Assemblies in Action: Reconstructing Popular Political Practice Across Epigraphic and Literary Sources

Popular assemblies were a defining feature of Greek cities from the Archaic period to Late Antiquity, irrespective of a city’s particular politeia. Yet assessing their political role depends fundamentally on the nature of our evidence. For Classical Athens, an exceptional range of sources allows us to examine not only formal decisions but also debates, procedures, political strategies, and contemporary perceptions of assembly politics. For Hellenistic and Roman-period poleis, by contrast, scholarship relies heavily on epigraphic evidence, which provides abundant but selective glimpses of political practice. This evidentiary imbalance has shaped interpretations of assemblies in these periods and may contribute to assumptions about their declining significance. This seminar asks what we can recover about the internal workings of Roman-era assemblies by reading scattered evidence across different genres and contexts together. It argues that closer attention to the possibilities and limitations of our sources reveals dimensions of assembly politics and popular participation that a predominantly institutional approach tends to obscure.