“Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them,
and they that are great exercise authority upon them.
But it shall not be so among you:
but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister;
And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant:
Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto,
but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:25-28, KJV)
The word the Athenians used for their Assembly was
Ekklesia, the same word used in the New Testament for Church
(and it is the greatest philological irony in all of Western history that this word,
which connoted equal participation in all deliberation by all members,
came to designate a kind of self-perpetuating, self-protective Spartan gerousia -
which would have seemed patent nonsense to Greek-speaking Christians of New Testament times,
who believed themselves to be equal members of their Assembly.)
- Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter
