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.

Surely we can allow the Athenians some latitude,after all they were the first urbanised society to try democracy,they wouldn't have regarded our 'representative' democracy as democratic by their standards.

King Hazza,
Speaking of 'democracies'-Swiss women didn't get the vote nationally until 1971.

To anyone that might be interested I'd recommend-

"Greek Ways-How the Greeks created Western Civilization" by Bruce Thorton.

Mac: Of course Bruce Thornton is a fully paid up subscriber to the never-ending war on terror. One of his colleagues is Victor David Hanson--a psycho-path to his toenails.

Plus what do we really know about life back then? Efforts like Thorntons are just exercises in conjecture, and "romanticizing" the GEEKS. And more importantly part of the USA culture wars.

Plus the world is now essentially ruled by the mind created by TV. And anyone who pretends that the USA is anything but a hollowed out shell, or a grotesque caricature of what a democracy could potentially be,if the majority of the citizens were well-informed,is seriously deluded.

How many even bother to vote? Such being the very minimum civic responsibility in a democratic country.

One in four people in the USA believe that Obama is the "anti-christ"--whatever that could possibly be. The Left Behind series of "novels" are consistent best sellers in the USA too. As far as I know the outlook produced by those "novels" is quite an influential factor in USA politics altogether, including high levels of the former Bush administration.

Check out the WIKI entry.

True Mac- but as people in most Western societies only acknowledged Womens' rights during the male employee shortages during WW1 and WW2 when they NEEDED women to be granted proper rights to participate in society, I'm not too convinced of the lack of enlightedness of the Swiss and their democracy as opposed to the lack of pressing social conditions (actually IS a product of their democracy) to force the issue to be addressed as early like the other nations did.

Ho Hum,

OK,I don't know anything about Thornton's other affiliations,however his is definitely not the only book I've read on Classical Greece,nor will it be the last. Of course historians re-intepret history in terms of contemporary culture--this practice certainly doesn't invalidate history as a discipline. You certainly have a jaundiced view of the new Athens,for all its many faults the USA is still one of the great achievements of Western civilization,although I'll concede that its militarism is alarming.

King Hazza,

Yes,but some countries gave women the vote a decade before WW1 and as to womens' rights in general, some of these were wound back after the war ended.Women in the USA and the UK didn't get the vote nationally until after WW1.I agree that the factors involved are complicated and there's no clear cause and effect.

Fascinating stuff, David, and congrats on the book.

Interesting comments attributed to General Stanley McChrystal at the Nato assault on Marjah. Once the Taliban had been expelled by his troops, he said, "we have a government ready to roll out" to deliver the services people wanted.

The suppositions you mention, about the peaceful credentials of democracies, have given licence to ill-conceived attempts to implant the institutions that characterise western democracies in other countries, at gunpoint if necessary.

I wonder if you are going to look at the political economy of warfare in classical Athens, in the collection. US warmaking, in our own day, is imbricated with the military-industrial complex - updated, in an influential formula, by James der Derian, as the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.

Both the ever-more-highly mediated nature of conflict, and the increased rapidity and flexibility of capital accumulation that have characterised the business environment in the so-called 'shareholder value revolution', can be linked with the intensification of US warmaking in the post-Cold War era.

Perhaps the expectations unleashed by democracy among the Athenian property-owning class could only be satisfied, in economic terms, by constant conquest.

Democracies certainly aren’t unique in their pursuit of constant warfare. Reading this article by David Pritchard you would think they were somehow unique in their military aggression.

He seems to conveniently forget William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte,Ghenghis Khan,Hitler,
The Japanese, The Spanish Armarda, The Scottish Clans, The Papal wars, The Russian Revolution,
Mankind has always waged war , what is so different about ancient Greece? Don’t forget the Muslim leader Mohammed and his conquering exploits. History is full of wars why single out Greece, this seems like the usual attempt to bash America by way of association.

The book would I am sure be a fascinating cultural look at ancient Greece and is no doubt wonderfully written and researched but if it is suggesting the idea that Greece because it was a democracy was more prone to military aggression, then I think that is a presupposed political mind set which history does not support.

Although it may be that the democracy determined the military affairs and the way Athens fought its wars, may I suggest an alternative thought – that the way Athens fought its wars determined and delivered the democracy.

I find it a stretch to consider the Athenian ‘constitution’ post Cleisthenes to be a democracy. To be sure, it was more democratic than its predecessor and more democratic that any other Greek state at the time. But it lacked many features of democracy that would come in the following century. (Not for nothing did the Romans date their republic – which we wouldn’t call a democracy – as starting one year earlier than Cleisthenes’ reforms).

The flowering of the Athenian democracy came after 480BC and I’d suggest 483BC being a more important date than 508BC. This was when the Athenians became a maritime power.

It is hardly co-incidental that the first democracy in Europe was also the first maritime empire in Europe. In Sparta, the state’s power came from the Spartiate hoplite. In Athens (after 483BC) the state’s power came from the rowers. For the first time ever, the state’s safety went beyond those who could afford to buy a breast-plate and hoplon and rested in the hands of those without wealth.

For that reason, it seems to me, the Athenian man-in-the-street, had the power to seek political power. In those places where the military consisted of the wealthiest stratas, those were the people who ran the state. In Athens, the military was the people and the people ran the state.

In our own times we see similar advances. The rise of democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries walks hand in hand with the opening of the military to the masses and the growth of total war where the entire population is involved in the war effort. Again, it was a sea power that was at the forefront of the modern democratic movement. Even in our own time we saw claims for 18 year olds, forced to fight in the paddy-fields to also get the vote.

I don’t particularly quibble with the view that Athens revolutionised warfare. But I wonder whether enough emphasis has been given to the idea that, by opening up the military and the leadership to so many ‘new-men’, this was the revolutionary move and the reason the Athenians changed warfare. The outsider who makes good often sees things from a new and clearer viewpoint than those raised within the culture. (Think Marius). Pylos was a devastating defeat for the old ways and a pointer to the new and it was orchestrated by new-men – Cleon and Demosthenes.

The democracy was young and vibrant and all things were possible. Phormio takes on an armada with a handful of ships because he could. Invade Egypt - why not? Take on the Mede - no problem. According to Alkibiades, the plan included conquering not just Sicily but Carthage as well. Boundless optimism, suppressed for a time by Perikles but the reason why democracy works.