DEMOPOLIS

Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice

JOSIAH OBER
Stanford University, California
 ch a p ter 2

The Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens

If it is to be realistic, rather than utopian or otherwise idealized, a political

theory of democracy before liberalism rests on a demonstration of feasi-
bility. Since reality proves possibility, a single case will serve the purpose.
The new form of popular government that the Athenians established in the
immediate aftermath of the popular revolution of 508 BCE was the world’s
first political regime to name itself “democracy.” Classical Athens, from the
late sixth to the late fourth century BCE, is also the best-known and most
fully documented example of a long-lasting democracy in a complex soci-
ety in the era before the development of liberal political thought.
I have discussed the history of democratic Athenian political culture and
institutions in more detail in other work.1 Here, after a brief survey of
Athenian political development, I turn to the question of the original and
mature meanings of the Greek word demokratia, as it was used in political
discourse by partisans and critics of democracy in the ancient Greek world.
The point of the exercise is to show that, in our best-documented historical
case, both the conceptual understanding and the institutional form were
very different from the unstable, arbitrary, and casually brutish form of
populist-driven majoritarian tyranny that democracy before liberalism is
often taken to be.
Ancient Athenian society obviously had many historically contingent
features. The Demopolis thought experiment offered in the following
chapter abstracts from history in order to show that a state adopting a
system of self-government relevantly similar to Athenian democracy need
not be burdened by, for example, slavery or exclusively male franchise nor
limited in scale by its reliance on directly democratic modes of decision
making.

1 Athenian demography, political institutions, and historical development in relationship to Athenian

politics and society: Ober 1989, 2008a.

18
 Athenian Political History 19

2.1 athenian political history

With a total resident population of perhaps 250,000 persons, a citizen
(adult male) population in the tens of thousands (perhaps as high as
50,000+ in ca. 431 BCE; ca. 30,000 in the fourth century BCE, the age of
Plato and Aristotle), and a home territory of about 2,500 km2 , Athens was
an exceptionally large city-state. It was also exceptionally diverse, encom-
passing several distinct regions, many local cults, and hundreds of eco-
nomic specializations. Like most city-state residents, Athenians were highly
aware of class differences. Managing diversity across the citizen popula-
tion was a primary aim of city-state institutions (Ober 1989). Athens’s size
became an asset only after a series of dramatic reforms in the aftermath of
the revolution of 508 BCE strengthened civic identity and enabled coordi-
nated political action on matters of common interest by large numbers of
citizens.
Key postrevolutionary democratic reforms made participatory citizens
of all resident males and (prospectively) their male descendants without
regard to property or income qualifications. The new order also created
a council of citizens, chosen by lot and recruited from across the polis’s
several regions. The council conducted much of the ordinary business of
government and set the agenda for a legislative assembly, open to all cit-
izens. In the fourth century BCE, there were 40 assembly meetings each
year, and a typical meeting attracted one-fifth to one-quarter of the citi-
zen body. The assembled citizens debated legislative proposals and voted
directly on them. Each citizen’s vote was given equal weight. Jurors in the
People’s Courts and most magistrates were likewise chosen by lottery. A few
magistrates, notably military commanders, civil engineers, and (eventually)
certain financial officials, were elected for one-year renewable terms. All
citizen-officials were legally accountable for their performance and under-
went a formal review upon completion of a year’s term.
Athen’s democracy was a direct form of government by citizens. The
assembled citizens voted directly on policy; they did not elect representa-
tives to make policy for them. Yet the common notion that representation is
a uniquely modern concept, utterly foreign to ancient democratic thought
(e.g., Rosanvallon 2006: 62), is misleading. The Athenian demos (as the
whole of the citizen body) was imagined as present in the persons of those
citizens who chose to attend a given assembly. So the demos was concep-
tually represented, pars pro toto, by a fragment of the citizenry. In a related
sense, the decisions made by the 500 lottery-chosen councilors, by juries
(typically of 201 or 501 citizens over age 30), and by boards of “lawmakers”
20 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
(Section 2.3), stood for decisions of the people as a whole and were bind-
ing upon the entire community (Ober 1996: Chapter 8). Because Athens
was very small compared to most modern nation-states, the Athenians did
not face the problems that arise when authority over rule making is dele-
gated to elected legislative representatives (Chapter 7). But there is nothing
in the Athenian conceptualization of democracy, to which we turn below
(Section 2.2), that renders political representation inconceivable.
Athens’s democracy lasted, with two brief oligarchic interludes (410 and
404 BCE), until 322 BCE. For 180 years, Athenian political culture evolved
and Athenian government proved itself to be highly adaptive. Atheni-
ans grew increasingly sophisticated in their understanding and practice of
democracy. The fundamental conditions of freedom in respect to pub-
lic speech and association, equality of votes and opportunity for office,
and civic dignity as immunity from humiliation and infantilization were
robustly supported by formal rules and related behavioral norms. The
Athenians regularly adjusted the institutional mechanisms of their govern-
ment. Legislation, passed in the course of the fifth century BCE, intro-
duced pay for many forms of public service, including serving as a juror
in the People’s Courts. In 451 BCE, natal citizenship was legally limited to
legitimate sons born to a female native married to a male native, effectively
recognizing Athenian women as coparticipants in the formation of the cit-
izen body (while denying the franchise to sons born to Athenian men who
had taken foreign wives). In the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE a series
of constitutional changes, discussed below in this chapter, legally limited
the direct legislative authority of the citizen assembly, without restricting
the citizens’ collective authority over all aspects of state government. We
will consider some other Athenian institutional innovations in subsequent
chapters. Yet from the beginning to the end of the democratic era, the core
meaning of democracy as citizen self-government remained stable.
Athenian political development offers initial, historically contingent
answers to the questions with which we began, concerning what basic
democracy is, why it arises, how it is sustained, and what it is good for.
When measured against contemporary norms, Athens was far from a liberal
society: Athenian democracy arose within a cultural framework in which
active participation in government, as a legislator, juror, or public official,
was strictly limited to males, and ordinarily to native males. Slavery was
very common (perhaps one-third of Athenian residents were slaves) and
taken largely for granted. Impiety, while not defined in detail in Athenian
law, was a capital offense. The institution of ostracism allowed for the occa-
sional (albeit temporary) expulsion from the state territory, without a trial
 Athenian Political History 21
or criminal charges, of an individual regarded as dangerous or otherwise
objectionable by a plurality of his fellow citizens. And yet the classical Athe-
nian definition of democracy, so I will argue, fits the preliminary definition
of basic democracy offered in the first chapter. The Demopolis thought
experiment, sketched in the next chapter, seeks to generalize the features
of basic democracy, abstracting it from the specifics of ancient Greek his-
tory, culture, and political practice.
As noted in Chapter 1, no definition of democracy can claim final
authority. But it is worth noting that the original meaning of democracy,
and the meaning that was embraced by Greek democrats across classi-
cal antiquity, was not “majority tyranny.” Rather, it was “collective self-
government by citizens.” Moreover, in practice, the collective authority of
the citizens to do just as they wished, whenever they gathered as a body,
was limited in practice from the beginning, by what amounted to con-
stitutional rules. It was certainly possible for Athenian populists to claim
that “it is monstrous if the demos cannot do as it pleases.” Populist dema-
gogues occasionally persuaded the assembled demos to act rashly, against
its established norms, against it interests, and in ways the Athenian citizens
subsequently came to regret.2 But those instances were exceptions to the
standard practice of rule- and norm-bounded decision making. Were such
irrational public acts typical rather than exceptional, Athens would quickly
have failed in the competitive world of Greek city-states. Moreover, the his-
torical arc of Athenian government reform bent in the direction of clearer
and more formal rules, aimed at imposing sanctions on populist oppor-
tunism by would-be leaders. Athenian democracy proved robust to extreme
shocks, including physical destruction of the city by foreign invaders, a
plague that killed at least one-quarter of the population in a few years, and
devastating loss in a protracted war. It also proved capable of providing,
most of the time and for much of Athens’s population, relatively high lev-
els of security and welfare.3
Since Athenian political history shows that democracy of the basic form
existed more or less stably and effectively over a long period of time in a
complex society, the argument that basic democracy cannot have existed is
ipso facto refuted. Basic democracy is thus proved to be compatible with
the demands of human nature and behavior as it is manifest in relatively

2 Monstrous: Xenophon Hellenica 1.7.12: assembly condemns the Arginousai generals en masse. Regret:
ibid., 1.7.35.
3 Ober 2008a: Chapter 2 measures Athens’s capacity as a state relative to other Greek city-states. Ober
2017 estimates welfare and income inequality across the Athenian population in the late fourth cen-
tury BCE.
22 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
large societies. Of course ancient Athens, with a total population in the
hundreds of thousands, was tiny compared to major modern nation-states.
Moreover, although the resident population of Athens was exceptionally
diverse by the standards of Greek antiquity, and diversity was readily iden-
tified as a feature of democracy (Plato, Republic, Book 8), Athens was cer-
tainly not pluralistic in the sense of including sizable minorities with pri-
mary identities and political preferences defined by inflexible and demand-
ing monotheistic religious traditions. Questions about how far a basic
democracy might be scaled up, and whether it could answer to the require-
ments of a large and pluralistic contemporary nation-state, are addressed
in subsequent chapters.

2.2 original greek definition

As is well known, the ancient Greek word demokratia conjoins the words
demos (people) and kratos (power).4 But what sort of power, and who are
the people? The compound term was almost certainly coined in Athens,
within a generation of the revolution of 508 BCE. By the mid fifth cen-
tury BCE, hostile critics were claiming that the true meaning of the word
was “the unconstrained domination of the many poor over the wealthy
few” – i.e., the tyranny of a self-interested majority faction. That critical
rebranding informed Thomas Hobbes’s account, in Leviathan, concern-
ing the kind of large assembly that might serve as an appropriately lawless
sovereign (albeit only as a third-best option, after a single monarch and a
small ruling council); we will return to Hobbes on democracy in Chapter 4.
Mutatis mutandis, the ancient critics’ definition fits Carl Schmitt’s (2007)
conception of politics as a system of power defined by existential contests
engaged by friends against enemies. Schmitt’s emphasis on contestation is,
in turn, the basis of a range of political theories developed by contempo-
rary democratic agonists. Yet majoritarian tyranny is decidedly not the sort
of government envisioned by the ancient Greek originators of term.5
There is no good reason to take the hostile testimony of democracy’s
ancient Greek critics, or those subsequently influenced by them (at what-
ever remove), as evidence for what the term originally meant to democ-
racy’s Greek inventors in the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Nor, a
4 This section is adapted and updated from Ober 2008b, in which the philological argument for the
original meaning of democracy was first presented.
5 Possible dates for coinage of the term demokratia: Hansen 1986. Critics of democracy: Ober 1998.
Democratic agonists: Chapter 8, note 5. Canevaro (forthcoming) demonstrates that, at least in cases
for which the numbers of votes were recorded, decisions of democratic Greek legislative assemblies
tended to be consensual, with few or no dissenting votes.
 Original Greek Definition 23
Table 2.1 Greek (and neo-Greek) terminology for regime types

5. Related political
1. Empowered 4. Other terms: persons,
body 2. -kratos root 3. -arche root regime-name terms abstractions

One autocracy monarchia tyrannia tyrannos

basileia basileus (king)
Few Many aristokratia oligarchia dynasteia hoi oligoi (few)
demokratia polyarchy isonomia (law) hoi polloi (many)
isokratia isegoria (speech) to plethos (majority)
ochlokratia (mob) isopsephia (vote) ho ochlos (mob)
isopsephos (voter)
Other timokratia (honor) anarchia isomoiria (shares) dunamis (power)
(exempli gunaikokratia eunomia (law) ischus (strength)
gratia) (women) politeia (mix of bia (force)
technocracy democracy and kurios (master)
oligarchy: as used exousia (authority,
by Aristotle) license)

Notes: Earlier (fifth-century BCE attested) forms in bold, “standard” terms used in the later fifth
and fourth-century in bold underline, exotic ancient inventions in plain type, post-classical/modern
inventions in italics.

fortiori, is there reason to apply that hostile definition to the mature prac-
tice of democracy as it developed in Athens and other Greek city-states in
the fourth through the second centuries BCE.6 A philological compari-
son with other compound Greek terms for regime types (monarchia, oli-
garchia, aristokratia, timokratia, etc.) suggests that the demos of demokratia
was more expansive than its critics alleged. Linking kratos to demos was an
optimistic assertion of the demos’s collective strength, rather than a cynical
claim regarding the domination or subordination of others. As a matter of
historical fact, collective strength enabled Athenians to dominate others,
especially during the mid-fifth-century imperial era. But that fact ought
not to be confused with the term’s original or mature meaning.
The ancient Greek vocabulary for political regimes was focused on the
question “who rules?” The choice was from among a set of three options: an
individual, a small and exclusive coalition, and an extensive and inclusive
body of citizens. Table 2.1 offers a schematic map of the terminological ter-
rain. Three key terms for the authority of an individual, elite coalition, and

6 On democracy in the Hellenistic third and second centuries BCE, see Grieb 2008; Hamon 2010; Ma
2013; Teegarden 2014.
24 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
extensive citizenry are monarchia, oligarchia, and demokratia. Even in this
small sample, two things stand out: First, unlike monarchia (from the adjec-
tive monos, “solitary”) and oligarchia (from hoi oligoi, “the few”), demokra-
tia (from demos, “the citizenry/people”) is not specifically concerned with
“number.” The term demos refers to a collectivity of unspecified size (see
below). Unlike monarchia and oligarchia, demokratia does not, therefore,
answer the question “how many are empowered as rulers?” Second, Greek
names of regimes divide into terms with an -arche suffix and terms with a
-kratos suffix.7 Table 2.1 lists the primary classical Greek terms for regime
types along some postclassical and modern Greek-derived terms.
Given the Greek penchant for creative neologism, not least in the realm
of politics, it is notable that some regime names are missing from the
list. The standard Greek term for “the many” is hoi polloi, yet there is no
ancient Greek regime was named pollokratia or pollarchia. Nor is monokra-
tia, oligokratia, or anakratia ever attested.8 I focus in the first instance on
the six bold-faced terms in columns 2 and 3 of Table 2.1: demokratia, isokra-
tia, and aristokratia among the -kratos roots and monarchia, oligarchia, and
anarchia among the -arche roots.9
Each of the three primary -arche root terms (Table 2.1, column 3) is con-
cerned with “monopoly of office.” A Greek magistracy was an arche. The
public offices as constitutional entities were (plural) archai. An archon was
a senior magistrate: the holder of a particular office with specified duties.10
Each of the three -arche-root regime names thus answers the question “how
7 The primary Greek terms are as follows (with sample citations in classical authors): Anarchia:
Herodotus 9.23; Aeschlus Suppliants 906. Aristokratia: Thucydides 3.82. Demokratia (and verb
forms): Herodotus 6.43, Thucydides 2.37. Gynaikokratia: Aristotle, Politics 1313b. Dunasteia (as
the worst form of oligarchia): Aristotle Politics 1292b10, 1293a31. Isegoria: Herodotus 5.78, Demos-
thenes 21.124. Isokratia: Herodotus 5.92.a. Isomoiria: Solon apud Aristotle Constitution of Athens 12.3.
Isonomia: Herodotus 3.80, 3.142 (opposed to dunasteia: Thucydides 4.78). Isopsephia: Dionysios of
Halicarnassus 7.64. Isopsephos: Thucydides 1.141. Monarchia: Alcaeus Fragment 12; Herodotus 3.82.
Oligarchia (and active and passive verb forms): Herodotus 3.82.2, 5.92.b; Thucydides 6.38, 8.9; as
personification (on tombstone of Critias): scholion to Aeschines 1.39. Ochlokratia as pejorative form
of rule by the many: Polybius 6.4.6, 6.57.9. Timokratia: Plato Republic 545b; Aristotle Nicomachean
Ethics 1160a. Fuller lists of citations available in Liddell et al. 1968; Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: www
.tlg.uci.edu/.
8 Demarchia refers not to a regime type but to a relatively minor local office (ho demarchos, chief office-
holder in a town, “the mayor”). In this case the prefix refers to the jurisdiction in which authority
is exercised, rather than the number of rulers. Plato, at one point in the Republic (8.545b), suggests
timarchia as a synonym for the honor-centered regime he ordinarily calls timokratia.
9 Each of these is attested in the fifth century, although oligarchia and aristokratia are probably some-
what later than demokratia, isokratia, and monarchia.
10 The word arche, in Greek, has several related meanings: beginning (or origin), empire (or hegemonic
control of one state by another), as well as office or magistracy. In classical Athens, nine archons
were chosen annually – along with several hundred other magistrates: Hansen 1999. On the role of
offices in classical, and especially Aristotelian, political thought, see Lane 2016.
 Original Greek Definition 25
many rulers (quasi actual or potential officeholders), among some larger set
of possible rulers, are there in the state?” The answers are, anarchia (none);
monarchia (one); oligarchia (few).
By contrast, the -kratos terms (Table 2.1, column 2) do not refer to
offices or officeholders as such. Unlike arche, the Greek word kratos is not
used of “office.” In regime names, kratos must refer to political authority,
but if not authority gained by monopoly control of office, then ruling in
what manner? Kratos has a root meaning of “power” – but Greek linguis-
tic usage of the noun kratos and its verbal forms ranges widely across the
power spectrum, from “strength/power to” through “constraint” to “dom-
ination/power over.” We can narrow the range of possible meanings for
-kratos as a regime-name suffix. Unlike the -arche-root group of regime
names, which, as we have seen, is composed of “number terms,” none of the
prefixes in the -kratos group refers specifically to number. Thus, on the face
of it, -kratos terms seem not to be about distinguishing the size of the group
that holds offices, dominates, or rules over others as a subset of a larger body
of possible rulers. Does it nonetheless serve to distinguish those who rule
by employing power to dominate from those who are thereby dominated?11
It is possible, on the analogy of oligarchia in which hoi oligoi (the few)
monopolize public offices, to imagine that aristokratia pertains when hoi
aristoi (the excellent) dominate the rest by some other means. The term
might, therefore, be construed as asserting that “those who dominate are
excellent – and the dominated are not.” But, in light of the positive con-
notations of the Greek term, it seems more likely that aristokratia asserts,
first, that excellence is the defining principle of the regime and, next, the
strength or capacity of the excellent to organize public affairs accordingly.
In Aristotle’s taxonomy of regimes, aristokratia is the name of the regime in
which excellent few rule justly, in the common interest of all, as opposed
to oligarchia in which the few rule in their own factional advantage. Public
offices are, on this reading, just one mechanism that the capable rulers may
employ in organizing public affairs according to the regime’s core principle
of excellence.12
Among the other compounds in the -kratos group, only gunaikokratia,
“feminine rule” or rule by women (gunaikos = genitive of gune, “woman”),

11 On the wide range of meanings for kratos, see Liddel et al. 1968, s.v. Williams 1993: 105 points
to kratos as “physical constraint” and to its association with bia (force) in Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Bound. Domination is what Geuss 2008 characterizes as the relation “who whom.”
12 Positive connotations: Liddel et al. 1968, s.v. Aristotle on aristokratia: Politics 1279a34–37. The differ-
ence in meaning between the ancient Greek term and medieval and modern usages of “aristocracy”
are highlighted by Fisher and van Wees 2015.
26 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
could be construed as referring to monopoly officeholders. Timokratia
refers to an abstraction: time (honor). In Plato’s Republic, timokratia (the
second-best regime, after the rule of philosopher-kings) pertains when
honor (construed especially as courage: Balot 2014) is the defining principle
of the regime and the honorable organize public affairs accordingly. Isokra-
tia likewise refers to an abstraction, “equality.” By analogy to aristokratia
and timokratia, isokratia pertains when the general principle of the regime
is equality and when public affairs are arranged accordingly by equals. In
this case, it is especially difficult to see kratos as referring to domination,
insofar as domination is inherently a relationship of inequality.
Because isokratia was employed as a synonym for demokratia, it is espe-
cially important for our comparative purposes. Isokratia shares its prefix-
root (iso-, “equal”) with two other terms used by the fifth-century BCE his-
torian Herodotus as synonyms for democracy: isonomia and isegoria. Judg-
ing from isonomia (equal-law) and isegoria (equal-public address), it appears
that in political discourse, iso-prefix-roots refer to equality in respect to
access, in a sense of “right/capacity to make use of.” Isonomia is equality
in respect to access to law, legal processes, and legal protection. Isegoria
is equal access to deliberative forums: equal right to speak out on public
matters and to attend to the speech of others. Equal access in each case
is a valued means for using other valued instruments (law, public speech).
As in the case of aristokratia, the positive connotation of these evaluative
political terms suggests that equal access to the specific instrument in each
case conduces to a common good.13 Isokratia is, by analogy, equal access
to the instrument of kratos – to public power that conduces to a common
good through enabling things to be done in the public realm.
So kratos, when it is used as a regime-type suffix, appears to be power
in the sense, not of domination or monopoly of office, but, more posi-
tively, of strength, capability, or “capacity to do things.” This is well within
the range of how the word kratos and its verb forms were used in archaic
and classical Greek. Under isokratia, each person who belongs to the cate-
gory “those who are equal” (say, the citizens) enjoys access to public power
in this “capacity” sense, and likewise, mutatis mutandis, for gunaikokratia,
13 Isomoiria: “equal shares” is an iso-root term that seems to inhabit a somewhat different semantic
field. Solon, who was later regarded by the Athenians as the father of democracy (Mossé 1979),
speaks of the lower sort demanding isomoiria in the rich land of Attica with the worthy (kakoisin
esthlous is[omoirian] echein: [Aristotle] Constitution of Athens 12.3): This may refer to a proposed
redistribution of land (see Rhodes 1981 ad loc.), although other interpretations are possible. Thucy-
dides (7.75.6) refers to the retreating Athenian soldiers in Sicily in 413 BCE as “having a certain
isomoiria of evils,” while noting that sharing of the burden of misfortune with many (polloi) served
to alleviate its weight.
 Original Greek Definition 27
timokratia, and aristokratia.14 In each case, access to public power would
presumably include, but need not be limited to, access to public offices. In
sum, rather than imagining the -kratos group as sharing the -arche group’s
primary concern for the monopoly control of public offices by a strictly
delimited number of persons, I would suggest that each of the -kratos-root
terms originally referred, positively, to the aspiration for, or fact of, the
exercise of political power-as-capacity by the deserving: whether it was the
female, the honorable, the excellent, the equal – or, with demokratia, the
whole of the citizenry.15
Demokratia cannot mean “the demos rules/dominates by a monopoly
on officeholding” in that the singular demos (unlike the plural hoi oligoi)
must refer to a collectivity, a “public” – and that public cannot collectively
be “officeholders” in any ordinary sense.16 In classical Greek, demos had
multiple meanings, including the primary meaning of “citizenry” and the
secondary meanings of “the citizen assembly” and “the lower classes.”17 In
the postrevolutionary political context in which the demokratia compound
was coined, when all native, adult, male residents of Athenian territory were
enfranchised, demos must refer to “the whole of an extensive and diverse cit-
izen body” (in conformity with earlier Greek usage of the term) rather than
“the many who are poor” (i.e., “not leisured”), as it later came to mean to
democracy’s critics. When it refers to “the citizen assembly,” demos points
to the whole of the citizenry, insofar as access to the assembly was open to
all citizens. The demos that authorized legislation in a given meeting of the
assembly stood for the whole of the citizenry.18 In classical Athens, then,
demos originally meant “the whole of the citizenry” (free native male pop-
ulation of a defined territory) – not a sociologically delimited fragment of
the citizenry. Demos of demokratia was originally an inclusive term, refer-
ring to all potential rulers (in the relevant category of free, native, adult
14 Albeit, I cannot positively eliminate the counterposition that, in each case, what is being asserted
(in ordinary Greek political language, if not in the philosophical vocabulary of Plato or Aristotle)
is the defining characteristic (excellent, female, honorable, equal to one another) of the group that
rules by domination over others. But this seems less likely, in light of the positive connotations of
the relevant terms (with the possible exception of gunaikokratia) and the general Greek disapproval
of brute domination of rulers over potential rulers (free, native males as opposed, e.g., to slaves).
15 This suggests why there is no monokratia or oligokratia: “the one” and “the few,” when in authority,
were regarded as inherently strong and capable, through control of wealth, special education, and
high birth. So it was not in question whether the one or the few possessed a capacity to do things –
the question was whether they controlled the apparatus of government.
16 Aristotle worries about this issue in Book 3 of the Politics. See discussion of Lane 2013.
17 Liddel et al. 1968, s.v. Donlan 1970.
18 Athenian revolution of 508 BCE: Ober 2007a; the general enfranchisement of resident males after
the revolution: Badian 2000. Demos in assembly as synecdoche for the entire citizenry in Athenian
public discourse: Ober 1996: 117–122.
28 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
males) as opposed to just some. If we employ Aristotle’s analytic vocabu-
lary of parts and wholes, we may say that the demos was a comprehensive
whole rather than a subsidiary part. Thucydides has the democratic politi-
cian, Athenagoras, make that exact point in a speech to the citizen assembly
of Syracuse: “the demos encompasses the whole; oligarchy only a part.”19
If we extrapolate from isokratia and other -kratos compounds, the
term demokratia makes both philological and historical sense: Demokra-
tia, which emerged as a regime type with the historical self-assertion of
a demos after a popular revolution (Ober 2007a), asserts a demos’s collec-
tive capacity to do things, to rule in the positive sense of capably orga-
nizing public affairs. If this is right, demokratia does not refer in the first
instance to the demos’s monopolistic control of preexisting constitutional
authority. Demokratia is not just “the power of the demos” in the sense of
“the dominion or monopolistic power of the demos relative to other poten-
tial power-holders in the state.” Rather, it means, more capaciously, “the
empowered demos” – it is the regime in which the demos gains a collective
capacity to effect change in the public realm. And so it is not only a matter
of the people’s collective control of a public realm (Pettit 2013). Rather, it is
their collective capability to act effectively within that realm and, indeed,
to reconstitute the public realm through their joint action.
The institutions of Athenian demokratia were never centered on the use
of a majority-voting rule to elect officeholders. Voting for generals (for
example) and directly on policy was certainly important – the individ-
ual Athenian citizen could be described not only as isonomos and isegoros
but also as isopsephos: an equal in respect to his vote. But in contrast to
isonomia and isegoria, isopsephia is another “missing” classical Greek regime
name: It is unattested until the first century BCE and was never periphra-
sis for demokratia. Psephokratia (vote-power) is unknown in ancient Greek.
Ancient critics of popular rule sought to rebrand demokratia as the equiva-
lent of a tyrannical “polloi-archia” – as the monopolistic domination of gov-
ernment apparatus through the voting power of the many who were poor.
This is the strategy, for example, of the so-called Old Oligarch, an anony-
mous fifth-century pamphleteer (Ober 1998: Chapter 1). But we ought not
to confuse this rebranding with the positive meaning of term, as it was used
by Greek democrats across the long history of Greek democracy.20

19 Thucydides 6.39.1: “It will be said, perhaps, that democracy is neither wise (xuneton) nor equitable
(ison), but that the holders of property are also the best fitted to rule (archein). I say, on the contrary,
first, that the demos encompasses the whole (xumpas), oligarchy only a part (meros).”
20 Plato, in the Statesman, retains most of the fifth-century regime terminology but “doubles” the name
demokratia in order to refer to the power of the demos both in the positive sense of “law-abiding,
 Mature Greek Definition 29
Demokratia therefore originally meant “the People’s capacity to do
things” – to make history through joint action at scale.21 As used by its
inventors, the term democracy was descriptive, asserting that the people do
have the capacity to effect change. As we will see (Chapter 5), joint action
at scale required the exercise, by citizens, of inherent human capacities for
reason and communication in the formation of shared plans for the pur-
suit of common purposes.22 But its inventors also deployed “democracy”
normatively, contending that the people ought to be capable of making and
enforcing rules. The original Greek definition thus captures the core of
what a nontyrannical form of democracy is, in principle and practice: legit-
imate collective self-governance by citizens.

2.3 mature greek definition

The Greek term kratos can have, as we have seen, the sense of both strength
and constraint; those meanings are conjoined in acts of rule making and
enforcement. The kratos of the Athenian demos was manifest in rules,
enacted by the citizens and binding on all members of the Athenian com-
munity, and in the enforcement of those rules. In classical Athens, citi-
zens were expected to participate from time to time in the civic activities
that sustained the nontyrannical regime; not to do so was to risk the cen-
sure of fellow citizens, to be called out, as Thucydides’s Pericles puts it
in the famous Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.40.2), as “useless.” Athenian
law and participatory behavioral norms sustained democratic conditions of
political freedom, political equality, and civic dignity. Athenian democrats
and their ancient critics alike regarded those conditions as essential for
democracy’s continued existence.23 But the conditions of freedom, equal-
ity, and dignity in turn required restraint in the demos’s exercise of kratos.
In Greek political history, the full recognition that the demos must, and
can, impose legal limits on the exercise of its own capacity to do things, by

limited rule” and the negative sense of “lawless domination.” In Polybius’s History (6.4.5), written
in the second century BCE, demokratia becomes a generic term for “legitimate, law-respecting,
republican government” – and is opposed, as such, to ochlokratia, a neologism for “lawless mob
rule.”
21 This interpretation is consistent with the conjunction of demos and kratos in Aeschylus’s Suppliants
of ca. 463 BCE, a play that is often taken to offer the earliest periphrases of the word demokratia:
“the ruling hand of the people” (demou kratousa cheir: 604); “the people, the power that rules the
polis” (to damion, to ptolin kratunei: 699).
22 On the philosophical underpinnings of a methodologically individualistic theory of joint action,
I follow Bratman 2014; Bratman’s theory of joint action is applied to democracy at scale by Ober
2008a; Stilz 2009; Pettit 2013. See, further, Section 6.2.
23 Participation norm, which leaves ample space for pursuit of individual projects: Thucydides 2.40.2;
political freedom: Hansen 1996; political equality: Raaflaub 1996: civic dignity: Ober 2012.
30 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
regulating legislative procedure, developed well after the democratic found-
ing era. But by the end of the fifth century BCE, the need for limits had
been recognized and formalized in Athenian law.
The recognition that the authority of the ruling demos can and should
be limited by law is often thought to distinguish liberal democracy from
democracy before liberalism (Starr 2007). Limitations on legislative author-
ity in democratic government are associated with a liberal ideal of individ-
ual liberty, understood as a natural condition or an inherent human right.
Yet the theory and practice of legal limitation of legislative authority was
well developed in Greek antiquity, long before the emergence of doctrines
of natural law or rights theory. In classical Athens, it was the imperatives
of security and prosperity that impressed upon the citizens the necessity
of limiting the power of the assembled demos to act as an unconstrained
legislative body. The necessity was reconfigured as a virtue by the realiza-
tion that the essential democratic conditions of political liberty and equal-
ity were potentially compromised by the unconstrained exercise of public
authority by a democratic majority.
Democracy, as a regime type, persisted in the Greek world for some 400
years; the theory and practice of democracy evolved considerably over that
time. By the era of the historian Polybius, in the second century BCE, the
term demokratia was synonymous with “legitimate nonautocratic govern-
ment,” and the notion of “mixed government” – in which presumptively
monarchical, aristocratic, and popular elements would serve to counteract
tendencies to autocracy inherent within each element – was commonplace.
But in practice, legislative limitation came much earlier.24
Certain self-imposed constraints on the authority of the demos to do
what it wished to individual citizens appear to be coterminous with democ-
racy’s founding. The practice of ostracism, for example, by which an indi-
vidual could be expelled from the community by plurality vote was lim-
ited by procedural rules. The rules required a prior majority vote in favor
of ostracism, permitted such a vote only once each year, and limited the
period of expulsion to ten years.25 For our purposes, however, the key devel-
opment was an innovative set of legal changes enacted in the late fifth and
early fourth centuries BCE. Those changes were motivated by the Athe-
nians’ recognition that the stability of the state required systematic con-
straints on the power of the people to do things, just when and as they
pleased. The constraints came in two forms: first, formally distinguishing
24 Greek democracy outside Athens: Robinson 1997, 2011. Polybius on democracy: esp. 6.4.5; on mixed
government: 6.11.11.
25 Ostracism: Forsdyke 2005; Ober 2015b: 174–175.
 Mature Greek Definition 31
day-to-day policy, made by simple majority vote in a legislative citizen
assembly (usually by show of hands), from fundamental constitutional law,
made by a more cumbersome, multistage quasi-judicial process; second,
formally subordinating the “decrees” passed in the ordinary meetings of the
assembly to codified constitutional “laws” made through the more cumber-
some quasi-judicial process.26
In the late fifth century BCE, in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War,
the Athenians instituted, by democratic means, a new constitutional rule
whereby they required the immediate expression of the will of the assem-
bled citizenry, in the form of “a decree of the Assembly” to be consistent
with existing fundamental law. They had recently codified and archived
the laws. Now they distinguished the procedure for making and amending
fundamental law from the direct-vote method of passing decrees. Consti-
tutional law could be revised, if and when a majority of the assembled
citizens voted to initiate a constitutionally mandated process that allowed
specific laws to be challenged and, potentially, changed. According to the
usual reconstruction of the process, lawmakers responsible for considering
and authorizing changes were randomly selected (by lot) from among cit-
izens over age 30 (Hansen 1999: 167–168; cf. Canevaro 2015). The process
resembled a jury trial, in which the assembled lawmakers heard detailed
arguments for and against adding a new law and simultaneously repealed
those existing laws that contradicted provisions of the new law. Amend-
ing the constitution was not nearly so difficult as it is, for example, in the
contemporary US. But, when compared with ordinary Athenian legislative
procedure, the new process for changing Athenian constitutional law was
relatively protracted, public, and deliberative.
The constitutional innovation came in the aftermath of two oligarchic
coups d’état and a devastating military defeat. After the democratic restora-
tion of 403 BCE, the Athenians saw that a return to prosperity required
political stability. Stability in turn required a credible commitment on the
part of the ordinary-citizen majority to a legal order that would protect
the persons and property of the wealthy. Elite citizens must, for their part,
credibly commit to preserving the entitlements (e.g., pay for public service)
that enabled the relatively poor to participate in politics. The civil war era

26 Athenian constitutional reforms of the later fifth century BCE and following: Hansen 1999; their
context: Shear 2011; Carawan 2013. Motivation for changes: Carugati 2015, with literature survey.
Canevaro 2013, 2015, forthcoming, argues for a somewhat different procedure and suggests (per litt.)
that the nomothetai were ordinary assemblymen. For my present purposes, the important thing is
that under the new rules, the procedures for making constitutional laws were distinct from and
more cumbersome than those for making ordinary legislative decrees.
32 Meaning of Democracy in Classical Athens
was ended with a reconciliation agreement that took, as Edwin Carawan
(2013) has shown, the form of a contract between the elite-citizen “men
of the city” and the ordinary-citizen “men of Piraeus.” The new constitu-
tional order was predicated on acknowledging that the social diversity of
the demos gave rise to opposing policy preferences. Yet it also recognized
what Federica Carugati (2015) has called “the patrios politeia consensus”
across that diverse population – a widespread agreement that Athenians
were “ancestrally” committed to living according to their own laws. There
was general agreement that behavior that endangered the ability of Athe-
nians to negotiate diverse preferences and to live together peacefully was
against the law. There was also a widely shared sense that toleration of law-
lessness led to poverty and insecurity. That general consensus was enough
to bootstrap recommitment to a formal system of fundamental constitu-
tional law.
The change in the way in which constitutional law was made in Athens
was, therefore, predicated on an equilibrium solution, achieved in high-
stakes social conditions by people who recognized that they had more to
gain by cooperating than by fighting. The result was what we may call the
mature (philo-democratic) Greek definition of democracy: collective self-
governance by a socially diverse body of citizens, limited by constitutional
laws that were also established by citizens.
That ancient definition is consistent with two of the most famous and
resonant phrases in early American political history. One is Abraham Lin-
coln’s succinct evocation, in his Gettysburg Address, of “government of the
people, by the people, for the people.” Basic democracy is for the people,
in the sense of aiming at the fulfillment of fundamental interests that are
commonly held by the citizen body as a whole, rather than merely satisfy-
ing the preferences of a majority faction. It is by the people insofar as the
citizens make, execute, and enforce public policy. And it is of the people in
that democracy is a common possession. The citizens own the government,
it is their government, because they were and are its author. That collec-
tive authorship and ownership had been asserted in the previous century
in the Preamble of the US Constitution: “We the People . . . do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”27
The assumed and aspirational political context in 1787 and 1863 was,
of course, a representative government rather than a direct democracy on
the Athenian model. As noted above, ancient Greek democracies came
about and were sustained in distinctive and presumably unrepeatable

27 On the importance of the Preamble to a democratic reading of the Constitution, see Amar 2005.
 Mature Greek Definition 33
historical circumstances. They manifested distinctive social and cultural
features. Some of those features, which included slavery and denial of par-
ticipation rights to women, are foreign and abhorrent to any contemporary
regime that today would be considered a democracy. But, as we turn to the
Demopolis thought experiment in the next chapter, we need not be bur-
dened with ancient Greek sociocultural baggage or, for that matter, with
the attitudes characteristic of political leaders in the America of 1787 or
1863. If Demopolis is imagined as a state in the twenty-first century CE, its
citizens will not require a moral commitment to principles of liberalism to
do without slavery and to open participation rights to women.
All ancient Greek democratic governments were, as Paul Cartledge
(2016) has emphasized, procedurally different from all modern democracies
in relying on the regular and direct legislative activity of citizens. I suggested
in Section 2.1 that the procedural distinction does not point to an unbridge-
able conceptual chasm. In Chapter 7 we will turn to the question of how
the basic democracy framework might support a government in which the
people have delegated to representatives the primary responsibility for most
(although not necessarily all) rule making and enforcement. For now, I
assume that until it is shown that a representative government of a large
state cannot be a basic democracy, that is, a system of self-government in
which citizens are capable and (directly or through representatives) col-
lective rulers, it remains possible that democracy before liberalism could
be relevant for a modern state.28 Thus, as we turn to the thought exper-
iment of Demopolis in the next chapter, I consider it possible that the
government that will emerge from the experiment could be provisionally
delegated to representatives. By abstracting from the specific historical cir-
cumstances in which ancient citizen self-government arose, the thought
experiment allows us to posit a system of basic democracy in different con-
texts – including modernity.

28 Representative democracy: Pitkin 1967; Manin 1997; Urbinati 2006. Achen and Bartels 2016 and
Caplan 2007 are prominent examples of the argument that the people are incapable of effective col-
lective self-government, under the conditions of modernity. Like other liberal critics of democracy,
they seem, however, eager to retain the term “democracy” for their preferred form of government,
a strategy reminiscent of Polybius, above. Of course, democracy, as a form of organizational gover-
nance, is not limited to states; see, for example, Manville and Ober 2003.