Surikov I. What was the Name of the Supreme Government Body in the Democratic Athenian Polis?
I.E. Surikov* WHAT WAS THE NAME 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. *I.E. Surikov — Ph.D., Senior Research Fellow (the Institute of General History, Russan Academy of Sciences). For citation use: [Surikov, I. 2011, 30 August. “What was the Name of the Supreme Government Body in the Democratic Athenian Polis?” Yaroslavl State University, Centre for Classical Studies. http://antik-yar.ru/events-2/ancient-civilization-political-institutions-and-legal-regulation/surikov-i?lang=en]. |
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