Lessons From Athens

It’s been a while! Sorry for the hiatus, I’ve been in Greece and California for the past few months. Only recently have I gotten to settle in and finish this latest essay. There will be no post this Saturday. Thank you to all my subscribers, and please enjoy.

This was my submission for the first writing exchange of the Classical Book Club, where we learn, read, and write about Classical Greece and Rome. If you’re interested in joining, contact me at collisteru@gmail.com.

Ancient Greece appears to us like a half-remembered dream. Reading its history, we snuggle into familiar details like the fully-formed liberalism of Athens and the proto-Christianity of Plato. Then we are violently awoken by a passing comment on animal soothsaying or state eugenics.

It is therefore difficult to bring ancient history together with our own. Should we try? Is Ancient Greece the prologue to our own culture, or just another foreign past? This is the central question of classics today.

The difficulty, like so many, is solved by reading. The best summary of Athenian culture remains the Funeral Oration of Pericles. In describing Athens, the general gives a good workable definition of the West. A few examples show this.

I put Pericles’ statements about Athens in quotes and how they parallel modern Western states in italics. [1]

1. “Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves.”

Most non-Western countries are eager to imitate Western styles of governance. Almost every country in the world has a constitution, an idea they take from the United States, which took it from Rome.

Even very undemocratic countries like to style themselves as liberal democracies, as in the Federal Republic of Somalia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This can sometimes become darkly funny, like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea versus the Republic of Korea.

2. “If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences… advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit”

Western countries promote meritocracy and, at least in theory, reject aristocracy and nepotism.

3. “… far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes”

This is the basis of interpersonal liberalism. It is also the foundation of contemporary queer rights, among others.

4. … this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured…”

The rule of law

5. “We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; we trust less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger”

The West isn’t secretive. It has never had a period of national seclusion like Edo-Period Japan, nor centuries-long trade secrets like Chinese silk production. Further, the West shuns hyperrigorous East Asian-style training regimes and trusts (with incredible faith) that each person pursuing their own happiness will produce, in aggregate, every type of the highest excellence.

6. “We cultivate art without extravagance and knowledge without weakness; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining the struggle against it.”

Gaudiness is shunned by elite Western institutions. Poverty is nothing to be ashamed of, though laziness is.

Pericles describes us. The Athenians are our ancestors not by blood but by common thinking. We have more data than modernity alone can give us about how Western culture performs and changes under different conditions. That makes it worthwhile to look at Athenian democracy for inspirations and warnings to our own.

Has real democracy ever been tried? The Athenians who coined the term would say no, at least not in modern times. Their democracy was direct; all modern ones are representative.

In direct democracies, individuals come together to make decisions themselves. Each citizen has the right to participate in assemblies, vote, propose laws, debate, and serve their turn on councils and important posts.

In modern democracies, the people govern by proxy. By recurring elections they choose among members of the political class. The people give a certain politician power and, in exchange, ask them to vote how their constituents want them to.

The modern system would horrify the Greeks. They fought hard, with strict term limits and randomized elections, to prevent a political class from forming. Reading about democratic Attica shocks us into realizing how we outsource our democracy. We outsource our decisions to representatives and our opinions to the media. How did direct democracy work? How did Athens work?

The Foundations of Democracy

We don’t know the details of how democracy developed in Athens, but we can make good guesses. It was a gradual process. Laws were likely first compiled under Solon, then revised and reformed by Cleisthenes in 508 BC.

By the time of Cleisthenes, every decision, from declaring wars to trying officials, was made in the Ekklesia, meeting on Pnyx hill. Every year 500 citizens, 50 from each of the ten tribes of Attica, were chosen by lot to form the Boule, a council of executives who ran municipal affairs. The Boule was like an Athenian executive branch.

For a tenth of every year, 50 members from each tribe in the Boule rotated into the leadership part of the Boule, the Prytany. The leader of the Prytany was called the Epistasis. Chosen by lot among the members of the Prytany every evening, he ruled all Athens for a night and a day. It was only possible to be Epistasis once in a lifetime. About a fourth [5, Page 314] of Athens’ adult male population could brag that they were once president of Athens, but none for longer than twenty-four hours.

