In the Athenian democracy, voting was limited to free men of the citizen class, but wtihin that minority it was very democratic indeed. The Assembly had unchecked sovereignty, and many public offices were filled by lot for short terms, like jury duty. So, no citizen could fairly speak of “the goverment” as something controlled by “them.” There was no place in the system for career officeholders. (There were career politicians, but only in the sense that they had connections and influence and rhetorical skills and were somewhat more interested in politics than their neighbors.) Some criticized the system as too democratic, making judges-for-a-day out of ordinary schmucks.
What I don’t see in this article is any mention of a “permanent goverment” of civil servants expert in their fields. Was there such a thing, or was it a later invention?
I assume the head of the army, officers, etc. are technically civil service even if the rank and file are volunteers or conscripts. Did Athens have a (paid?) standing army or did they throw a big posse together whenever there was an issue? Of course, later on they were essentially a moderately big state, so things would be very different.
Later on they did have a decent-sized navy; I assume these were purpose-built warships, not converted cargo vessels. If so, like any other wooden boat they probably required a modicum of upkeep, scraping barnacles, replacing ropes and oars and sails; which meant an on-going city budget, war or not, wth all that entailed.
I strongly suspect any port city that size had at least one permanent tax collector (yeah, yeah, the port was 30 miles away) and he would probably be accompanied by some burly assistants. Maybe that was a subcontract job like the Romans.
A lot of the public works, IIRC, were done by “gifts” from the big shots, much like Rome, or by the temple organization from donations. It’s possible that the tyrant/prince du jour simply used his entourage and slaves to perform the mundane tasks like guarding the assembly property and chasing down law-breakers. In one Tom WOlfe book, he describes the reign of terror where the tyrant had various citizens ordered to arrest others, so that everyone had some guilt on them and were less likely to want a different ruler to take over who might hold them to account. IIRC, Socrates just ignored his order and went home and nothing happened to him. It sounds like by Socrates execution, they had a jail, whether it was a real one or just a room in the back of the current ruler’s house…
Until an expert comes along I’m going to take an educated stab at no. It seems the earliest references we have to a defined civil service are late Roman imperial period. Before that you had the personal slaves and freedmen of Emperors, senators and provincial governors, who served the same function but were attached to a particular individual.
Freedmen, mostly, and really starting with the Emperor Claudius in the early period. The top people changed here and there, but IIRC for the most part the guys working under them kept their heads down and just got by. Since they technically were serving at the Emperor’s pleasure, it wasn’t considered a separate function for a great deal longer, but they did usually pass from one Emperor to the next. That is, it wasn’t instutionalized until much later, but all the basics were present. The one key difference is that a lack of an Emperor could mess things up, because they didn’t have any authority on their own.
Of course, the government generally didn’t need that many people to run it. They could get by quite well without too much fuss.