Central Athenian Historical Overview

What is in a word? We may live in a very different and much more complex world, but without the ancient Greeks, we would not even have the words to talk about many of the things we care most about. Take politics for example: apart from the word itself (from polis, meaning city-state or community), many of the other basic political terms in our everyday vocabulary are borrowed from the ancient Greeks: monarchy, aristocracy, tyranny, …

…ostracism to be valid, and all the biggest political fish risked being fried in this ceremonious way. For almost a hundred years ostracism fulfilled its function of aborting serious civil unrest or even civil war. At the end of the fifth century it was replaced by a legal procedure administered by the jurors of the people's courts. Power to the people, all the people, especially the poor majority, remained the guiding principle of Athenian democracy.