Chapter 2: The
City-State
Mariana Aguiano Sandoval
Larissa Martínez Castro
Vocabulary
Demes: Greek demos, people, land; see d - in Indo-European
roots. One of the townships of accient Attica.
Metics: resident alien, a person who did not have citizen rights
in their Greek city-state of residence.Metic comes from the
Greek μέτοικος, metoikos, where the second element is derived
from οἶκος, oikos, "house; inhabit."
The City-State
Social Classes
Politically and legally distinct
Citizens
Resident
Foreigners/Metics
Slaves
Membership : minimum share of political activity
or participation in public business.
Aristotle considered that eligibility to jury-duty is the best criterion of
citizenship. Whether a man was eleigible to many offices or only a few
would depend upon the degree of democracy that prevailed in his city.
* Romans latin lus
implies possesion of
private right, man to
whom certain rights are
legally guaranteed.
* Greeks thought of citizenship not as
a possesion but as something shared;
like members in a family.
* Profound influenceupon Greek
political philosophy. It meant that the
problem as they conceived it was not to
gain a man his rights but to insure him
the place he was entitled.
Political
Institutions
Assembly or Ecclesia
* A town meeting which every Athenian was entilted to attend after he has
reached tha age of 20.
* Met 10 times in the year and in extraordinary sessions at the call of the
council.
* The terms were short; there was usually a provision against re-election and
thus the way was open for the other citizens to have a turn at the management
of public affairs.
* Magistrates were held as a rule noy only by individuals butby bords of ten,
one-chosen from each of the tribes into which the citizens were divided.
* Magistrates had little power.
The two bodies which formed the keys to popular control of
the government in Athens:
*Council of Five Hundred
*Courts with their large popular juries.
Local
government
100 demes (wards,
parishes,
townships) units of
local government
Membership
hereditary
The demes had some measure of local autonomy and certain local
police-duties of no importance; they were the door to which the
Athenian entered into citizenship, for thet kept the register of their
members and every Athenian boy was enrolled al 18.
* Presentation of candidates to fill the various bodies by which the
central government was carried on.
* The system was a combination of election and lot. The demes elected
candidates, roughly in proportion to their size and the actual holders of
office were chosen by the lot from the panel thus formed by election. To
Greek understanding this mode of filling offoces by lot was distinctively
democratic form of rule, since it equalized everyone´s chances to hold
office.
* Ten generals who were chosen by direct election were eligible to
repeated re-elections. They were military officers ;exercised not only
important powers in foreign parts of the Athenian Empire but also great
influence over the decisions of the Council and the Assembly.
In Sparta the council was a senate composed of elders chosen for life and
without responsibility to the assembly. Membership in such a council would
normally be the prerogative of a well-born governing class.
The Council of the Areopagus was the remnant of an aristocratic senate
which has been shorn of its powers by the rising democracy.
* Each of the 10 tribes into which the Athenians were divided furnished 50
members and 50 memebers from a single tribe were active for the 1/10 of the
yearly term of office.
* This committee of 50 argumented by one councilman from each of the 9
tribes not in office, was in control and transacted business in the name of the
entire council.
* A president was chosen by lot from 50 for a single day and no Athenian could
hold this honor for more than a day in his entire life.
* The Council was also the central executive body in the government. Foreign
embassies had access to the people omly through the Council.
* The council had entire control of finances, the management of public
property and taxation. The fleet and its arsenals were directly controlled by it,
and amultitude of commissions and administrative bodies or servants were
attached more or less closely to it.
* The powers of the Council were always dependent upon the good will of the
Assembly.
* Declarations of war, concluding of peace, the forming of alliances, the
voting of direct taxes or general legslative enactments were expected to go
before the Assembly for the popular approval.
* At all the events decrees were passed in the name of the Council and the
people.
* It was through the courts that popular control, both of magistrates and of
the law itself was consumated. TheCourts were the keystone of the whole
democratic system.
* The members of these courts, or jurymen, were nominated by the demes,
a panel of 6,000 being elected each year and then told off by lot to sit in
particular courts. Any Athenian citizen 30 years old might be chosen of this
duty. The court was a very large body, scarcely less than 201 and commonly
as much as 501.
* The court was non merely a judicial organ; it was conceived to be literally
the Athenian people for the purpose inhand. The courts were utilized and
over the law itself.
The 3 ways the
courts had control
over the magistrates
1) Power of examination before a
candidate could take office
2) An official could be made subject
at the conclusion of his term office
to a review of all the acts
performed by him and took place in
a court.
3) There was a special auditing of
accounts and a review of the
handling of public money for every
magistrate at the end of his term
The courts had control over the law itself which might give them real
legislative power and raise them to a position in particular cases
coordinate with the Assembly itself.
