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.
Hansen established the actual practices of the direct democratic assembly, the nature of the leadership exercised by the distinct classes of orators and generals in the absence of any form of partisan political structures, and the importance of mood and rhetoric on the opinions of the mass assembly. He answered many of these questions through analogy with the only surviving modern institutional forms of direct democracy, the local assemblies, or Landsgemeinde, in Switzerland, in most of which women began to vote only from 1972.
His second insight was based on the fact that previous interpretations of Athenian democracy had ignored how it had changed as a result of Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian war with Sparta and the constitutional reforms that began in 403 BC.
The system had moved from the assembly being sovereign to one that was ruled by the distinction between laws (nomoi) that were permanent, and decisions (psephismata) that had to be made in conformity with the laws, and could be challenged in the courts if they were not.
Hansen’s evidence came from existing fourth-century assembly speeches, and the resulting book was entitled The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes (1991). It contrasted the period in which the statesman Demosthenes used his oratory to persuade the assembly on matters such as the threat of invasion from Macedonia with the fifth-century democracy of Pericles, about which little could be known. In his subsequent work Hansen went on to analyse in similar empirical fashion the traditions, differences and similarities between ancient and modern democracy, and in A Comparative Study of Thirty City-State Cultures (2000) he investigated the common features of city-state culture from ancient Mesopotamia to the Maghreb – western and central north Africa – and the Malay Straits.
His last major work was An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis (2004), poleis being the plural of polis, the city-state. Hansen organised an international team to create an enormous gazetteer listing the 1,035 known Greek city-states of the classical world, with all their social institutions; it was a result of 10 years of international conferences sponsored by the Danish National Research Foundation, and established definitively the conception of the polis.
The project also threw up an inadvertent and curious finding – as I reminded Hansen at a celebration of the book’s completion in Copenhagen, unlike modern Copenhagen or ancient Rome, Greek cities appeared to possess neither bars nor brothels.
Born in the Frederiksberg district of Copenhagen, Mogens was the son of Gudrun Heslet, a translator, and Herman Hansen, an engineer. He attended Øregård and Østre Borgerdyd schools; a maverick from childhood, he infuriated his teachers by playing tricks such as forging their signatures to professional standards.
At Copenhagen University he studied ancient Greek and history, graduating in 1967. The following year he was appointed to a junior post as an instructor in Greek. In 1975 his stream of articles began, and he went on to become a fellow of the Royal Danish Academy, the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut and the British Academy. Though he received other national and international honours, he did not seek promotion to a professorship, continuing to have lunch every week with his pupils.
Hansen told of how after the completion of his major publications “I returned to my position in classical Greek at the university and, accordingly, to the university’s pay-roll. I was 63 and expected to go on for another seven years at the university. However, I was immediately ordered to go to a meeting with the faculty, who asked whether I would like to retire at once. I responded, a little disappointed, that I would agree to that if I was replaced by a young scholar aged 40. That, however, was not the plan. The plan was to cut the position away. ‘Then I’ll stay,’ I said. And I did, until 2010.”
He had a total disregard for hierarchies and enlivened international conferences with his infectious enthusiasm, flute playing, spontaneous limericks and gifts of strange blue smoked fish.
In his youth he was involved in a car accident. His fiancee died, and he was hospitalised for many months. His recovery was aided by the physician Birgitte Holt, who was also a musician and Nordic philologist. They subsequently married; she died in 2021, and he is survived by their son, Toke.
• Mogens Herman Hansen, historian, born 20 August 1940; died 22 June 2024
