<P> Some Athenian citizens were far more active than others, but the vast numbers required for the system to work testify to a breadth of direct participation among those eligible that greatly surpassed any present - day democracy . Athenian citizens had to be descended from citizens--after the reforms of Pericles and Cimon in 450 BC, they "would be confined to those whose parents were both Athenian". Although the legislation was not retrospective, five years later, when a free gift of grain had arrived from the Egyptian king, to be distributed among all citizens, "many' illegitimates' were discovered" and removed from the registers . </P> <P> Citizenship, "commonly applied not only to the individuals themselves but to their descendants as well", could be granted by the assembly, and was sometimes given to large groups (e.g. Plateans in 427 BC and Samians in 405 BC) but, by the 4th century, only to individuals and by a special vote with a quorum of 6000 . This was generally done as a reward for some service to the state . In the course of a century, the number of citizenships so granted was in the hundreds rather than thousands . </P> <P> There were three political bodies where citizens gathered in numbers running into the hundreds or thousands . These are the assembly (in some cases with a quorum of 6000), the council of 500 (boule) and the courts (a minimum of 200 people, on some occasions up to 6000). Of these three bodies, the assembly and the courts were the true sites of power--although courts, unlike the assembly, were never simply called the demos (the People) as they were manned by a subset of the citizen body, those over thirty . But crucially citizens voting in both were not subject to review and prosecution as were council members and all other officeholders . </P> <P> In the 5th century BC we often hear of the assembly sitting as a court of judgment itself for trials of political importance and it is not a coincidence that 6000 is the number both for the full quorum for the assembly and for the annual pool from which jurors were picked for particular trials . By the mid-4th century however the assembly's judicial functions were largely curtailed, though it always kept a role in the initiation of various kinds of political trial . </P>

Who held the most power in the athenian democracy