Lesson 4: Athenian Democracy
The Ekklesia
The ‘ekklesia’ was the central organ of the Athenian democracy.
The word ‘ekklesia’ refers to a body that is ‘called out’ in Classical Greek.
All citizens of the city of Athens were eligible for membership in the ‘ekklesia’. The ‘ekklesia’ usually met on a low hill called the Pnyx located in the southwest of the city.
It was at meetings of the ‘ekklesia’ that important matters were debated. Decisions were made by voting, and the ‘ekklesia’ actually had the power to make practically any kind of decision that it wanted to.
In the “Apology of Socrates”, Plato refers to an incident in which the ‘ekklesia’ decided to make a group of naval commanders who had failed to rescue a group of drowning sailors stand trial in one group. By right, each of the commanders should have been tried individually.
Although such a trial was not legal in the strictest sense, the ‘ekklesia’ pushed ahead with it, had the naval commanders condemned to death and even had some of them executed (two of them had fled Athens before the trial).
This incident serves to point up the fact that the ‘ekklesia’ was in a certain sense all-powerful in the Athenian democratic system.
What makes this story all the more remarkable is the fact that these selfsame commanders had just won a major battle (the battle of Arginoussae).
Although most of the important decisions regarding the city were made in the ‘ekklesia’, it seems as though not everyone actually did attend (or was even interested in attending) its meetings.
In practice, many of the rural inhabitants of Attica (the area surrounding Athens) would not have been able to attend these meetings simply because it would have been too much trouble for them to make the journey to the city.
We must remember that many of these people were farmers. Time was therefore precious to them, and many of them would have preferred to spend their day working on their farms rather than attending the political debates in the ‘ekklesia’.
In one of his plays, “The Acharnians”, the great comic playwright Aristophanes refers to the use of a “red rope”. This supposedly refers to the practice of sending out the Athenian equivalent of the police, the Scythian archers (see Lesson 5), with a rope that had been soaked in red dye to herd people who were hanging around in the market-place into the Pnyx.
If such a measure was indeed used, then it does seem that many Athenians would indeed have been reluctant to attend these meetings of the ‘ekklesia’.
In fact, in the fourth century BC, pay for attendance at these meetings had been introduced in order to make up for the time spent there!
