dered by the distance one would have to walk
89 or by space in the meeting place on the Pnyx hill (southwest of the Agora), which could seat about 6,000 on benches or cushions on the outcropping rock and, in the latest period, perhaps as many as 13,800. 90
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Only foreigners, resident foreigners (called metics), slaves, and female citizens were excluded from political rights. 91 In 431 B.C. about 45 percent of all adult males were classified as metics and slaves, and by 323 this number had risen to 53 percent. This restriction on participation in public life was tightened in 451 B.C. , when a decree was passed limiting citizenship to the offspring of marriages between two Athenian citizens. 92 This exclusion of far more than half the population, when women are included, from public affairs represents no inner contradiction with Athenian democratic theory, since there was no philosophical or religious belief in the full equality of all human beings. 93
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Hansen estimates the number of adult male citizens in the fifth century to be about 40,000, reduced perhaps to 30,000 or fewer after the plague and the defeats in the Peloponnesian War. 94 During the fourth century, the meetings of the Ecclesia were regularly attended by no fewer than 6,000 citizens.
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During the last half of the fifth and first half of the fourth centuries, the Ecclesia met in regular mandatory sessions ten times a year, together with a number, perhaps a sizeable number, of other meetings. During the Spartan invasion of Attica in the Peloponnesian War, Pericles arranged that no Ecclesia would be held. Around 355 B.C. the number of meetings was set at forty a year, four in each prytany, of which there were ten of thirty-five or thirty-six days in a normal year. Votes were taken by show of hands. Citizens sat where they pleased rather than according to political groups. 95
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At no point, even in this period of direct democracy, could the people officially issue a call for a meeting. The Ecclesia was usually summoned on four days' notice by the prytaneis, the presiding officers. The fifty prytaneis were selected by lot from each of the ten tribes that consti-
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