Leaderships and crises of ancient democracy in Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon and Polybius

Abstract

The text examines passages taken from the aforementioned historians in an attempt to understand, on the one hand, how fragile a democracy may become, as a result of collective choice and action, and, on the other, how resilient it may prove to be when leaderships do everything to destroy it, to the point of bolstering forces that would eventually restore or reinforce it, after having brought it down temporarily. Based on the enactive approach proposed by Y. Popova (2015), this text discusses how the narratives deriving from the examples examined remain valid when addressing contemporary issues.