I lived in Greek villages for 5 years and was told over many an ouzo about the accomplishments of the Greeks. I have a list somewhere here. It’s long. I would avoid the obvious fact that it’s been pretty quiet there for about 2000 years, but let’s not get into that. Main thing I was raised to admire about Greek culture was that they invented democracy. 

Thing is,  they didn’t. 

I don’t just mean the painful outlier, that women and slaves weren’t included.  Other cultures had already experimented with voting. I was taught that representative democracy is what changed the possibilities of governance. Jeffersonian Democracy, is what changed the world. 

It didn’t. 

The Greeks didn’t invent voting. They did something far more brilliant. They opened up the playing field. They recognized that the real issue was who you can vote for, not merely who can vote. In other words, who got to be a ‘candidate’, was decided by wealth, inheritance, the bloke with the strongest army. So the main trait of a leader was that he was already in a position of power. 

The common man was not able to rise to consideration.

The critical thinker here was Cleisthenes who had the idea of a lottery system. Any citizen could go through an ingenious lottery machine, carved of marble, called the kleroterion, and totally at random, be chosen to be a leader of considerable power, or hold a variety of other public service positions. (Not all. For example Generals were chosen by vote.) The innovation was simple, democracy can not survive if the only people who hold office were already a part of the ruling class. 

Ring a bell.

The US Constitution outlined who could vote, dragging along much of the same racism and sexism of the ancients. Americans are still fighting for the right to vote. Respectfully, maybe who can vote has always been the lesser issue. Who can RUN is where the wealthy have always had their thumb on the scale.  And that battle field has hardly been breached in more than 2000 years. 

The Greeks have a word for the dark heart of the issue, ‘Pleonexia. It means, ‘the insatiable desire… 

to have more than one’s share.’