It is something of a cliché for modern politicians to stand before marble columns and invoke the legacy of Ancient Athenian democracy, as if we were merely operating a high-tech version of Athens itself. We often like to imagine that our voting booths are the natural evolution of the Pnyx hill, yet if an Ancient Greek were to appear today, they would likely find our version of democracy unrecognizable.
They might even call it a “polite oligarchy,” given the stark contrast between contemporary political systems and the realities of Ancient Athenian governance. To truly grasp what the Athenians were attempting, we must look beyond the romanticized versions of history and see it for what it was: a radical, messy, and often brutal experiment in running a society that had grown weary of its oligarchs.
Ancient Athenian democracy as a “big tent”
One of the biggest misconceptions we have is that Athenian democracy was built on equality in the way we understand it today. In reality, the democracy of the fifth century BC was an extremely exclusive, members-only club that excluded vast swaths of the population for reasons now almost unimaginable. While we like to picture an entire city-state coming together, the truth is that citizenship was a tightly guarded, hereditary prize, controlled by a select few.
Out of the hundreds of thousands of people living in the region, only about 30,000 adult men actually had a seat at the table. Everyone else—women, enslaved people, and foreign residents who kept the economy running—was not included. We often invoke their legacy to project a sense of timeless inclusion, yet the Athenian reality was a system of intense participation for a tiny minority, built on the total disenfranchisement of everyone else.
Why Ancient Athenians didn’t like elections
This is usually the part that surprises people the most, since we normally associate democracy with free and fair elections: the Greeks didn’t actually like elections. In fact, they viewed them with a good deal of suspicion. To them, elections were an “aristocratic” tool, naturally favoring the wealthy, famous, and those skilled at making speeches, even if they lacked the fundamental knowledge and qualities necessary to govern a state effectively.
The true engine of their democracy was sortition, or choosing leaders by lottery—yes, by lottery. Whether for the Council of Five Hundred or the massive juries that decided the city’s legal outcomes, many positions were filled by randomly drawing names rather than holding elections. The aim was to ensure that no “professional politician” could become entrenched in power, helping to guard against authoritarian tendencies.
Today, we treat the election cycle as the pinnacle of freedom, but an Ancient Greek citizen would likely look at our campaign financing and media blitzes and see not liberty but a total surrender to the elite.
Democracy was a constant fight, not a given
The reason these myths persist isn’t that we are bad at history but because we use the past to make our current systems feel more stable and legitimate. We talk about the “will of the people” as if it were a harmonious, singular entity rather than a combination of millions of often contradictory opinions.
However, if one reads Thucydides, it becomes apparent that Ancient Athenian democracy was chaotic, loud, and frequently pushed to the edge of violence—a natural state in a society that allowed free speech. The Athenians didn’t see democracy as a finished product or a “system” you could simply set and forget. They saw it as an exhausting, daily process of holding those in power accountable by any means available.
When we observe our own politics becoming polarized and heated, we often panic and assume the system is breaking. The Athenians, however, would have recognized such friction as the very mechanism that kept the gears turning. They understood that the real danger wasn’t disagreement or confrontation between factions but the moment people stopped talking or when the middle ground disappeared entirely.
In the end, what the Athenians established wasn’t a polished, ideal society where lofty ideals trumped chaos. On the contrary, it was a constant struggle to prevent power from turning into privilege. Their democracy worked precisely because it never stood still; it thrived on argument, dissent, and the willingness of citizens—even if that meant only a fraction of the male population—to call out those in power who became too comfortable.
That is the lesson we often miss when we romanticize the ancients: democracy was never meant to be quiet or convenient. It was supposed to be combative, dynamic, and always a little uncomfortable for both those in power and the people.