The year 430 marks the beginning of the decline of Athens, the disastrous fight against Sparta combined with an epidemic of typhoid fever, fatal for Pericles in 429, inexorably leads the now demoralized city to its loss. The occupation by Spartan troops resulted in the return of tyranny in 411, with the coup of the Four Hundred, first overthrown and then returning in a new form in 404 with the "Thirty Tyrants". These suppress Heliaa, restore the past prerogatives of the Areopagus, and relegate the Ecclesia to a simple advisory role, securing the reins of power for themselves. This regime, deeply reactionary and despising democracy to the highest degree, will not survive the departure of the Spartan occupier at the beginning of the year 403.
4th century BC. J.-C.:a weak city and a doubted regime
In the 4th century BC. J.-C., the city, fallen power, is considerably impoverished. The Athenian empire has disappeared, Athenian democracy is no longer an exportable model. However, a renewal of the democratic momentum blows on the city, the extension of the misthos (until then reserved for heliasts and bouleutes) to citizens going to the Ecclesia, causes an influx of city dwellers from all walks of life (nobles, small and large traders, potters, and dockers) in the assembly, whose sovereignty will no longer be questioned. This popular success of democracy (which is, let us remember, originally an invention of aristocratic politicians to face the demands of a nascent petty bourgeoisie) is criticized. For Aristophanes, who notably criticized the change to three obols of the misthos under Cleon in his play The Wasps, but also Aristotle, the poor, increasingly involved in the exercise of power, are more sensitive to the arguments of demagogues. Thus the crowd of citizens, under the influence of popular vindictiveness, takes rash decisions such as the death sentence of the exemplary Socrates, populism is born. It is therefore not surprising that the intellectual critique of democracy first appears, in a particularly severe form, in the main disciple of Socrates:Plato. This hierarchizes the political regimes in the Republic by placing democracy just ahead of tyranny and behind aristocracy, timocracy, and oligarchy.
These internal criticisms, although important on a philosophical level, met with only a weak echo in the population. It was the conquest of the whole of Greece by Philip II of Macedonia, with the defeat of Chaeronea in 338, which the vigilant Demosthenes was unable to prevent and which resulted in the end of the independence of the cities, and therefore of all the pre-existing regimes. , which dealt a fatal blow to Athenian democracy. Its institutions were abolished in 322, only the Boulè survived, confined to the role of "municipal council".