Greek polis in the Ancient World

It is well documented in historical accounts dating back from this period that striver populations were most ubiquitous in antediluvian Greek societies. Sparta's own ail with her helot population was a source of enduring tempest within that city-nation, and may have led directly to her net undoing (Meltzer 83-84).

What makes the Athenian example under Pericles so compel is that it was here that true democracy is understood to have originated, and it is to this date of reference that modern political theorists trace the elective heritage so essential to the Western tradition. In m or so(prenominal) respects, the continuing self-exaltation of Western Civilization is itself a nod to the example of Ancient Greece as it was encapsulated in the Athens of Pericles, and the players during this era are the quintessential forebears for modern political theorists.

Indeed, the very notion that a democratic society may be founded upon, or contingent upon, a slave class is philosophically incongruent. By definition, the existence of thrall must be an anathema to any and all democratic sensibilities. A state "of the people, by the people, and for the people" cannot in any part be comprised of slaves and also be considered democratic. History, of course, has done critical to bear out this theoretical truism, as many later(prenominal) prima facie democratic societies have taken no straining to conceal, much less abolish, a dependen

Other figures, though more conservative, nonetheless put the turning of slaves in Periclean Athens before the Peloponnesian War (431 BC) at 70,000, with an additional 25,000 metics (resident aliens without political rights) rounding out the non-citizen mix. Compared with the 60,000 citizens of Athens, these numbers expose that at the height of Periclean democracy, Athens was fully "the largest slaveholding state of its prison term (Meltzer 65)."

What is clear is that the rigors of citizenship in Periclean Athens did not permission (or smile upon) the added rigors of actual labor. It was the uttered purpose, or telos, of the citizen to engage in good governance and surrender himself to the city-state in times of war.

Conversely, it was the explicit purpose of the slave to provide the labor that would allow the master-citizen the time to contemplate and govern in accordance with his station.

Indeed, it was the sheer pervasiveness of the slave population that demanded that this be so. Slaves appear to have been present in almost all of the most significant developments in the autobiography of Athenian democracy (Kyrtatas 44). Called upon for a myriad of services, slaves were even called up to military duty when Athens was under threat. Often a slave's best chance for manumission, the opportunity to defend Athens appealed to slaves throughout the Periclean Age. It has been noted that by 406 BC (more that 20 years later on Pericles' death) slaves and metics, having been promised freedom, fought valiantly on Athenian ships. Those that survived were duly rewarded with citizen status (though ultimate Athenian defeat at the hands of the Spartans was imminent, and Athens would by and by never be the same) (Kyrtatas 43-45).

In modern times, much is make of the plight of the poor, even if too little is done intimately it. This perhaps is one of the distinctive features of the modern democratic tradition, and some have argued that it is because the poor exist that democracy as
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