Athenian Democracy - Aftermath

Aftermath

Alexander the Great had led a coalition of the Greek states to war with Persia in 336 BC, but his Greek soldiers were hostages for the behavior of their states as much as allies. His relations with Athens were already strained when he returned to Babylon in 324 BC; after his death, Athens and Sparta led several Greek states to war with Macedon and lost.

This led to the first of a number of periods in which an outside power controlled Athens; Often the outside power set up a local agent as political boss in Athens; but when Athens was independent, it operated under its traditional form of government; even the bosses, like Demetrius of Phalerum, kept the traditional institutions in formal existence.

An independent Athens was a minor power in the Hellenistic age; it rarely had much in the way of foreign policy; it generally remained at peace, allied either with the Ptolemaic dynasty, or later, with Rome; when it went to war, the result (as in the Lamian, Chremonidean, and Mithridatic War) was usually disastrous.

Under the Roman alliance, the more oligarchic parts of the Athenian constitution, the Areopagus and election of officials, became relatively more important, and the Assembly and selection by lot less so. After about 125 BC, the eponyous archon, and probably the others, were normally prominent men, and this oligarchic tendency appears to have been produced by a system of election.

In 88 BC, there was a revolution under the philosopher Athenion, who persuaded the Assembly to agree to elect whoever he might ask to office. Athenion allied with Mithridates of Pontus, and went to war with Rome; he was killed during the war, and was replaced by Aristion. The victorious Roman general, Publius Cornelius Sulla, left the Athenians their lives and did not sell them into slavery; he also restored the previous government, in 86 BC.

After Rome became an Empire under Augustus, the nominal independence of Athens dissolved and its government converged to the normal type for a Roman municipality, with a Senate (gerousia) of decuriones.