Lessons of democracy, from its bloody roots

Democracy itself is up for reelection this Nov. What can we learn about democracy's future by delving into its past? I visit ancient Athens & Rome to see if those old stones and walls would talk to me

With the Worldwide Wrestling Federation rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden slowly building to a crescendo, it’s becoming increasingly clear that democracy itself is up for reelection this November.

Americans – indeed the world – are not used to thinking of the United States in such fragile terms. Despite our many national flaws, we have long been one of the world’s inspirations for representative democracy. But the fact that Trump is this close to another grab for the apple reveals that there is something dark and disturbed within the American soul. As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”

Indeed, this 230-year-old experiment in democratic governance has been a crucial part of an epic journey of democratic emergence all over the world, punctuated by stories that have long been filled with both heroism and defeat.

In the wake of the 2008-10 economic collapse of historic proportions, and then the pandemic-induced collapse in 2020, democratically-elected governments have taken their share of blame for their struggles. Some pundits have even gone so far as to suggest that authoritarian governments in China, Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Israel and India will own the future. Some have audaciously declared that democracy is no longer central to human progress, indeed that democracy is overrated and becoming irrelevant in this AI-saturated, social media-polarized, un-brave new world we are entering.

Could this be true? I have spent much of my professional life writing about democracy and representative government, including ways to improve our democratic practices. So I have become seized with an urgency to investigate this charge. Part of my philosophical journey has led to visits to the ancient nascencies of democracy, to see if they might reveal some secrets to me. Would I find that the democratic roots had withered, like a formerly glorious but now rotten tree? Or would I find inspiration from these places, and from the democratic heroes who had struggled there, and whose brave and noble shoulders we are standing upon today?

Ancient Athens, birthplace of democracy

I travelled first to the ancient beginnings, to the place where western democracy originally broke ground, as far as historians can tell. To Athens, Greece, and more specifically to the Agora, the 2500 year old cradle of the democratic spirit.  Located at the base of the Acropolis and just across the rail tracks from the cafes and tavernas of the Monastiraki district, the ancient Agora site today is only a few sparse acres and hemmed in by a modern city. But its importance looms large in the western canon. 

A few of the Agora’s ancient buildings have been reconstructed, but most of the site is still in ruins, with stubs of columns, old walls, and headless busts poking out from the earth that long ago swallowed them. You have to use your imagination a bit to visualize it. “Agora” means “gathering place,” and this spot was a crucial intersection for a throbbing polis that began over two thousand years before the first settlers reached what would become the United States.

Physically the Agora was a large public square flanked on several sides by major civic buildings, inside of which merchants sold their goods and services from shops and stalls amid the colonnades. It was a beehive of commercial activity, with everything from fruit and livestock to perfume, hardware, money-changing and slaves trading hands. Looking up at one of the busts on display, that of a bearded Mediterranean with a sharp nose and steely gaze, I am mesmerized by the thought that “if I walked past this guy walking down a street in New York today, he would fit right in.” Anatomically, stylistically, coiffure-wise, he looks modern and hip. And his quotidian concerns might not have been all that different — work, family, duty, social life, entertainment, a tasty glass of vino…

But his understanding of democracy would have been quite different. The Agora also was where Athenians gathered for the exchange of ideas as well as goods. Among the hive of stalls, a ferment of debate over philosophy, ethics and politics unfolded on a daily basis. Philosophers, statesmen, orators and dramatists, little known outside Athens at the time but who were to become giants of the western canon, traded ideas and policies at the Agora. Pericles, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Alcibiades, Aristides and Themistocles were regulars. Socrates was a constant presence there. “He was always on public view,” wrote the historian Xenophon, “for early in the morning he used to go to the walkways and gymnasia, to appear in the agora as it filled up, and to be present wherever he would meet with the most people.”

This hotbed of intellectual and commercial bustle was fed by a particular innovation in human organization that had appeared on the scene just a few years before. After several million years of human anatomical evolution, and a few tens of thousands of years of social evolution, at a certain moment in history something ground-breaking appeared, a revolutionary game changer:  democracy.

