why did athenian democracy fail why did athenian democracy fail

World History Encyclopedia. Scorning the vanquished, he declared that he was sparing them only out of respect for their distinguished ancestors. After all, at the time of writing, Athens was the greatest single power in the entire Greek world, and that fact could not be totally unconnected with the fact that Athens was a democracy. Yet, with the advent of new technology, it would actually be possible to reinvent today a form of indirect but participatory tele-democracy. Ideals such as these would form the cornerstones of all democracies in the modern world. 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. They denied specifically that the sort of knowledge available to and used by ordinary people, popular knowledge if you like, was really knowledge at all. The assembly could also vote to ostracise from Athens any citizen who had become too powerful and dangerous for the polis. Read more. Ancient Greece saw a lot of philosophical and political changes soon after the end of the Bronze Age. Aristion executed citizens accused of favoring Rome and sent others to Mithridates as prisoners. Actor posing as Socrates Sullas solution: rob the Greek temples of their treasures. S2 ep4: What would a more just future look like? Mithridates, who came from a Persian dynasty, ruled a culturally mixed kingdom that included both Persians and Greeks. Apparently, some Roman stones had missed the gate and crashed into the Pompeion next door. The constitutional change, according to Thucydides, seemed the only way to win much-needed support from Persia against the old enemy Sparta and, further, it was thought that the change would not be a permanent one. This time, they burst through Archelauss hastily constructed lunette. What he failed to realize, however, is that crowding the population of Athens behind its Long Walls would be deadly if disease ever broke out in Athens while Sparta had it besieged. If you join your strength to me, my power shall reach the combined power of all of you. Then March 86 BC, shouts and trumpet blasts rend the night air as Roman soldiers, swords drawn, run through the city. That was one, class-based sort of objection to Greek-style direct democracy. Although active participation was encouraged, attendance in the assembly was paid for in certain periods, which was a measure to encourage citizens who lived far away and could not afford the time off to attend. 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. Thanks to Sullas ruthlessness, Athenions demagoguery, and the Athenians manic enthusiasm for the proposed alliance with Mithridates, Athenss days as an autonomous city-state were all but over. Aristion didnt hold out long: He surrendered when he ran out of drinking water. 'What', asks the teenage Alcibiades pseudo-innocently, is 'law'? While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. With few military resources of its own, the city turned for help to the Roman Republic, the rising power of the day. Positions on the boule were chosen by lot and not by election. Macedonians under Philip IIfather of Alexander the Greathad defeated Athens in 338 BC and installed a garrison in the Athenian port city of Piraeus. Its popular Assembly directed internal affairs as a showcase of democracy. Why did the system fail? [15] Neither side gained an advantage until a group of Romans who had been gathering wood returned and charged into battle. Any male citizen could, then, participate in the main democratic body of Athens, the assembly (ekklsia). History is a guide to navigation in perilous times. "It shows how an earlier generation of people responded to similar challenges and which strategies succeeded. and the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. The Italian Social War ended in 88, freeing the Romans to meet the Pontic threat in the east. known for its art, architecture and philosophy. Nor did he do anything to help defend his own cause, so that more of the 501 jurors voted for the death penalty than had voted him guilty as charged in the first place. It was from the creation of this empire that the sovereign Athenian demos gained the authority to exercise the will of Athens over other Greek states and not just her own. 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. Therefore, women, slaves, and resident foreigners (metoikoi) were excluded from the political process. The Greek idea of democracy was different from present-day democracy because, in Athens, all adult citizens were required to take an active part in the government. Men on both towers discharged all kinds of missiles, according to Appian. Seeking to offer a unified theory about Greece's current political and economic crisis, this article unravels the particular mechanisms through which this country developed as a populist democracy, that is, a pluralist system in which both the government and the opposition parties turn populist. It only hastened Athens' eventual defeat in the war, which was followed by the installation at Sparta's behest of an even narrower oligarchy than that of the 400 - that of the 30. World History Encyclopedia is a non-profit organization. Thank you! Sparta had won the war. To the Persians, he emphasized his descent from ancient Persian kings. The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens. Terrified Romans fled to temples for sanctuary, but to no avail; they were butchered anyway. 