Self-government is honored in a relief showing Democracy placing a wreath on the people of Athens.
It was erected in the market place to remind the citizens to value their freedom.

   "We are free and tolerant in our lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law...We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority"

    Democratic government began as a Greek concept. The Greeks heeded law and prized order. But they also had a passion for freedom and abhorred corruption and tyranny. Aristophanes could denounce in a play an officeholder as "This public robber, this yawning gulf of plunder, this devouring Charybdis, this villain, this villain, this villain." And according to law: "If anyone rise up against the people with a view to tyranny...whoever kills him...shall go blameless."

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PERICLES ON DEMOCRACY

    In the winter of 431-430 B.C., with the Peloponnesian War begun, Pericles made his funeral oration. Instead of praising only the dead, he chose to extol Athens. Below are two striving passages translated by the Scholar Rex Warner

    "Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which the man possess"

    "Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well...we do not say of a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.., And this is another point where we differ from other people. We are capable at the same time of taking risks and of estimating them beforehand. Others are brave out of ignorance; and, when they stop to think, they begin to fear. But the man who can most truly be accounted for is he who best knows what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then goes undeterred to meet what is to come".