Democracy meant about one adult in five
Athenian DEMOCRACY was direct — no representatives, no parties. Citizens turned up in person to vote on war, taxes and law, and most public officials were chosen by lot rather than election, on the grounds that elections favour the rich and the persuasive. A machine called the kleroterion randomised the draw with coloured tokens and a bronze tube.
But a CITIZEN meant an adult male whose parents were both Athenian. Women could not vote. Foreign residents could not, however long their families had lived there. Enslaved people, who made up a very large share of the population, certainly could not. Estimates put the eligible electorate at somewhere around 10 to 20 per cent of adults. It was a genuine and radical invention and it excluded most of the people it governed, and both halves of that are true at once.
Greece was not a country
There were hundreds of separate poleis — city-states — each with its own laws, calendar, coinage and army, frequently at war with each other. ATHENS and SPARTA were not rival regions of one nation; they were independent states with opposite systems, and the Peloponnesian War between them ran for twenty-seven years and ended Athenian power.
SPARTA is the one most distorted by film. It was a militarised society that kept a much larger enslaved population, the helots, permanently suppressed — the army existed substantially to hold them down. Spartan women, by contrast, owned property, were educated and exercised in public, which appalled other Greeks. The famous three hundred at Thermopylae fought alongside several thousand allies who rarely get mentioned.
The marathon story is not quite the story
The tale of a runner dying after carrying news from MARATHON to Athens is a late invention, first written down some five hundred years afterwards by Plutarch, who names two different runners in two different accounts. Herodotus, writing much closer to events, tells a different story entirely: Pheidippides ran to Sparta to ask for help, a distance of about 150 miles, and did it in two days.
The modern race is a nineteenth-century revival with a made-up distance. The 1908 London Olympics set it at 26 miles 385 yards so the course could start at Windsor Castle and finish in front of the royal box, and the figure stuck. The original games at OLYMPIA had no marathon at all — the longest running event was about three miles.
Three philosophers, one classroom
SOCRATES taught PLATO, who taught ARISTOTLE, who tutored Alexander the Great. Four generations in about a century. Socrates wrote nothing — everything attributed to him comes through Plato, so scholars cannot fully separate the teacher from the student's version of him.
He was tried and executed by that same DEMOCRACY in 399 BC for corrupting the young and not believing in the city's gods, having spent decades questioning people in the AGORA until they contradicted themselves. The rest of the grid is the physical world around them: the ACROPOLIS and the PARTHENON above the city, the COLUMN and the TEMPLE, the OLIVE, the ORACLE at Delphi, the open-air THEATRE, the CHARIOT, and the military machinery — the HOPLITE with his shield, the PHALANX, the TRIREME. Our philosophers page follows the thinking forward.