| Abstract: | The political culture of classical Greek civilization, with its distinctive twin ideals of citizenship and mass participatory democracy, represents a revolutionary development in the history of human society. The social origins of that momentous cultural breakthrough are examined in this essay, with specific attention being given to those forces – destructive as well as reorganizing – which undermined the bases of traditional aristocratic domination and which prepared the ground for the emergence of new institutional patterns. Pressures for structural and normative ‘democratization are shown to have been exerted primarily by changes in the military domain, the central axis of political and economic power within the ancient city. |
