Ancient Greece, and Athens in particular, have routinely been "privileged" in modern discourse.  Exactly why this happened is itself a topic for scholarship.  This page will collect various scholarly statements on why we should study ancient Greek society.  The opening selection comes from Ian Morris, a social historian of Archaic and Classical Greece:
 

By denying the differences between Greek and other east Mediterranean … social structures, [some scholars] are ignoring most of what makes Greek history worth our attention…. With the collapse of the discourse of Europeanness which has guaranteed ancient Greece a special place since the late 19th century, the most compelling reason for continuing to study Greece is its comparative value for understanding contemporary arguments about liberty and equality…. In the best documented polis, Athens, a citizen structure had emerged by 500 BC which ignored the boundaries which other societies erected between men according to their wealth or occupation.  Instead, the Athenians drew lines around a theoretically homogenous male citizen group. Their exclusions seem as odious to us as dp the status boundaries in other ancient societies; but the point is that the Athenian case was different.  And it was not a uniquely Athenian trajectory, resulting from peculiar historical accidents, but was part of a boad set of developments in central Greece, which can be explained by the social historian/archaeologist.  We must not let the specter of Eurocentrism scare us away from discussing what was special in Greek history.

Ian Morris in Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 6.2 (1993)