Mark Chou is Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Australian Catholic University. He is also the author of Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail.

• Introduction: Democracy and Tragedy1. Democracy and Tragedy in Ancient Athens2. A Multivocal Democracy: The Democratic Impact of Tragedy's Multivocal Form in Ancient Athens and Today3. Dramatizing Democracy: Introducing Aeschylus' Suppliants4. Marginal Women, Marginalized Stories: Democracy and the Politics of Fifth-Century Supplication5. Civilization and Violence: A New Vision for Contemporary Democracy6. Toward a Multivocal DemocracyBibliographyIndex

The West often lazily claims it inherited democracy from ancient Greece. It did no such thing of course. Two and a half thousand years of intervening history, intervening cultures and contaminations later, the West went 'democratic' in a way very different from Greece. But Mark Chou makes an extraordinarily lucid and elegant argument that we have many great things to learn from the Greeks as to what democratic pitfalls are to be avoided, and what we must do to make our own version of democracy multivocal and actually democratic. Chou's reading of Aeschylus is brilliant and moving.