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  Perhaps the Athenians thought in those terms, but if so, we have no record of a city pining for a civil servant they had loved and lost. It seems rather to have been the case that they simply assumed everyone would be reasonably competent. There were other jobs one could be elected to hold, mostly notably the ten stratēgoi – generals – who were in charge of Athens’ military campaigns. But even those key posts were voted for annually. And a vote of confidence in the generals was held during each prytany, too. If a vote of no-confidence was carried, the general would be tried in court for his failures. When politicians today make their glib statements about ‘the court of public opinion’, they really have no idea how lucky they are. Trial by media may be unfair, but it’s probably less traumatic than a monthly assessment of your competence by a random selection of your peers. For all their occasional impetuousness, we must assume that the Athenian people were actually far more tolerant of mistakes than we are now. If we instituted monthly competence checks nowadays, starting on 1 January, it’s difficult to imagine most politicians or military leaders staying in office past February.

  And the consequences of being tried and convicted of military incompetence were severe, as the historian Thucydides experienced himself directly. Thucydides wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War that tells us much of what we know about the latter half of fifth-century BCE Greece. The Peloponnesian War was a disastrous conflict between the Athenians and their one-time allies against Persian invaders, the Spartans. For thirty years they conducted campaigns against each other – each summer the Spartans would travel to Athens for battle, and the Athenians would withdraw inside the walls of their city. The Spartans were the greatest warriors that the Mediterranean had ever seen. Conversely, the Athenians had the greatest naval force that the ancient world had known. They were perfectly matched.

  The town of Amphipolis was an Athenian colony on the coast of Thrace, north of Athens; much of Greece had been divided into supporters of Sparta or Athens, whether they liked it or not. It was a tough time in history to try to be neutral, as we’ll see with the Melians later on. In the winter of 424–423 BCE, Brasidas, a Spartan general, offered the Amphipolitans good terms if they would surrender to him. Thucydides, who was an Athenian general that year, arrived too late to save the city, and the Athenians decided he was to blame for their considerable strategic loss. They recalled him from battle, and exiled him for twenty years, some of which he spent in Sparta. It’s perhaps a sign that his heart was in history rather than military leadership that he manages to find a lugubrious bright side, even to this indignity: ‘I saw what was being done on both sides, particularly on the Peloponnesian side, because of my exile, and this leisure gave me rather exceptional facilities for looking into things.’

  Amphipolis’ loss is perhaps history’s gain: Thucydides certainly believed his exile gave him a unique viewpoint on the Peloponnesian War, so why should we doubt him? But one presumes most generals wouldn’t be so sanguine about a twenty-year exile. Yet we never read of the slightest suggestion that men weren’t prepared to put themselves forward for this potentially risky job. Something else to bear in mind, perhaps, when we’re repeatedly told that politicians need a pay-rise or we won’t attract the best people into politics. It seems that the opportunity to wield power, exert influence and make oneself known is a powerful lure, even in the face of poor remuneration and possible exile. An ungenerous person might suggest that history teaches us we could offer our politicians a hefty pay cut and still get plenty of perfectly competent candidates ready to take on the job.

  It’s very tempting, when considering Athenian democracy, to become rather giddy at how accessible and instant everything was. People turned up and voted about matters that had direct, personal consequences for themselves. Take the example of the war. The Athenians would vote, in the Assembly, for or against certain military campaigns. Should they assemble a force to resist the Persians, make an expedition against Sicily or destroy the rebellious city of Mytilene (the capital city of the island of Lesbos)? They weren’t voting, as politicians do now, for other people to gather up weapons and head off to war. Athenian voters were the same men as those who rowed Athenian triremes – ships with three banks of oars. They were the infantry or the cavalry, depending on their wealth: you could only be a cavalryman if you could afford to provide yourself with a horse. So one can criticise the Athenian Assembly for its occasional mistakes, its impetuousness or its folly, but one can’t suggest that the men involved in the decision-making process were ever divorced from the consequences of their actions. Even those too old to fight would be voting their sons or brothers into the battle lines. One contrasts that with the scene in the 2004 movie Fahrenheit 9/11 in which the polemicist director Michael Moore tries to persuade Members of Congress to sign their own kids up to fight in a war for which they have voted. Only one congressman was the father of a soldier serving in Iraq.

  Certainly, we can and should take lessons from ancient Athens with regard to our political attitudes. The notion of political apathy is very modern: only once you have rights can you afford to become bored with them. And the widespread modern feeling that the political classes are quite separate from the rest of us is an ugly one, and not one which the Athenians would have understood. Because they all took an active role in administering their democracy, the ruling class wasn’t separate from the voting class. The notion that it doesn’t matter who or what you vote for because they’re all the same would not have struck a chord in Athens.

