This is How Democracy Dies

Athens in the summer of 411 BCE was a city smoldering beneath the weight of its own glory. The golden age had cracked, and under the strain of war, pride, and poverty, the world’s first democracy was about to slit its own wrists. This wasn’t some minor squabble among politicians. It was an existential crisis. A full-blown betrayal from within. The people of Athens, people who once cheered for Pericles and marched proudly in the agora, found themselves spectators in a slow-motion coup that would topple their democracy not once, but twice, in the span of a single year.