The Walled Orchard by Tom Holt Page A

methods which anyone could use, and so making and listening to political speeches became the national pastime and obsession of the Athenian people. The oarsmen had plenty of leisure when there was no naval action in hand, since most of them by definition had only small holdings of land to work (if they had more than a few acres they would qualify for the Heavy Infantry or Cavalry class, who are far too grand to live off the proceeds of State piracy) and there is no better way known to man of spending an idle afternoon than sitting in Assembly with a jar of dried figs listening to clever speeches and then voting to annex a few more cities.
    This new style of politics called for a new breed of politicians. There was no longer much point in striving for the high offices of State now that the real power lay with Assembly. But in theory at least, any Athenian citizen was allowed to address Assembly and propose a measure, and it soon became obvious that the way to get on in politics was to make speeches and propose measures, as often and as loudly as possible. It was also open to any Athenian citizen to prosecute any other Athenian citizen in the law courts, and Athens has a great wealth of un-Athenian Activities legislation specifically designed to be useful to politicians. By this time we Athenians had already developed our wonderful judicial system, whereby all trials are heard by mass juries of several hundred citizens; all that remained to perfect the system was the introduction of a living wage for jury service. Thus was created the Athenian professional juryman, who gets up before dawn to stand in line for a place on the jury. If he gets there early enough he is assured of entertainment of the very highest quality from the speechmakers plus a day’s wages at the end of the performance. This way of life is particularly attractive to older and less active men who can neither dig nor row, and they are extremely careful to convict anyone who threatens to destroy their livelihood by proposing political reforms. On the other hand, they are always grateful to people who do a lot of prosecuting, since for every prosecution there has to be a jury, and these people are very rarely convicted of anything, even if they are genuinely guilty.
    And that, more or less, is how Athens came to have the most pure and perfect democracy the world has ever seen, in which every man had a right to be heard, the law was open to all, and nobody need go hungry if he was not too proud to play his part in the oppression of his fellow Greeks and the judicial murder of inconvenient statesmen. The by-products of the system included the perfection of oratory and a universal love among all classes of society of the spoken word in its most delicate and refined forms. No wonder we are a nation of aesthetes.
    The only problem was Sparta. Ever since Zeus, whose sense of humour is not particularly attractive to us mortals, put Athens and Sparta on the same strip of land, there has been war between the two cities. Asking Athens and Sparta to live together without fighting is like expecting night to marry day, or winter to form an offensive and defensive alliance with summer. Having unquestionably the best land army in the world, the Spartans generally had the best of these wars; but since the population of Sparta was small and spent most of its time reminding its own empire in the south of Greece about the merits of absolute loyalty, it had never been able to take any lasting measures against Athens, such as burning it to the ground and sowing salt on the ashes.
    Sparta had been the nominal leader of the League during the war, but as soon as it became clear that the Persians could only be defeated at sea the real leadership passed to Athens, and since the Spartans were busy with violent internal politics as soon as the war ended, there was nothing they could do to stop us building our empire in the way I have just described. As soon as they were clear of their local