The Egalitarian Battlefield: on the Origins of the Majority Rule in Archaic Greece
Abstract: Scholarship of the origins of Greek democracy has traditionally concentrated on the big picture. The Mainstream emphasizes that the democratization of politics was the result of interconnected economic, institutional, and technological trends that reach back as far as the eighth-century B.C. and which are thought of as promoting democratic development. Regarding the the introduction of formal votes in political assemblies not much is known; the specialized literature is very limited. We argue that voting may have emerged spontaneously as a substitute for fighting. It can be shown that under the circumstances of hoplite battle fighting and voting were close substitutes. We then explore whether these conditions were given in Greece in the period 700--500 B.C. The approach chosen is interdisciplinary, bringing together scholarship of the classics, military history, the institutional-economic approach to human conflict. It will be shown that geography, technology and institutions produced a unique `microtechnology of conflict' which meant that voting may have come into being not as an invention but rather an imitation of an idiosyncratic form of warfare.
