Did Athens have a democracy or an oligarchy?

 

In ancient philosophy, there were two schools of thought that were popular. One was most similar to Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher). The school argued that nature is good and civilization is bad. Naturally, all men are equal; civilization has made them into classes. Another school, most like Nietzsche (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher), claimed that all men are unequal, contrary to the previous one. Morality was an invention of the weak to limit and deter the strong. That power is the supreme virtue and the supreme desire of man. Of all the forms of government, the wisest and most natural is aristocracy.

Obviously, the latter had an attack on democracy, which was the rise of the wealthy minority in Athens. It was called the Oligarchical Party. How it can be considered a democracy is not clear. There was not much democracy to denounce in Athens. Aristocracy was the symbol of power and government. Athens had 400,000 citizens, and about 250,000 were slaves, without any political rights. Only a few of the 150,000 free citizens are represented in Ecclesia, Athens' general assembly or parliament, where state policies are debated and decided. The Dikasteria, the supreme court of Athens, consisted of over a thousand members to make bribery expensive, selected through alphabetical root among the free citizens. However, no institution has ever been democratic, the meaning that we have assigned to democracy.