Bret Devereaux

What Thucydides says re democracy is that they need good leaders, who put the polis first, and don't appeal to the absolute fucking worst instincts of the people in the service of their own aggrandizement. Might I suggest that we Americans should keenly appreciate that insight?

...right, so Thucydides thinks that the best people to govern the polis are its elite leaders, not the demos itself. He had a dim view of the average Athenian's ability to decide for themselves what the polis ought to do, and thought they'd be better off advised by their betters

Remember that Athens was a direct democracy, not a representative one. The position of "the people should select wise elites to lead them and make all of the decisions" was the oligarchic position in Athens.

But Thucydides never said anything like that. He said Pericles WAS a wise person that the people DID select, repeatedly, despite his being willing to say unpopular things & not cater to the worst in them.

The issue here is you are trying to fit Thuc into a modern conception of where the democratic/oligarchic line is. 'the people need a leader to tell them what to do' (instead of, 'the people need an executive to do what they tell them') *is* the oligarchic position in Athens.

But if you're going to describe Thucydides as anti-democratic in relation to how he writes about Sparta or somewhere else, the exact line between what was considered democratic or oligarchic in Athens seems less pertinent than a more general idea of democracy.

The issue is what seems democratic or oligarchic in Greece. No Greek would describe *any* modern state as a democracy - everything we call a democracy they'd likely frame as either oligarchies or 'mixed constitutions.'

Modern democracies are all systems whereby the people select a few elites from a larger pool of elites to make decisions on their behalf (because all modern democracies are substantially based on the Roman Republic, itself an oligarchy/mixed constitution, dep. on who you ask)