In this way, the 500 members of the boule dictated how the entire democracy would work. Its main function was to decide what matters would come before the ekklesia. It dealt with ambassadors and representatives from other city-states. It supervised government workers and was in charge of things like navy ships (triremes) and army horses. Unlike the ekklesia, the boule met every day and did most of the hands-on work of governance. The boule was a group of 500 men, 50 from each of ten Athenian tribes, who served on the Council for one year. The second important institution was the boule, or Council of Five Hundred. (Only about 5,000 men attended each session of the Assembly the rest were serving in the army or navy or working to support their families.) Any member of the demos-any one of those 40,000 adult male citizens-was welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens. The EkklesiaĪthenian democracy was a direct democracy made up of three important institutions. Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from Athens for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia. Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process. For example, in Athens in the middle of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or “resident foreigners,” and 150,000 slaves. However, the “equality” Herodotus described was limited to a small segment of the Athenian population in Ancient Greece. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe. Although this Athenian democracy would survive for only two centuries, its invention by Cleisthenes, “The Father of Democracy,” was one of ancient Greece’s most enduring contributions to the modern world. This system was comprised of three separate institutions: the ekklesia, a sovereign governing body that wrote laws and dictated foreign policy the boule, a council of representatives from the ten Athenian tribes and the dikasteria, the popular courts in which citizens argued cases before a group of lottery-selected jurors. It was the first known democracy in the world. In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos, “the people,” and kratos, or “power”).

Democracy 3 achievement guide