This is the most facilitating I have read to date. Good on you Dr Pritchard. You are an asset to the Australian academic scene.

Interesting.The Athenians lost the Peloponnesian War because their hubris,perhaps it's an object lesson for our contemporary 'Athens'.

Yes it is an interesting essay but of what relevance are the dreadful politics pf the ancient GEEKS to todays quantum world of instantaneous inter-connectedness.

A world in which one false move could very well trigger off World War III.

And besides which the Geek state was a slave state and only elite males were able to participate in the activities of the demos.

Meanwhile look at Greece today!

A very interesting read.

On the note of the likelihood of democracies to jump into wars, one must also weigh up how much demos input there actually is- it seems an arguable case that Athenian demos felt need to endorse it, yet Switzerland had never participated in any war, not even WW2 with countries of different alliances all around its own borders- despite relieving many a threat to do so- at the same time a considerable military power.

As for 'slave democracy'- it may be a depressing thought that almost every system of democracy was just as much so in some form at some point.

This is certainly an interesting post but I wonder. As I recall Athens at the time of which you write was an expanding society with a fixed amount of arable land and low technology. It is likely that the "democratic" leadership saw the answer, as they do today, to be economic growth and changes in the economy of the city–state would then be a covariate of changes in way of running it. Could it be that the progress of democracy was merely a confounding variable to the real agent of change – a growth economy where the only means of growth was aggression against neighbouring states with looting as the object. Certainly it does seem that the Homeric city–states lived by piracy to give it its true name! There may have been other factors at work and I would suggest a more sophisticated analysis might give a different answer.

Makes a change from the usual post but, okay, Athens as a democracy conducting wars. A glance at the record shows that Athenian democracy managed to engineer its own destruction by picking a big fight with Sparta, leading to the Peloponnesian wars. Sparta was as much to blame but the Athenian democracy also showed no great wisdom in oppressing its supposed allies. Short sighted and greedy is how I would have characterised it. The supposed democracy would, in fact, be closer to one of today's smaller local government councils (there would be more people in any of those local council areas than there were in Athens at the time), than a modern parliamentary democracy.
That said, it seems like an interesting book. May have a peek at it myself.