The Discourse on the Ancestral Constitution in the Early Hellenistic Period

In the early Hellenistic period, Greek city-states consistently presented themselves as free and democratic, to the point that democracy had become the dominant form of government across the Greek world. Building on this observation, scholars such as Quaß have argued that even references to the patrios politeia (ancestral constitution) or patrioi nomoi (ancestral laws) should be read as genuine allusions to democracy. This chapter takes a different approach, analysing the discourse on the ancestral constitution in the early Hellenistic period through the lens of new institutionalist theory, and specifically discursive institutionalism (DI). By treating discourse both as the substantive content of ideas and as the interactive process through which those ideas are conveyed, this framework allows for a more nuanced contextualisation of the slogan's deployment. The chapter argues that appeals to the ancestral constitution were not the exclusive property of democratic regimes. Oligarchic governments made equally effective use of the same rhetoric, creating an apparent aporia that straightforward identification of the slogan with democracy cannot resolve. The solution lies in recognising a substantial continuity between the Classical and Hellenistic periods in the flexible and politically ambiguous use of the patrios politeia discourse. In 322 BC, Antipater imposed a return to the ancestral constitution as a condition of peace, effectively dismantling Athenian democracy. Subsequently, Poliperchon framed the overthrow of oligarchy as a restoration of ancestral democracy, whilst Demetrius of Phalerum integrated the same discourse into the propaganda of his oligarchic regime, and Demetrius Poliorcetes was later celebrated as the restorer of the patrios politeia despite introducing significant institutional changes. The chapter concludes that the discourse on the ancestral constitution functioned as an essentially atemporal ideology, deploying selective and elusive arguments from the past to legitimate policies of discontinuity, rendering institutional change publicly acceptable by presenting it as a return to tradition.