Evaluate the structure and limits of Athenian democracy in the age of Pericles

What this dot point is asking

Athenian democracy did not begin with Pericles. Its foundations were laid by the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 to 507 BCE, who reorganised citizens into ten tribes based on local districts called demes and created the Council of 500. Earlier still, Solon had reformed debt and class in the 590s BCE. By the fifth century these institutions had matured into the most participatory system in the ancient world, though only for adult male citizens.

The core institution was the Ekklesia, or Assembly, open to all adult male citizens, which met around forty times a year on the Pnyx hill. It debated and voted directly on war, finance, laws and policy, usually by show of hands. Day-to-day business was prepared by the Boule, the Council of 500, chosen by lot from the tribes, while the courts were staffed by large juries of citizens, also chosen by lot and paid for service. Selection by lot, rather than election, was seen as deeply democratic because it gave every citizen an equal chance to govern. Generals, the strategoi, were elected because their roles needed expertise, and it was as an elected general that Pericles led Athens.

Pericles dominated Athenian politics for around thirty years and is the central figure for this dot point. The historian Thucydides records his Funeral Oration of 431 BCE, delivered at the start of the Peloponnesian War, in which Pericles praises Athens as a democracy that is an education to the wider Greek world and a place where power belongs to the many. Thucydides also famously remarked that Athens was, in name a democracy but in fact the rule of its leading citizen. Under Pericles, Athens used the funds of the Delian League to rebuild the temples burned by the Persians, including the Parthenon (447 to 432 BCE) on the Acropolis, overseen by the sculptor Phidias.

The limits of the system are essential to a strong answer. Citizenship was narrow. After the citizenship law of 451 BCE, sponsored by Pericles himself, a citizen had to have two Athenian parents. Women had no political rights and were largely confined to the household. Slaves, who may have numbered in the tens of thousands, had no rights at all, and the system depended on their labour, including in the silver mines at Laurion. Metics, free resident foreigners, paid taxes and served in war but could not vote or own land. By modern standards, the democratic citizen body was perhaps only ten to twenty per cent of the adult population. Ostracism, a vote to exile a citizen for ten years, could remove rivals without trial.

The evidence is rich but biased. Thucydides admired Pericles and is hostile to later demagogues; the comedies of Aristophanes mock the Assembly and its leaders; the philosophers Plato and Aristotle were sceptical of democracy and wrote partly to criticise it. Inscriptions and the surviving Constitution of the Athenians give institutional detail. For a TASC answer, use these sources critically and judge how democratic Athens really was by setting its participatory ideals against the people it excluded.