The ancient city-state of Athens is considered one of the birthplaces of democracy, with Athenians adopting this system of government around 508 BCE. How has democracy evolved over the past two millennia? And what roles do debate and community play in the democratic process?
As Pomona College prepares to host a California gubernatorial debate on April 28, Associate Professor of Classics Benjamin Keim explains what our methods for assessing potential officeholders have in common with those of the ancient Athenians. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What role did the idea of community play in ancient Athenian democracy?
The word politics is derived from the Greek word for city-state, polis. So, to the ancient Athenians, politics was a means of living in community. Modern vocabulary around politics, including around democracy and other types of regimes, is regularly drawn from ancient Greek because of the early and profoundly influential conversations by Greek intellectuals about how we humans might best and most productively live in community and govern ourselves.
In ancient Athens, if you as a citizen didn’t embody the values of your community, you weren’t considered capable of serving as a leader or of representing your community as an officeholder.
How was ancient Athenian democracy both similar to and different from modern democracies?
The most fundamental difference between ancient Athenian and modern American democracy is that Athenian democracy was a radical, direct type of democracy, whereas modern democracy is representational. Everyone who was an Athenian citizen had a vote and could participate freely in the Assembly, where major Athenian policy decisions were discussed.
However, in the Athenian system as in the American system, there’s the theory, there’s the ideal and then there’s the actual practice. We see some of the same socioeconomic constraints on political participation in Athens as we do in the U.S.
Even if all Athenians had the opportunity to attend every Assembly, and everyone who attended also spoke, some—by dint of their wealth, connections and/or rhetorical craft—were far more active and engaged in driving the political discourse.
How did the radical directness of Athenian democracy impact the way the government functioned?
In Athens—with a few notable exceptions—holding office was less about a person’s skill or ability to handle a particular job and more about their character, about their standing and their recognition as being a good citizen. The Athenians wanted to make sure that they were putting forward good citizens for these positions.
As Aristotle tells us, there were ten questions that every candidate for office had to answer in the correct ways to show that they were upstanding citizens. Then, except for areas that required specific skills—such as accounting and the military—selection processes were conducted by lottery. This process was meant to encourage the breadth and depth of political participation across Athens.
Why is debate such an integral part of the democratic process?
It’s one of the ways that we the people—the demos—exert our political power.
In the U.S. democratic system, debates provide an opportunity for voters to scrutinize the people who want to lead the community. And while there’s no exact precedent for our modern debate format in ancient Athens, there’s still that element of question-and-answer as we determine who should represent us.
The ten questions that the ancient Athenians asked potential officeholders are in some ways essentially similar to the main question that modern voters ask our candidates: Are you worthy of holding this office? Debates help us answer that question of worthiness by showing us how our would-be rulers’ values measure up to our own ideals.