Grade 6 Fall — Ancient Civilizations from Deep Time to 476 CE: Mesopotamia, Egypt and Nubia, Indus, China, Hebrews, Greece, and Rome — Whose Sources? Whose Voices? Whose Living Descendants?
History · CIV
G6
hist.g6.f.civ.athenian_direct_democracy_with_exclusions
Analyze Athenian direct democracy (Cleisthenes' reforms 508 BCE through the Periclean period and the end of the Classical Athenian democracy in 322 BCE) — its institutions (Assembly / Council of 500 / popular courts / ostracism) AND its citizenship-exclusion ratio (~10-13% per Mogens Herman Hansen 1991): only adult male citizens could vote; women, enslaved people (~25-30% of Attic population), metics (resident foreigners), and children were excluded
Read selected Thucydides Pericles' Funeral Oration (Strassler Landmark edition); apply MG-14 Athenian Citizenship-Exclusion Pie Chart; integrate Math G6-Fall ratio-and-percentage skill (~30,000-40,000 adult male citizens out of ~300,000-350,000 total Attic population = ~10-13%); compare/contrast Athenian direct democracy with US representative democracy via CA HSS 6.4.3
Mastery threshold
90%
Min instances
12
Typical minutes
45
Spaced intervals (days)
1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 60
Prereqs
- Analyze ancient Greek civilization across Bronze Age (Minoan c. 3000-1450 BCE + Mycenaean c. 1750-1050 BCE) → Dark Age (c. 1050-800 BCE) → Archaic (c. 800-500 BCE) → Classical (c. 500-323 BCE) periods, including the development of the polis (city-state), the Homeric epics (Iliad and Odyssey c. 8th century BCE), Greek polytheistic religion, the Greek alphabet, and the foundations for democratic governance — per Edith Hall's scholarship
- Explain the six core constitutional principles — federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, popular sovereignty, limited government, judicial review — with concrete examples for each, via iCivics 'Branches of Power' simulation
Common misconceptions
- Treating Athenian democracy as fully inclusive — only ~10-13% of the Attic population could vote, and women + enslaved + metics were excluded
- Treating Athenian direct democracy as the same as US representative democracy — Athenian citizens voted directly in Assembly on every issue (no representatives); US is REPRESENTATIVE democracy where citizens elect representatives who then vote
- Forgetting that Athenian democracy was BOTH revolutionary (popular sovereignty for the time) AND deeply exclusionary (the demos was defined to exclude the majority) — both facts true simultaneously