Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists

Abstract

Recent archaeological and textual studies by classical scholars give us new ways of thinking about Athenian democracy. Morgens Hansen, for example, has calculated the seating capacity of the Pnyx, the site where the Athenians held their assemblies. By figuring out how much space a seated adult Athenian male would occupy, he has concluded that the assembly in the fourth century B.C. could have held at most 6,000 people. That is a third or fourth of the potential participants (Hansen 1983, 18). Another classical scholar argues that attendance was considerably below this and concludes: “The Athenians had never seen a full meeting of the citizen body, though the very idea of democracy is predicted on it. From the very start they must have accepted that any assembly was bound to be a sample of the citizenship—and not even a random sample” (Carter 1986, 193). Other questions worthy of being asked but not asked before are now raised: How were votes actually counted? How does one calculate a closely divided vote when there are 6,000 people sitting in the assembly?In one of the classic books on Athenian democracy published in 1957, the author claimed: “Prima facie the Athenian democracy would seem to have been a perfectly designed machine for expressing and putting into effect the will of the people” (Jones [1957] 1964, 3). Hansen, with his calculations of the seating capacity of the Pnyx, and scholars questioning the degree to which and how citizens really engaged in the political life of Athens, are motivated by this perspective on ancient democracy.