Greek Democracy Dbq

How Democratic were the Greeks? In this paper, we will get an understanding of the relationship between Greek Democracy, the military needs, and social class divisions of Greek city-states. Solon helped to create the constitution for Ancient Greek’s democracy. The ancient Greeks remained in small city-states because the mountains and coastlines cut them off from one another. The government was constantly changing and a form of Democracy developed in some city-states. The most important Democracy was at Athens. In Athens elected officials and an assembly of citizens met and citizens learned to speak their minds and take pride in their freedom and the independence. Why did Democracy form in Greece? One reason was warfare. The Greeks were occasionally …show more content…
There were also many slaves and foreigners that had no rights. In Sparta the farmers belonged to the state and had no freedom. But in Sparta women had rights and the citizens were equal among their city-state. The relationship between Greek Democracy and military needs was shown in Visual document one, written document one, and also written document two. In visual document two, poor men were used as rowers on warships. It says that these rowers “May have helped persuade Athens to grant citizenship rights to poor free-born men”. Athens and Sparta fought against each other in the Pelopponeisan Wars, the Athenians held funerals for all of the people killed. Thucydides wrote a document about Pericle’s Funeral Oration based on what he knew about Pericles. Thucydides says “Then. Again. Our military training is in many respects superior to that of our adversaries”. Plato uses the metaphor of a ship to express his attitudes towards democracy in “The Republic” which is written document two. He thinks Greek democracy is in terms of a boat with a very strong leader who cannot see or …show more content…
The people take advantage of the leader of the vessel and they try to take over the democracy. Solon instituted a policy of “harmonious government” or defined the nature of citizenship. Formaly it was a matter of birth but now all citizens were defined by economic class. The nobles did not want citizen rights for the demos and the demos wanted to reduce the influence of the nobles as stated in Fragment 7 (West), “in undertakings of great import, it is difficult to please all”. All of these issues lead to later problems in the social class division. The relationship between Greek Democracy and the social class division was shown in (visual document one and three, written document one, and also the document on Ostracism). In visual document one and the document on ostracism, it tells us about the people who were exiled. The demos would obtain a shard of pottery called an ostracon and would write the name of one person on the shard. The votes were then tallied up from the ostracon and the person with the most votes was exiled from the city-state for a certain number of