Also posted to Revise and Dissent.

Athens is the city that gave the world democracy. While the idea has been inherited, the reality was rather different to a modern democracy. In ancient Athens all the citizens voted on the laws, whereas these days people vote for people who vote for the laws. Or even vote for the person who will unilaterally decide the laws for themselves. While that might make Athens more democratic, in some ways Athens was also less free. Certainly all the citizens voted but so be a citizen you had to be male, quite old and the son of Athenian parents. If your parents were slaves or metics (resident foreigners or Athenians deprived of citizen status) then you had no vote. A lot of these differences are the meat and drink of usual studies into ancient democracy. But it wasn’t just the human world which was viewed differently, so was the divine. This is the subject Bowden’s book Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy examines, the relationship between the will of the Gods and the will of the people in ancient Athens. Specifically he looks at the will of Apollo as it was revealed by the Delphic Oracle. More >