It is early morning on a low hill west of the Athenian marketplace, and a few thousand men are sitting on the bare rock.
The hill is called the Pnyx. There is a stone platform cut into the slope, a speaker's step, and the ground rises away from it so that the crowd can see and be seen. A priest has sacrificed a piglet and carried it round the meeting ground, marking off the space inside which the city's business will be done.
Then a herald asks a question. In Greek it is five words long, and it is the reason this hill matters more than almost any other patch of ground in European history.
Who wishes to speak?
Not: what has the king decided. Not: what do the priests say the god wants. The question is open, it is addressed to everybody present, and whoever stands up gets to make his case. Then the hands go up, the vote is counted by eye, and the city does what the larger number of raised hands said to do.
This is not how anybody else in the world was running a state at the time, and it is not how most of Europe would run one again for another two thousand years.
The Greek word is demokratia, and it is worth being careful about it, because the modern word inherited the spelling and changed almost everything else.
Athenian democracy was direct. There were no representatives, no parties, no candidates asking for your vote so that they could go and decide things on your behalf. If you wanted a say in whether the city went to war, you walked to the Pnyx on the morning of the meeting and said so yourself, or you stood there and listened and put your hand up at the end.
It was also, in a way modern readers usually find startling, run largely by lottery. Most public offices were not elected. They were assigned by drawing lots among the citizens who put themselves forward, on the reasoning that election favours the well known and the wealthy, and that ordinary competence is spread widely enough that a randomly chosen citizen will do. Generals were elected, because commanding a fleet is a skill and everyone agreed you should not draw for it. Almost everything else was drawn.
And it was narrow. The citizens were adult men whose parents were both Athenian. Women were excluded entirely from the vote and from public office. Slaves, who were owned in large numbers, were excluded. So were resident foreigners, who might have lived in the city for three generations, paid taxes, and fought in its wars.
Historians argue about the numbers, and the honest answer is that nobody knows them well. The usual modern estimates put the adult male citizen body somewhere in the range of thirty thousand to sixty thousand in the fifth century, inside a total population of Attica that may have been a quarter of a million or more. What that means is not in dispute, whichever figure you take. The people who could vote were a minority of the people who lived there.
It is possible to hold both of those facts at once. This was a system in which a potter could stand up and contradict an aristocrat in public and be listened to, and it was a system that rested on slavery and shut out half the free population on the grounds of sex. Neither fact cancels the other, and a history that mentions only one of them is not being careful.
The Assembly met perhaps forty times a year. Any citizen could attend, and in the fourth century they were paid a small sum for doing so, on the frank understanding that a man who works with his hands cannot give up a day's earnings for nothing.
Preparing the agenda was the job of a Council of five hundred, and the Council is where the design gets interesting. Its members were chosen by lot, fifty from each of ten tribes, for one year, and no man could serve more than twice in his life. Nothing about that arrangement lets a permanent governing class form. By the end of a lifetime a very large share of the citizen body had sat on it, which means a very large share had spent a year learning how the city's finances, harbours, cavalry and shrines actually worked.
A rotating fiftieth of the Council was on duty at any moment, and its foreman was drawn afresh each day. He held the keys to the treasury and the seal of the city, and he held them for twenty four hours, and never again.
The courts worked the same way. Juries were drawn by lot and they were enormous, two hundred and one men, five hundred and one, sometimes more. There was no judge to instruct them and no appeal. A jury that size is very difficult to bribe, which was the point.
And there was ostracism. Once a year the Assembly could be asked whether it wished to hold one. If it said yes, citizens later scratched a name on a piece of broken pottery, and if enough votes were cast the man named most often had to leave Attica for ten years. He kept his property and his standing and he came back afterwards. It was not a punishment for a crime. It was a way of removing a man who had become too powerful for the city's comfort, without killing him, and thousands of the actual potsherds have been dug up, so we can still read the handwriting.
It did not arrive as an idea. It arrived out of a factional street fight.
In the late sixth century Athens had thrown out a family of tyrants, and two aristocrats were competing for control of what came next. One of them, Cleisthenes, was losing. So he did something that his rival had not thought of, and which the ancient writers describe with a certain surprise. He took the ordinary people into his political partnership, and offered them a share of the city in exchange for their support.
What he then built, in 508 or 507 before Christ, was a reorganisation of who counted as whose neighbour. Athenians had belonged to four old tribes that ran on kinship, which meant that the great families brought their followings with them into every dispute. Cleisthenes abolished that arrangement and created ten new tribes, each of them deliberately assembled out of villages from the city, the coast and the inland farms, so that no tribe was the property of any one family or region.
