War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens

Athens is famous for its democracy and its innovative culture. Not widely known are its invention of new forms of combat and strategy and its intensification of warfare. This volume studies this military revolution from multiple perspectives and considers the surprising impact of Athenian democracy on the waging of war.

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.