We go back to a time before Greece, when every government in the world was of the palace polity variety. How did the first forum polity arise?
The Cretan civilization was the first European civilization; stimulated by the east, it was a monarchical, hierarchic entity; the Greeks, an Indo-European people, descended on Greece around 2000 BC, moved southward over hundreds of years, and, inspired by Crete, and in conjunction with their predecessors, created the mainland civilization of Mycenae. However, with the Dorian invasion the light went out in the Aegean and a Dark Age ensued from 1100 BC to 750 BC. This was the period described by Homer, as I have mentioned in another place. This was the first time that Europe lost a parent. But the offspring was to be totally different from the sire.
When civilization reemerged around 750 BC, it was far less hierarchic: we see Agamemnon abused by Achilles with impunity. The former, indeed, was merely primus inter pares. Thus the forum polity began to emerge, and kingship went out of fashion. Thus the first Dark Age gave rise to democracy, and the second to representative government. The similarity doesn't end there. In Greece, the tyrants emerged to provide stable government, just as absolute monarchs were later to emerge in Western Europe. They were both deposed, and 'the people' came to be in charge.
The idea of democracy, as S.E.Finer has suggested, transmitted itself over the ages: he called it 'ideational transmission'. One of the things that irked Thomas Hobbes was the ideal of democracy propounded in the universities of his age. He says 'And because the Athenians were taught, (to keep them from desire of changing their Government,) that they were Freemen, and all that lived under Monarchy were slaves; therefore Aristotle puts it down in his Politiques, (lib.6.cap.2) "In democracy, Liberty is to be supposed: for 'tis commonly held, that no man is Free in any other Government." And as Aristotle; so Cicero, and other Writers have grounded their Civil doctrine, on the opinions of the Romans, who were taught to hate Monarchy, at first, by them that having deposed their Sovereign, shared amongst them the Sovereignty of Rome; and afterwords by their Successors. And by reading of these Greek, and Latin Authors, men from their childhood have gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favoring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Sovereigns; and again of controlling those controllers, with the effusion of so much blood; as I think I may truly say, there was never any thing so dearly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues.' Amen. Today, the English tongue has very much the same effect and we have dearly bought in these eastern parts the learning of the western tongues.
But Hobbes's words raise a fresh problem: how to account for the Roman Republic? Now, it might very well have been an ideational transmission from Greece for there were numerous Greek outposts in the south of Italy. Indeed, the myth of the founding of the Republic smacks totally of a Roman adaptation from the overthrow of the tyranny of Hippias in Athens, which made way for the innovation of democracy by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. In fact, the traditional Roman date for the transition from monarchy falls suspiciously close to the corresponding year in Athens, namely 509 BC! This was clearly a fiction. However, there appears so far to have been no ideational transmission of the kind detested by Thomas Hobbes.
The explanation is far more mundane: it was a power vacuum that paved the way for the gradual emergence of the Republic. Etruscan kings ruled over Rome, but the last king was not run out of the city on account of his son's rape of Lucretia, as folklore had it. The Etruscans were already in decline when they received a coup de grace from the Greeks in the waters of Cumae in 474 BC. Thus, the transition to the Republic must be dated at least to 470 BC (Greco-Roman Civilization, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, p313). When the Etruscans abandoned the Romans, the latter found themselves leaderless. Naturally, they had to form some kind of government, and they hit upon the choice of praetor maximus, an imperial legacy that later gave way to that of two consuls elected for a year.
The result, however, was not a democracy and not even representative government, but an oligarchy. Until the 1980s, according to Karl-J. HÃ ¶lkeskamp - it had been agreed that the social and political order of the libera res publica had been aristocratic or even "oligarchic,' meaning that all institutions and positions of power were controlled by a particular kind of ruling class, which recruited not only magistrates, generals, priests, and senators from its ranks, but also the official representatives of the people, the tribuni plebis. Scholars had generally taken for granted that this ruling (or "political') class--often called an "aristocracy of office" or the "senatorial aristocracy"--had an inner circle, the true nobilitas, consisting of those families with a consular tradition and a kind of virtually, though not formally, hereditary claim to the highest magistracy. This nobility also controlled the Senate, because the (higher) magistrates regularly returned into its ranks after their year of office; the Senate was taken to have been the central institutional organ of this aristocracy and, therefore, the actual decision-making and thus, in the full sense, "ruling' body." This consensus was question by a scholar and the present author has lately written a book to reestablish the former consensus. We need not get into the debate here, but need merely note that the republican credentials of the Romans have been seriously questioned.
Hence we find that several accidents in Greece, Rome and Western Europe have given rise to the practice and idea of democracy. The first gave way to the Hellenistic world, the second to the Empire and the third to the European Union. Most of humanity has simply bypassed these accidents: and most of humanity will remain immune to them, for accidents affect only those who participate in them, not those who have never been present.
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