Civic Duty In Athens

Freedom, is the basis upon which the United States of America was founded, a nation in which all beliefs and views are considered in equal measure to each other, that being said are it’s citizens truly free? According to the ancient greek city state Athens, freedom was the ability to be civically engaged in the laws and governance of the community. These citizens would have scoffed at the idea that freedom was the ability to pursue happiness and pleasures, to them those were pursuits were laziness and could be done by slaves and non-citizens and therefore were trivial in nature. Personally I agree with this notion that freedom is more than the right to pursue happiness, that being said the type of political participation in the United states …show more content…
Their way of life came into being because of a “desire for mere life...[and]...the desire to live nobly and well sustains it,” and it was through the polis that this was sustained (Rahe p. 275). The Athenians believed civic duty to be of the utmost importance, it was to have the ability to affect others or at least seem to that the Athenians believed was the purpose of life and was lesueur itself (Rhea, p. 272). Their society was built upon the premises trades and jobs are menial tasks, tasks that they could do in their sleep, and the rigor was needed in life and could be obtained through challenges in the polis. Historians after the fall of Athens would look back on the sway and allure of the polis had on citizens and remark “incredible that citizens of little means would travel distances and spend considerable time away...to deal with public matters” (Wolin, p. 68). In Rhea article he writes “the visible polis...rested on an invisible and politically inarticulate body of slaves condemned to labor...so that their masters might...devote time...to speech and action in public,” showing that slaves and underlings/non-citizens were lesser than citizens because they could not take part in engaging mind challenges (Rahe, p. 271). To the polis these mind challenges were part of an …show more content…
A problem in societies no matter the decade or size is exclusion of groups, the United states it was slave, indians, and women and in Athens it was slaves non-citizens and women (Wolin, p. 80). The problem with this in both cases is that the governing body is biased in some way towards the excluded parties (Wolin, p. 65). In the United States Wolin comments on how unjust it seemed that even though slaves fought in almost every national war, that even after the emancipation they still did not have the same rights of original colonist (Wolin, p. 68). As I said before America has a system and thrives on the exclusion of people or at the very least exploited them, take elections as an