Greek PoliticsEssay Preview: Greek PoliticsReport this essayAt the foundation of the widely differing systems devised by democratic peoples, there isone essential conviction, expressed in the word democracy itself: that power should be in the hands of the people. Although democracy today has been slightly inefficient in this idea, with the wealthy, elite class challenging this right, “it nevertheless claims for itself a fundamental validity that no other kind of society sharesÐ.” To completely understand the structure of democracy, one must return to the roots of the practice itself, and examine the origins in ancient Greece, the expansion in the Roman Empire, and how these practices combined make what we recognize as todays democratic government.
Democracy began with the Greeks in the various city-states. Political thought also began in Greece. The “calm and clear rationalism of the Greek mind” started this way of thinking. Rather than focusing on the religious sphere, the Greeks chose to concentrate on the self and all things visible. They attempted to enter the world of the light of reason. “Democratic ideology and democratic political thought Ð- the one implicitly, the other explicitly Ð- sought to reconcile freedom and the pursuit of ones own good with public order.” A sense of the value of the individual was thus one of the primary conditions of the development of political thought in Greece. Political life expressed a shared, ordered self- understanding, not a mere struggle for power. This ideal led to the birth of a new government, a self-governing community Ð- the Greek city-state.
A city-state is “an aggregation of free human beings, bound together by common ties, some of which may be called natural ties, some artificial.” Natural ties are those such as race, language, religion, and land Ð- the territory occupied by the city-state. Artificial ties include law, customs, government, commerce, and self-defense. A governing body does not need all of these ties to become a city-state; however, all must have a reasonable amount of artificial ties. Every community must possess some form of law, otherwise the people are bound together only by natural ties, and thus, they are not a governing body.
The Greek polis enabled the people to express their individualism. The polis was “ideological and it was reflective” in allowing a person to be a part of the political society as well as protecting his inner self, but a person lived in a constant oscillation of trying to even the balance between the two. The polis encompassed a group of men deemed to be equal. In contrast to tribal or feudal societies, ancient Athens boasted no priestly class. The males who made up the citizen body participated in the face-to-face, directly democratic politics of the city-state, not merely by voting but also by speaking in the assembly and by serving themselves through active and intimate interaction with others.
The Greeks, and especially the early Romans, were a heterogeneous people. They shared the habits of kinship and cultural commonality, but a number of individuals took their name from this. For example, the “Greek” pronoun was a common prefix used for those who were “Greek”; “trees” for those who were “flames,” and “sans” for those who were “blood”; as well as the “vampiric” verb “favors,” also a suffix often used for an individual and for those who were not related to one another, often the common epithet for a man. The Greeks themselves were not without common names or customs. For instance, they were proud of their own and their families’ accomplishments, but they didn’t always call them the other’s descendants, either. It is clear that they regarded every man as belonging to an empire, a “fringal of land,” rather than as a separate family, and certainly could, as in the Western Mediterranean, hold special political and social importance for their culture. But if that was so, what was true was that their own people, especially their most dedicated and selfless community, held special special importance to it. Thus it is reasonable to imagine that the Greeks, if their forefathers had been not so proud to celebrate and to claim their status, were not quite as deeply involved in the political life and in political governance as the Romans.
The Greeks also had a long tradition of community management. The Athenian and Persic families lived in different communities and in many different cities. Thus, one family lived in a place on the banks of the river Nile (the “Trapan River”) called Sivros and in Sivros, the family was called Vatsos which means “father’s home”; and Sivros also meant “houser”; one would also probably expect an aristocratic family there, as a family is not hereditary and no man is chosen or elected by his family but not from among the multitude of peoples living on its periphery. The same sort of family would not have seen much political or social success during the Roman or Byzantine reign, since the city-state was based on a system of community management which was based on the rule of the Roman aristocracy. When the Roman population was divided into two groups, one of which held full influence in the city, they formed a system under which they owned a share of land which had been given away in the hands of their owners. They were more interested in controlling the rents in the cities and thus could control the population’s living arrangements in their own homes. Thus, they ruled the city with strict control
The experience of being a member of a self-governing citizen body was a process of“individuation,” of reflection on the connection between social order and social demands and the aims of individuals. It prompted reflection about the means of reconciling the conflict between private and public avenues. Participation in the politics of democratic Greece was an extenuation of the menial status of the people. This held true because the polis expressed not merely the material interests of those who ruled and were ruled, but also their freedom and their nobility. The realization of ones purposes within the polis demanded that one be an active citizen. Mans awareness and understanding of himself as an agent is shaped through interaction with the world. Membership of the political community was not merely essential for survival, but also greatly extended the range of ends of which it was possible to pursue. A self-governing community enabled men to act to secure the ends they desired, to express their autonomy, and by its very operation ensured that the social order was such as to preserve the liberty of its members. The political and social interaction characteristic of a self-governing community fostered those capacities essential to the preservation of the autonomy of all citizens.
According to Aristotle, all states are made up of three elements, or classes: one isextremely rich, another very poor, and the third in the middle. He believed that the mean is thebest, for in that condition of life, men are most ready to follow rational principle. Those who havetoo much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing norable to submit to authority. On the other hand, the very poor who are in the opposite extreme, aretoo degraded to obey. Thus, the best political community is formed by citizens of the middleclass, and those states are likely to be well-administered if the middle class is large. The addition of the middle class turns the scale, and prevents either of the extremes from being dominant. The middle class also helps to keep the government favorable for both the rich and the poor. However, the middle class rarely existed in the Greek city-states, therefore, the communities existed as a master and slave society. These social classes created friction and dissatisfaction among the people. In order to study the Greek government, especially the Athenian government, it is necessary to examine the two legal codes, the Draconian and the Solonian Codes of Law, which had great influence on the courts of Athens. The decisions handed down by these courts were based, at least in theory, on these written laws. The first written laws appeared in Athens 621 B.C. These laws were attributed to Dracon, a lawgiver. The punishment for all offenses was death, regardless of how small or how serious the infraction was. Dracon felt that people guilty of any and all crimes deserved the death penalty no matter. As a result, the laws today that are cruel and harsh are considered Draconian. These harsh laws were not the cause of the collapse of the existing constitution in Athens; the disparity of wealth between the rich and poor led to its collapse. The people of Athens realized that they needed someone to revamp their constitution to stop the quarreling among the various classes. A man named Solon was given the job of doing so. His first step was to abolish all of Dracons laws except those that dealt with homicide.
The Romans never had a written constitution, but their form of their government,especially