Ancient Greece

Lesson 4: Athenian Democracy

The Boule

The ‘boule’ was an elected council of 500 citizens who were chosen to serve for a period of one year. Members could only serve on two separate occasions in their lifetimes.

This body handled most of the day-to-day running of the Athenian state. It did not actually make any major decisions, but instead was responsible for seeing to it that the decisions made by the ‘ekklesia’were actually carried out.

To illustrate how this works, we can consider the example in the last section about the trial of the naval commanders at the battle of Arginoussae.

All the decisions about how the trial was to be held, and the actual proceedings of the trial itself would have been carried out by the ‘ekklesia’. It was only after these decisions had been made that the members of the ‘boule’ were given instructions to actually see to it that they were put into force.

These two words are sometimes translated into English as “Assembly” and “Council”. Such translations can be misleading, as the English translations can actually obscure the nature of the relationship between the two bodies.

The function of the members of the ‘boule’ were rather different from what we would expect the function of a “councillor” to be in our own society!

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