Ostraca Found In The Athenian Agora. These are votes cast to choose a victim for ostracism - banishment from Athens for ten years. They are
scratched on potsherds and the examples shown name four prominent politicians of fifth-century Athens - Aristides, Themistocles, Cimon,
Pericles.
Fifth and finally, there were features of the ekklesia's own procedure and psychology which reduced its democratic effectiveness and
independence. It met much less often than the boule, and infrequent meetings do not make for informed debate. Its votes were not counted;
opinion was manifested by show of hands and this was then gauged impressionistically, as at a modern trade-union mass meeting. And even
as late as the end of the fifth century, the age of the demagogues, there is evidence that the democratic Athenian voter 'loved a lord': the young
aristocrat Alcibiades in 415 could still demand a high office of state on the grounds that his racehorses had won at the recent Olympic Games.
Such claims show the enduring power of wealth, especially inherited wealth, which inevitably militates against democracy. Despite all the
blemishes and shortcomings of Athenian democracy, its long arm did act as a protector against arbitrary treatment of the poorer classes by
oligarchs throughout the fifth-century Aegean world, and from the point of view of those classes it was a tragedy that that world gradually lost
faith in its protector.
War
The democracy just described was called 'generally acknowledged folly' by Alcibiades; but we have seen that Alcibiades and his class stood to
gain from the combination of democracy and empire: magistracies and military commands were conferred on them through the deference of
their political 'masters' in the ekklesia, and the empire brought them territorial and other material benefits. They were therefore ready to fight
to preserve the 'acknowledged folly' when the Great Peloponnesian War broke out in 431. But that war was to break the power and influence
of the Alcibiades class; virtually no Athenians entered chariot teams at Olympia in the three generations after 400 (as opposed to twelve in the
single generation 433-400), and when the empire itself disappeared in 404 there disappeared also the motive for upper-class co-operation with
what one oligarch's epitaph called, with engaging frankness, the 'accursed people'; so that the rich no longer splashed out on civic expenditure
at home with their old panache. The greatest change effected by the Peloponnesian War was an increase in professionalism generally, and
naturally this was most conspicuous in the military sphere. Politician and general are henceforth separate callings in Athens, a development
foreshadowed in the career of Pericles himself, whose first known activities (in the 460s) are purely political; only later came the great
military commands. This professionalism meant that Alcibiades' horses, even supposing that the accursed demos had let him keep them in the
more vindictive atmosphere of the fourth century, would not have sufficed to guarantee him political or military success. Such professionalism
affected more than the officer class. The fourth century has been called the age of mercenary soldiers, but the change begins in the last
decades of the fifth century: when in 400 the Athenian Xenophon helped to lead a paid army of 10,000 Greeks eastwards in support of a
Persian pretender, Cyrus, the financial terms of mercenary service are already fixed and taken for granted. Persian satraps (provincial