Narrative IV - The classical Greek world II, c. 400–300 BCE

Summary

Two of Socrates' former pupils, Xenophon and Plato, drew unambiguously negative lessons from the outcome of Socrates' trial: democracy, they believed, or at any rate democracy Athenian-style, was an irredeemably bad thing. In the real world, however, democracy achieved its widest reach and most powerful embrace precisely during the first half of the fourth century bce. True, the democracies that were either now established for the first time, or re-established, perhaps after yet another bout of stasis, very rarely belonged to the species that Aristotle was to dub the ‘last’ or most extreme version of democracy. They were, instead, more or less ‘moderate’ democratic regimes, combining features of pure unfettered democracy, people-power, with more or less oligarchic features of government such as the imposition of a property qualification for eligibility to hold office or/and the use of election (not the lottery) to fill the highest executive offices.

Two of the most striking of the ‘new’, fourth-century democracies were the island state of Chios and the landlocked polis of Thebes, both of which would also become founder members of the Athenians' Second, mainly naval, League, which was established exactly a century after the First, in 378. Thucydides (8.24) had praised the Chian oligarchy of the fifth century for its self-restraint and stability amid prosperity; presumably by that he meant that the richest few Chiots had not abused their position of wealth and power by unduly exploiting or politically oppressing the masses.