Greek Dbq

The real question is were the Greeks very democratic? I really do not think the Greeks were democratic at all. They really didn’t exemplify true qualities of a Democratic City-State. The next few paragraphs will show the reason behind my answer, and how people were treated unfairly. My first reason behind this is the Athenian government only granted citizenship to men who parents were free-born Athenian parents. These were the only people who could vote, and do other things involving the government. So all the people that could vote would vote for a person to be ostracized. Which means that the government banishes you from the city-state for a certain amount of years. This is an example of them not being democratic at all. In a democratic city-state they could

Another thing that rose from Sparta were slaves. Since all of the men were gone fighting they didn’t have any men to do the jobs men would normally do. So they would bring in slaves which were called Helots. Helots were just soldiers from the Persians and other armies that the Spartans had taken and used as slaves. This began to bring conflict between the social classes of all Greek city-states because all the city-states began to have slaves. The rich people began ruling the civilizations whether they actually knew anything or not. Everyone else was basically forced into poverty during that time. People would make pottery just to earn some money it got so bad. This is an example of Greek not being a democracy because in a democracy everyone gets a say, and during that time only the rich people had a say in who became the leaders. I started out with the question, were the Greeks very democratic? I answered it by saying that them making people slaves and treating people differently because of their class resulted in them not being very democratic. I strongly believe with the evidence I have that the Greek city-states were not really democratic at