The Athenians, especially those of the fifth and fourth centuries b. c.e., left us an amazing wealth of materials from which to reconstruct their religion, culture, laws, and politics. This embarrassment of riches has led to an extraordinary focus on Athens in the study of ancient Greece. Almost any general book on Greek history is roughly 25-33 percent pure Athenian material, and Classical Athenian at that, and in any library, well over half of the books on ancient Greek politics, law, philosophy, or literature focus on Athens exclusively. This has led to a somewhat skewed view of ancient Greece in which it appears that only the Athenians had a democratic government or a literary heritage. It also tends to obscure the fact that Athens was not necessarily "typical" and that one cannot extrapolate from Athens to the rest of Greece. It is really only in recent times that any concerted efforts have been made to learn more about the cultures and societies of the various Greek poleis outside of Athens.
For example, it is a common misconception that democracy in ancient Greece was "invented" in Athens. All standard textbooks give the progression from Solon to Kleisthenes to Pericles as the evolution of Greek democracy (see chapter 7). By contrast, Eric Robinson, in his book The First Democracies: Early Popular Government Outside Athens (1997), has argued that democratic ideologies might be attributed to the relative egalitarianism associated with colonization. Every (adult male) colonist received equal portions of land and, by extension, an equal say in city politics. This system led to democratic elements in some colonial poleis as early as the mid-sixth century b. c.e., well before the first real manifestations of democracy in Athens under Kleisthenes. As such, rather than being in the vanguard of democratic reforms, Athens may have been acting under the general stimulus of egalitarianism spreading out from the colonies in the seventh and sixth centuries, which affected several of the Greek city-states in the Archaic Age.
World History