  Can we rediscover this sense of civic pride and duty now, when voter turnout is low and often getting lower with each new generation? The example of President Obama suggests we can: his election campaign was funded by many small donors rather than a few big hitters. In other words, he had popular support from the masses, rather than oligarchic support from a small number of businesses or individuals. Whether you like his politics or not isn’t really important; what matters is that he has reminded people, en masse, that they should care enough about themselves and their country to participate in electing their leaders. The enemy of political progress is the belief that nothing will ever really change. And indeed, if we believe that, we render it true. It’s the civic equivalent of saying that you don’t believe in fairies, and then watching one fall dead at your feet, its little fairy wings broken by your cynicism. The Athenians had plenty of failings, but one thing they really got right was the understanding that participation was the way to effect change. Why stand outside something with a placard when you could be changing it from within? The Athenians should inspire us to become school governors, patient representatives, local councillors and Members of Parliament. They should persuade us to stop shrugging and sighing when we could instead be improving our lot. We could stop huffing at the hospital closures or airport expansions we oppose and stand against them at the next election instead.

  We need reminding that people power isn’t just for trivia. We love voting – look at the success of reality television, which depends on it. If we didn’t want our opinions heard, there would be no Big Brother, no X Factor or American Idol, no Dancing with the Stars. And while I’m prepared to concede that many people might prefer things that way, that is hardly the point. The point is that we vote when we care about the outcome, and we can see that our vote will have an effect, even a tiny one. Almost 100 million people voted in the 2009 American Idol final: if voters, especially young voters, are as apathetic as we’re led to believe, why would they bother to be one small voice among millions? The answer, surely, is that they see there’s a real choice to be made, even if it may seem a rather trivial one.

  The real causes of political apathy are being ignored because it’s so much easier simply to blame the young. But if people aren’t voting in elections, maybe the problem isn’t the voters but the elections themselves. Look at the turnout in Ireland for European Parliament elections, for example, which buck the Europe-wide trend for decreasing turnout. Across Europe, voter turnout has dropped at every European Parliament election since the first one, in 1979. But in Ireland, although that trend was followed last century, it was reversed dramatically when voter turnout shot up from 50.2 per cent in the 1999 elections to 58.5 per cent in 2004. According to the Irish Times, this was because a referendum on citizenship was held on the same day. Whatever the incentives, over 57 per cent of Irish people voted in the 2009 elections, which, Europe-wide, attracted a turnout average of about 43 per cent.

  People vote when they’re persuaded that the consequences of voting, or not voting, are important. Is it time to acknowledge that some voters don’t vote for MEPs because they simply don’t want them? And if they don’t want them, then why have them? What would be different, for example, if Slovakia, where only 19 per cent of voters cast a ballot in the 2009 European Parliament elections, went unrepresented in the European Parliament? Would anything really change in the countries that didn’t vote? And if things would change, for the worse, then how hard can it be to explain that to the electorate, to show them what they get in exchange for turning out and voting?

  Nowadays, we are insulated from the consequences of political inaction. If I don’t vote for the London mayor, London doesn’t end up without a mayor. It just gets the one other people voted for – which, let us be honest, is what might well happen even if I did vote. The received wisdom is that people don’t bother voting when they know that their vote can’t really change the outcome. But the American Idol voters disprove that completely: it just isn’t the case that we only vote when we think an election will be a tight race. We vote when we care, and our politicians need to remind us how much we really do care. The Athenian example should inspire us to try to reduce the distance between political cause and effect. We need to see what we’re getting whe
n we put our cross in the box, just as they did when they raised their hands on the Pnyx.

  But for all their glittering ideals, the Athenians’ definition of democracy was decidedly limited; and when we admire, as we should, their directness, involvement and participation, we have to bear in mind what was missing. The Athenians lived in a world where every citizen had the right to vote. But, as previously noted, their definition of who counted as a citizen was profoundly limited. For a start, citizens had to be male adults. Women, as so often in the ancient world, and indeed in many parts of the modern one, didn’t count. Although some philosophers – Plato, for example – could see that there was something decidedly screwy in allowing half the available talent pool in any society to go untapped, the Athenians were not mould-breakers in the world of gender equality. They were also fiercely xenophobic when it came to civic rights. To be an Athenian citizen, it wasn’t enough to live in Athens. You needed to have been born there, with two Athenian parents. A woman may not have had the right to vote, but she could still ruin your right to citizenship if she hailed from another part of Greece.

  You couldn’t move from Thebes to Athens and acquire voting rights there, the way you can move from Chicago to New York and find yourself voting for the New York mayor thirty days later. Citizenship – the right to own property as well as the right to vote – was a closely guarded privilege. Athens had a vast population of metics, or resident aliens, as it is usually translated (if that sounds neither too Sting nor too X-Files). The idea which permeates the extremes of modern political discourse – that those who were born somewhere have greater rights to it than those who arrive there later – was prevalent in the ancient world. If you wanted to live somewhere as glamorous as Athens when you’d been born on a Mediterranean backwater island, no one would stop you. But you would never be allowed to think of yourself as Athenian, the way those of us who now pitch up in a country’s capital can call ourselves Parisians or Londoners. And you wouldn’t be able to vote on matters that affected you in your city of residence.

