The Athenian Democracy In The Age Of Demosthenes

The Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. is the most famous and perhaps most nearly perfect example of direct democracy. Covering the period 403-322 B.C., Mogens Herman Hansen focuses on the crucial last thirty years, which coincided with the political career of Demosthenes. Hansen distinguishes between the city's seven political institutions: the Assembly, the nomothetai, the People's Court, the boards of magistrates, the Council of Five Hundred, the Areopagos, and ho boulomenos. He discusses how Athenians conceived liberty both as the ability to participate in the decision-making process and as the right to live without oppression from the state or other citizens. Equality was conceived of as an equality not of nature but of opportunity.

This history of Athenian democracy covers the period 403-322 BC, and focuses in particular on the crucial last thirty years which coincided with the political career of Demosthenes and ended with his suicide in 322. It examines Athenian democracy both as a political system and as an ideology. In describing the former it distinguishes between the three major decision-making organs (the Assembly,the Legislators and the People's Courts) and the magistrates who were responsible for preparing the agenda for the legislature and also for carrying its decisions into effect. In discussing Athenian democratic ideology, the book also makes the important distinction between the ideals held by the democrats themselves and those imputed to them by the critics of democracy. The Athenians conceived of liberty both as the ability to participate in the decision-making process, and as the privilege to live without oppression from state or other citizens. Equality was not considered as an equality of nature, but as one of opportunity.

This volume collects twelve historical papers, some published here for the first time, in which Stephen Lambert explores the implications of the inscribed Athenian laws and decrees for the history of Athens in the age of Demosthenes.

Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.

First full study of ancient Greek democracy in the Classical period outside Athens, which has three main goals: to identify where and when democratic governments established themselves; to explain why democracy spread to many parts of Greece; and to further our understanding of the nature of ancient democracy.

This book asks an important question often ignored by ancient historians and political scientists alike: Why did Athenian democracy work as well and for as long as it did? Josiah Ober seeks the answer by analyzing the sociology of Athenian politics and the nature of communication between elite and nonelite citizens. After a preliminary survey of the development of the Athenian "constitution," he focuses on the role of political and legal rhetoric. As jurymen and Assemblymen, the citizen masses of Athens retained important powers, and elite Athenian politicians and litigants needed to address these large bodies of ordinary citizens in terms understandable and acceptable to the audience. This book probes the social strategies behind the rhetorical tactics employed by elite speakers. A close reading of the speeches exposes both egalitarian and elitist elements in Athenian popular ideology. Ober demonstrates that the vocabulary of public speech constituted a democratic discourse that allowed the Athenians to resolve contradictions between the ideal of political equality and the reality of social inequality. His radical reevaluation of leadership and political power in classical Athens restores key elements of the social and ideological context of the first western democracy.