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The democratic triumph in Syracuse, like Sparta a Dorian city, was seen in Athens as a validation of local policies pushing for more rights for the lower classes, so that they could prove supportive to trading and landholding elites.
Democracy in Greek poleis functioned as a way to minimize the effects of political infighting within the new ruling class. This sometimes was very much the direct descendent of the old ruling class, as in the case of Alcmeonids; and in fact, that was exactly how it developed in the contemporary Carthaginian and Roman republics, with old families like the Brutus and Barca soon finding ways to outshine others.
Whereas old oligarchies presented an unstable balance between competing aristocratic families that sometimes ended in blood running down the streets or the fields, democracy (and republican systems) allowed for that competition among the new landholding and trading elites to be slightly more peaceful, as violence – still frequent in the form of street politics – was more subdued and limited, at least in theory, by the chance of future political reversals, which kept hope for a reversal of fortunes alive among those defeated in specific votes.
The rise of democracy as an alternative form of government was a unique Greek development with no real equivalents in the Fertile Crescent, where only very early city-states maintained warrior assemblies with a right of oversight against the king[1]. It’s also connected to the destructive effect of the Thirteenth Century BC invasions, which effectively meant that places like Athens and Corinth (not to speak of the relatively modern Syracuse or the non-Greek Rome and Carthage) were, in practice, early city-states with warrior assemblies.
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