Fragment Of The Tribute List For The Year 440-39 B.C., recording 1/60 of the sums paid to Athens by contributing states of the Athenian
League. The main headings here are for the Hellespontine District and the Thraceward District. The sums are in drachmae, written in Attic
alphabetic numerals. The lists of payments were exhibited on the Acropolis.
The theory was that the ekklesia was sovereign in Athenian political life, though it is hard to find a clear statement of this principle anywhere:
the cry that 'it would be shameful if the people were not allowed to do what it wishes' is once raised - but to justify a piece of gross illegality.
Aristotle perhaps puts it best when he says that the people would like to be sovereign. Actual popular sovereignty is best illustrated by the
power which the people retained - and used - to depose and punish its servants, among whom the ten generals were conspicuous: they held the
most important classical Athenian office to which appointment was by election, not by lot.
But there were various ways in which the sovereignty and importance of the ekklesia were eroded in practice. The first limit on its importance
was the vigour of deme life. The demes (there were 139 of them) were the constituent villages of Attica; each deme supplied a given number
of councillors to the boule, the numbers varying in proportion to the population of the deme. But that was far from being the only thing that
demes did: like the democratization of Attica, the sixth-century centralization of Attica was a very partial affair, in that the city of Athens
never absorbed all the political energies of the citizens of Attica; instead Attica was a kind of federal state in which local and national loyalties
coexisted. Deme decrees, -which survive on stone, are the best proof of this: they begin with formulas which closely echo the language of
'national' decrees ('it seemed good to the demesmen of ...', corresponding to 'it seemed good to the Council and People' of Athens), and cover
such topics as the lending out of deme money, the leasing of a deme theatre, the construction of a deme 'civic centre' (agora), and the
conferring of honours on men from other demes, and even on foreigners. The mention of theatres and agora (whose existence has occasionally
been confirmed by archaeology) is itself suggestive: these buildings were characteristic of a developed polis and the Attic demes have been
described in modern times as 'city-states in miniature'. A further proof of this is the intense religious life at deme level, which inscriptions
attest, including long and complex cultic calendars (one inscription even shows an admittedly large and prestigious deme consulting the oracle
at Delphi on its own initiative). Religion was central to the life of the polis, as to the deme. Naturally there were limits to the autonomy of
demes: they had no 'foreign policy' beyond the right to honour foreigners, and in some respects their finances were subordinate to those of the
city of Athens; for instance, the fortifications of militarily exposed demes were a state responsibility. But the absence of deme inscriptions
after about 300 B.C. sadly illustrates the decline of one highly characteristic aspect of classical Athenian polis life, although, centuries after