Practice question · Multiple choice
Athenian democracy paid citizens to attend the assembly and to serve on juries. What problem was the payment solving?
Hints
- Ask who can attend an all-day assembly unpaid, and who cannot.
- The right already existed. What stood in the way of using it?
Show the answer
C. That rights are worthless to anyone who cannot afford the day
Why
A right you cannot afford to exercise belongs in practice to the leisured, and the stipend removed exactly that filter. Aristotle's critics understood it perfectly, they attacked the payment as what made the democracy genuinely popular rather than formally so.
Practise Classical Greece and the Polis
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Classical Greece and the Polis
- Complete the description of ostracism.
- Order the construction (and stress-testing) of the Athenian experiment.
- Sort each feature: filled by lottery or by election in classical Athens?
- An ostracism only counted if enough citizens showed up to scratch a name on a potsherd. Set the quorum.
- Why did Aristotle call the lottery democratic and election aristocratic?
- Most Athenian public offices were filled by lottery rather than election.