The Athenian democracy in this session is the game at its most politically interesting — the gap between the Athenian ideology of freedom and the material reality of slavery, empire, and the exclusion of women and non-citizens from political life. Kassandra moves through Athens as an outsider to whom the freedom does not technically apply, which gives her a clarity about the institution that its beneficiaries do not have.

Selling freedom by the vote is not cynicism. It is a precise description of how Athenian democracy functioned — the vote available to citizens, the definition of citizenship narrow enough to exclude most of the people the democracy claimed to represent. Odyssey does not lecture about this. It places Kassandra in the middle of it and lets the irony accumulate.