The term democracy emerged in the classical city-state of Athens to denote power exercised by common people, at that point men who were not slaves. From around the sixth century BC, officials were chosen by lot and were subordinate to a citizens’ assembly that made decisions. Writers on this process tended to describe it in theoretical terms. But the Danish historian Mogens Herman Hansen, who has died aged 83 after a short illness, transformed understanding of how Athenian democracy functioned by approaching it empirically, through a series of simple questions.
He did this from two points of view: practical and constitutional. First, he looked at physical constraints, asking how many men could be accommodated on the Pnyx, the hill in central Athens that was home to the assembly, in its different configurations; how long sessions lasted; how long speeches were; how the assembly voted; how often it met; how leaders asserted their authority and established any continuity of policy; and what social classes they came from.
