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Notes

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[1] Socrates's regular income from invested property seems to have been only about $12 per year. It is to be hoped his wife, Xanthippe, had a little property of her own!

[2] Possibly the son of a man whose parents notoriously had been slaves in Athens would have found many doors closed to him.

[3] Of course women were entirely excluded from the Ecclesia, as from all other forms of public life. The question of "woman's rights" had been agitated just enough to produce comedies like Aristophanes's "Parliament of Women," and philosophical theories such as appear in Plato's "Republic."

[4] Payment for attendance at the Pnyx seems to have been introduced about 390 B.C. The original payment was probably only one obol, and then from time to time increased. It was a sign of the relative decay of political interest in Athens when it became needful thus to reward the commonalty for attendance at the Assembly.

[5] "A prytany" was one tenth of a year, say 35 or 36 days, during which time the 50 representatives of one of the ten Athenian tribes then serving as members of the Council of 500 (each tribe taking its turn) held the presidency of the Council and acted as a special executive committee of the government. There were thus at least 40 meetings of the Ecclesia each year, as well as the extraordinary meetings.

[6] A "demagogue" (=people-leader) might well be a great statesman, and not necessarily a cheap and noisy politician.

[7] Aristophanes's "Acharnians" (ll. 50 ff.) gives a valuable picture of this and other proceedings at the Pnyx, but one should never forget the poet's exaggerations for comedy purposes, nor his deliberate omission of matters likely to be mere tedious detail to his audience.

[8] This seems to have been the regular form for beginning a "probouleuma" although nearly all our information comes from the texts of proposals after they have been made formal decrees by the sovran Demos.

[9] When an individual had to be voted for, then ballots were used.

A Day in Old Athens

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