Democracy
Democracy means the rule of the people (in Greek).
That is where each individual person has a vote about what to do.
Whatever the most people vote for wins. There is no king
or tyrant, and anybody can propose a new
law.
One problem that immediately comes up in a democracy is who is going
to be able to vote. Should people vote who are just visiting from
some other city-state? How about little kids,
should they vote? Or should there be some limits?
Another problem for democracies was that it was very inconvenient for men to always be going to the meeting-place to vote. Most men had work to do, planting their grain, making shoes, fighting wars or whatever. They couldn't be always voting. So most democracies sooner or later ended up choosing a few men who would do most of the voting, and the rest only came when there was a really important vote. It was hard to decide how to choose these few men, and different cultures did it different ways. Athens did it by a lottery. If you got the winning ticket then you were on the Council of 500. Men served for a year.
Democracy spread around the Mediterranean,
but it was pretty much wiped out by the Roman
Empire about 100 BC. Still, places like
Athens continued to use democratic methods to make their own decisions
on local matters for a long time after that.
A thousand years later, in the Middle Ages, some cities
in Italy - Siena, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Venice - went back to having
a democratic government. These were all organized in slightly different
ways, but none of them allowed the poor or women to vote, and some had a lottery
system like Athens.
(To read a description of the democracy of Florence
written by a man who lived there at that time, click
here).
