In Athens, democracy was generally not viewed as a good form of government because giving power to all meant giving power to the ignorant and uneducated lower-class people. In Pseudo-Xenophon: Constitution of the Athenians (431 BCE), an unknown Athenian commonly referred to as Pseudo-Xenophon shares his thoughts about democracy. The Athenian tells the reader than the higher class citizens are respectable and the lower classes are ignorant and uneducated, making the working class unfit to lead. The essay on the Athenian Constitution says that the masses “display extreme ignorance, indiscipline and wickedness” and that “poverty gives them a tendency toward the immoral and in some cases their poverty leads to their being uneducated and ignorant.”