Developing Democracy

Pericles’ career began in 461 BC, when he was the leading voice in the successful ostracization of Cimon. With this figurehead of the conservative faction out of the way, Athens stepped in a populist direction. The Assembly gave money to commoners to attend the plays. Political remittances increased. Morale reached a new height. The happy Athenians thanked Pericles by voting him strategos (general) every year for the rest of his days.

Pericles’ enduring influence is surprising in a system supposed to be without career politicians. His golden tongue, trained by Anaxagoras, and his well-trained voice [3, page 13] helped him to overcome the spirit of the constitution, showing the tendency of the strongest people to overcome the systems they were born into.

As naval commander, Pericles managed the expansion of the Delian League, led by Athens, and its dominion over more and more city-states. At this time, in foreign policy Athens resembled the late 20th century United States. It aimed to spread peace, democracy, and Athenian hegemony abroad.

War Erupts

As Thucydides [2] tells us, the Athenian train went off the rails on the island of Corcyra. The democratic faction of the city of Epidamnus felt compelled to enter an alliance with Corinth against Corcyra, their parent colony. Before long, the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues, the latter led by Sparta, were dragged into the conflict. Pericles suppressed the pacifist faction and declared war on Sparta. What began as a small dispute in a backwater part of Greece became the Peloponnesian War.

The war did not go well. While Athens’ naval superiority made victory seem likely at first, multiple disastrous campaigns, especially the devastating Sicilian Expedition, wore down Athens. At the same time the democracy still functioned, as its sage decision to spare Mytilene during the war showed.

Athens had caught Mytilene, one of its own cities, plotting against it. Athens suppressed the rebellion but wasn’t sure how to punish it. At first, out of anger, the Athenians planned to torch Mytilene and kill everyone in it. Cleon, a famously hotheaded politician, argued that this would be the best way to deter rebellion in the future. However, Diodotus opposed the annihilation. A gentle hand would preserve Athens’ reputation as the less barbaric alternative to Sparta. Diodotus’ moderate argument won out, showing both the procedural strength of Athenian democracy and its capacity to govern well.

The Effects of the War

One year into the war, the Plague of Athens killed Pericles, leaving a power vacuum in which various generals vied without success. By the war’s end, Athens was torched and occupied. The Spartans brought in conservative oligarchs that Athens had exiled during the war and installed them as a puppet government called The Thirty.

The Thirty promised to “restore Athens’ ancestral constitution.” They actually interpreted it in a way that ended democracy and provided a pretext for many political killings and atrocities. [4] Democracy was only restored after a successful coup. Since Socrates had not fled Athens under The Thirty, the new democrats saw him as a collaborationist. His execution followed not long after.

Democracy Endures

The main result of the Peloponnesian War was to establish the Spartan hegemony over Greece. This period is usually characterized as a dark episode where Sparta destroyed democracy everywhere. While Sparta did promote its own oligarchical ideals, its empire was less powerful than its reputation suggests.

The war left Sparta high on victory and eager to extend its winning streak. The Spartan general Lysander campaigned against the Persians in Asia Minor and won a victory at Sardis in 395 BC. His hope to reconquer Asia Minor was short-lived, since he had to turn back home and deal with an uprising in Corinth. The cracks of Spartan hegemony were already starting to show.

Rebellions chipped away at Sparta for two decades. In 362 BC, Thebes prevailed over Sparta in the Boeotian War, replacing it as leader of Greece. Spartan hegemony had lasted only 33 years, a poor performance compared to the 45 previous years of Athenian dominion.

While Sparta decayed, democracy continued in Athens as before. Its new focus on internal affairs benefitted the city. Imperial ambitions had destroyed Athens, but soft isolationism preserved it. This was the age of the orator Demosthenes, as described in Hansen’s work [5]. Improved literacy meant more written laws. The already-bulking engine of state expanded with new financial and public offices. Power shifted away from the assembly and towards special committees. This executive grew more powerful, probably inspired by Sparta and the administrative success of The Thirty.

These reforms can be called successful, since Athenian democracy lasted through disaster after disaster until Macedon conquered it in 322 BC. By that point, democracy had thrived for 186 years. It died not from internal degradation but military defeat. The traditional interpretation of Athenian Democracy as a failure is wrong. If democracy failed in Athens, it failed only to furnish a sufficient army.

