538 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
Hellenic device of federalism. A representative system in which the
people's control over the government was exercised at one remove
would, no doubt, have seemed an anaemic dilution of Democracy to
citizens of city-states like Florence or Athens, for whom Democracy had
signified the direct participation of all the citizens in public affairs; and,
for the sake of making a reality of this political ideal, most of these
Hellenic and Medieval Western democracies had been content to see
the size of their commonwealths limited for ever to the maximum within
which a direct participation of the whole citizen body in the government
was still practicable. When this was taken as the touchstone for testing
the genuineness of Democracy, a country with the area and population
of Attica in the fifth century B.C. was the largest that could be governed
democratically in the Athenian and Florentine sense; for in Attica the
points farthest from the capital—an Eleusis, a Marathon, a Sunium—
were none of them farther away from Athens than a single day's journey
on foot,1 while a citizen body that, at a maximum estimate, may have
approached a total strength of sixty thousand at its peak,2 was unlikely,
except on rare occasions, to present itself on the Pnyx in such force as to
make the conduct of public business unmanageable.3

1 On the xoth December, 1911, four students of the British Archaeological School at
Athens, one of whom was the writer of this Study, verified this by walking from Sunium
to Athens between the dawn and the dusk of a winter's day. Starting from Sunium at
6.30 a.m., our party reached Athens as night was falling. We should have arrived in
daylight if, when approaching Vari, we had not wasted an hour or so by swerving off
the track and scouring the south-eastern spurs of Hymettus in a vain search for the Cave
of Pan. A citizen of fifth-century Athens whose home was at Sunium, Marathon, or
Eleusis would, no doubt, have had to spend at least one night in the capital when he
made the journey thither on foot in order to transact business there.

2 That is, if M. N« Tod, in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. y (Cambridge 1947,
University Press), p. 11, is right in interpreting Thucydides' figures in The History of the
Atheno-Peloponnesian War, Book II, chap. 13, to mean that the total number of male
Athenian citizens of all classes, of the age of eighteen years and upwards, was something
between 55,000 and 61,000 in 431 B.C. Whatever the figure actually was in 431 B.C., it
may have been higher before 445 B.C., when some 5,000 men were struck off the register
in execution of a law, passed in 451-450 B.C., restricting the Athenian franchise to the
children of married couples in which both parents had been Athenian citizens at the
time of the child's birth. We do not know the extent to which this reduction of the total
by 5,000 in 445 B.C. had been offset by natural increase during the next fourteen years.

3 In composing their nostalgic political Utopias, in which Sparta was their ideal and
Athens was their bugbear (see III. iii. 90-97), Plato and Aristotle agreed with one another
in setting the optimum number of citizens for the citizen body of a city-state at a figure
that was very much lower than the actual numerical strength of the Athenian citizen
body in their day, when its strength was considerably smaller than it had been at its
peak. In the Republic (423 A-D) Plato declares that, so long as his ideal city-state has the
constitution that he has laid down for it in this dialogue, he does not mind if the number
of citizens capable of bearing arms is no higher than a thousand; and he stipulates that,
if the number is to be higher than that, it must not be raised to a figure at which the
community will lose its unity. In The Laws (737 0-738 A) Plato takes as his criterion for
the scale of his ideal city-state the need for the community's man-power to be sufficient
to enable it to defend itself successfully if attacked by its neighbours, and on this
criterion he opts for a figure of 5,040 citizens capable of bearing arms. Aristotle, in his
discussion of the optimum magnitude in The Politics (1235 3-1226 B), refrains from
committing himself to any precise figure and merely stipulates that the number of the
citizens must not be so large as to make it impossible for them to be all personally
acquainted with one another, or impossible for an announcer without a loud-speaker
(/dfcul //i? J£Tprop«os)tomake himself heard by the whole assembly. A popular assembly
even of this size would, of course, have been unmanageable if it had been the only organ
of government. In a competently managed Hellenic democracy such as the Athenian in
the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., the popular assembly was enabled to transact its busi-
ness effectively tbanks to an infusion of the representative system into the Cleisthenean
Constitution of 508-507 B,C, Public business was pre-digested and presented, and its