THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 194, 18 August 1931, Page 6

THE ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY.

In speaking of the Greek democracy in his address on "The Spirit of Ancient C4reece," the Rev. W. A. Constable said it was well to remember that citizenship was restricted to Greeks and Jo men, and did not include women and slaves. It was not, therefore, a true democracy with equal rights for all, and we cannot say what the story of Athens might have been had democracy rested on a broader basis. But we know what it was. Pericles had insisted that all private interests should bo subordinated to the interests of Athens, and enterprises to which the State was committed were not to be starved or mismanaged in order to further the purposes of factious politicians. Thucydides says that Athens was shipwrecked by the disregard of those two principles. He implies that under Pericles "what was nominally a democracy was in reality (Tovernmcnt by the first citizen." He ascribes the fall of Athens to private cabals for the leadership of the masses, which introduced civil discord, and to the manner in which the conduct of high and important matters was made subject to the whims of the multitude. Under Cleon, whom Aristophanes pictures as a true type of the blustering demagogue, we are told words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was given them. There is- a curiously modern ring a'unit these words of the Greek historian: "The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish. The use of fair phrases was in high reputation. The ancient simplicity into which honour so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared." It was the decay of honour and simplicity that turned the Athens of Pericles, that Athens which was the home of liberty, art, philosophy and men of action, into the Athene which a modern writer has described as governed by "the noise and blather, the babbling and bubbling, the blabbering and blubbering of Athenian democracy."—W.M.