How big is too big for assembly democracy? How small is small enough? According to recent scholarly estimates, in Greek city-states the citizen body of adult males typically numbered between two thousand and ten thousand-about the right number, in the view of some Greek political theorists, for a good polis, or self-government city-state.
In Athens, however, the citizen body was much larger than that-perhaps around sixty thousand at the height to Athenian democracy in 450 B.C.E. “The result,” as one scholar has written, “was that Athens simply had too many citizens t function properly as a polis.” A century later, as a result of emigration, deaths from war and disease, and additional restrictions on citizenship, the number may have been reduced by half, which was still too many for its assembly to accommodate more than a small fraction of Athenian male citizens.