<P> Athenian democracy has had many critics, both ancient and modern . Ancient Greek critics of the democracy include Thucydides the general and historian, Aristophanes the playwright, Plato the pupil of Socrates, Aristotle the pupil of Plato, and a writer known as the Old Oligarch . Modern critics are more likely to find fault with the narrow definition of the citizen body, but in the ancient world the complaint, if anything, went in the opposite direction . For them, the common people were not necessarily the right people to rule and made huge mistakes . According to Samons: </P> <P> The modern desire to look to Athens for lessons or encouragement for modern thought, government, or society must confront this strange paradox: the people that gave rise to and practiced ancient democracy left us almost nothing but criticism of this form of regime (on a philosophical or theoretical level). And what is more, the actual history of Athens in the period of its democratic government is marked by numerous failures, mistakes, and misdeeds--most infamously, the execution of Socrates--that would seem to discredit the ubiquitous modern idea that democracy leads to good government . </P> <P> Thucydides, from his Aristocratic and historical viewpoint, reasoned that the common people were often much too credulous about even contemporary facts to rule justly . Josiah Ober notes that "Thucydides cites examples of two errors regarding Sparta: the beliefs that the two Spartan kings each had two votes in council and that there was a Spartan battalion called the' Pitanate lochos .' Thucydides sums up:' Such is the degree of carelessness among the many (hoi polloi) in the search for truth (aletheia) and their preference for ready - made accounts' ." He contrasted his own critical - historical approach to history with the way the demos decided upon the truth . So "Thucydides has established for his reader the existence of a potentially fatal structural flaw in the edifice of democratic ways of knowing and doing . The identification of this "flaw" is a key to his criticism of Athenian popular rule ." </P> <P> Also, Donald Kagan writes that "In the fourth century, Plato and Aristotle must have been repeating old complaints when they pointed out the unfairness of democracy:' it distributes a sort of equality to equal and unequal alike' ." Instead of seeing it as a fair system under which' everyone' has equal rights, the critics saw it as the numerically preponderant poor tyrannizing the rich . They regarded this as manifestly unjust . In Aristotle this is categorized as the difference between' arithmetic' and' geometric' (i.e. proportional) equality . </P>

The ancient athenians developed the first form of democracy