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. Ultimately, the Romans grew exhausted, and Sulla ordered a retreat. With Athens under his thumb, Sulla turned back to Piraeus. They didnt act immediately; a fight over who would lead the army against Mithridates was settled only when Consul Lucius Cornelius Sulla secured the command by marching on Rome, an unprecedented move. This is a form of government which puts the power to rule in the hands of . S2 ep 5: What is the future of artificial intelligence. After suitable discussion, temporary or specific decrees (psphismata) were adopted and laws (nomoi) defined. That was definitely the opinion of ancient critics of the idea. Democracy inevitably fails because it is predicated not on merit but on popularity. It was the first known democracy in the world. 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 power). Centuries later, archaeologists discovered some of these in the ruins of the Pompeion, a gathering place for the start of processions. He was chief historical consultant for the BBC TV series 'The Greeks'. With winter coming on, Sulla established his camp at Eleusis, 14 miles west of Athens, where a ditch running to the sea protected his men. Now all citizens could participate in government, not just aristocrats. The classical period was an era of war and conflictfirst between the Greeks and the Persians, then between the read more. 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. 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 . 474 Words2 Pages. In a democracy, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, there is, first, that most splendid of virtues, equality before the law. It was true that Cleisthenes demokratia abolished the political distinctions between the Athenian aristocrats who had long monopolized the political decision-making process and the middle- and working-class people who made up the army and the navy (and whose incipient discontent was the reason Cleisthenes introduced his reforms in the first place). When that failed, the Romans settled in for a long siege. There were no police in Athens, so it was the demos themselves who brought court cases, argued for the prosecution and the defense and delivered verdicts and sentences by majority rule. Athens, for example, committed itself to unpopular wars which ultimately brought it into direct conflict with the vastly more powerful Macedonia. The Athenians: Another warning from history? The Pontic king sent his Greek mercenary, General Archelaus, into the Aegean with a fleet. With people chosen at random to hold important positions and with terms of office strictly limited, it was difficult for any individual or small group to dominate or unduly influence the decision-making process either directly themselves or, because one never knew exactly who would be selected, indirectly by bribing those in power at any one time. The next day, as he made his way to the Agora for a speech, a mob of admirers strained to touch his garments. 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. In the 4th and 5th centuries BCE the male citizen population of Athens ranged from 30,000 to 60,000 depending on the period. Web. 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. For more details about how Ober came to . The . 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. People of power or influence weren't concerned with the rights of such non-citizens. Of this group, perhaps as few as 100 citizens - the wealthiest, most influential, and the best speakers - dominated the political arena both in front of the assembly and behind the scenes in private conspiratorial political meetings (xynomosiai) and groups (hetaireiai). For only $5 per month you can become a member and support our mission to engage people with cultural heritage and to improve history education worldwide. 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. Please support World History Encyclopedia. Indeed, there was a specially designed machine of coloured tokens (kleroterion) to ensure those selected were chosen randomly, a process magistrates had to go through twice. Ancient Greece is often referred to as "the cradle of democracy.". The resulting decision to try and condemn to death the eight generals collectively was in fact the height, or depth, of illegality. 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. 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. Citizens probably accounted for 10-20% of the polis population, and of these it has been estimated that only 3,000 or so people actively participated in politics. World History Foundation is a non-profit organization registered in Canada. Few areas of the world have been as hotly contested as the India-Pakistan border. 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. In ancient Athens, hatred between the rich and poor threatened the city-state with civil war and tyranny. His achievements included the construction of the Acropolis, begun in 447. His election as hoplite general quickly followed. During the night, Archelaus sealed the breaches in the walls by building lunettes, or crescent-shaped fieldworks, inside. A further variant on this view was that the masses or the mob, being ignorant and stupid for the most part, were easily swayed by specious rhetoric - so easily swayed that they were incapable of taking longer views or of sticking resolutely to one, good view once that had been adopted. A demagogue, a treacherous ally, and a brutal Roman general destroyed the city-stateand democracyin the first-century BC, https://www.historynet.com/the-end-of-athens/, Jerrie Mock: Record-Breaking American Female Pilot, When 21 Sikh Soldiers Fought the Odds Against 10,000 Pashtun Warriors, Few Red Tails Remain: Tuskegee Airman Dies at 96. All Rights Reserved. This newfound alliance initially benefited Athens. Then there was also an executive committee of the boul which consisted of one tribe of the ten which participated in the boul (i.e., 50 citizens, known as prytaneis) elected on a rotation basis, so each tribe composed the executive once each year. Submitted by Mark Cartwright, published on 03 April 2018. Athens is a city-state, while today we are familiar with the primary unit of governance . According to Appian, Sulla ordered an indiscriminate massacre, not sparing women or children. Many Athenians were so distraught that they committed suicide by throwing themselves at the soldiers. Athens, meanwhile, was devastated. However, the equality Herodotus described was limited to a small segment of the Athenian population in Ancient Greece. 