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

Politically and legally distinct

Citizens

Resident Foreigners/Metics

Slaves

Social Classes

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.

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 3 ways the courts had control over the magistrates

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.

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.

Political Ideals

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.

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?

Questions