Advancement Of Athens Essay

Paper 2 history 170 Throughout history, people have loosely thrown around the term “advancement” in many shapes and forms. However, one does not explain what the word advancement means and how it is applied to certain countries throughout history. People consider early Athens to be an “advanced” city-state because they were ahead of their time, but why? Athens was an advanced region compared to other societies because of three major differences, their military, their arrogance towards other nations, and their style of government. Athens had become Greece’s strongest city-state by sending troops to different regions of Greece, such as Thebes, and conquering that city. This made city-states such as Thebes, have to send

When historians and political scientists alike, study the Athenian government, there is a sense of astonishment on how a nation could have such an advanced style of government. In this era, there was no such thing as individual rights and political representation. The only political idea most regions at this time had, was for their people to be safe, and the only way to do so, was for the ruler to expand and grow stronger. However, the Athenian style of government was the first style of Democracy. Athens was in most part a direct democracy for the people in an assembly. In order to be a part of this assembly, one must be a citizen, and the Athenian definition of a “citizen” was any adult male over a certain age. These citizens could speak at a council meeting and vote on new laws. As stated on page 85 of the text “philosopher Aristotle degraded this form of government as ‘mob rule,’ because it gave too much power to the demos, a word meaning ‘neighborhood’ or ‘affinity group’”. In the end, Aristotle was correct about the Athenian government having too much power in the hands of people and eventually led to their downfall. However, because of their style of Direct Democracy, Athens became the most powerful city-state in Greece for hundreds of years, and eventually led to different branches of democracy, such as the United States democracy