Though it must be said that even Athens had its antecedents. 2000 years before (c. 2700 BCE), the ancient popular assemblies of Mesopotamia – in Syria, Iraq and Iran today – spread west to Phoenician cities such as Byblos on the modern day Lebanese coast. These proto-democratic bodies functioned as the first (that we know of) kind of popular counterweight to kingly power. From Byblos it was just a two millennium hop and a skip across the Mediterranean-Aegean Seas to Athens. So the ancient assemblies of Syria-Mesopotamia are like fossilized remains buried beneath the ruins of Athens. That’s the truer origin story of democracy.

But Athens found its way there eventually. Around 508 B.C. the nobleman Kleisthenes organized Athens into 10 tribes. Each of the tribes was empowered to choose by lot fifty of its citizens who together comprised a 500 member Boule (Senate).  The Boule prepared legislative bills to be voted on directly by an Assembly of All Citizens (Ekklesia of the Demos). Some 30,000 adult males of Athenian birth were eligible to vote out of a total population of around 250,000 men, women, and children, free and unfree. Of those 30,000, perhaps 5,000 might regularly attend one or more meetings of the Assembly of All Citizens, of which there were at least forty a year in Aristotle’s day. Those at the Assembly did not elect representatives to vote on their behalf, they voted directly on legislation and executive bills. It was the type of direct democracy people power later emulated in New England town meetings.

I stood there before the sparse skeleton of one building, the meeting place of the 500 member Boule. This edifice once stood in a row of administration buildings on one side of the main square. Next door are the remains of one of the more significant public buildings of the Agora, known as the Tholos. Originally an enclosed circular structure with six interior columns, today all that is visible is the circumference of the foundation. But it was the headquarters of the 50 citizens who served as administrators for 35 days — after which they were replaced by citizens from another tribe.

By the end of the year’s rotations, representatives from all 10 tribes had a turn in the administration. Since all sides rotated leadership, this reduced petty partisanship and special interests trying to prevent the other side from governing. Perhaps Kleisthenes, who is considered the father of ancient Athenian democracy, understood something essential about how to avoid the balkanization and polarization that plagues U.S. democracy today — rotation of power ensured compliance with the golden rule of politics, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” because you know that those over whom you were lording today would soon lord over you.

Not far from these buildings stood a pedestal once decorated with bronze statues of the mythical heroes of each of the 10 tribes. On the sides of this pedestal hung wooden boards with announcements for the citizens of Athens, including legal decrees coming up for a vote, forthcoming lawsuits, lists of citizens conscripted into the army, civic or honorary distinctions and the like -- their version of Twitter, I thought, a central kiosk or internet message board.

At the time, Athenian democracy was cutting edge stuff, but all was not so copacetic from a modern standpoint. Women were totally excluded, this was a men’s club; foreigners, especially unfree slave foreigners, were also excluded. The citizen body was a closed political elite with a small electorate, similar to America at its founding in 1789 when only white men of property could vote and many of the framers owned slaves who they agreed would be counted as 3/5 of a free person. And of course, Athenian democracy showed its capacity for injustice when it condemned Socrates to death in 399 B.C. just because he asked too many annoying questions to those elites in power. “Corruption of the youth” was the charge. The site of the jail where the pesky inquisitor  (“the gadfly,” as Plato described him) was imprisoned and suffered his sentence -- death by hemlock poison -- also is located here, occupying an out of the way corner from the central square of the Agora.

I had come to this ancient place to see if these old stones and walls would talk to me. Standing there in the dusty middle of what is left of the Agora, scanning the column nubs and half statues that look like rows of broken teeth, I was visited by the ghosts of the past that were warning about the present. Nothing can be taken for granted, each generation must renew its democratic faith and commitment.

Down the tunnel of time, I thought I could hear the distant cacophony of traders and merchants hawking their wares, and see the ghosts of Pericles’ entourage pushing through the crowds, and spy Socrates off to one side with a knot of impressionable young males gathered round (one of them looking like Plato).  I felt momentarily dizzy, lost in contemplation of democracy’s centuries-long sojourn.  Beyond Athens, Europe’s ancient cradle is scattered with nascencies and power spots that mark the ebb and flow of the democratic tide that eventually led to American shores.

