Democracy Gone Wrong

Athens had a unique history that helped shape its character long before it became a democracy and rose to dominance. It was the chief town of the region known as Attica, a small triangular peninsula extending southeastward from central Greece. Because much of its area of about a thousand square miles is mountainous and rocky and unavailable for cultivation, early Attica was relatively poor, even by Greek standards. However, its geography proved a blessing when invaders from the north swept down and occupied the more attractive lands of the Peloponnesus, regarding Attica as not worth the trouble of conquest. Unlike the Spartans, the Athenians claimed to have sprung from their own soil and to have lived in the same region since before the birth of the moon. As a result, they did not have to contend with the burden of an oppressed, alien, and discontented underclass as the Spartans had to.

Because Athens unified the entire region quite early in its history it was not troubled by quarrels and wars with other towns in Attica. Each of them became part of the Athenian city-state, and all their free, native-born inhabitants were Athenian citizens on an equal basis. The absence of intense pressures, internal and external, may help explain Athens' relatively untroubled nonviolent early history and its emergence in the fifth century as the first democracy in the history of the world.

The power and prosperity of the fifth-century Athenian democracy depended primarily on its command of its great maritime empire, centered on the Aegean Sea, the islands in it, the cities along its coast. It began as an association of "the Athenians and their allies" called by modern scholars the Delian League, a voluntary alliance of Greek states that invited Athens to take the lead in continuing the war of liberation and vengeance against Persia. It gradually became an empire under Athenian command, functioning chiefly to the advantage of Athens. Over the years almost all its members gave up their own fleets and chose instead to make a money payment into the common treasury. The Athenians used these funds to increase the number of their own ships, and to pay the rowers to stay at their oars for eight months each year, so that eventually the Athenian navy had by far the biggest and best Greek fleet ever known. On the eve of the Peloponnesian War, of some 150 members of the league only two islands, Lesbos and Chios, had their own fleets and enjoyed relative autonomy. Even they, however, were unlikely to defy Athenian orders.

The Athenians made a large profit from their imperial holdings and used it for their own purposes, especially for the great building program that beautified and glorified their city and provided work for its people, and for the accumulation of a large reserve fund. The navy protected the ships of Athenian merchants in their prosperous trade throughout the Mediterranean and beyond. It also guaranteed the Athenians access to the wheat fields of Ukraine and the fish of the Black Sea, with which they could supplement their inadequate domestic food supply and, with the use of imperial money, even replace it totally if forced to abandon their own fields in the course of war. Once they completed the walls surrounding their city and connecting them by additional Long Walls to the fortified port at Piraeus, as they did in mid-century, the Athenians were virtually invulnerable.

In Athens the assembly made all decisions on police, foreign and domestic, military and civil. The council of Five Hundred, chosen by lot from the Athenian citizens, prepared bills for the assembly's consideration but was totally subordinate to the larger body. The assembly met no fewer than forty times a year in the open air, on the Pnyx hill beside the Acropolis, overlooking the Agora, the marketplace and civic center. All male citizens were permitted to attend, vote, make proposals, and debate. At the start of the war about forty thousand Athenians were eligible, but attendance rarely exceeded six thousand. Strategic decisions were thus debated before thousands of people, a majority of whom had to approve the particular details of each action. The assembly voted on every expedition, the number and specific nature of ships and men, the funds to be spent, the commanders to lead the forces, and the precise instructions to be given those commanders.

The most important offices in the Athenian state, and among the few filled by election rather than by lottery, were those of the ten generals. Because they commanded divisions of the Athenian army and fleets of ships in battle, they had to be military men; because they were elected for only a one-year term, and could be reelected without limit, they also had to be politicians. These leaders could impose military discipline while on campaign, but not within the city. At least ten times a year they were required to face a formal presentation of any complaint against their behavior in office, and at the end of their term they had to make a full accounting of their conduct, both military and financial. On each occasion they were subject to trial if accused and serious punishment if convicted.

The beginnings of Athenian democracy were founded in simple merchants, farmers, sheep herders, and other goods-producers. As Athens developed, the old and ancient tyrannies of the past were overthrown in favor of a democracy, or "rule of the people". As Athens grew larger, into the size of a burgeoning 250,000 strong Attican city-state, Athens began to expand to acquire resources to feed its growing empire. At first, they created alliances and Leagues. Eventually, they absorbed their allies into their own empire. Eventually, democracy in Athens was overthrown in favor of an oligarchial elite called the Five Thousand.

Any strong, powerful, and large democracy will face this cycle of conclusions and actions and reactions. With peaceful and idealistic beginnings, the hunger for raw resources grows greater and greater until conquest is not just acceptable, but yearned for. No empire can stand forever. Eventually, every empire throughout history has fallen due to political intrigues, foreign pressures, and the native demands for freedom and liberty. Such was the fall of Athens, an example of a democracy gone wrong.