Daniela Cammack, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, Princeton University Press, 2025. Hbk, pbk

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This is a short notice, to draw your attention to a remarkable book, with far-reaching implications for the use made by theorists of democracy of the Athenian practice of demokratia, and for contemporary politics. The argument, massively supported by meticulous analysis of practically every available original source, and a vast secondary literature, is straightforward. Demokratia was not a system in which 'the people ruled themselves', nor can it be equated with modern-day democracy. It was explicitly a system in which the mass, (the majority of male citizens, ordinary working men, 'those who do not possess much property'), collectively exercised direct power over the elites who 'governed', and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, none of whom supported it, understood it clearly as such. The principal institutions on which it depended, the assembly and the courts, have no modern-day equivalents.