What it was
Ten strategoi were elected each year, one originally from each tribe. Unlike almost every other Athenian office, the generalship was filled by election and carried no limit on re-election.
The exception is deliberate and revealing. Athenians were willing to let a lottery choose the man who held the state seal for a day, and not the man who would command the fleet.
How it worked
Generals commanded on campaign, but the office had no civil authority. Its political weight came from being the only continuously re-electable position, which allowed a man with the confidence of the assembly to hold real influence year after year.
Pericles is the case. He governed Athens for roughly three decades holding an office whose formal powers were military, because he was re-elected annually and the assembly followed his advice.
Generals were rigorously accountable. They were subject to a vote of confidence at each prytany, could be deposed, and were regularly prosecuted after unsuccessful campaigns.
Powers and limits
The limits were severe and are the point. A general could not make policy: he executed what the assembly decided and answered for the result.
The trial of the generals after Arginusae in 406 BCE — condemned collectively for failing to recover the dead after a naval victory, in a procedure the sources themselves call irregular — is the standard illustration of what accountability could become.
How it changed
The tribal basis of election was relaxed in the fifth century so that more than one general could come from a tribe.
In the fourth century the generalship specialised, with particular commands allocated to particular generals, and professional commanders and mercenary armies eroded the citizen-general model.
What the evidence supports
The generalship was elected while most offices were allotted.
Attested in the constitutional sources, which state the reason: some functions require expertise.
Generals were prosecuted routinely.
Attested across the historians and the forensic speeches. The Arginusae trial is the most notorious but not the only case.
How Pericles exercised power is a matter of interpretation.
Thucydides describes Athens as in name a democracy and in fact rule by the first man. That is a judgement by a partisan of Pericles, not a constitutional description.
Primary sources
Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 61
The election of the generals and their accountability.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.65
The assessment of Pericles' position: a democracy in name, government by the first man in fact.
Xenophon, Hellenica 1.7
The trial of the generals after Arginusae.
Covered elsewhere
- Military command and the officer corps is treated in the warfare encyclopedia: Command structure. Who commanded on campaign, on what authority, and what happened when a constitution put two men in charge of one army — covered there, including the alternating consular command at Cannae.
How to read the evidence labels
- Evidence level: Documented
- Supported by a named primary text or by excavated material evidence.
- Evidence level: Probable
- Supported by strong inference that most specialists accept.
- Evidence level: Disputed
- Substantial specialist disagreement exists; competing readings are stated.
- Evidence level: Literary
- Belongs to poetic or mythological construction rather than to history.
- Evidence level: Mythological
- Belongs to shared religious or mythic tradition rather than to any single text.
- Evidence level: Unknown
- The available evidence is insufficient to decide.
These labels describe the status of the evidence, not our confidence in a conclusion. A claim marked Literary is not a claim we doubt; it is a claim about what kind of thing a poem is.