Ancient Greece: The Historical Needle’s Eye of Modern Politics and Political Thought

A broad range of political procedures, principles, and ways of thinking that are crucial, widespread, and fairly generally accepted (though not always fully realized) components of political life in our modern world have their origin in ancient Greece, even if they were developed further in recent centuries. Most prominent among these are normative laws enacted by the community or its representatives, constitutions and constitutional theory, the principles of popular sovereignty, checks and balances, and representation, majority voting, the secret ballot, the concept of citizenship, and political thought and theory. This paper examines the question of when and why each of these “items” was invented by the Greeks, and why they were invented in Greece in the first place (in a small, mountainous, and mostly poor country beyond the reach of the great empires of the time) rather than in Mesopotamia or Egypt—in societies that developed marvelous early civilizations by which the Greeks were inspired in many other ways.