The history tells us that the first display of European democracy begins, arguably, not in Athens but in Sparta. It seems quite strange that the very first features of democratic society came into the world exactly from this city which defined itself as the direct opposite of the " Open society ". But what really matter to us is Athens, where the earliest innovation of political equality was created, more thoroughly than in Sparta and where newer and more rapid social reforms had occurred. These reforms allowed the creation of a system of participatory democracy, which combined both a complexity of political structure with the principle of almost total amateurism at the same time.
View of Athens
English: Diagram representing the constitution of ...
Solon, creator of the Solonian Constitution of Ath...Nevertheless, we can observe from some historical sources, that there are some possibilities that a democratic regime took its roots from the Phoenicians, which inhabited in Western Asia. Some facts indicate that the Phoenicians had something analogous to the self-regulating polis of ancient Athens. From the fact that the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and their methods of colonisation, it is reasonable to suggest that some of the Greeks' political origins were also assimilated from the Phoenicians. However, a majority of political scientists concentrate their attention especially on the Spartans and Athenians in this area of the question and we perhaps should do so.
However, even if we still think that the Greeks were the originators of democracy we should consider why it was the Greeks and what the special qualities that enables them to approximate to this political model in the distant past? Why was democracy born in Greece and nowhere else? There is one interesting point, which shows that in some ancient societies the privileges belonged to some age groups. The basis of these societies had been often military as in the early...