Perhaps the first use of parliamentary procedure occurred at a gathering of cavemen many thousands of years ago. Because writing had not been invented, there were no minutes taken. Presumably there was a proposal, either before or after discussion of a topic, and then agreement, perhaps by vote.

Although some parliamentarians may tell amusing stories about the alleged use of parliamentary procedure in heaven before or after the Battle of the Angels or the use of parliamentary procedure in the Garden of Eden, the Bible does not mention the first event at all and relates the Garden of Eden events in such a way that only the most avid imagination could perceive parliamentary procedure there. In fact, the Bible never uses the word "vote" and rarely uses the word "meeting" in the sense of a gathering of several people to deliberate. Only once does it use the word "presiding," and the context in that instance refers to a gathering of prophets over which Samuel briefly presides in I Kings 19:20.

In the ancient Eastern and Egyptian societies, there were undoubtedly some parliamentary deliberations, but the records were never generated or they remain unfound.

In Homer's Iliad, the most ancient of literary works in the Western World, there is an instance of a meeting in which the military leader of the Greeks, Agamemnon and others, make a decision in council and then assemble the troops to ratify the decision, datable to a war that occurred about 1250 B.C. This bicameral system--an upper house and a lower house--pervaded ancient Greek legislative history, and it is in ancient Greece that parliamentary procedure may, in its earliest traces, be unearthed, both in private meetings and in public ones.

There is no doubt that there were numerous Greek clubs (that is, permanent, voluntary associations of persons organized for a common end), sacred and secular. Originally these were religious or political entities. Later there were mercantile and trade associations, laborers' groups (including launderers, tanners, gardeners, fishers, bakers, and many more), organizations devoted to the continuation of a native culture among immigrants, and athletic associations, among others. One of the laws of Solon (c. 638-c. 558 B.C.) "gave legal validity to their regulations, unless they were contrary to the laws of the State."i Some of these groups existed officially to ensure a decent burial for their members, but they served largely as social groups. Even the labor groups were far more interested in socializing than in advocating economic advantages. Some of the clubhouses Greek clubs have been excavated.

Often the club meetings would begin with a religious activity, perhaps the source of our modern invocations at meeting openings. There are records from the second half of the second century A.D. that reveal the proceedings, punctuated by the interjections of enthusiastic members, of a general meeting of an urban group, including "a verbatim text of the new statutes of the society unanimously adopted thereat. These deal with the admission and subscription of members, the dates of periodical meetings, the maintenance of order and the penalties imposed for any disorderly behaviour, the religious ceremonies (including a sermon and a dramatic performance by officers and members of the society) which marked the principal meetings, the celebration of any auspicious event in the life of any member, the duties and privileges of the treasurer, and the attendance of members at the funeral of any of their number."ii

These private assemblies have left us fewer records than the public assemblies have, so let us now turn our attention to the public ones. Ancient Greece was less a nation than a loose confederation of independent city-states, of which the most famous were Athens and Sparta. The customary pattern of governmental organization in the Greek city-states included a king or other ruler function as chief executive, an upper house of advisors to the rule (who was often no more than first among equals), and a lower house, a popular assembly. The upper house was often small, although in some centuries it expanded to as many as five hundred (but it then had an executive committee), and the lower house was invariably large (frequently a few thousand).

In Athens, the lower house was the ecclesia, which means "those summoned." (The term was later adopted by churches to refer to the faithful.) The ecclesia "was nominally the whole body of free Athenian citizens over eighteen years of age; practically it was as many as could be got together, and . . . the maximum attendance did not exceed 5,000. For those legislative acts the validity of which nominally required ratification by the whole people, the number 6,000 was taken to represent the state."iii The only record of a count, however, "shows 3,461 for and 155 against, total 3,616, a very small proportion of the electorate. There was no quorum required for ordinary business. When a decree was proposed affecting a single individual . . . 6,000 must be present, and in the special case of ostracism [banishment for several years] a six thousand majority was perhaps needed for the decree of banishment to be issued. But it is certain that the average attendance fell far below this figure. During the later years of the Peloponnesian War it was impossible to bring 5,000 citizens together, however important the business. After its close it was so difficult to secure a respectable quorum that payment was introduced for attendance, and the fee was several times increased (perhaps with the decline in value of money) in the course of the fourth century, till it reached a drachma and a half (about an ordinary day's wage) for the ten regular, and a drachma for all exceptional, sittings."iv


















Notes



i Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. N. G. L. Hammond and H. H. Scullard, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 254.
ii Oxford Classical Dictionary, p. 255.
iii A. H. J. Greenidge, A Handbook of Greek Constitutional History (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 169.
iv Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 5th ed. rev. (1931; rpt New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 169.

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