ABSTRACT
When Aristotle stated that man is by nature a political animal, he was not only seeking to distinguish humanity from the lower animals: he was asserting the importance of the state-or, as we might say, government - in the human condition. And when in Book 3 of The Politics he examines what elements go to determine the nature of being a citizen, he explicitly identifies 'participation in giving judgement'. This concept of participation in government is one which ran through a great deal of Athenian political thought and action. The Greek city state, the polis, was small enough to permit all free men to share in the taking of political decisions, and it was an important duty laid upon the citizen to accept the responsibility that this entailed. Representative government, as we know it today, would have been a peculiar, indeed a questionable idea. Of course offices of state existed in Athens and their holders had a measure of delegated discretion, but they were often filled by lot and were in any case subject to a degree of popular oversight in their daily actions which governments today would find hard to stomach.