The Roman Republic “trumpifies” into civil war

There must have been something in the Mediterranean air around 500 B.C., because contemporaneously with Kleisthenes’ new code, ancient Rome took its first halting steps toward becoming a democratic republic. It began with the overthrow of a monarch, also around 508 B.C., followed by the launch of the structures that became the Roman Republic.

The Roman version of the Greek Agora was the Forum, which for centuries was the center of day-to-day life, the site for elections and important speeches, commerce, as well as triumphal processions, criminal trials and gladiatorial matches. While the Republic and its representative democracy was dominated by wealthy families and eventually collapsed into dictatorship – another warning to our modern era – in one intriguing way it was more representative than any modern-day republics. That’s because it granted an explicit “representation quota” to its poorest citizens.

In the early Republic’s Centuriate Assembly (where all male citizens of military age were enrolled in one of five voting groups based on economic class), the poorest classes were able to have their say. While the voting was weighted in such a way that the wealthier elements could always outvote the poorest, at least the poor were at the political table.

In the middle Roman Republic, the poorer classes exclusively elected ten high-level leaders, called the tribunes of the plebeians, who could use their office to take up the causes of the poor. Two brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, each served in the plebeian tribunates of 133 BC and 121 BC, respectively, and championed causes such as land redistribution to poor rural farmers and reforms against political corruption. The more popular the Gracchi brothers became, the more they were viewed as a threat by the ruling class, and eventually both were brutally murdered (Tiberius was lynched in the Forum).

Nevertheless, even in the oligarchic Roman Republic, class was distinctly recognized and formally incorporated into the voting practices and institutions. Today, the idea of such affirmative action along class lines is ridiculed. Instead, poor people pretty much have opted out of politics in the United States, since there are no class quotas, no tribunes like the Gracchi brothers to speak for them, and little hope that a viable political party might arise that can represent their interests (the poor in Europe, however, vote in higher numbers due to different electoral rules of proportional representation that create multiparty democracies that offer more choices to voters).

Rome’s republic ebbed and flowed, reacting to the times, until it was subverted during a series of civil wars and finally collapsed into an empire when Caesar crossed the Rubicon at the head of his army. But it lasted in one form or another for 482 years. Considering that the American republic has been around for less than half that time, Rome provides a cautionary tale that democracy cannot be taken for granted, it must be renewed and re-nourished by each generation.

Democracy’s future

Is an American Empire, run by a dictatorial emperor, in our future?

The shards I found in Athens, Rome and other early nascencies of democracy held a secret I wished to unlock, a pulsing in their mortar and fragments that I could feel when I touched my palms to their gritty surface.

A piece of the ancient Agora, still retaining its reddish pigment thousands of years later (author’s collection)

In ancient Athens and Rome we can see the first proto-vestiges of key concepts that modern democracies have refined, such as separation of powers, divided branches of power and checks and balances, guided by constitutions and laws. These developments went hand in hand with, in fact were preceded by, the first development of writing in ancient Sumer around 3200 BC, and Hammurabi’s legal code around 1772 BC. It has been such a long march.

To me, it almost has the markings of a predestined progression. Then came the Magna Carta, 1215 AD…Wang Zhan’s wooden moveable type, 1290…the Islamic Golden Age, c. 1290… Gutenberg’s printing press, 1455…the Renaissance, c. 1490…parliamentary government in Britain, 1707…American Constitution, 1787…proportional representation, mid-19^th century…and more. Each new innovation built on top of what came before. Each was driven by a personal desire, to the point of longing, for dignity and respect. Each was inspired by the human condition, and sought to return the inspiration by improving the human plight. Not that all pioneers and practitioners were pure of heart and spirit, but the collective movement for democracy was.

It seems highly unlikely to me, then, that democracy and representative government are has-beens, soon to be viewed in the rear view mirror. No, they are works in progress. And that work will never be finished. “To Form a More Perfect Union,” after all. Democracy is precious, we must never give up on it. It is one of the essences of being fully human.

All that was revealed to me as I stood under a bright lapis lazuli Athens sky, gazing at the shards of what once was, marveling that western notions of governance and democracy all began here, at the Agora, 2500 years ago. That seems like a long time to we individual humans, but in the evolution of democratic consciousness, apparently it’s not anywhere near the end, it’s not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

In contemplating this very human trajectory, the words of poet T.S. Eliot come to mind: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776