Central to liberalism is that politics - the bartering of power in a public and social situation - is conducted through the mechanisms of debate, deliberation, consensus and the reaching of a point of least dissatisfaction between parties, faction and special interest groups such as minorities. Liberalism replaces violence through this process. Lintott compares the meeting of violence, cohesion and legislation in Athens to Rome:

Cohen [writing on Athens] argues that social cohesion was (and is) far more a product of the regulation and modification of conflicts between individuals and families through shared assumptions and understandings than the effects of rules imposed from above: the law at Athens merely provided new channels in which feuds, rivalries, and tensions played themselves out.

This is an important corrective to the traditional positive approach to law which tends to be held by lawyers but is itself no more than a half-truth.

The cohesion of Athenian democratic society was maintained to a great extent by Athenian social attitudes and political ideology, whereas there was a major division in Roman society even in the politically stable period of the middle republic.

Athenian and Roman constitutional practice grew in response to political crisis. Athens became a democracy at the hands of crisis, and increasingly democratic forms of Roman governance were also in response to constitutional failure - a good example being the plebians quieted with the creation of the constitutional position of Tribune.

Westminster has a muddly constitutional practice as well which only changes after each new crisis and in some cases does not learn at all from it. Australia has had numerous crisis with our form of Westminster including two over-throws of democratically elected executives, in the 30s and 70s, yet little in modification to solve those issues.

Canada is now having their own version of the same crisis where a weak Governor-General has allowed governance to hibernate - or prorogue - while the current minority government tries to shore up its control of the legislative. Something that will most likely end up in failure.

Westminster at the national, NSW and Qld level has most likely survived as the crisis was amongst political elites, and the majority was only affected as much as having to go to the ballot boxes to determine which elites get to win for the next three years.

Triremes were the dreadnoughts of the classical era. They were expensive and required a great deal of maritime expertise, not to mention social class cohesion, in order to be effective in battle. The Athenian democratic political structure led to Athens dominating the seas until losses in the latter part of the Peloponessian War meant a degradation of the quantitative and qualitative advantages they held over the Spartans.

Trireme from didactylos47's photostream

Equally important was the logistical structure supporting the triremes. This is true for most military endeavours; American hegemony currently is based upon American dominance of logistics such that their forces can maintain a high tempo indefinitely. This was also true of the British military in their hay day. Triremes were short range weapons heavily reliant on human labor at the oars. Consequently they needed constant water and food provisioning. (more)

During the Athenian Sicilian campaign the cavalry of the Syracuse became the dominant weapon on the battlefield, stifling the forty thousand strong Athenian hoplites from gaining the advantage in the field. The Athenians in return raised their own cavalry and sent it to Sicily. They weren't the knights of medieval times though, they were small ponies, approximately four and half feet tall, and they lacked stirrups. Hardly frightening, except the Greeks of that time were tiny. Hanson writes:

These tiny mounts, mostly stallions, were only partialled protected with light cloth padding over the face, thighs and chest, and harder to ride than geldings.

It was hard to train riders to control the stallions as well as handle a spear and blade in battle. (more)

Cunning Realist writes on trauma cocktails which effectively make a nation accept anything; breaking down individual and social norms such that extremes become accepted as the new norm.

One of the interesting aspects of the Peloponnesian War was that the normal method of determining conflict between Greek city-states, hoplite battle, was replaced with political and ethnic genocide. Asymmetric warfare ruined the wealth, morality and power of Greece such that the Macedonians and then the Romans replaced them as the centre of Mediterranean power. (more)

America is the current global hegemon, so it is always possible to make analogies with the US and prior super-powers such as Britain, Rome, and even Athens. Victor Davis Hanson looks at the analogies between America and Athens in A War Like No Other. One of the curiosities of Sparta was that they would promise to bring tyranny to the states they liberated from Athenian democracy. Tyranny back then being a legitimate government form while democracy was the radical, liberal and egalitarian form of subversiveness. (more)