The word "democracy" combines the elements demos (which means "people") and kratos ("force, power"). Kratos is an unexpectedly brutish word. In the words "monarchy" and "oligarchy", the second element arche means rule, leading, or being first. It is possible that the term "democracy" was coined by its detractors who rejected the possibility of, so to speak, a valid "demarchy". Whatever its original tone, the term was adopted wholeheartedly by Athenian democrats.

The word is attested in Herodotus, who wrote some of the earliest Greek prose to survive, but even this may not have been before 440 or 430 BC. It is not at all certain that the word goes back to the beginning of the democracy, but from around 460 BC at any rate an individual is known whose parents had decided to name him 'Democrates', a name which may have been manufactured as a gesture of democratic loyalty; the name can also be found in Aeolian Temnus, not a particularly democratic state.

The Athenian democracy (sometimes called classical democracy) was the democratic system developed in the Greek city-state of Athens (comprising the central city-state of Athens and its surrounding territory Attica). Athens was one of the very first known democracies and probably the most important in ancient times. Other Greek cities set up democracies, most but not all following an Athenian model, but none were as powerful or as stable (or as well-documented) as that of Athens. It remains a unique and intriguing experiment in direct democracy where the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote on legislation and executive bills in their own right. Participation was by no means open to all inhabitants of Attica, but the in-group of participants was constituted with no reference to economic class and they participated on a scale that was truly phenomenal. Never before had so many people spent so much of their time in governing themselves.

Solon (594 BC), Cleisthenes (508 BC), and Ephialtes of Athens (462 BC) all contributed to the development of Athenian democracy. Historians differ on which of them was responsible for which institutions, and which of them most represented a truly democratic movement. It is most usual to date Athenian democracy from Cleisthenes, since Solon's constitution broke down and was replaced by the tyrant Peisistratus, whereas Ephialtes revised Cleisthenes' constitution relatively peacefully. The end of the Pisistratid tyranny was later attributed to the assassination of Hipparchus, the brother of the tyrant Hippias, by Harmodius and Aristogeiton, honored in later years by the Athenians for their alleged restoration of Athenian freedom. The assassination took place four years before the revolution; although the increased severity of the tyranny may have destabilized it. They were particularly popular with the aristocratic opponents of democracy.

The greatest and longest-lasting democratic leader was Pericles; after his death, Athenian democracy was twice briefly interrupted by oligarchic revolution towards the end of the Peloponnesian War. It was modified somewhat after it was restored under Eucleides; the most detailed accounts are of this fourth-century modification rather than the Periclean system. It was suppressed by the Macedonians in 322 BC. The Athenian institutions were later revived, but the extent to which they were a real democracy is debatable.

Another interesting insight into Athenian democracy comes from the law that excluded from decisions of war those citizens who had property close to the city walls - on the basis that they had a personal interest in the outcome of such debates because the practice of an invading army was at the time to destroy the land outside the walls. A good example of the contempt the first democrats felt for those who did not participate in politics can be found in the modern word 'idiot', which finds its origins in the ancient Greek word ἰδιώτης (idiōtēs), meaning a private person, a person who is not actively interested in politics; such characters were talked about with contempt and the word eventually acquired its modern meaning. In his Funeral Oration, Pericles states: 'it is only we who regard the one not participating in these duties not as unambitious but as useless.'

In short the answer to your question: 6th Century BC. (the 500's). :]

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