by Catherine Perez

Created on: March 23, 2009

The etymology of the word comes from the Greek: democratic, which means popular government.A democracy is a government system in which power is exercised by the people via a free electoral system.As the word, democracy was born in Greece, and to be more precise in Athens.

The origin of the Athenian democracy can be traced back to Solon. Solon was a poet and respected statesman of ancient Greece. Although, he wasn't himself in favour of democracy, his constitutional reform on the Athenian government became the foundation block of what will become a hundred or so years later the first democracy.

Cleithenes was the real founder of democracy in Athens. It is under the dictatorship of his brother in law that he managed to promote his new political system and successfully had the Athenian democratic Constitution adopted. (508/7)The Athenian democracy revolutionized people's views and ideas on political philosophy, and they shape in more ways than one our modern governments.It was under this democratic rule that the Greek civilization flourished. Athens allowed the like of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes to be heard. Of all the democracy, Athens was the most-stable, most-long lived of all; but also the most intransigent.The Athenian version of democracy died with Alexander the Great. But democracy itself went on spreading elsewhere, under different forms and variants.
Modern democracy differs from Greek democracy on three major points:

Population:
From a purely technical point of view, one can only imagine what problems would arise from trying to have millions of people to vote on every single little piece of legislation, or on every state decision. It would be infeasible.
Therefore a pure version of "direct" democracy was impossible to implement.

Level of participation:
In Ancient Athens, democracy was direct with no use of representative. Nowadays, most democracies have a representative system, which involves people electing those politicians who will in charge of making decisions in their name.

Eligibility:
In Athens, only adult male citizens were allowed to participate in the affairs of the State. Besides that criteria, one needed to be of double Athenian descent: mother and father.
Our modern definition of democracy includes the following two notions: that all members of the society without discrimination have equal access to power. And that, all citizens' freedom and liberties are legally recognized and protected.
There are many different types of democracy in our modern World, but one truth remains if the system is to be viable and it is the separation of power.
We owe a great debt to Ancient Greece and its philosophers. They, by given birth to democracy, recognized the inherent right of every individual to be free.

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