What effect did ancient Athens have on modern democracy?
In the decade before 500 B.C., the Athenians established the world’s first democratic constitution. This new kind of government was carried to its classical form by the reforms of Pericles a half-century later, and it was in the Athens shaped by Pericles that the greatest achievements of the Greeks took place. While the rest of the world continued to be characterized by monarchical, rigidly hierarchical, command societies, democracy in Athens was carried as far as it would go before modern times, perhaps further than at any other place and time. In our time democracy is taken for granted, but it is one of the rarest, most delicate, and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience. It existed for only two centuries in Athens and less than that in a small number of Greek states. When it reappeared in the Western world more than two millennia later, it was broader but shallower. The French and American revolutions extended citizenship more generously than in Greece, ultimately exclud
