-long battle featuring treachery and clever siege warfare. To some extent Socrates was being used as a scapegoat, an expiatory sacrifice to appease the gods who must have been implacably angry with the Athenians to inflict on them such horrors as plague and famine as well as military defeat and civil war. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Last modified April 03, 2018. (Thuc. The University of Cambridge will use your email address to send you our weekly research news email. Democracy, however, was found in other areas as well and after the conquests of Alexander the Great and the process of Hellenization, it became the norm for both the liberated cities in Asia Minor as well as new . Then there was the view that the mob, the poor majority, were nothing but a collective tyrant. Under Macedonian control, Athens had dwindled to a third-rank power, with no independence in foreign affairs and an insignificant military. Rome responded, rushing 20 warships and 1,000 troops to Piraeus to keep Philip V at bay. This money was only to cover expenses though, as any attempt to profit from public positions was severely punished. But without warning, it sank into the earth. More loosely, it alludes to the entire range of democratic reforms that proceeded alongside the Jacksonians read more, The Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. "It is profoundly dangerous when a politician takes a step to undercut or ignore a political norm, it's extremely dangerous whenever anyone introduces violent rhetoric or actual violence into a. Perhaps more significantly, however, the study suggests that the collapse of Greek democracy and of Athens in particular offer a stark warning from history which is often overlooked. Though Mithridates had to withdraw from territories he had conquered and pay an indemnity, he remained in power in Pontus. Immediately following the Bronze Age collapse and at the start of the Dark . Perhaps the most notoriously bad decisions taken by the Athenian dmos were the execution of six generals after they had actually won the battle of Arginousai in 406 BCE and the death sentence given to the philosopher Socrates in 399 BCE. As the year 87 drew on, Mithridates sent additional troops. Ultimately, the city was to respond positively to some of these challenges. Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images. A marble relief showing the People of Athens being crowned by Democracy, inscribed with a law against tyranny passed by the people of Athens in 336 B.C. Athenian Democracy. In 399 he was charged with impiety (through not duly recognising the gods the city recognised, and introducing new, unrecognised divinities) and, a separate alleged offence, corrupting the young. The book, entitled From Democrats To Kings, aims to overhaul Athens' traditional image as the ancient world's "golden city", arguing that its early successes have obscured a darker history of blood-lust and mob rule. It argues that it was not the loss of its empire and defeat in war against Sparta at the end of the 5th century that heralded the death knell of Athenian democracy - as it is traditionally perceived. At best it was mere opinion, and almost always it was ill-informed and wrong opinion. In 411 and again in 404 Athens experienced two, equally radical counter-coups and the establishment of narrow oligarchic regimes, first of the 400 led by the formidable intellectual Antiphon, and then of the 30, led by Plato's relative Critias. By Athenian democratic standards of justice, which are not ours, the guilt of Socrates was sufficiently proven. The generals' collective crime, so it was alleged by Theramenes (formerly one of the 400) and others with suspiciously un- or anti-democratic credentials, was to have failed to rescue several thousands of Athenian citizen survivors. When some topped the walls and ran away, he sent cavalry after them. Sulla had reason to let Mithridates off easyhe was anxious to deal with his political opponents back in Rome. For example, in Athens in the middle of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or resident foreigners, and 150,000 slaves. The first, rather obvious, strike against Athenian democracy is that there was a tendency for people to be casually executed. The Romans were extorting as much revenue as possible from their new province of Asia. Chronological order of government in ancient Athens. Sulla eventually gained the upper hand, thanks to large devices that Appian said discharged twenty of the heaviest leaden balls at one volley. These missiles killed a large number of Pontic men and damaged their tower, forcing Archelaus to pull it back. Third, was the slave population which . A very clever example of this line of oligarchic attack is contained in a fictitious dialogue included by Xenophon - a former pupil of Socrates, and, like Plato, an anti-democrat - in his work entitled 'Memoirs of Socrates'. But where Athenion failed, Mithridates was determined to succeed. His short and vehement pamphlet was produced probably in the 420s, during the first decade of the Peloponnesian War, and makes the following case: democracy is appalling, since it represents the rule of the poor, ignorant, fickle and stupid majority over the socially and intellectually superior minority, the world turned upside down. The boul or council was composed of 500 citizens who were chosen by lot and who served