THE DÊMOS IN DÊMOKRATIA Daniela Cammack1,2 The dêmos in dêmokratia, ‘rule by the people’, is often interpreted ‘entire citizen- ry’. I argue that that is a specifically post-democratic interpretation. From Homer in the eighth century B.C. down to at least Aeschylus in the mid-fifth, dêmos indi- cated not the entire citizenry but a part of it, namely those who wielded political power through their participation in a collective agent, in the first instance an as- sembly, as opposed to those who had influence as individuals. Dêmokratia sig- nalled that supreme political power had passed to this group, away from the lead- ing men who had previously held sway. The original and (well into the classical period) primary meaning of dêmokratia was the rule of the collective common people over the rest of the polis, including over its own political elite. Background There are many things we know we do not know about ancient Greek democracy. One is when the term dêmokratia was coined. It may feature in an inscription ten- 1 From July 2017, Assistant Professor, Yale University, Political Science. Email: dan-
[email protected]. I thank Cliff Ando, Victor Bers, Paul Cammack, Paul Cartledge, David Grewal, Kinch Hoekstra, David Lewis, John Mulhern, Gunnar Seelentag, George Scialabba, Rich- ard Tuck, Jane Mansbridge, Josiah Ober and John Zumbrunnen for their comments. Abbreviations follow the Oxford Classical Dictonary and L’Année Philogique; translations are mine unless oth- erwise stated. This draft Jan. 31, 2017. 2 The following works are cited repeatedly. P. Cartledge, Ancient Greek Political Thought in Prac- tice (Cambridge, 2009); W.