OEA 022124

Download Odysseas Espanol Androutsopoulos' paper here: The Origins of Anti-democractic Discourse: Representation and Mis-representation of Athenian Democracy in Ancient Historical Sources Odysseas Espanol Androutsopoulos (Classical Studies, Penn) THE DEMOCRACY OF ANCIENT ATHENS HAS LOOMED IN THE IMAGINARY of much of the world as the Ur-example of a representative political system. The story of Athens, of the “birth of democracy”, of the thwarting of the Persian empire, and of the meteoric rise to and just as rapid fall from power of the Athenian empire, in both cases linked to reasons often implied to be inherent in the very system that made it special, takes on the status of a founding myth. But how much of this narrative is borne out in ancient sources? ODYSSEAS ESPANOL ANDROUTSOPOULOS examines the depiction of mid-5th and 4th century BCE Athenian democracy in our two extant contemporary historiographical sources, the works of Thucydides and Xenophon and asks to what extent these sources themselves were colored by the biases of their cultural milieu. He looks at the way in which figures and events in the narrative are framed, and how responsibility is assigned for perceived success or failure, in a selection of important events across Thucydides’ "History of the Peloponnesian War" and its sequel, Xenophon’s "Hellenica.” He argues that much of our modern discourse on democracy stems from ancient Athenian sources that overwhelmingly represented an aristocratic milieu ambivalent about the system at best. This calls into question especially negative tropes, deployed to this day, about the inherent instability of democracy, the dangers of “mob rule”, and the consequent need for wise and firm leaders to “rein in” the people. Rather than based on historic fact, these tropes very well may have reflected the prejudices, echoed throughout the ages, of an often overtly anti-democratic elite.