This book seeks to answer vital questions about the establishment and practice of democracy (Greek demokratia) in the Greek world during the Classical period (480–323 bc). Its focus is not on Athens, the democracy for which the ancient testimony is most plentiful and about which there is an embarrassment of modern scholarly books. Instead, this study aims to take a comprehensive look at Classical democracies outside Athens, which are relatively rarely studied. If we are to understand the true nature of Greek democracy – a political legacy that is revered above all others from antiquity in contemporary politics, to such an extent that almost any non-democratic form of government is delegitimized – we need to know the range of possibilities for its practice, not just how things took shape in one city. Occasional comparison of the communities studied here with the Athenian democracy will be inevitable, but it will not happen systematically or frequently. One of the goals of this study, in fact, is to create a kind of database that in future will allow more detailed comparison of Athenian and non-Athenian practice than has been heretofore possible. It does not aim to do so comprehensively itself.

My previous book-length work on non-Athenian democracies, The First Democracies, was a very different project. There, the goal was simply to determine where and when the first democracies appeared in Greece. It covered the Archaic period (c. 700–480 bc) and concluded that by the middle of the sixth century demokratiai had formed in a number of city-states, though the thinness of the evidence precluded certainty about exactly how many there were or which had come first. But in the Classical period literary and epigraphic evidence for political history improves dramatically, enabling me to ask deeper questions in this study. The two central lines of inquiry that have driven it are: (1) how and why demokratia expanded as it did in the Greek world during the Classical period, and (2) what was the nature of democratic practice outside Athens.