Splitting Images: Communication in Classical Athens

Athens without its citizens, a silent city, would still have had the appearance of a democracy. Many of its laws were inscribed in stone; the visual environment communicated powerful ideological messages through depictions of the archetypal myths and narratives of the Athenian democracy. A sculpture of the tyrant-slayers, whose assassination of the tyrant Hippias' brother was popularly believed to have inaugurated the democracy, stood conspicuously in the market-place; public art portrayed valiant Athenian democrats defeating the tyrannical Persians who had failed, despite invading the city in 480 and 479 BC, to deprive it of its political liberty.

Yet the Athenian democracy consisted not in silent images but in noisy procedures; the poet Pindar can use 'the noisy regiment' as an alternative term for democracy. Democracy was actually a process which consisted in public verbal performances, by prominent men, in front of large audiences of responsive and vocal fellow citizens.