300, Athenians still identified themselves by the old double system of father's name and deme.
The second limit on the ekklesia was the boule of 500 members, -whose main function was to consider in advance everything which came
before the ekklesia. Like the Attic demes, the boule has been described - this time by an ancient author - as a microcosm (mikra polis) of
Athens, and the traditional view that the boule was merely the agent and servant of the ekklesia largely depends on this assumption that the
boule was socially representative and a 'cross-section' of the people. The assumption is not well founded. The boule was elected and unpaid
when Cleisthenes devised it in 507, and the first evidence for appointment of councillors (bouleutai) by lot from demesmen is about 450, and
for pay no earlier than 411. That is not to say that these were the dates when those institutions were actually introduced (in both cases it is
tempting to associate them with Ephialtes and the changes of 462), but it is important to remember that the change from an aristocratic to a
democratic boule was a gradual one. Actual evidence that the boule was socially unrepresentative, in that wealthy and influential citizens
preponderated, is harder to assess.
There is practically no literary evidence; but by examining surviving lists of councillors, which begin in the fifth century, and checking them
against independent evidence of wealth, we can see that membership of the boule was associated with higher social rank than we should have
expected had the system been really random. There are also allegations, in the writings of Athenian orators, that so-and-so wangled his way on
to the boule in a given year, and there are some striking coincidences - father-son or brother-brother teams serving together, or famous
politicians who sit on the boule in particularly exciting years for foreign policy - which all suggest that there were ways of circumventing the
lot (which was supposed to ensure that bouleutai were supplied by demes in a random way). The most obvious method of circumvention was
simple willingness to sacrifice time and therefore money when one's fellow demesmen were unwilling, but the 'wangling' allegations may
imply that more positive pressures were applied by the ambitious, who could for instance have bribed fellow demesmen not to put their names
forward at deme level. All this means that the boule, as a collection of influential and self-confident semi-professionals, might be expected to
lead the ekklesia, not just to follow, and we do indeed find the boule engaging in diplomacy which (judging from the formulas of the relevant
inscriptions) was never ratified by the ekklesia; moreover there is undeniable evidence of diplomacy being conducted, on occasion, in secret
from the ekklesia. There were of course limits to the boule's authority; for instance, membership lasted only a year, and nobody could serve
more than twice (provisions which prevented the boule from acquiring the hereditary prestige enjoyed by councils in some ancient states); but
even this should not be exaggerated: a particular political group would surely take steps to see that it always had a representative, in an
informal sense of that word, on the boule. Mention of the formal rules about service in the boule raises a fundamental question: "were the
lowest property group, the thetes, eligible for service? If not, that would be highly relevant to what was said above about the elite character of
the boule. But the evidence is unclear and the answer disputed.
Third, the generals. We have noticed that generals could be deposed, as even Pericles was, shortly before his death in 429. But common sense
suggests that in ordinary conditions, and especially in wartime, the generals must have had great executive latitude: for instance, security
considerations, although admittedly never a strong point with Greeks, must have made it undesirable to discuss detailed strategy in the full
ekklesia. And because it was an elected office, with no limit on re-election, the generalship enjoyed unusual respect.
Fourth, the 'demagogues', the popular leaders, such as Cleon in the 420s and Hyperbolus after him, who without necessarily holding any
particular office nevertheless exercised great power by oratorical and persuasive skills. Vilified by the literary sources, men like Cleon can be
partly rehabilitated by the help of inscriptions, which have shown not only that their social origins were not nearly so obscure as comic
playwrights like Aristophanes say, but also that a Hyperbolus was capable of thinking out complex and sensible legislation. In fact the
demagogues (and Pericles was himself only a grander kind of demagogue) owed their positions of influence to a structural gap in the
democracy: imperial administration meant an ever-increasing volume of work, and the Athenians, lacking a civil service of a modern type,
allowed such work to be done by politicians who made detailed knowledge their business: knowledge was power. The sanction against a
Hyperbolus was ostracism, a way of exiling a man for ten years by a kind of popular referendum (the word comes from the potsherds, ostraka,
used in the 'polling' process). In the fourth century there was a more sinister development: specialist politicians got a firmer grip on power by
being elected, for instance, to control state funds, jobs from which it was harder to unseat them.