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laszlo92 t1_j94z636 wrote

Reply to comment by BaldBear_13 in Weekly History Questions Thread. by AutoModerator

The democratic tradition in antiquity is hugely overblown.

Athens of course being the prime example of a democracy, but it has absolutely nothing to do with democracy as we know it today. It’s a democracy based on privilege and wealth.

Same goes for Rome’s Res Publica, which was never a democracy. Just because something was a republic does not mean it’s democratic, and obviously Rome developed to an extremely autocratic state.

I’d argue it’s easier for civilizations to expand fast when connected to rivers. The larger a civilization the sooner it’s autocratic.

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Bentresh t1_j95seep wrote

Additionally, it is not uncommon for monarchies to contain democratic institutions at the local level. For ancient Near Eastern examples, see Andrea Seri’s Local Power in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and Daniel Fleming’s Democracy's Ancient Ancestors: Mari and Early Collective Governance.

In any case, a geographic argument is rather dubious. It should be noted that early states in Greece like the Mycenaean kingdoms were in fact monarchies, and kingdoms developed in many regions without unifying rivers — the Canaanite city-states of the Levant, the kingdoms of ancient Cyprus like Idalion and Paphos, Elam and the other kingdoms of ancient Iran, the Anatolian city-states of the Early/Middle Bronze Age and the subsequent Hittite empire, etc., to say nothing of societies further afield like the Maya kingdoms of Mesoamerica.

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laszlo92 t1_j95sl9z wrote

Definitely true. If we look at how local cities were governed in the eastern part of the Roman Empire it was basically as democratic as you get in that time.

Organized in what was known as the Boulè, it was basically a democracy of the rich.

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