By John Voutos

Paying zero taxes and owning slaves were just two facets of Athenian life in the 5^th-4^th century BC.

Below are the top seven facts about ancient Athenian democracy you might not know.

Women, slaves, and foreign residents were not allowed to vote

The sons of non-Athenian mothers and fathers were, too, not allowed to vote in elections. Women were restricted from actively engaging in politics. Women were not expected in the Agora, a central public meeting space for announcements and discussions, and were expected to keep to the household. Athenian men who served in the military were the only citizens afforded the right to vote. Cleisthenes of Athens, regarded as the founder of Athenian democracy, later helped extend the right to vote to all citizens.

Athens had the largest slave population in ancient Greece

80,000 – 100,000 slaves – an average of three or four per household, with the richest having as many as 50 – made up just close to half of Athens’s population. Slaves, who were captured as prisoners-of-war, were auctioned at a market and sold to be used domestically in private homes, factories, shops, and mines, and also as civil servants. Slaves did not have any human or civil rights and were often beaten, tortured, and raped by their owners. While slavery was considered to be natural and necessary, slaves were often freed or allowed to buy back their freedom.

Most Athenians didn’t pay taxes

Taxation in Athenian democracy was progressive. Taxes were based on a system of liturgy, or λειτουργία, meaning “public service”. This system meant the wealthiest of society paid for public expenses and funded festivals, banquets, and facilities. The Athenian rationale was that the rich should shoulder the expenses of the city. However, paying taxes wasn’t legally enforced but rather encouraged as a sense of duty and the wealthy ostentatiously boasted of prestige and honour when they did.

Very few politicians were actually elected

Sortition, a randomised ‘lottery’ process for electing public officials, was the hallmark of Athenian democratic process. Sortition appealed to the ancient Athenians as a fair way of maintaining an equal participation of the masses in power and preventing corruption. Ancient Athenians voted for only 10 per cent of their officials, selecting the rest – including magistrates, the Boule Council of 500, and the all-male juries in legal cases – by sortition. Sortition is still used in modern jury selection.

Athens went a while without a police force

Athens went without a police force until the 5^th century BC. This police force consisted of a group of 300 Scythian slaves who guarded public meetings and performed arrests with bow and arrows in tow. While scholars agree that the force existed, speculation shrouds the authority and conception of the force.

The death penalty was exercised

Athenian law applied the death penalty with draconian severity. The death penalty could be imposed for theft of sacred property, prostitution, adultery, and homicide. Many other procedures from among the agones timetoi trials risked imposing the death penalty for theft, providing a false summons, and hubris – an ambiguous crime regarding violence committed for the sake of imposing humiliation or self-gratification. The guilty were executed by ingesting hemlock, a mixture based on plant extract from the poison hemlock. 

The first democracy about 2,500 years ago

Athens was home to the first direct democracy in the world. Athenian democracy developed around the 5^th century BC and served as one of the first forms of self-rule government in the world. Many Athenians from this era would mistake modern democracies today as oligarchy.

By John Voutos

On the night of April 10^th, 1826, thousands of inhabitants of Messolonghi, Greece, attempted a mass exodus against Ottoman armies.

Ottoman forces attempted to seize the strategically located port town of Messolonghi not once, twice, but three times. They were successful on the third.

The Greek Herald takes a look back at one of the most tragic and renowned episodes in the Greek struggle for independence.

First and second attempted sieges

Messolonghi was the first town in western Greece to join the cause for Greek independence. Messolonghi was a vital bastion in the War for its strategic location.

The Ottoman Empire attempted to capture Messolonghi several times in the early 1820s in the early phase of the War.

The first attempt saw Ottoman figures Omer Vrioni, Sultan Resid Mehmed Pasha, and Yusuf Pasha of Patras, lead 11,000 of their force against the town. Negotiations failed, time was stalled by the Greeks, and an unsuccessful assault was launched on the 24^th of December 1822. The first attempt lasted from the 25^th of October until the Ottomans conceded defeat a week later on the 31^st  of December 1822.

The second attempt in 1823, led by Vrioni and Mustafa Pasha Bushatli of Scutari, focused on the town of Anatoliko, Thessaloniki, and famously led to the Battle of Karpenisi.

The third siege and the exodus of Messolonghi

Each attempt brought with it a larger force and greater destruction.

Sultan Reshid Mehmed Pasha led twenty-thousand Ottomans in their third and successful attempt from 15 April 1825 to 10 April 1826. The Sultan assigned trenches to be dug and mounds to be built around the town. In late 1825, Mohammed Ali of Egypt sent a fleet of 135 ships to join Ibrahim Pasha’s force against Greece. The Greek War of Independence was escalating.

Hydra-born Admiral Andreas Miaoulis supplied the townsfolk with food until Ibrahim Pasha cut the town off from its supplies.

The inhabitants became skeletal and health complications arose while, slowly but surely, much of western Greece came under siege.

Fed up, Souliot captains Notis Botsaris and Kitsos Tzavelas, and chieftain Dimitrios Makris, held a meeting in the Saint Spyridon Church to devise a plan to escape on the 10^th of April 1826. The three, with the assistance of between three to four thousand men of “military age”, agreed to lead their own group of escapees safely out of the town while the others would attack and divert the Ottoman forces. Now, the Ottomans were onto their scent and began their tirade against the Greeks. “The town was like a roaring furnace,” Nikolaos Kasomoulis, a captain secretary, once recalled. Thousands died. Many others surrendered or committed suicide. Many of the escapees were sold into slavery. Only 1,000 of the 7,000 involved in the exodus that night survived.

Why it’s important

The tragedy caught the attention and prompted ‘Great Power’ intervention from Great Britain, France, and Russia to ally with the Greeks in the Battle of Navarino and help secure Greece’s independence.

Messolonghi was handed back to the Greeks four years after the massacre.

Messolonghi is recognised as the “Holy City of Greece.” 500 metres of Missolonghi’s fortifications has endured the test of time and can be seen today.

Theodoros Vryzakis’ oil painting The Exodus of Messolonghi (1814, or 1819-1879) famously captures the uproar, tension, and drama of the night in academic and calligraphic detail. French painter Eugène Delacroix’s Greece on the Ruins of Messolonghi (1826) sits in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux in Bordeaux, France.