Ancient democracy raises an acute challenge for modern liberal democrats, committed to both moral universalism and equal participatory democracy: the most famous case, Classical Athens, supposedly a congenial ancestor of modern democracies, is widely known to have tended to exclude all those outside an elite of male home citizens, denying full civic participation to women, foreigners and slaves. The problem is deeper than the mere coexistence of democracy and exclusivity. As also noted in Chapter 6 and elsewhere in this volume, the suspicion is ever present that Classical Athens' undoubted success in achieving political equality and participation among male citizens was itself dependent on, indeed built on, a system of exclusion of all outside that enfranchised group. Ancient democracy thus throws into relief the challenges confronted by modern political theorists who analyse, and seek to resolve, the tensions between moral universalism and 'bounded' democracy (e.g Benhabib 2006).This chapter investigates this problematic relationship between democracy and exclusivity in different ancient democratic communities, including Athens (studied together with republican Rome in section 2), but also many others. On the one hand, 2 close study of the ancient evidence amply confirms that exclusivity, combined with the demonisation of those outside the in-group, was often an effective short-cut to the levels of internal solidarity and trust necessary to sustain a demanding democratic system.On the other hand, the ancient world also offers wide-ranging evidence for experiments in 'expanding the polis', often combined with attempts to preserve the institutions and ethos of democracy. This was not merely a question of philosophers imagining a cosmopolitan utopia. It was also a matter of practical experiments in widening access to citizenship or in binding together disparate individuals and groups, of different origins, in shared political institutions, often covering a wide geographical area.Many such experiments were undertaken by the city-states of the Hellenistic era (c. 323-31 BC), which are the focus of section 3. These were the city-states which existed within and between the vast monarchies of the complex, multicultural world created by Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near and Middle East, which brought Greek political and cultural models into constant interaction with those of many other civilisations (see Thonemann 2016 for a recent overview). Against this background, many city-states doubled down on exclusivity, fending off newcomers, especially those of alien cultural background. Simultaneously, however, many other city-states, or groups of city-states, launched complex experiments in loosening or broadening citizenship, sometimes by inventing new unions of two or more city-states, macrocosms of a single polis, with their own adapted institutions, often democratic ones. Section 3 assesses the complex relationship between 'expansion of the polis' and democracy in these Hellenistic cases, linking them to broader ...