for one year with the limitation that they could serve no more than two non-consecutive years. In 229, when the Macedonian King Demetrius II died, leaving nine-year-old Philip V as his heir, the Athenians took advantage of the power vacuum and negotiated the removal of the garrison at Piraeus. One unusual critic is an Athenian writer whom we know familiarly as the 'Old Oligarch'. Soon after, Roman soldiers overheard men in the Athenian neighborhood of the Kerameikos, northwest of the Acropolis, grousing about the neglected defenses there. Since Athenians did not pay taxes, the money for these payments came from customs duties, contributions from allies and taxes levied on the metoikoi. When a Roman ram breached part of the walls of Piraeus, Sulla directed fire-bearing missiles against a nearby Pontic tower, sending it up in flames like a monstrous torch. Sullas solution: rob the Greek temples of their treasures. Blood flows in the narrow streets, as the Romans butcher the Athenianswomen and children included. Originally published in the Spring 2011 issue of Military History Quarterly. Athenions fate is not clear. Sulla circulated among his men and cheered them on, promising that their ordeal was almost over. But - a big 'but' - it works: that is, it delivers the goods - for the masses. The Pontic king sent his Greek mercenary, General Archelaus, into the Aegean with a fleet. Ostrakon for PericlesMark Cartwright (CC BY-NC-SA). In practice, this assembly usually involved a maximum of 6000 citizens. Ancient Athenian democracy differs from the democracy that we are familiar with in the present day. The ancient Greeks have provided us with fine art, breath-taking temples, timeless theatre, and some of the greatest philosophers, but it is democracy which is, perhaps, their greatest and most enduring legacy. Pericles knew Athens' strength was in their navy, so his strategy was to avoid Sparta on land, because he knew that on land, Athens would be no match for Sparta. The king probably wished to engage the Romans far to the west, away from his core territories in Anatolia. At the meetings, the ekklesia made decisions about war and foreign policy, wrote and revised laws and approved or condemned the conduct of public officials. Cartwright, M. (2018, April 03). This, fortunately, did not last long; even Sparta felt unable to prop up such a hugely unpopular regime, nicknamed the '30 Tyrants', and the restoration of democracy was surprisingly speedy and smooth - on the whole. The Romans built a huge mobile siege tower that reached higher than the citys walls, and placed catapults in its upper reaches to fire down upon the defenders. The result was a series of domestic problems, including an inability to fund the traditional police force. At the start of the century Athens, contrary to traditional reports, was a flourishing democracy. The word democracy comes from the Greek words demos, meaning "the people," and kratos, meaning "to rule.". An early example of the Greek genius for applied critical theory was their invention of political theory Three of the seven noble conspirators are given set speeches to deliver, the first in favour of democracy (though he does not actually call it that), the second in favour of aristocracy (a nice form of oligarchy), the third - delivered by Darius, who in historical fact will succeed to the throne - in favour, naturally, of constitutional monarchy, which in practice meant autocracy. This complex system was, no doubt, to ensure a suitable degree of checks and balances to any potential abuse of power, and to ensure each traditional region was equally represented and given equal powers. That at any rate is the assumed situation. In Athenian democracy, not only did citizens participate in a direct democracy whereby they themselves made the decisions by which they lived, but they also actively served in the institutions that governed them, and so they directly controlled all parts of the political process. Sign up for our free weekly email newsletter! Only around 30% of the total population of Athens and Attica could have voted. Not All Opinions Are Equal In a democracy all opinions are equal. After defeating the Bithynians, Mithridates drove into the Roman province of Asia. Solon Put Athens on the Road to Democracy. was part of the first Persian invasion of Greece. Sulla called a halt to the pillage and slaughter. If they did not fulfill their duty they would be fined and sometimes marked with red paint. License. The Athenian Democracy existed from the early 7th century BC up until Athens was conquered by the Macedonians in 322 BC. known for its art, architecture and philosophy. Critically, the emphasis on "people power" saw a revolving door of political leaders impeached, exiled and even executed as the inconstant international climate forced a tetchy political assembly into multiple changes in policy direction. The tyranny had been a terrible and. Positions on the boule were chosen by lot and not by election. Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, []. Over time tyrants became greedy and cruel. Athens' democracy in fact recovered from these injuries within years. Under this system, all male citizens - the dmos - had equal political rights, freedom of speech, and the opportunity to participate directly in the political arena. In this way, the 500 members of the boule dictated how the entire democracy would work. As we have seen, only male citizens who were 18 years or over could speak (at least in theory) and vote in the assembly, whilst the positions such as magistrates and jurors were limited to those over 30 years of age. Over time, however, the Romans had begun to look less friendly. [15] As winter stretched on, Athenians began to starve. Though he at first refused, he later relented and sent a delegation to meet with the Roman commander. In 129 BC, after Rome established its province of Asia, in western Anatolia across the Aegean, Delos became a trade hub for goods shipped between Anatolia and Italy. When Athenion returned home in the early summer of 88, citizens gave him a rapturous reception. The events that led to renewed hostilities began in 433, when Athens allied itself with Corcyra (modern Corfu ), a strategically important colony of Corinth. The Athenians had reason to fear for their lives. About the same time that the Pontic army was sweeping across the province of Asia, Athens dispatched the philosopher Athenion as an envoy to Mithridates. In the later parts of the Republic, Plato suggests that democracy is one of the later stages in the decline of the ideal state. We contribute a share of our revenue to remove carbon from the atmosphere and we offset our team's carbon footprint. Its popular Assembly directed internal affairs as a showcase of democracy. His political opponents had seized control of Rome, declared him a public enemy, and forced his wife and children to flee to his camp in Greece. Athens, therefore, had a direct democracy. Democracy inevitably fails because it is predicated not on merit but on popularity. Plutarch also claims that Aristion took to dancing on the walls and shouting insults at Sulla. To the Greeks, he represented himself as a new Alexander, the champion of Greek culture against Rome. The Greek emissary became an enthusiastic booster of the king and sent letters home advocating an alliance. Read more. This demokratia, as it became known, was a direct democracy that gave political power to free male Athenian citizens rather than a ruling aristocratic read more, The amazing works of art and architecture known as the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World serve as a testament to the ingenuity, imagination and sheer hard work of which human beings are capable. Yet the religious views of Socrates were deeply unorthodox, his political sympathies were far from radically democratic, and he had been the teacher of at least two notorious traitors, Alcibiades and Critias. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possesses. There was no political violence, land theft or capital punishment because those went against the political norms Rome had established. They therefore in a sense deserved the political pay-off of mass-biased democracy as a reward for their crucial naval role. Ideals such as these would form the cornerstones of all democracies in the modern world. Unfortunately, sources on the other democratic governments in ancient Greece are few and far between. Around 460 B.C., under the rule of the general Pericles (generals were among the only public officials who were elected, not appointed) Athenian democracy began to evolve into something that we would call an aristocracy: the rule of what Herodotus called the one man, the best. Though democratic ideals and processes did not survive in ancient Greece, they have been influencing politicians and governments ever since. Enter your email address, confirm you're happy to receive our emails and then select 'Subscribe'. Direct involvement in the politics of the polis also meant that the Athenians developed a unique collective identity and probably too, a certain pride in their system, as shown in Pericles' famous Funeral Oration for the Athenian dead in 431 BCE, the first year of the Peloponnesian War: Athens' constitution is called a democracy because it respects the interests not of a minority but of the whole people. Passions ran high and at one point during a crucial Assembly meeting, over which Socrates may have presided, the cry went up that it would be monstrous if the people were prevented from doing its will, even at the expense of strict legality. Intellectual anti-democrats such as Socrates and Plato, for instance, argued that the majority of the people, because they were by and large ignorant and unskilled, would always get it wrong. A Council of 500 and Assembly were created. So what we have in Herodotus is a Greek debate in Persian dress. For more details about how Ober came to . Terrified Romans fled to temples for sanctuary, but to no avail; they were butchered anyway. Realizing the citys defenses were broken, Aristion burned the Odeon of Pericles, on the south side of the Acropolis, to prevent the Romans from using its timbers to construct more siege engines. Our publication has been reviewed for educational use by Common Sense Education, Internet Scout (University of Wisconsin), Merlot (California State University), OER Commons and the School Library Journal. 'Why', answers his guardian Pericles, who was then at the height of his influence, 'it is whatever the people decides and decrees'. Men on both towers discharged all kinds of missiles, according to Appian. Athenian democracy developed around the fifth century B.C.E. Hes just returned to the city-state from a mission across the Aegean Sea to Anatolia, where he forged an alliance with a great king. In this case there was a secret ballot where voters wrote a name on a piece of broken pottery (ostrakon). He also helped himself to a stash of gold and silver found on the Acropolis. Sulla had siege engines built on the spot, cutting down the groves of trees in the Athenian suburb of the Academy, where Plato had taught some three centuries earlier. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. All male citizens of Athens could attend the assembly which made political decisions. This executive of the executive had a chairman (epistates) who was chosen by lot each day. The stalemate continued. To the Persians, he emphasized his descent from ancient Persian kings. He disappears from the historical record; Aristion must have deposed him. According to a fragmentary account by the historian Posidonius, Athenions letters persuaded Athens that the Roman supremacy was broken. The prospect of the Anatolian Greeks throwing off Roman rule also sparked pan-Hellenic solidarity. One of the indispensable words we owe ultimately to the Greeks is criticism (derived from the Greek for judging, as in a court case or at a theatrical performance). According to the writer's dramatic scenario, we are in what we would now call the year 522 BC. Antiphon's regime lasted only a few months, and after a brief experiment with a more moderate form of oligarchy the Athenians restored the old democratic institutions pretty much as they had been. 2.37). 'What', asks the teenage Alcibiades pseudo-innocently, is 'law'? In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or "rule by the people" (from demos, "the people," and kratos, or. Mithridates swiftly retaliated, invading and overrunning Bithynia. Greek myths explained everything from religious rituals to the weather, and read more, The term Ancient, or Archaic, Greece refers to the years 700-480 B.C., not the Classical Age (480-323 B.C.) History is who we are and why we are the way we are.. During the Classical era and Hellenistic era of Classical Antiquity, many Hellenic city-states had adopted democratic forms of government, in which free (non- slave ), native (non-foreigner) adult male citizens of the city took a major and direct part in the management of the affairs of state, such as declaring war, voting . Nevertheless, democracy in a slightly altered form did eventually return to Athens and, in any case, the Athenians had already done enough in creating their political system to eventually influence subsequent civilizations two millennia later. Arriving at Delos, Archelaus quickly took the island. Indeed, for the Athenian democrats, elections would have struck at the heart of democracy: They would have allowed some people to assert themselves, arrogantly and unjustly, against the others. Now, Roman senators and Athenian exiles in Sullas entourage asked him to show mercy for the city. As the Pontic general Archelaus persuaded other Greek cities to turn against Romeincluding Thebes to the northwest of AthensAristion established a new regime in Athens. The island had many Roman and Italian residents and relied heavily on the Roman trade. He sees 12 stages in the development of Athenian democracy, including the initial Eupatrid oligarchy and the final fall of democracy to the imperial powers. There was in Athens (and also Elis, Tegea, and Thasos) a smaller body, the boul, which decided or prioritised the topics which were discussed in the assembly. How did Athens swing so quickly from euphoria to catastrophe? Dr. Scott argues that this was caused by a range of circumstances which in many cases were the ancient world's equivalent of those faced by Britain today. Most of the Greek cities there welcomed the Pontic forces, and by early 88, Mithridates was firmly in control of western Anatolia. One night Sulla personally reconnoitered that stretch of wall, which was near the Dipylon Gate, the citys main entrance. Athens, meanwhile, was devastated. Books The Athenians: Another warning from history? As below ground, so above. In the words of historian K. A. Raaflaub, democracy in ancient Athens was. Of all the democratic institutions, Aristotle argued that the dikasteria contributed most to the strength of democracy because the jury had almost unlimited power. Athens in the early first century had energy and culture. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet. The Romans quickly got to work on their own tunnel, and when the diggers from both sides met, a savage fight broke out underground, the miners hacking at each other with spears and swords as well as they could in the darkness, according to Appian. https://www.worldhistory.org/Athenian_Democracy/. At the kings order, the locals slaughtered tens of thousands of Romans and Italians who lived among them. Last updated 2011-02-17. Athens, too, should throw in with this rising power, he asserted. Once near his target, Sulla moved to isolate Athens from Piraeus and besiege each separately. The number of dead is beyond counting. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Nevertheless, in one sense the condemnation of Socrates was disastrous for the reputation of the Athenian democracy, because it helped decisively to form one of democracy's - all democracy's, not just the Athenian democracy's - most formidable critics: Plato.

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