It is often thought that free and active citizenship as we know it has its roots in the very first democracy:that of Athens. But active citizenship among the ancient Greeks had much more of the characteristics of a cultic religion, as it had been in use for centuries.
In the year 508 BC, Kleisthenes, a member of the famous Athenian family of Alkmeonids, made his famous reforms in the polis (city-state) of Athens. Those reforms made Athens the world's first democracy. From then on, all free men, regardless of family background or property, took part in political life in the polis on an equal footing. Kleisthenes divided the land around the city of Athens into ten phylai (regions) which in turn were subdivided into trittyes and small demen (village communities).
If your Athenian ancestry was approved, you were registered as a freeborn male as demotes. That made you a member of the trittys and the phyle, and finally from the demos, the people who collectively held power in Athens. It is often thought that after the Kleisthenes reforms, every free citizen automatically possessed Athenian citizenship in this way, as a kind of legal status. But about political rights and duties (our modern conception of citizenship) the sources from the time of Kleisthenes and later never speak.
More and more historians therefore doubt this political and legal definition of citizenship. One of them is Sara Wijma, former historian at the University of Groningen. In an article in the Dutch Journal of History she argues that the most important change after Kleisthenes was not that as an Athenian man you suddenly possessed citizenship , but that you were an active citizen by actively participating in religious life in the polis.
Demen calendars
Kleisthenes' reforms radically changed the division of Athenian society, and with it the social division of roles. The new classification is reflected in religious life, among other things. Athenians suddenly joined a deme or phyle participate in religious festivals. And there were quite a few of those in Athens. Some sources say that a third of the days in a year were official religious holidays.
That the importance of religious life received an impulse after Kleisthenes can be seen, among other things, in so-called demen calendars. It stated which gods belong to the members of a deme worship, when sacrifices should be made and how expensive they should be. Those local cults were often centuries old. But from the fifth century on, the calendars also showed how and when the members as deme had to participate in policy-level rites.
Membership of the phyle brought with it religious and cultic obligations after Kleisthenes. Any phyle was chosen by the Oracle of Delphi ten mythological heroes who gave their names to the new phylai. Heroes, gods and fallen soldiers were no longer commemorated locally or on a family basis, but throughout the phyle .
Participation in sports competitions also started after 508 BC. increasingly on a phyle basis. The festivals had often been around for much longer, but Athenians suddenly took part with their phyle. They marched there together, trained together and, if they won, they shared the prize. And to think that these people before 508 BC. had virtually nothing to do with each other.