Why Is American Democracy Representative and not Direct?

A lot of people think that the American constitution was inspired by Athens. That’s wrong. It’s actually inspired by Rome.

The founding fathers chose Rome as their model for many reasons. America geographically resembles the Roman Empire much more. Attica is about the same size as Maryland alone. America’s huge size, as well as conflicting states’ rights, made it impossible in the 18th century for direct democracy to work there. It would be impossible to call 10% of Americans by lot every year into Washington. The resulting representative government produced exactly what the original democrats sought to avoid: a political class.

From Representative to Direct Democracy

The political class is just one of many problems with American democracy:

1. The “effective suffrage” is lower than actual suffrage. Only about 12% of Americans choose the president. Choices in the primaries are constrained by primary order and at their best made by only 20% of Americans.

2. Voters are uninformed. Most Americans do not research much before they cast their vote. When they do research, the information they receive is filtered by the media, which is to say, the political class.

3. Reelection is the only incentive motivating politicians to keep their promises. Reelection is a weak incentive compared to money. It is nonexistent during the last term.

The constitution provides a stage on which various factions of oligarchs vie for power on the backs of the mob. America is a multipolar oligarchy, not a democracy.

However, we see a new sun rising, chasing away the long night of oligarchy. The technological issues that barred direct democracy in 1789 no longer exist. The internet obviates them. I see in the mind’s eye virtual-reality enabled ekklesias, in which people from as far as Alaska and Florida see and speak directly to each other. We can have the democracy of Athens inside the empire of Rome.

One objection to direct democracy is that the average person would not be able to understand laws. A few examples show that this won’t be fatal. Semi-direct democracy in Switzerland works well. Swiss citizens can both propose and veto new laws via referendum. Further, a lot of the difficulty is deliberate obscurantism, which we can fight against with incentives. There is no inherent reason why laws should be difficult to understand.

Sortition

The other main idea we can draw from ancient democracy is sortition, or choosing citizens for office randomly. The Greeks considered this absolutely central to democracy. They used a random number generator called a Kleroterion to select people for the executive branch.

Why wasn’t sortition revived along with democracy itself? First, it’s worth noting that the details of sortition weren’t accessible until the 1890s, when Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians was unearthed. So they couldn’t influence early republican movements.

Still, the founding fathers were familiar with Thucydides and Plato’s Timaeus. They had inklings of what Athenian democracy was about. They didn’t like what they saw. They saw democracy by sortition as a corrupt system that lost against Sparta, killed Socrates, and was condemned by Aristotle.

The American model influenced the French Revolution and the later nationalist movements of the 19th century. Democracies settled on a system of representation moderated by expanding franchise rather than sortition. Early experiments in sortition during the Renaissance were abandoned by the 19th century. [6].

However, our own century has seen a bit of a revival of sortition. A lot of countries, especially in Europe, have experimented with sortition in small citizens’ assemblies or advisory bodies. They usually run into the problem that representative bodies aren’t keen on handing over their power. For example, in 2008 the Dutch parliament rejected the proposals of a randomly-selected citizens’ forum. This lends evidence to the idea that political structures are more often established by the sword than by rational means.

Still, sortition hasn’t been tried enough. We don’t know enough about its consequences and incentives. We should experiment more, starting at the smallest scale, in our clubs and organizations. Should sortition-based organizations do better than more traditional organizations, they may outcompete them, resulting in a more democratic civic life.

Conclusion

Athens was a truer and more resilient democracy than we usually give it credit for. While modern democracies improve on Athens by expanding suffrage, representative democracy is arguably a downgrade. By studying Athens and implementing what we learn, we can improve our own democracies.

[1] Thucydides. “Pericles’ Funeral Oration.” History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 2. Translated by Richard Crawley. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War/Book_2#Pericles_Funeral_Oration

[2] Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm#link2HCH0003

[3] Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Penguin, 2004.

[4] Krentz, Peter. The Thirty at Athens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982.

[5] Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

[6] “Sortition in Politics: From History to Contemporary Democracy.” Contemporary Political Theory (2025). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02606755.2025.2530916