Political Ideals
The popularly chosen Council and its responsability to the Assembly, and
the independent and popularly chosen juries, where the charactheristic
institutions of Athenian democracy.
However there were, behind institutions, certain conceptions of what the
institutions ought to embody.
These ideals are less easy to discover and less tangible to describe, but
there are no less important than the institutions themselves for an
understanding of political philosophy.
Historian Thucydides has stated, in a passage of incomprable
brilliance,this meaning which democracy had for thoughtful Athenians.
This is the famous Funeral Oration, appropriately attributed to Pericles,
who was the leader of the democracy.
I would have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness of Athens,
until you become filled with the love of her; and when you are impressed by
the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men
who knew their duty and had the courage to do it, who in the hour of conflict
had the fear of dishonour always present to them, and who, if ever they
failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to their contry,
but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest offering which they could
present at her feast.
The main purpose of Pericle’s speech was evidently to awaken in his
hearer´s minds the consciousness of the city itself as their supremely
valuable posession and as the highest interest to which they could devote
themselves.
Pericles has little to say of tradition or of the past, it is the present glory of a
united and harmonious Athens upon which he dwells. What he asks of his
hearers is to see Athens as she really is, to realice what she means in the
lives of her citizens, as if she were a supremely beautiful and worthy
mistress. Their citizenship is, then, the Athenian´s highest glory.
Rotation in office, the filling of offices by lot, and the enlargement of governing
bodies even to unwieldmess were all designed to give more citizens a share in
the government.
The government of Athens was a democracy, “for the administration is in the
hands of the many and not of the few”.
Holding of office counts for little in the calculations of modern democrats, other
than those few for whom politics is a career.
“An Athenian citizen does not neglect tha state because he takes care of his
own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a
very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public
affairs, not as harmless, but as a useless character; and it few of us are
originators, we are all sound judges of policy.”
“When a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public
service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is
poverty a bar, but a man may benefit his country whatever be the obscurity of
his condition.”
“We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and
hands. And in the matter of education, whereas they (the Spartans) from early
youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which are to make them
brave, we leave at ease, and yet are equally ready to face the perils which
they face.”
In the Athenian conception, then, the city was a community in which its
members were to live a harmonious common life, in which as many citizens
as possible were to be permitted to take an active part, with no discrimination
because of rank or wealth, and in which the capacities of its individual
members found a natural and spontaneous and happy outlet.
Neverthless, it was an ideal and not a fact.
Even at its best the democracy had its seamy side which had as much to do
with the begginings of political theory as its successes.
After the Peloponnesian War, Plato sadly said that, “Any city, however small,
is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich.”
Loyalty tended constantly to be paid into a particular form of government or to
a party rather than to the city, and this too easily opened the way to sheer
political egoism which was not even loyal to a party.
Athenian Ideal
Fundamental Values
Freedom
Respect for law
“There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse
we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbour if he
does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, tough
harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unsconstrained in our private
intercourse, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are
prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws,
having an special regard to those which are ordained for the protection of
the injured as well as to those unwritten laws which bring upon the
transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.”
The citizen´s freedom depends upon the fact that he has a rational capacity
to convince and to be convinced in free and untrammeled intercourse with
his fellows.
The Greek had, indeed, a somewhat naive belief that he alone of all men
was gifted with such a rational faculty, and that the city-state alone of all
governments gave free to play it.
There is one point upon which every Greek political thinker is agreed,
namely, that tiranny is the worst of all governments.
For tyranny means just the application of unlawful force: even though it be
beneficent in its aims and results, it is still bad because it destroys self
government.
“ No worse foe than the despot hath a state. Under whom, first, can be no
common laws, but one rules, keeping his private hands The law.”
The Athenian ideal might be summed up in a single phrase as the
conception of free citizenship in a free state.
The processes of government are the processes of impartial law which is
binding because it is right.
It was the measure of the Athenian´s pride in his city that he believed that
here, for the first time in human history, the means for realizing this ideal
had been aproximately realized.
It is the measure of his sucess that no later people has set before itself the
ideal of civic freedom uninfluenced by his institutions and his philosophy.
Questions
1.-How many inhabitants of Athens were slaves?
2.- How was composed the second main group in a Greek city?
3.- Define the meaning of membership.
4.- Greek philosopher that considered that eligibility to jury-duty is the best
criterion of citizenship.
5.- How many times at a year The Assembly met and what were the acts of
it?
6.-What are the characteristic institutions of Athenian democracy?
7.- Passage stated by Thucydides, of incomparable brilliance, that has the
meaning which democracy had for thoughtful Athenians.
8.- According to Pericle´s speech, what is the Athenian´s highest glory?
9.- How many ways did the courts had control over the magistrates?
10.- Which are the two bodies which formed the keys to popular control of the
government in Athens?