Athenian democracy: Encyclopedia II - Athenian democracy - Participation and exclusion

Athenian democracy - Participation and exclusion

Athenian democracy - Size and make-up of the Athenian population

The population of Attica can only be roughly guessed at as the Athenians themselves never conducted a complete census. Numbers of slaves and metics (resident aliens) in particular will have fluctuated. During the 4th century BC, the population of Athens may well have comprised some 250,000—300,000 people. Citizen families may have amounted to 100,000 people and out of these some 30,000 will have been the adult male citizens entitled to vote in the assembly. In the mid-5th century the number of adult male citizens was perhaps as high as 60,000, but this number fell precipitously during the Peloponnesian war. This slump was permanent due to the introduction of a stricter definition of citizen described below. From a modern perspective these figures seem pitifully small, but in the world of Greek city-states Athens was huge: most of thousand or so Greek cities could only muster 1000-1500 adult male citizens and Corinth, a major power, had at most 15,000.

The non-citizen component of the population was divided between metics and slaves, with the latter perhaps somewhat more numerous. Around 338 BC the orator Hyperides (fragment 13) claimed that there were 150,000 slaves in Attica, but this figure is probably not more than an impression: slaves outnumbered those of citizen stock but did not swamp them.

Athenian democracy - Citizenship in Athens

Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes – effectively twenty years and over – had the right to vote in Athens. This excluded a majority of the population, namely slaves, women and resident foreigners (metics). Also disallowed were citizens whose rights were under suspension (typically for failure to pay a debt to the city: see atimia); for some Athenians this amounted to permanent (and in fact inheritable) disqualification. Still, in contrast with oligarchical societies, there were no real property requirements limiting access. (The property classes of Solon's constitution remained on the books, but they were a dead letter). Given the exclusionary and ancestral conception of citizenship held by Greek city-states, a relatively large portion of the population took part in the government of Athens and of other radical democracies like it. At Athens some citizens were far more active than others, but the vast numbers required just for the system to work testify to a breadth of particpation among those eligible that greatly exceeded any present day democracy.

Athenian citizens had to be legitimately descended from citizens—after the reforms of Pericles in 450 BC on both sides of the family, excluding the children of Athenian men and foreign women. Although the legislation was not retrospective, five years later the Athenians removed 5000 from the citizen registers when a free gift of corn arrived for all citizens from an Egyptian king. Citizenship could be granted by the assembly and was sometimes given to large groups (Plateans in 427 BC, Samians in 405 BC), but by the 4th century only to individuals and by a special vote with a quorum of 6000. This was generally done as a reward for some service to the state. In the course of a century the numbers involved were in the hundreds rather than thousands. This reflected the general conception of the polis as a community, somewhat like an extended family, rather than as a territorial state.

Modern democracies too have their own exclusions: resident foreigners (legal and otherwise), individuals below a certain age and in some cases incarcerated citizens and those who have committed felonies. The modern form has other limitations as well: the right of voting is usually restricted to once every several years, and voters merely get to choose their representatives in the legislative or executive branches—and it is these representatives, not the voters themselves, who make policy decisions (with the exception of occasional referenda).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Participation and exclusion", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki