After the terrorist attack of September 11, federal agencies quickly began snatching documents from Web sites and libraries. One of the first items to go- a Federal Aviation Administration report detailing security breeches at U.S. airports dating to 1962.

How to balance America's need for safety and the public's right to know quickly became a national issue. Islamic militants had taken horrific advantage of a heritage of openness and freedom by studying, training and traveling throughout the U.S. and Europe planning the ambush. Unwittingly, the terrorists suddenly forced a reexamination of a fundamental value of Western democracies, the right of free people to review how government conducts its business.

Last fall, governors, attorneys general and legislators quickly introduced bills to restrict access to state records. So-called sunshine laws, statutes outlining a citizen's right to inspect government documents, were reviewed in Florida, Ohio, Colorado and elsewhere. Policy makers reasoned that diagrams of dams, power plants and pipelines, along with procedures and records of hazardous waste sites, public utilities and other facilities could be used in other attacks.

Pundits cried foul at the sudden shift in how public information requests were viewed. Suddenly, the assumption of the public's right to know became a question of whether there was a need to know. Civil libertarians feared security measures would rob the public of its oversight role, one of democracy's sturdiest hallmarks.

“I realize I'm shouting into the wind here,” Paul McMasters, First Amendment ombudsman for the Freedom Forum, a non-partisan foundation, told Research in Review. “But American citizens are being denied the opportunity to be partners in their own government.”

If nothing else, public debate over how the nation defends itself in this new, sure-to-be-long war on terrorism has produced healthy reflection on how America's system of governance came to be.

Scholars tell us that we have the ancient Greeks to thank for much of what passes for constitutional democracy in modern times. In particular, the notion that every citizen has a right to see public ( government-created) records comes from ancient Athens, the most celebrated city-state of ancient Greece.

Twenty-four hundred years ago Athenians were making what today we call a public information request, says James Sickinger, a classics professor and noted Greek historian at FSU. A free flow of information between government and the governed helped citizens keep an eye on the management of public resources and the performance of state officials, he said.

“Athenians instituted safeguards to prevent malfeasance by public officials. There was a bureaucracy that made public records available to citizens who wanted to consult them.”

The practice continues today, and in fact has become the stock-in-trade of journalists throughout the Western World.

Athens was an anomaly in the ancient world, says Sickinger. All other Greek city-states were ruled by oligarchs, and Persia-the superpower to the east-was a monarchy. In Athens, sovereignty was held by an assembly composed of all native-born, free, male citizens over the age of 18. Literacy was a practical skill in a political system that assumed that citizens understood the issues they faced collectively as a state.

In Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens, University of North Carolina Press, 1999, Sickinger explains how literacy, open records and democracy were intertwined by the ancient Greeks. At the nexus of literacy and open records, Sickinger finds self-government.

“Record-keeping was crucial to the essence of democracy,” he said. “Written records preserved information and made it more available to citizens.”

Scholars have long puzzled over the origins of the so-called open society, where people have a right to reconstruct through the use of documents what the government does and how it does it. This oversight of transactions and procedures is unique to a free society and is expressed in the sunshine laws of many states, especially Florida's.

James Sickinger successfully challenged the assumption that literacy and public documents were unimportant in Athens. His research shows that a right to inspect official documents were central to Athenian democracy 2,500 years ago.

Florida, in fact, is nationally renowned for open government. State law provides access to “any record of local and state officials and offices, unless that record is specifically exempted by law.” (When they go to the polls in November, voters will decide whether to require a two-thirds vote in both the state House and Senate to pass an exemption.)

Since the days of ancient Greece, bureaucrats have debated what kind of information to publish. Although Dracon, an Athenian lawgiver of the late seventh century B.C., gave Athens a written code of laws it was Solon-the “Thomas Jefferson” of ancient Athens-who popularized the power of written law when in 594 B.C. he placed control of the judiciary in the hands of citizens, says Sickinger. In an Athenian courtroom all could see how documents transported information across time and space.

“Athenians posted many types of documents, agendas of meetings, proposals for new laws and notices of lawsuits on whitened wooden tables displayed around the city,” said Sickinger.

The information that appeared to attract the most interest in the fifth century B.C. concerned money collected by the state and matters of defense. This would seem to fit a city where all citizens were members of the legislative body that set public policy.

“A citizen could get by without being literate, but if he intended to participate fully in government he would find the ability to read and write would be extremely valuable if not indispensable,” claimed Sickinger.

In most other Greece city-states, a “record” of official business was originally maintained by official rememberers, people whose job it was to remember the law. Luckily for Athenians, their fate in political and legal disputes didn't rest upon the capriciousness of human memory.

“This meant that a ruler no longer had a monopoly of knowledge of the law and the convenience of remembering the clauses that suited him to remember,” said Sickinger.

Between the seventh and fifth century B.C. Athenians found more and more uses for reading and writing. They graduated from registering decrees and laws to making lists of assembly members, alien residents and military draftees and by the fifth century were requiring reports from boards of directors that oversaw businesses such as the port, silver mines and so on.

The agenda and decisions of boards and the assembly were posted in all parts of the city on white boards, the mass media of ancient Athens. Scholars have identified at least four locations for these bulletin boards at the Agora, a large marketplace where the people gathered to do business and discuss political and social issues. While the empire grew, Athenians developed more uses for writing and effective record-keeping techniques.

In the fourth century B.C. public uses of writing spread and people began to write speeches and pamphlets and distribute them. Of the more than 150 speeches written between 419 and 322 B.C.that have been recovered, the majority was written for a client for a fee. The speeches were delivered before the assembly, copied by hand and circulated for further study and discussion.

This fragment is from a stone tablet used as a decree passed by the Athenian assembly in 420 B.C. It honors a man for services rendered to the city and included a dinner for him, his son and brother.

Literacy became so widespread that the citizens of Athens constructed a building, the Metroon, to store official records. Documents were archived on sheets of papyrus and wooden writing tablets. Athens maintained the Metroon for more than 500 years, it survived well into the second century A.D.

When a citizen requested a document a member of the Metroon staff would find it, copy it and deliver it. The system apparently was quite efficient, says Sickinger.

“We have over a hundred speeches composed for delivery in Athenian courtrooms in which laws and decrees are frequently read out. We never hear of problems finding or locating documents, inscribed, archival or otherwise,” said the professor.

No one knows exactly how prevalent literacy was among the general population of ancient Greece, but Sickenger says that literacy clearly was a tool in the administration of the state. Athenians kept a meticulous account of the government's performance. If someone wanted to check how the money earmarked to operate a public facility, such as a naval shipyard, was spent and the amount of duties collected they could examine an official balance sheet. If there were questions concerning a communal resource, such as the production of a silver mine, one could request a copy of the latest report.

Sickinger cautions against drawing neat parallels between antiquity and today. It is unknown what the Athenians did with their public records on the verge of war. Sickinger said that some scholars believe whatever documents the Athenians had were abandoned and destroyed by the Persians when they sacked the city in 480 B.C. But there's no concrete evidence suggesting what restrictions if any were placed on public records when faced with war and the impending fall of the city.

In studying the texts from that era, Sickinger found that open records were necessary for self-government, a finding that challenges an increasingly popular assumption that Athens was predominately an oral society. Rather than being an insignificant aspect of ancient civil life, Sickinger found in ancient lists, decrees, laws and speeches evidence that public documents made democracy possible.

Sickinger's findings have undermined a revisionist theory that took hold and was advanced in the latter part of the 20th century. This view held that writing in Athens was done merely for symbolic reasons and that Athenians expressed less interest in the content of public records than people today.

Essentially, Sickinger has built a new platform to view the role of the written word in ancient Athens. He took what scholars agree about how daily life was lived, examined the artifacts recovered and reviewed the texts that survived. He concludes that when faced with rapid population growth in the seventh century B.C., Athenians found that literacy enabled them to share information. It was then decided to preserve in writing -a relatively young invention-the rules that governed their community.

Sickinger thinks that next use of the new technology-writing-arose when an Athenian magistrate jotted down guidelines to follow when resolving disputes. Sickinger traced literacy's evolution in public affairs from this unknown official through the sixth century when secretaries first appeared and into the fifth century when the written word was very much a part of civic life.

“The argument Jim uses is new,” said Jeffrey Tatum, chair of the FSU classics department. “Before Jim, no one had ever demonstrated this concept with such care.”

Sickinger's reputation is soon to carry him back to very center of democracy's birthplace. He recently was named the incoming Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a three-year post he assumes this summer.

Many universities send their doctoral students to the American School for a year of specialized training. As supervisor of the school's graduate program, Sickinger will be in a position to influence the academic development of the next generation of Greek classicists.

In his new role in the American School, Sickinger also will explore further the historic relation between public records and democracy. He does so at a time when the political heirs of Athens are at war with a group of terrorists hostile to the notion of individual rights. Ironically, it was these madmen's perverse use of rights practiced first by ancient Greeks that has triggered a massive resolve among free societies worldwide to preserve them at whatever cost.