Part 2 - appearance of Democracy - birth and infancy in Greece

Democracy has been described as “one of the rarest, most delicate, and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience”(Donald Kagan, Pericles). “It has been a fleeting phenomenon in the history of government and has lain outside the experience of the vast majority of the peoples of the world down the ages.  It originated and flourished in Athens for almost two centuries 2,500 years ago…But…democracy…disappeared root and branch from human experience and…survived only in the history books and in the reflections of the intelligentsia.” (Thomas Mitchell, Democracy’s Beginning, The Athenian Story). 

Certainly, there has always been a yearning for freedom when it has been taken away or never existed.  However, this generally has not been sufficient.  The notion of freedom must make the crucial transition or transformation to an organized effort that achieves a critical mass or threshold. 

It is true that as time went on and the various constituent parts of Democracy began to develop and coalesce there began to be something to build on, react to, and alter.  However, this has been the case relatively recently in human history.  

So, how did the bits and pieces of Democracy appear and develop?  Like nearly everything about the evolution of our species collective development, known facts, actions, and written words, only take us so far.  Why exactly did something happen when it did and in the way it did? There can be some explanatory clarity in hindsight but there has always been an element (large or small) of chance, luck, and serendipity in all human affairs.  We only have so much control and some potentially wonderful event or action can nonetheless go nowhere.  Here are some key moments we know about where history, agency, and good fortune combined to create formative moments in the development of Democracy.

The Greek Polis, discussed in Part 1, was the organizational form within which Democracy developed.  The Poleis, or city-states developed in what is now Greece, between 800 and 500 BC, and they numbered over 800 by the end of this period. This time frame is  known as the Archaic Age with very little known about most of it.  The Polis, can be summarized as a self-governing, geographic region with defined borders and a significant urban center.  At its core, the Polis was its people.  The urban center was central to the lives of all the people within the Polis. 

Much of what we do know about the Archaic age comes from Homer (see his epics, the Illiad and the Odyssey) ) and the less well-known, Hesiod.  Homer is believed to have lived some time between the 12th and 8th century BC and Hesiod in the late 8th century. 

The developed Homeric polis was a self-governing entity controlled by a hereditary aristocracy.  There is nothing in this that we can recognize as democracy.  However, a seed of democracy was the self-governing feature even if by an oligarchy as opposed to a single all powerful ruler.  A second seed was the demos, a large grouping likely composed of independent farmers.  The demos had no decision-making power but they were formally assembled to be given information and hear debates when major public issues were at hand. These two seeds were not at all common - neighboring areas were ruled by despots and had no space for recognition of the welfare of individuals. 

The Homeric ideal form of the polis was defined by “order, justice, and security under the benign  governance of a worthy nobility motivated by a concern for the public good as well as personal glory. The ordinary citizen had a place and a role in the workings of the body politic, and a right to expect that his political masters would treat him fairly and protect his interests”  (Thomas Mitchell). Of course, these ordinary citizens did not include women or slaves. 

In contrast to Homer, Hesiod focused on the peasant farmer and saw honest toil as the pathway to reaching ones full potential (arete).  While he did not object to the class divisions of his time and control by the aristocracy, Hesiod focused on the issues of the correct use of power and the moral foundations of the polis.  He was the first to lay out a clear ethical basis for the polis, “the first of the Greeks to articulate in a structured way a concept of the state as a community of citizens whose relations and institutions must be based on justice.  He has a well-developed concept of what justice means, presenting it as an intrinsic human quality the predisposes human beings to have regard for each other, to give each his due, to live together in accordance with accepted norms of behavior in a manner that ensure order, harmony, and concern for the common good.”(Thomas Mitchell)  In his day, this would have been a strange set of very foreign and difficult to comprehend concepts for nearly all.