War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens

Athens is famous for its direct democracy and its innovative culture. Not widely known is its contemporaneous military revolution. Athens invented or perfected new forms of combat, strategy and military organization and was directly responsible for raising the scale of Greek warfare to a different order of magnitude. The timing of this revolution is striking: it followed directly the popular uprising of 508 BC and coincided with the flowering of Athenian culture, which was largely brought about by democracy. This raises the intriguing possibility that popular government was one of the major causes of Athenian military success. Ancient writers may have thought as much, but the traditional assumptions of ancient historians and political scientists have meant that the impact of democracy on war has received almost no scholarly attention. This volume brings together ancient historians, archaeologists, classicists and political scientists to explore this important but neglected problem from multiple perspectives.

Paul Cartledge, A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, Cambridge University
David M. Pritchard is Senior Lecturer in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics and a member of the Cultural History Project at The University of Queensland. He has co-edited Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World (2003) and co-authored Public Finance in Athens, 594 BC to AD 14 (2011), and is currently finalizing a monograph on sport, democracy and war in classical Athens for Cambridge University Press.