state. At another meeting, petitioners could address the people formally on any
subject. The remaining meetings were for other business. The meeting place for the
assembly was on the lower slopes of a small hill called the Pnyx near the agora and
the Acropolis, and may have accommodated as many as 6,000, though we may
suppose that numbers were generally much lower. Meetings were begun with the
question ‘who wishes to speak to the assembly?’ In theory any citizen might take up
the challenge. Voting seems to have been chiefly by a show of hands. The assembly’s
decisions were implemented by the council, which also had an important role in
financial matters. Only those officers whose duties required special expertise, such
as the ten generals or certain financial administrators, were not appointed by lot but
by annual election with prior nomination. The generals could be re-elected annually.
But all officials had to undergo scrutiny before taking office and were accountable
upon leaving it. The cornerstones of the developed democracy were therefore annual
sortition (also a feature of the lawcourts with their mass juries) and rotation, which
prevented power being concentrated in factions or individual office-holders.
So by the mid-century, as a result of these measures the power and influence of
the old aristocracy and the well-to-do were curtailed while the lower orders of the
state were given equal rights. This extension of the franchise making it more inclusive
was complemented by a measure that had the opposite effect. In 454, when the
archonship was extended to the lowest class of citizens, Pericles made citizenship
more exclusive by enacting a law that children were only eligible for citizenship if
both their parents were themselves Athenian citizens. The law seems to have been
rigorously enforced. By modern standards, therefore, the Athenian democracy was
a rather limited affair, made more so by the citizenship law. Greek non-citizens
(metoikoi), often traders and businessmen, who in total may have amounted to as
much as a third of the total free population could have residence but were not allowed
to own property in Attica, or to marry an Athenian citizen. Only rarely were they
granted citizenship as a result of some special service, nor was it possible for an
individual who was not by birth an Athenian citizen to buy a way into it. Women,
though they might have citizenship, were excluded from exercising political rights on
grounds of their sex. Slaves by definition had no rights. Nevertheless by ancient
standards, the extension of franchise and its exercise were indeed remarkable and
way beyond anything that had developed previously.
There was a radical change, too, in Athenian external relations. When the island
of Naxos attempted to secede from the Delian league in 470, it was prevented from
doing so, forfeiting its fleet and its defensive walls and being required to contribute
money, which was spent upon the Athenian navy. In 465 the island of Thasos also
attempted to secede and met a similar fate. Gradually fewer states contributed ships
and more contributed money, which was obviously to the Athenian advantage.
Individual cities made their own arrangements with the leading power, but there is
62 THE GREEKS