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. Archelaus was to seize Delos, then solidify Pontic control of Athens and as much of Greece as possible. 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. The tyranny had been a terrible and. It reached its peak between 480 and 404BC, when Athens was undeniably the master of the Greek world. The number of dead is beyond counting. Any member of the demosany one of those 40,000 adult male citizenswas welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. 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. Though Archelaus restored Delos to Athenian control, he turned over its treasury to Aristion, an Athenian citizen whom Mithridates had chosen to rule Athens. The two either supported the Romans or were currying favor with the side that they expected to win. 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. We are committed to protecting your personal information and being transparent about what information we hold. Then he recounted events in the east. His influence and that of his best pupil Aristotle were such that it was not until the 18th century that democracy's fortunes began seriously to revive, and the form of democracy that was then implemented tentatively in the United States and, briefly, France was far from its original Athenian model. Athens was forced to destroy its main defenses, abolish the Delian League and its fleet was handed over to the Spartans. As soldiers carted away their prized and sacred possessions, the guardians of Delphi bitterly complained that Sulla was nothing like previous Roman commanders, who had come to Greece and made gifts to the temples. He disappears from the historical record; Aristion must have deposed him. Among the enduring contributions of the Greek empire to Western society is the foundation of democratic society. Little more than a hundred years later it was governed by an emperor. In 590 BCE Athenians were suffering from debt and famine throughout Athens. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe. 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. But why should they be? If they did not fulfill their duty they would be fined and sometimes marked with red paint. Others were rather more subtly expressed. The mighty Persian empire (founded in Asia a generation earlier by Cyrus the Great and expanded by his son Cambyses to take in Egypt) is in crisis, since a usurper has occupied the throne. Sulla called a halt to the pillage and slaughter. He also said that the ability to govern and participate in government was more important than one's class. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! It was in the courts that laws made by the assembly could be challenged & decisions were made regarding. 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. Instead, Dr. Scott argues that the strains and stresses of the 4th century BC, which our own times seem to echo, proved too much for the Athenian democratic system and ultimately caused it to destroy itself. Solon Put Athens on the Road to Democracy. The answer lies in a dramatic tale starring the demagogue Athenion, a mindless mob, a tyrant, and a brutal Roman general. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Aegean, events touched off an explosion whose force would swamp Athens. Persuasive speakers who seemed to offer solutions - such as Demosthenes - came to the fore but ultimately took it closer to military defeat and submission to Macedonia. However, Plutarch drew on Sullas memoirs as a source, so these anecdotes may be unreliable; Sulla had an interest in denigrating his opponent.). In the later parts of the Republic, Plato suggests that democracy is one of the later stages in the decline of the ideal state. Critics of democracy, such as Thucydides and Aristophanes, pointed out that not only were proceedings dominated by an elite, but that the dmos could be too often swayed by a good orator or popular leaders (the demagogues), get carried away with their emotions, or lack the necessary knowledge to make informed decisions. 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. Although the 4th century was one of critical transition, the era has been overlooked by many ancient historians in favour of those which bookend it - the glory days of Athenian democracy in the 5th century and the supremacy of Alexander the Great from 336 to 323 BC. Cleisthenes formally identified free inhabitants of Attica as citizens of Athens, which gave them power and a role in a sense of civic solidarity. 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. Cleisthenes introduced democracy in Athen (500c BCE) Democracy of Athens. Fighting ensued, and the Athenians then took steps that explicitly violated the Thirty Years' Treaty. After all, at the time of writing, Athens was the greatest single power in the entire Greek world, and that fact could not be totally unconnected with the fact that Athens was a democracy. After all, at the time of writing, Athens was the greatest single power in the entire Greek world By 413, however, the argument from success in favour of radical democracy was beginning to collapse, as Athens' fortunes in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta began seriously to decline. Over time tyrants became greedy and cruel. Athenian democracy refers to the system of democratic government used in Athens, Greece from the 5th to 4th century BCE. The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet.