“By the late sixth century BC the Athenian city-state had established a genuine democratic form of government.
First, the authority of the popular assembly was strengthened.
Every Athenian male citizen over the age of twenty had the right to participate.
The system was “one man, one vote” regardless of wealth or property holdings.
The popular assembly was the supreme institution of the state and it was convened several times throughout the year.
Everything was decided by the popular assembly, including declarations of war, the ratification of peace treaties, the forging of foreign alliances, and the selection of government officials.
[Leader] Cleisthenes changed the standard used to divide the classes from the levels of agricultural income used in Solon’s time to one that did not discriminate between occupations.
By doing this, he substantially strengthened the influence of the merchant and artisan classes over government.
Cleisthenes also increased the number of Solon’s one-year government officials from nine to ten and renamed the position strategos, a word that is the origin of the word “strategy.”
The ten men employed in this official post might be best described as “state officials in charge of government and war,” were elected yearly by the popular assembly.
This was to become the cabinet of the Athenian polis.
In this age, for the first time ever, a system of government was born that allowed the direct participation of the ordinary citizen.
In later ages, this particular system would be called “direct democracy,” because in it every single citizen was directly involved in the exercise of authority.
In the history of the world to the present day, the Athenian democracy of that period remains the first and only example of a direct democratic state that possessed importance and size enough to influence other states.
The number of enfranchised citizens in Athens in those days—the number of adult males—was said to range from thirty thousand to forty thousand.
There were probably many who were unable to participate in the popular assembly in the capital city of Athens because they lived in regions distant from the capital, or else they were engaged in trade or some other activity that took them overseas.
As a result, it is said the usual attendance at the assembly was approximately ten thousand.
One imagines the Greeks’ characteristically vigorous sense of independence and their argumentative nature would have combined to render it remarkably difficult to manage the business of such a meeting.
Furthermore, it is questionable whether all ten thousand had the powers of judgment necessary for dealing with affairs of state.
But given that this remains an unresolved problem of democracy today, 2,500 years later.”
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