What Ancient Athens Can Teach Us about the Health of American Democracy
Nearly two months have passed since election day here in the U.S. and we have only recently arrived at what seems a definitive, though perhaps not yet universally recognized, result. There were overt attempts to pressure state officials in order to manipulate the Electoral College process, a process that the majority of Americans find inscrutable and want replaced. What is more, the two sides together spent an estimated seven billion dollars on the presidential election in order to bring us to this vexingly uncertain conclusion.
There is every reason to wonder about the health of our democracy today.
We might note that the Founding Fathers made a close study of Athenian democracy in framing the principles of our system. A look back to our country’s ancient ancestor can shed a new and transfiguring light on the conditions of democracy itself — and the evident deficiencies of our present instantiation.
While there are surely reasons to despair today, the ancients might provide some direction and some comfort as we contemplate the difficult process of rehabilitating our system.
The Emergence of Demokratia
Let us revisit the historical emergence of democratic rule in Athens, Greece, at the end of the 6th century BCE. Demokratia in Athens was by no means born overnight. There were many initiatives and institutions that were, if not yet democracy, at least pro-democratic, preparing the way for kratos or ‘rule’ by the demos or ‘people.’ Usually we think of the reforms of Cleisthenes around 507 BCE as the institution of democratic rule, for that was the moment when participation in the assembly was granted to all Athenian citizens. However, preceding this moment were innovations that made democracy possible.
Already in the middle of the 7th century, a leader by the name of Draco initiated the writing down of the laws governing Athenian life. The laws would no longer be the orally transmitted possessions of a special class of citizens. Rather, Draco displayed the laws in public, written out on wooden tablets for any literate Athenian to study and appeal to.
Simply by making the laws accessible, reliable, and consistent, rather than subject to the caprice of rulers, Draco prepared the way for a democratic society. Without this universal and equal access to law, every citizen having a say in making laws, that central doctrine of democratic governance, loses its effective force.
Another institutional change that we might see as a preliminary to democracy in Athens is the founding of the Greater Dionysia, the annual spring festival that pitted three of the greatest tragic and, eventually, comedic dramatists of the day against one another in competition. This festival was likely instituted sometime in the second half of the 6th century in Athens by the tyrant Peisistratus. Wealthy Athenians financed these performances as part of their tax obligation to the city-state. The entire citizenry of Athens, more or less, attended, experiencing together these cultural products every year.
From the plays that have been passed down to us—the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander, for example—we know that the art form enjoyed by the Athenians was challenging, raising extremely complex moral and political issues and presenting the limitations of human power and understanding in all their tragic and comedic consequences. While participation in this experience did not mean that Athenians lived in a democratic state, it did mean that they had a shared cultural foundation, renewed annually, in which they were all steeped and on which they could all draw in speaking to one another about their lives, their values, their aspirations.
Finally, when the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes were established, there was one ingenious feature that surely helped secure a healthy ground for Athenian democracy. Cleisthenes politically disenfranchised old clans, extended families, and professional gild-like groups — all the long-standing divisions in the city that were based in real or perceived special interests. He replaced these with ten completely arbitrary demes or ‘tribes,’ insisting that each of these political subdivisions be comprised of a certain number of citizens from the city of Athens proper, some from the interior farmlands, and some from the coastal region. While all of the citizenry voted in the assembly, participation in the five-hundred citizen boulê or ‘council’ was divided by deme, fifty citizens from each of the ten demes being responsible for administering the daily affairs of the city. As a result of Cleisthenes’ engineering, each of the ten political subdivisions considered and represented not the special interests of this or that faction in the city, but each of the city’s three very different regions all together.
An awareness of these pre- and sub-democratic elements in ancient Athens helps us to see our own system more clearly. Rather than, for example, asking the simple and surely important question of whether the winner of the popular vote won our election, the bare minimum in evaluating the health of a democratic system, instead we might ask: Is there a respect or lack of respect for the rule of law? Do we share a rich and deep cultural foundation? Can we still glimpse and together aspire to something like a common good, a good that might be brought to light and clarified through universal participation in open and ongoing public debate?
Democracy: Reality and Ideal
One final note: democracy in its ancient form fell far short of its own noble ideal of full participation in governance by the people.
Even as it aspired to take power from the hands of a few and place it in the hands of many, ancient democracy found itself at its inception sadly hamstrung by shameful exclusions, marginalization, and myopic denials. Though every citizen of Athens could expect to speak in the assembly about political issues and expect their fellow citizens to listen, citizenship was granted exclusively to male, natural-born Athenians, excluding all slaves, all foreign-born residents, and all women.
After all the arduous preparatory work and the various salubrious conditions that the Athenians had put in place to support their democracy, we mark the disappointing chasm between the ideal and the reality.
This too can affect how we perceive our historical present. Are we not better able to consider, judge, and take action in our democratic reality, if we do the intellectual work of clarifying our deeply held and shared political principles, in order to better understand precisely where and how we are failing to live up to them? Rather than imagining a need to instill utterly new values and new ideas in response to every recognized evil, we may often benefit from identifying the values and ideas to which our democracy already necessarily commits us.
Democracy requires of itself, at its outset and today, codified and respected laws, a rich store of shared cultural experience, and a ubiquitous fellow-feeling and commitment to the communal good. In retrospect, from our late-modern vantage point, democracy in its ancient form seemed to lack any real consciousness of its failure to make good on its own honorable ideals.
Having understood this about the origins of our own present form of government, we must now take a hard look in the mirror, comforted perhaps by the insight that democracy is always hard-won and always imperfect. It required a great deal of work and ingenuity from the ancients in order to emerge at all, and its survival and no doubt its health today will require every bit as much from us.
