any case blighted by social and economic factors which do not here con-
cern us. So what really matters for us is Athens, where almost equally
early political innovation was developed much further than in Sparta, and
in an orderly and amazingly rapid sequence of reforms. What resulted
was a system of participatory democracy which combined a complexity
and sophistication of political detail on the one hand (including a very
severe attitude to individual accountability), with the principle of almost
total amateurism on the other, in a marriage which remains unprece-
dented to this day.

But before we move on to Athens, we should ask whether European
and specifically Greek democracy really was the first democracy of all.
The recent reaction against 'Hellenocentricity', 'privileging the Greeks',
and so on, may be more than mere fashionable reaction against the
European-mindedness (and anti-Semitism) of the past two centuries of
classical scholarship: there are serious grounds ( Bernal 1987, 1991) for
giving the Phoenicians some of the credit traditionally given to the
Greeks. The Phoenicians, in western Asia, had something comparable to
the self-regulating city-state or polis of archaic and classical Greece. Since
it is now agreed that the Greeks took their alphabet and their methods of
colonization, perhaps even the city-state concept itself, from the
Phoenicians, we should be similarly prepared for the possibility of
Phoenician origins for some of the Greek political arrangements we most
admire. Scientific study in this area has, however, hardly begun: as with
the Spartans, we can do no more than mention the Phoenicians and
move on.

Even if we concede priority to the Greeks, we still need to ask, with-
out much hope of an answer, what was special about them. Why demo-
cracy there? One interesting approach ( Sallares 1991: 181 ff.) is in terms of
age-classes, that is, the system, familiar to anthropologists, whereby politi-
cal privilege is strictly doled out according to age. Stratification of society
on these lines is often military in origin, and the structure of the early
Greek (and indeed Roman) state was essentially military and remained so.
Early tyranny was the stage of political development which succeeded the
hereditary aristocracies of early Greece. Tyranny sometimes happened
when individuals, often young men of brilliant athletic or military pres-
tige and so with (in their own view) a claim on privilege beyond the
level to which their age restricted them, made good that claim by force.
Once the idea spread that the age-class could be transcended in this or
some other way, it was (the theory goes) a short move to the more gen-
eral idea that privilege should be distributed without respect to age.

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