  Perhaps still more disquieting to modern eyes even than the thousands of disenfranchised women and resident foreigners is the fact that Athens could not have had its democratic systems if it hadn’t also had slavery. If an Athenian citizen was going to turn up and vote in person at some or all Assembly meetings; if he was going serve on the council, and be part of one of its presiding tribes for thirty-six days in a row; if he was going to participate in his direct democracy at all, in other words, he couldn’t also work on those days. And if he was a farmer, or a blacksmith, or pretty much anything else, he would need someone to cover for him; the harvest wouldn’t wait until he’d gone into town and voted. That someone was most probably going to be a slave. So is Athens really a place we should look up to at all? Or is admiring their political system on a par with admiring the management theory of plantation owners?

  Well, both of those things are partly true. The Athenians were so extraordinary, so modern, in so many ways that it is rather difficult to forgive them when their value system clashes with ours so entirely. But, in their defence, they lived in a world where slavery went unquestioned by everyone. Every ancient society had slaves, one way or another. That’s how they got so many huge building projects realised without running years late and billions over budget. Time, as the hymn goes, makes ancient good uncouth, and what seemed normal and reasonable to the Greeks seems considerably less so to us. While no one in their right mind would defend the institution of slavery, it is a pointless exercise to demand that every society throughout history value the same things that we do.

  The real weakness of Athenian democracy, according to ancient writers, wasn’t the people it left out, but the people it let in. The writers whose work survives – Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Aristophanes – were far less exercised by the lack of universal civic rights than they were about the calibre of voters. To these critical right-wingers, democracy was only a whisper away from ochlocracy – mob rule. The word ‘democracy’ has a very different resonance for us now, so often seen as something to aspire to, for societies which lack the freedoms that many of us take for granted. When George W. Bush talked repeatedly about trying to foster democracy in the Middle East, people may have scoffed at his cultural insensitivity, but they largely agreed with the premise: to most of us, it seems that democracy might be flawed but it is still, in the words of Winston Churchill, ‘the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried’.

  That was certainly not the opinion of ancient authors, who were usually oligarchic in their views. They considered the best form of government to be the rule of an elite (which is what, originally, the word ‘aristocracy’ meant – ‘the rule of the best’ – before it came to attract rather more negative, inbred connotations). The dēmos, or people, could be a terrifying prospect to the upper classes. They were a noisy, brutish mass: impetuous, emotional, easily led into stupid decisions. Thucydides tells us rather censoriously, for example, of their changeable mood during the Mytilene Debate. In 428 BCE, near the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, Mytilene, the capital city of Lesbos, revolted from Athens. The traditional punishment for this kind of rebellion was the mass execution of all adult men, and the enslavement of all women and children. It was, in essence, genocide. And once the Athenians found out that Mytilene had rebelled, they voted to accept a proposal for this severest of retributions, made by Cleon, a demagogue (literally meaning ‘people-leader’, but always used pejoratively). And a trireme was dispatched to carry the orders to Mytilene.

  Cleon received a terrible press from Thucydides, who called him ‘remarkable among the Athenians for the violence of his character’. Cleon’s family were probably tanners, and he was therefore very much a representative of the dēmos. Cleon was ruthlessly parodied in several of Aristophanes’ comedies, especially The Knights, where he was portrayed as a thuggish, vicious-minded steward who flogged the slaves and misled his master, Dēmos. And the real Cleon’s proposal for the gravest punishment for Mytilene must have helped to create his reputation for thuggishness: the day after they had voted for mass execution, the Athenians reconsidered. When they questioned their harsh decision of the previous day, Cleon did his utmost to persuade them that they had chosen wisely. But the Athenians decided to be more merciful, and a second trireme was immediately sent out, to try to catch up with its predecessor. The second boat arrived just in time to prevent the death sentences being carried out.

  Thucydides tells this story with a sort of weary resignation, as though this is the kind of thing you have to accept with a democracy: idiot crowds making idiot decisions at the behest of idiot speakers, then promptly regretting them. But in defence of the Athenian masses, they very rarely made such a volte-face. They made mistakes, certainly. They committed to the wrong military campaigns, and they could be blood-thirsty and unforgiving. But not often. Just as we wring our hands when extremist right-wing parties thrive in local elections, high-minded political theorists like Plato and Aristotle sometimes despaired of the lowbrow men who decided crucial affairs with their emotions rather than their brains. But actually, the Athenians should fill us with hope: they made a lot of excellent decisions, and when they made bad ones, they could be men enough to admit it and perform a speedy U-turn. If only our politicians, and perhaps our media, could be so open about their errors, then we might yet live in a more sensible world.

  But as the fifth century drew to a close, so too did Athenian hegemony of the ancient world. They had done untold damage to themselves by deciding on a foolish and unnecessary conflict with Sicily between 415 and 413 BCE, which cost them the best part of a generation of young men. And their long war with Sparta was finally lost in 404 BCE. Sparta, however, couldn’t press home their advantage for long: they were drastically weakened by the revolts of the Helots, a serf people whom the Spartans treated rather as one might a race of alarming and unloved wild dogs. The legendary Spartan land force, so lethal against the Athenians, was crushed by Theban soldiers in 371 BCE, in Leuctra, a village near Thebes. But the Thebans, similarly, were unable to shine for long. Soon a new power arrived: Philip II of Macedon, followed by his son, Alexander the Great, tutored by Aristotle in politics and philosophy, and quickly demanding new worlds to conquer.