After Athens: Ancient Democracy and Its Many Afterlives

Anchoring Athenian Democracy

Second Expert Meeting

June 22, 2026, 13:00-17:00
Universiteitsmuseum Utrecht
Lange Nieuwstraat 106

Floris van den Eijnde (UU, History)
Mathieu de Bakker (UvA, Classics)
Lars Behrisch (UU, History)
Lukas van den Berge (UU, Law, Economics and Governance)

The Anchoring Athenian Democracy Project

What was Athenian democracy? What made it thrive, adapt, and eventually unravel? Consisting of three expert meetings and an advanced postgraduate course at the Dutch Institute in Athens, this project offers a multidisciplinary exploration of one of the most ambitious, influential, and (in)famous political systems in human history. Athenian democracy is remembered for its radical political inclusivity among its male—though not its female—citizens, but this project asks deeper questions: How was it sustained over nearly two centuries? What internal contradictions and external pressures shaped its evolution? And why does this ancient system continue to speak to us in a time of rising authoritarianism and democratic erosion?

Expert Meeting 2:

After Athens: Ancient Democracy and Its Many Afterlives

From antiquity to the present, ancient Athens has served not only as a historical example, but also as a contested political resource: admired, criticized, reimagined, and repeatedly mobilized in debates about liberty, popular rule, civic participation, conflict, and constitutional order. The second expert meeting of the project Anchoring Athenian Democracy turns to these afterlives.

Where the first expert meeting focused especially on the origins of Athenian democracy and on the ways in which democratic innovation was anchored in older civic, religious, and institutional frameworks, this meeting shifts attention to the longer history of reception. Later thinkers, artists, historians, and political theorists did not simply preserve the memory of Athens. They selectively re-embedded Athenian democratic ideals in new contexts, using them to articulate changing ideas of freedom, citizenship, law, civic virtue, agonism, and popular sovereignty.

Program June 22

Universiteitsmuseum Utrecht, Lange Nieuwstraat 106 (Oranjerie)

13:00 Arrival and Coffee

13:20 Eric Moormann (Radboud Universiteit) – Winckelmann and Freedom

14:10 David Napolitano (Universiteit Utrecht) – A Case Study Exploring the Reception of
Athenian Democracy in Thirteenth-Century Communal Italy: Brunetto Latini’s
Tresor (1263-1266/7)

15:00 Tea Break

15:20 Annelien de Dijn (Universiteit Utrecht)

16:10 Vincent Seminck (Universiteit Utrecht) – Democracy: Compromise, Consensus
and Confrontation

17:00 Drinks

N.B.: One more expert meeting will follow in November
Please register by sending an e-mail to nms@uu.nl