Surikov I. What was the Name of the Supreme Government Body in the Democratic Athenian Polis?

WHAT WAS THE NAME
OF THE SUPREME GOVERNMENT BODY IN THE DEMOCRATIC ATHENIAN POLIS?

It is well-known that in any Ancient Greek polis the Assembly of citizens was the supreme power, – at least formally, and in democratic cities like Athens really, too. So, the question is: how Classical Athenians named their Assembly? Traditionally, it is thought that such a name was the ἐκκλησία, and, until very recently, nobody challenged this view. But M.H. Hansen, in his paper published in 2010, showed very persuasively that, as a matter of fact, Athenians called their Assembly the δῆμος (it is one of meanings of this highly polysemantic noun), and the word ἐκκλησία meant a meeting of the Assembly. This paradoxical observation is exhaustively proved by Hansen on the source data and appears to be a full-scale discovery, with many important implications. For example, now the correlation of terms δῆμος, ἐκκλησία and ἡλιαία becomes much clearer. The δῆμος is the Assembly as such; the ἐκκλησία is a meeting of the Assembly for deciding legislative and electoral matters; the ἡλιαία is a meeting of the same body, but on judicial matters.

See full version of the paper in Russian.