Part III – Early Republic - From 4300 After Founding to 5120 A.F.
The first Greek Republic was proclaimed after decades of revolution following King Alexander XXVIII's legendary abdication. The wise men calculated that it was 4300 years from when Emperor Alexander I crowned himself.
Many local rulers resented losing their power and mobilized to fight against such; however, many arguments had to do with the exact mechanisms of how the common people would choose their leaders.
The larger cities felt that their higher populations made their concerns proportionally more important. The smaller cities obviously did not agree. They did not want to be part of a nation whether they were legally overwhelmed by their larger brethren, and felt their territory was also of vital importance to the country.
After all, the land area around each settlement was and still is roughly equal except for the few cities particularly close to each other, notably Mycenae and Thessalonica. The inland cities Athens, Sparta and Thessalonica pointed out that the rest were surrounded by mostly water. The coastal cities argued that their seafaring trade, especially in whale products, was also of vital national interest.
It was determined that larger cities would have more votes, but not proportionally more, and that territory would not count except in how it affected population growth. The first myriad would lead to one vote, but it would take two more myriads for the city to have a total of two votes, three more than that to earn a third vote, and so on and so forth. That formula, more than a millennium and a half old, is still used today.
The charter of the country called for counting citizens every twenty years for this purpose, and further explained Until such enumeration shall be made, the City of Athens shall be entitled to chuse [sic] six, Sparta three, Thermopylae five, Corinth three, Delphi three, Pharsalos two, Knossos two and Argos two. So the first Senate sat with twenty-six men.
The Greek national legislature has grown since then, and seated quite a few women. The chamber still does not seat as many as the gynaikists would like. Admittedly, their point seemed understandable. Women still amounted to far less than half of the Senators. This was more of a difference than could be explained by other factors. Greeks would see this if they cared to, although a proper education in statistics aided this realization.
However, the tradition of obstructing the consul or prime minister has remained much the same since those early days. That was a key part of their role, as grudgingly as I the Prime Minister admit it. At least there hadn't been any war efforts for them to interfere with at the time.
Greek explorers soon learned you couldn't go much further north on the continent than Knossos. However, astronomical observations already indicated by that time that our homeland was near the south of the world.
This was further confirmed by the maps the Embassy traders brought back – we traded cartographical knowledge with the foreigners as well as the results of scientific inquiry. This saved us so much trouble fielding a fleet of ships and stumbling around the world, especially given the rickety triremes of the age. To sail on one of those would have been suicide, to order it out manslaughter; the Greeks never fielded any.
With exchange of both maps and research scrolls, what we received from one nation we could trade to another to further the process.
France was equally far south, Japan just as far north, Egypt somewhat in the middle of the world. Although it seemingly passed unnoticed at the time, part of India had been found between Egypt and France. The locations and extents of Celtic and Persian territory were wholly unknown then, as odd as that may seem now to people of the modern world.
Despite the north of the continent ending near Knossos, there was much of the same fertile grasslands and rich forests to the south; Herakleia was only the beginning of the Greek colonization in that area. The west had at least enough room for Mycenae. As those cities' new senators were seated in 4660 After Founding, the Senate expanded to thirty-two.
Another even number. Those who laid out the constitution of the Greek republic had of course foreseen tied votes, but perhaps hadn't foreseen how common they'd be. Fortunately, the secondary consul, usually a political ally of the consul, had the authority to cast tiebreaking votes. That's all that many people thought he did besides sitting around and waiting for the consul to die. However, he could also preside over Senate deliberations – that was a part of political mechanisms confusing even to some politicians, but the post did direct a lot of soft power its controller's way.
It was much harder to keep order in a republic, chiefly because the public voted against military enforcers on an understandably consistent basis. As such, most garrisons had been reduced or disbanded entirely, certainly not expanded, the surplus equipment and training facilities being sold for scrap.
However, the freedom offered by a republic fueled much technological, economic and industrial development, more than enough to approach the problem in other ways. Building expertise could raise colossal structures for public entertainment of all sorts. Five millennia into Greek history, all but the smallest cities had one or were raising one. Spartans of today and those of that era sat on the same seats to watch the same kinds of fights, although less and less often being to the death, as part of the march of progress.
I felt I could speak without hubris when calling Athens not only the greatest city in the republic but the whole world, in large part because it had raised the greatest of those entertainment structures. The Globe featured some of the usual fare, but it was dedicated to the works of Goulielmakis Dorukounima. His reputation has only grown over time, but he had nevertheless been widely respected even his own time, unlike many great artists. He could write anything from masterpieces of tragic drama to riotous comedies. His histories veered closer to political propaganda and pandering to the powers-that-be than his admirers liked to admit, but they were still epic stories. The Greeks always had a strong tradition of theatre, but with the government of the era raising the Globe, it played to as large a crowd as baser entertainments.
It took awhile to rename the Colonial Office to the Settlement Office, but the change in its mission had long since existed in fact. Its establishments were full members of the Republic commensurate to their size. This was instead of property of the Emperor, King, or even the older larger cities as a whole.
Whatever they were called, many modern Greeks such as myself couldn't quite explain why they had jammed Thessalonica on the western coast of Greece barely south of Mycenae. I suppose the two cities as they stood today may well be slightly larger than Mycenae would have been on its own, but competition between the two for the lands of the western peninsula was a continuing sore point in the Senate which required consular intervention. Ephesos and Rhodes both had much more territory to themselves going down the southwestern coast like Herakleia on the southeastern shore. Astute students of modern geography would note that the continent extended further south, the site of more cities. However, the Greek people had for centuries been happy with Lake Herakleia Australis as our southern border. There was a lot north of that to be happy about in the days of the early republic.
