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Ancient Athenian citizens were likely to be involved at some point in their lives not only in voting on issues but also in formulating the choice and content of proposals to be made.
the European Union). Most modern democracies include women in their definition of the demos, the sovereign body wielding the kratos, or power, and so today women vote as well as men. Modern democracies do not depend on slave labor, so they do not, as ancient societies did, exclude much of the resident population from citizenship. While some democracies do retain the practice of a year’s national service, most do not require all their voting citizens to be ready for military service at any time up to the age of sixty, as was the case in ancient Athens. The greatest difference, however, is the proportion of our lives we each spend exercising our citizenship muscles. The difference here is not merely quantitative: most of us today are excluded from the process of civic deliberation. Ancient Athenian citizens were likely to be involved at some point in their lives not only in voting on issues but also in formulating the choice and content of proposals to be made. This 42
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CITIZENSHIP
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was because most served for a whole year on the Athenian Council (the Boule). Discussion of classical democracy usually focuses on the two crucial decision-making bodies constituted by the Assembly and the law courts. The Assembly, in which citizens could vote from the age of eighteen, was the supreme legislative body, meeting from thirty to forty times a year; in theory, any citizen was entitled to speak on any proposal. In practice, the number of people able to address the Assembly was limited, and men over fifty in the queue to speak were given precedence by the herald. The wisdom which comes with experience was recognized as a qualification for greater civic responsibility. Once a citizen was thirty, he could volunteer for jury service, for which he would be paid. Juries were selected by a complicated system designed to prevent bribery: from the body of volunteers, juries were selected and allocated randomly and at the last minute. If you were a citizen who frequently acted as juror, such as Philocleon, the protagonist of Aristophanes’ Wasps, you would have been involved in cases connected with the political life of the city-state, such as appeals against Assembly or Council rulings. Many civil and criminal cases also had political ramifica-
tions, since statesmen and aspiring politicians used litigation to further their own careers and damage those of their rivals. Yet neither voting in the Assembly on the Pnyx Hill, even though it offered an opportunity to hear debates on the expediency of policies, nor sitting on juries in the various courts across the city entailed anything like the commitment of time and intellectual effort required of Council members, the officials charged with extended deliberation of policies. The bouleutai, or “Deliberators,” met in the Bouleuterion, a large chamber on the west side of the agora. Supposedly founded by Solon in 594 BC, the old building was replaced circa 415 BC with a new one still further west than the first. The councilors were symbolically privileged as thought-leaders; they sat together in seats of honor at the front of the theater during the festivals. The importance of the Council in the Athenian democracy is underlined by the haste with which the oligarchs who took power in the coup of 411 BC ousted the democratically elected councilors and hijacked the Bouleuterion as their power base. Our understanding of the importance of the Council, and the sheer complexity of the tasks each member was expected to be competent to fulfill, was transformed by the discovery of the Constitution of Athens, attributed to Aristotle and discovered on two separate papyri, in Egypt in 1879 and 1890. The Council required no fewer than 500 citizens to serve, proportionately selected from each of the 139 demes of Attica. They were replaced every year by lot (at least from the mid-5th c. BC). The Council is likely to have contained, in any year, a representative cross-section of all classes and income brackets across the citizen body: one ancient scholar described it as a mikra polis, i.e., a “mini-city.” Since no man could serve more than twice in his life, chances were good that any citizen who had reached the qualifying age of 30 would