This is a piece of political engineering, and the point of it was to break the old loyalties by making men vote and serve and fight alongside people they were not related to. Whether Cleisthenes did it because he believed in popular government, or because it was the only move left to a man who was losing, is not something the sources settle. Our fullest account was written by Herodotus two generations later, and he says plainly that Cleisthenes was bringing the people over to his side.
Property qualifications for the highest offices were loosened over the following decades. Pay for jury service came in around the middle of the fifth century, which is when a poor man could first afford to serve. What we call Athenian democracy is a thing that assembled itself over roughly a century, and no single person designed it.
There is a part of this story that the admiring accounts tend to hurry past, and it should not be hurried past.
After the Persian invasions were beaten off, Athens organised a league of Greek states to keep the Persians away. Members contributed ships, or, increasingly, money instead of ships. The treasury sat on the sacred island of Delos, which is where the league gets its modern name.
Over about twenty five years, that alliance turned into an empire. The treasury was moved to Athens. Members who tried to leave were prevented by force, sometimes brutally. The contributions became tribute, assessed by Athens, collected by Athens, and spent partly on the fleet and partly on the city itself.
The buildings on the Acropolis that people fly across the world to look at were paid for, in significant part, out of that money. So, less visibly, was some of the machinery of the democracy, because a state that pays several thousand jurors and councillors and rowers needs a revenue that farming Attica alone would not produce.
This is the uncomfortable shape of it. The most participatory state in the ancient Mediterranean was also, at the same time, running the most extractive one, and the same citizens voted for both. When the Assembly debated what to do about a city that had revolted, it was the same men on the same hill, and on at least one recorded occasion they voted to kill the entire adult male population of an island, then met again the next day, changed their minds, and sent a second ship to overtake the first.
That story is told by Thucydides, who was there, and it is usually quoted to show the volatility of a crowd. It shows something else as well. The reversal happened because somebody stood up and argued the other way and enough hands changed. The system that produced the atrocity also produced the second thoughts, and it produced them fast enough to matter, and only just.
The end of it came in two stages, and the first was self inflicted.
In 406 before Christ an Athenian fleet won a hard battle at Arginusae, and then a storm prevented the commanders from picking up the survivors and the dead from the water. Athens was appalled. The Assembly voted to try the generals, and to try them all together in a single vote, which its own law did not allow, because Athenian procedure guaranteed each defendant a separate trial.
The foreman of the Assembly that day happened to be a stonemason's son in his sixties named Socrates, and he refused to put the illegal motion. He was shouted down, the motion was put by somebody else, and six generals were executed.
Seven years later, having lost the long war with Sparta and endured a short murderous oligarchy, the restored democracy put the same Socrates on trial. The charges were impiety and corrupting the young. A jury of five hundred and one heard him, convicted him by a margin that was not large, and sentenced him to death. He drank the hemlock in 399.
It is a mistake to read that as the moment democracy died. Athens went on governing itself this way for another seventy years, and some historians think the fourth century version worked better than the fifth. It is also a mistake to look away from it. A system in which the people are sovereign contains no external safeguard against the people, and Athens demonstrated the point twice within a decade, once against its generals and once against its most persistent critic.
What finally ended it was not an argument but an army. Macedon, a kingdom to the north that the Athenians had spent years arguing about, defeated the southern Greek cities in 338, and over the following decades Athenian self government was narrowed, restored, narrowed again, and finally not restored.
Three things in this chapter are firmer than they may sound, and three are softer.
Firm: the institutions. We have the actual potsherds from ostracisms, inscriptions recording tribute assessments, and a detailed ancient description of how the constitution worked. The lottery, the rotation, the enormous juries, the one year terms, all of that is well attested.
Softer: the numbers. Citizen totals, slave totals and Assembly attendance are all reconstructed from fragmentary evidence, and specialists disagree by wide margins. Any confident figure you meet, including the ranges given above, is an estimate resting on a chain of inferences.
Softer: motive. Whether Cleisthenes was a democrat or an opportunist, and whether the Athenians thought of the empire as an injustice, are questions our sources answer with their own opinions rather than with evidence. Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle were all interested parties, and two of the four disliked democracy.
Softer still: the line from there to here. Modern representative government did not grow out of Athens by descent. It was invented elsewhere, much later, for different reasons, and its designers often cited Athens as a warning rather than a model. What did carry forward was smaller and more durable than an institution. It was a habit: the assumption that a public decision should be preceded by public argument, that the argument should be one anybody standing there may join, and that having lost the vote is a reason to comply and not a reason to draw a sword.
Everything in the next forty nine chapters happens in a continent that forgot that habit for a very long time, and then spent several centuries and a great deal of blood working its way back towards it.