Bret Devereaux

And while I hear what you're saying about direct democracy, during this conflict democratic parties and oligarchic parties were fighting to the death. They weren't killing each other over whether leaders led the people or were led by them. The differences were more gross.

Functionally every Greek polis had the same basic set of governing institutions, be they oligarchy, democracy, or tyranny. The question was *always* the little issues of how power was distributed between those institutions. The gap between oligarchies and democracies was small.

Really? I'm reading your Sparta series now and it seems to imply the opposite.

Sparta is both 1) a unique polis because of the helots and 2) one of the hardest of hard oligarchies.

I get the sense that Pericles does; he's speaking here, not Thucydides. There's a whole exciting debate about the degree to which Thucydides' speeches were his own construction or original (he claims to have gotten the gist of the original when he could)...

...but this is a speech he could have personally attended or had direct, reliable reports of. A fair number of his readers would have been witnesses to the speech. Which suggests it follows Pericles' thinking, rather than Thucydides'