First Democracy In Athens Research Paper

Athens, a small city state that was located in Greece, created the first democracy. A democracy is a government that allows all people to vote on some of the decisions that the government makes. They were considered a city state because they were a city in Greece, but they had to create their own government. Athens is now the capital of Greece. The people in Athens created the first democracy between the 5th and 4th century bce (bc). Before Athens, other civilizations, including ones that were extremely similar to Athens, did not create democracies or types of governments that were similar to the “structure” of a democracy. This made it hard for Athens to create the first democracy because they did not know what they needed to do and what they needed to have in order to create a democracy. According to the article that is titled The Making and Unmaking of Democracy, “The

Athens has an area of only 1,131 square miles. This is extremely small compared to other civilizations. For example, Egypt, another civilization that existed from, is 386,662 square miles. Egypt is 385,531 square miles larger. This is a massive difference. Athens small size does have an advantage when creating a democracy. Since they did not have technology to tell everyone what is going on in the government without traveling or gathering the all of the adult males that could vote, their size allows them to travel quickly. Most of the people lived in the same area because of the small amount of land that is available to them, meaning that it would be easy to gather the people in one place and tell them what is going on in the government and what they might need to vote on in the future. This is important because if the people in Athens are expected to make a good, educated, vote that will help Athens, they have to have information about what they are voting about and how it will affect Athens