So why did the Agora lead to proto-fascism in Sparta and absolute hereditary monarchy in Macedon? What Ancient Athens and its empire proved was that democracy, against a sufficiently clever and resilient autocracy, will lose every time it tries to fight because the democracies make self-destructive decisions and have everyone to blame for it, while autocracies can be far more ruthless and unfettered and thereby more effective in the grand game of power. Plus, there's the equally grim irony from the perspective of modern times that Spartan autocracy had more to recommend itself in one area than did Athenian democracy: Sparta was much more egalitarian than Athens where Spartiates were concerned and Spartan women had more rights than any women would after the collapse of Sparta in the Battle of Leuctra ever again. The only price paid was the reduction of an entire group far more numerous than the Spartiates themselves into a permanent slave caste, but there's no such thing as a free lunch.
Well, you said 'Greece' had the agora and the agora as a geographical place serves as a good representation of the Greek ideal of direct diplomacy. In reality democracy in Athens was a murkier and a more convoluted concept in origin and it crashed and burned fairly swiftly in the Peloponnesian War and had little relevance to the postwar Greek Empires on the Spartan or Macedonian models
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That form of democracy may have been applicable to a community as small as Athens at the time, but it's not today. Way too many variables, to be able to afford to rely on the good nature of everyone involved.
The agora reminds of the veche in the Novgorodian Republic (and other similar Slavonic republics), where some form of representative democracy was also practiced until the time when the more centralised Duchy of Moscow conquered them and imposed its feudal system upon them.
Albeit the agora was a general institution of the Polis as a society, so that means that dictatorships and hereditary monarchies like Sparta and Macedon also had them and yet it didn't lead either to any path to democracy as such. So I think that raises the question of what influence, if any, the Agora had if it could lead to hereditary monarchies and slave states that ran on terrorizing the slaves and served as the basis for totalitarian structures that inwardly were more egalitarian than Athens for the Spartiates as a whole but the Gods have mercy on you if you're a helot.
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