Athenian democracy: Encyclopedia II - Athenian democracy - Main bodies of governance

Athenian democracy - Main bodies of governance

There were three political bodies where citizens gathered in numbers running into the hundreds or thousands. These are the assembly (in some cases with a quorum of 6000), the council of 500 (boule) and the courts (a minumum of 200 people, but running at least on some occasions up to 6000). Of these three bodies it is the assembly and the courts that were the true sites of power — although courts, unlike the assembly, were never simply called the demos (the People) as they were manned by a subset of the citizen body, those over thirty. But crucially citizens voting in both were not liable to review and prosecution as were council members and all other officeholders. In the 5th century BC we often hear of the assembly sitting as a court of judgement itself for trials of political importance and it is not a coincidence that 6000 is the number both for the full quorum for the assembly and for the annual pool from which jurors were picked for particular trials. By the mid-4th century however the assembly's judicial functions were largely curtailed, though it always kept a role in the initiation of various kinds of political trial.

Athenian democracy - Council of 500

The council (boule) of 500, the largest board of officeholders, formed a steering committee for the assembly, drafting legislation and setting its agenda. A citizen could serve on the council twice in their lifetime. Any citizen could submit proposals to the council for drafting. Technically it was forbidden for the assembly to vote on measures without a pre-proposal (probouleuma) from the council. These might be concrete, worked-out proposals or 'open', that is little more than items on the agenda. The council, or rotating sections of it, also served as a kind of front desk for the state, on duty in the council chamber 24 hours a day. Every day of the year one of these councillors was head of state for the day (for instance, holding the keys to the treasury and the seal of the city and being responsible for greeting foreign envoys, and in the 5th century presiding over the assembly and council meetings). It has been calculated that one quarter of all citizens must at one time in their lives have held the post. This head of state position could be held once only in a lifetime.

Athenian democracy - Assembly

As usual in ancient democracies, one had to physically attend a gathering in order to vote. Military service or simple distance prevented the exercise of citizenship. Voting was usually by show of hands (cheirotonia, "arm stretching") with officials 'judging' the outcome by sight. With thousands of people attending, counting was impossible. For a small category of votes a quorum of 6000 was required, principally grants of citizenship, and here coloured balls were used, white for yes and black for no. Probably at the end of the session, each voter tossed one of these into a large clay jar which was afterwards cracked open for the counting of the ballots. (Ostracism required to voters to scratch names onto pieces of broken pottery, though this did not occur within the assembly as such.)

In the 5th century BC, there were 10 fixed assembly meetings per year, one in each of the ten state months, with other meetings called as needed. In the following century the meetings were set to forty a year, with four in each state month. (One of these was now as the main meeting, kuria ekklesia.) Additional meetings might still be called, especially as up until 355 BC there were still political trials that were conducted in the assembly rather than in court. The assembly meetings did not occur at fixed intervals, as they had to dodge the annual festivals that were differently placed in each of the twelve lunar months. There was also a tendency for the four meetings to bunch up toward the end of each state month.

Attendance at the assembly was voluntary. In the 5th century public slaves forming a cordon with a red-stained rope herded citizens from the agora into the assembly meeting place (pnyx), with a fine for those who got the red on their clothes. This, however, cannot compare with the compulsory voting schemes of some modern democracies. It was rather an immediate measure to get enough people rapidly in place, like an aggressive form of ushering. After the restoration of the democracy in 403 BC, pay for assembly attendance was introduced for the first time. At this there was a new enthusiasm for assembly meetings. Only the first 6000 to arrive were admitted and paid, with the red rope now used to keep latecomers at bay. These two uses of the red rope are known from Aristophanes's comedy Acharnians 17-22, the forcing in, and his Ekklesiazousai 378-9 for the keeping out.

Athenian democracy - Athenian Courts

Athens had an elaborate legal system centred on the dikasteria or jury courts: the word is derived from dikastes, 'judge/juror.' These jury courts were manned by large panels selected by lot from an annual pool of 6,000 citizens. To be eligible to serve as juror, a citizen had to be over 30 years of age and in possession of full citizen rights (see atimia). The age limit, the same as that for office holders but ten years older than that required for participation in the assembly, gave the courts a certain standing in relation to the assembly: for the Athenians older was wiser. Added to this was the fact that jurors were under oath, which was not a feature of attendance at the assembly. However, the authority exercised by the courts had the same basis as that of the assembly: both were regarded as expressing the direct will of the people. Unlike office holders (magistrates) who could be impeached and prosecuted for misconduct, the jurors could not be censured, for they, in effect, were the people and no authority could be higher than that. A corollary of this was that, at least in words spoken before the jurors, if a court had made an unjust decision, it must have been because it had been misled by a litigant

Essentially there were two grades of suit, a smaller kind known as dike or private suit, and a larger kind known as graphe or public suit. For private suits the minimum jury size was 201 (increased to 401 if a sum of over 1000 drachmas was at issue), for public suits 501. For particularly important public suits the jury could be increased by adding in extra allotments of 500. One thousand and 1500 are regularly encountered as jury sizes and on at least one occasion, the first time a new kind of case was brought to court (see graphe paranomon), all 6,000 members of the juror pool were put onto the one case. In public suits the litgants each had something like three hours to speak, less in private suits.

The cases were put by the litigants themselves in the form of an exchange of single speeches timed by water clock, first prosecutor then defendant. In a public suit the litigants each had three hours to speak, much less in private suits (though here it was in proportion to the amount of money at stake). Decisions were made by voting without any time set aside for deliberation. Nothing, however, stopped jurors from talking informally amongst themselves during the voting procedure and juries could be rowdy shouting out their disapproval or disbelief of things said by the litigants. This may have had some role in building a consensus. The jury could only cast a 'yes' or 'no' vote as to the guilt and sentence of the defendant. For private suits only the victims or their families could prosecute, while for public suits anyone (ho boulomenos, 'whoever wants to' i.e. any citizen with full citizen rights) could bring a case since the issues in these major suits were regarded as affecting the community as a whole.

Justice was rapid: no case could last no longer than one day. Some convictions triggered an automatic penalty, but where this was not the case the two litgants each proposed a penalty for the convicted defendant and the jury chose between them in a further vote. No appeal was possible. There was however a mechanism for prosecuting the witnesses of a successful prosecutor, which it appears could lead to the undoing of the earlier verdict.

Payment for jurors was introduced around 462 BC and is ascribed to Pericles, a feature described by Aristotle as fundamental to radical democracy (Politics 1294a37). Pay was raised from 2 to 3 obols by Cleon early in the Peloponnesian war and there it stayed; the original amount is not known. Notably this was introduced more than fifty years before payment for attendance at assembly meetings. Running the courts was one of the major expenses of the Athenian state and there were moments of financial crisis in the 4th century when the courts, at least for private suits, had to be suspended.

The system shows a marked anti-professionalism. No judges presided over the courts nor was there anyone to give legal direction to the jurors, as the magistrates in charge of the courts had only an administrative function and were themselves in any case amateurs (most of the annual magistracies at Athens could only be held once in a lifetime). There were no lawyers as such, but the litigants acted solely in their capacity as citizens. Whatever professionalism there was tended to disguise itself: it was possible to pay for the services of a speechwriter (logographos) but this was not advertised in court (except as something your opponent in court has had to resort to), and even politically prominent litigants made some show of disowning special expertise.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Main bodies of governance", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki