Democracy in Ancient Greece: Ideals and Realities
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If to us 'democracy' is almost always 'a good thing', even if at times somewhat vaguely all things to all men, to the Greeks from the very beginning it was a partisan, fighting word, separating both philosophies of government and social classes. There were counter-coups by aristocratic factions against democratic ways of 15 governing the state, and these factions and their publicists and their sympathizers throughout the centuries saw demos not as 'the people' in an honorific sense (as centuries later an aristocrat, Charles James Fox, was to move a toast in the early days of the French Revolution: 'To our sovereign masters, the People'); but rather as the mob, the ignorant and vengeful masses, those too poor to have any education that could fit them for public debate and public service; those all too easily swayed by demagogues trading promises for power. Plato in his dialogues venomously denounces democracy as being the rule of opinion over knowledge; only those with philosophical knowledge of the real nature of things were fit to rule - a view hardly popular, if we read him literally (and it is debatable whether we should), except to tyrants or kings. Broadly speaking, he favoured the idealized aristocratic virtues of excellence and personal perfection.
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The fundamental democratic ideal was freedom (eleutheria). This was seen as both the political liberty, indeed almost the obligation, to participate in decision-making but also the private liberty to live more or less as one pleased. The most important liberty was freedom to speak out for the common good in the public assemblies and freedom to speak and to think as one chose in the privacy of the home or in the symposia, the male, social discussion clubs. Equality was prized, but it was legal and political equality, not economic in the least (except in fantasy in some of the dramatic satires and comedies, even equality for women in the Ecclesiazusai). And there was also the collective freedom of the city itself from conquest by others. The Greeks as a whole boasted that they were the eleutheroi, the free. Not merely were they collectively free (after some difficulties, most obviously, from domination by the Persian emperors), but they held themselves to be morally superior as individuals to those they called barbaroi, or barbarians, precisely because the barbarian Persians, however sophisticated, did not enjoy free politics and democracy. It was a cultural distinction, not a racial one: the culture of free men contrasted with the subjects of despotism.
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The difficulties and disadvantages of aristocratic rule were many. The claim to have the rule of the wise and the experienced in the business of government had obvious flaws. Aristotle pointed out in his book of lectures The Politics and in his studies of constitutions that aristocracy as an ideal too often degenerated into either oligarchy, the rule of the powerful, or plutocracy, the rule of the rich. None the less skill and wisdom were needed in politics and the business of good government. The best answer lay in finding some middle way: the few ruling with the consent of the many, or 'ruling and being ruled in turn'. And, in any case, rule by the few always needed to placate the many, especially for the defence of the state and the conduct of war. In Athenian terms, someone had to pull the oars of the great trireme war galleys and do so willingly and skilfully; not a job for sullen slaves or time-serving mercenaries but for willing citizens defending their city - or expanding its power aggressively.
