Athenian Democracy: Legitimate Or Not?

Athenian Democracy: Legitimate or not? According to Webster’s dictionary, the term “democracy” is defined as: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections. The word democracy comes from the words demos and kratos. The definition of Demos is people and the definition of Kratos is power. The Athenian’s claimed to have practiced democracy, but using that definition it was not a total democracy. Many of the people living in Athens at the time were not even considered citizens, much less able to vote. The Athenians had some principles associated with making it a democracy when it came to the process of

During the era in which they did this there was an island named Eobeoa, which was located almost directly across from Athens. After the Athenians defeated the Persians, shortly thereafter they also defeated the people from Eobeoa. After they conquered them, they took the land that they used and divided into 100 acre areas that were distributed among the Athenians. To protect this new asset that they had the Athenians forcible moved out even more people on the coast to build forts along the shore. While the new citizens lived there they hired mercenaries to protect their land while they were away. This was one of the first places that the Athenians built on their way to making an empire (Copestake and

The women during this time frame were viewed so poorly they were perceived as evil. Continuing with that, the women were to keep almost their whole face covered so they because they were hardly supposed to be seen at all. Men were viewed as having complete control over their wives, which is why the woman covered their hair because their husband was the only one allowed to see it. Slaves were viewed even lower than women were in the Athenian democracy. Many of the slaves became slaves due to the fact of being prisoners of war. There was a very large number of slaves and they were kept under watch for every second of the day. The Greeks had watch towers looking over the area where they slept at night. It is evident that there was a clear division among the different people during this time, with the male citizens having the ultimate power and only say over everything that went on. The citizens in the Athenian democracy who did not vote were not viewed highly at all, they were called iodites, where the word idiot comes from. (Copestake and Hughes).

Not everyone in the Athenian Democracy could be considered a citizen. In fact, a very small number of those actually living in within the Athenian democracy could actually participate in the voting and in the government. The only people eligible to become a citizen were males. These males had to have completed military service, or ephebes, and had to be over the