Democratic Athens I

Ancient Greece: City and Society

In this lecture Dr Gillian Shepherd picks up from where the last left off: with the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny and the rise of democracy in Athens. With the reforms of Kleisthenes, the Athenian political landscape was radically altered and old channels of power broken. The Agora and other areas of Athens such as the Pnyx provide important evidence for the new form of government – and while Athenian democracy differs in many respects from modern democracy and was more restricted, nevertheless in no other Greek state did such a wide section of the population hold power.

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