This book focuses on the development of civism as it contributed to ancient Greek culture and helped shape the psychology of citizenship in the Western world. The strength of this work is its interdisciplinary examination of those trends and influences that combined to give new insights into the rise and the fall of democracy in the ancient polis of Athens. The author presents an extensive description of the intellectual forces that attracted international scholars and teachers to Athens who in turn established important schools of higher learning as they labored to develop and advance the study of rhetoric and philosophy as competing alternative approaches for addressing the perceived weakness of the democratic system.