We have seen that by the early third century the periodic fasting of the many and the sexual abstention of a smaller number were significant features of many Christian churches. Fasting was commonly seen as integral to prayer. The involuntary celibacy of many widows, by being taken together with the permanent abstinence vowed by some consecrated virgins, was given by writers a symbolic role in manifesting the holiness of the Church. Absent was any widespread belief that fasting and sexual abstinence entered into a personal struggle for holiness. Christian asceticism had not yet been adapted into a popular narrative that related the difficult making of a saint in conflict with his or her own failings.We now turn to this development, and to the single most important author of this narrative: Origen. This learned exegete is notorious for supposedly castrating himself as a youth inspired by Matthew 19:12. The story may be a later slur given undue credence by Eusebius. What matters here is Origen's influence on the changing understanding and growth of Christian asceticism.

THE MIDDAY SUN AT MAMRE – ORIGEN'S ASCETIC VISION

At Mamre, Origen observed in a homily, God had appeared to Abraham in the full glare of the midday sun, and had sat down with his two angels to share the banquet offered them by the patriarch. But God had not accompanied his two angels to Sodom, where in the failing light of dusk Lot gave them a simpler meal of bread.

Arthur Vööbus, the pioneering scholar of much Eastern monasticism, wrote that ‘ideas have legs’. This book has demonstrated how ideas about abstention from food, drink, sleep, and wealth, could travel between religions as well as between far distant places in the Graeco-Roman world, though they were often much changed on the journey.Widely varying practices concerning food and sex could be given a new home in Porphyry's philosophical asceticism. Neoplatonist ideas about training for contemplation of the divine could then be deployed in Philos redescription of Jewish practices originally meant to uphold the priestly purity of Israel. From there, amongst other places, they crossed into service within a Christian psychomachy. Within Christianity communal fasts were taken over from Judaism only to be partly turned against their original practitioners. Origen's ascetic theology travelled far across the empire, so that purely regional accounts of monasticism obscure the exegete's profound influence. Regional cultures, on the other hand, proved more or less hospitable to different ascetic ideas. The idea of prayer without work found it hard to get a foothold in urban communities likely to be burdened by its presence. Semi-anchoretic monasticism could only travel a certain distance from the communities which sustained it. Some ideas proved extremely hard to budge, despite the best efforts of eloquent Christian preachers: widowed Christians continued to remarry; while celibate men and women continued to live together for something like two hundred years after we first find them denounced for so doing.

Some ascetic ideas could not find a space within the pages of this book: Manichaean abstention has been the most notable absentee.

Study of pagan and Jewish asceticism has taught us that asceticism can be variously practised and understood. The asceticism portrayed in literary texts is not a simple window on what actually happened, nor a sure guide to how practitioners understood their ascetic acts. Furthermore, we have seen the influence of Greek Neoplatonist asceticism on Jewish Hellenistic thought. What influence, then, would Graeco-Roman and Jewish beliefs have on nascent Christianity? How would Christians use abstention from food and sexual relations? By approaching these questions from the perspective of common fasting, we shall see how indebted early Christianity was to Judaism in this respect, though we shall also see its wish to deny that debt. Fasting became a powerful means of distinguishing Christians from Jews and of defining different Christian groups. On turning to sexual restraint we shall see a distinctive practice of permanent renunciation which was widely advocated by appeal to a cluster of New Testament texts, but which was variously related to baptism and accompanied by differing accounts of marriage. In text and life the sexually abstinent, widows and virgins, made for groups within the Church which together displayed the life of heaven. Finally, we shall see the degree to which a highly educated Christian, Clement of Alexandria, was drawn (like Philo and to some extent by Philo) to re-cast popular ascetic practices within a Greek philosophical frame.

MOURNING SET IN STONE

At Rome, early in the third century ad, two calendars were carved prominently on the sides of a stone statue of a seated figure, while the monument was inscribed elsewhere with the titles of various theological treatises.

THE TYRANNY OF THE DÊMOS

The ambiguity of the term dêmos noticed above (chapter 5) – meaning both the citizen body as a whole, and the poor majority of same – laid open dêmokratia, the kratos of the dêmos, to the charge of mob rule. The trope of the dêmos as tyrant recurs repeatedly in the non- or anti-democratic theorising of the fifth and fourth centuries, and indeed has recurred ever thereafter, from the fourth century bce to the American founding father Alexander Hamilton and beyond (Roberts 1994). Plato, towards the end of the Republic (563c), enjoys playing with the magnificent conceit that under a regime of ultra-egalitarian democracy even the humblest dumb animals such as donkeys get puffed up with ideas above their proper station in life. Nonetheless, one of the cleverest illustrations of this strong countercurrent of oligarchic sentiment, theory and activity is to be found in a less predictable source, Xenophon of Athens, showing himself in this respect at least a worthy fellow pupil of Socrates (for whom the majority was pretty much always by definition wrong).

The earliest surviving example of Athenian prose, a vehemently anti-democratic ‘Athenian constitution’, was handed down from antiquity and subsequently printed as being a genuine work of Xenophon. That attribution is demonstrably false, however (see appendix II). The real Xenophon's own, highly derivative oligarchic political theory is to be found elsewhere, partly in the arguments he borrows from others or places in the mouth of his mentor in the work entitled Memoirs of Socrates, but more especially in the Cyropaedia (further, below, s.v. ‘Xenophon’).

Democracy, ancient-Greek-style, is probably the most key theme of my ‘key theme’. It could hardly be more acutely topical. In Myanmar today, for instance, ordinary people are literally dying for democracy, or what is counted as democracy nowadays. At all events, they want something the opposite of what they have, a military junta, which is what the Greeks would have called a dunasteia or non-responsible collective tyranny. In the longer-established of the modern democracies, however, the very fact of democracy is somewhat old hat or vieux jeu. Perhaps indeed it is only at its instauration that democracy really tastes ‘sweet’, to use a political metaphor current among the ancient Greeks themselves (Herodotus 7.135.3). When exactly should we date its instauration, though?

I realise that from another – globally comparative – point of view (Detienne 2007) the date at which democracy was first invented in the world may seem relatively unimportant. From my point of view, however, concerned as I am with the relationship between ideas and practice in ancient Greece, where as a matter of fact democracy was first invented, it is of the greatest moment to try to find out when that happened.

John Milton was born almost exactly 400 years ago as I write this preface. Paraphrasing Wordsworth, I should say that his spirit at least is still living at this hour. A powerful renascence is currently under way in the practice of political theory and the study of its history, as an academic subject lying on the interdisciplinary margins between philosophy, history and social thought. Within the frame of this academic renascence and the pragmatic political concerns associated with it, the Greeks' pioneering and fundamental role in the Western political tradition is universally recognised. General books on democracy typically start with a ritual obeisance to the ancient Greeks; a few (Dunn 2006, for conspicuous example) even attempt to do something like justice to the ancient Greeks' – very different – kind of democracy. Newer still is the reappraising of the potential contemporary reference and relevance of ultimately Greek ideas, especially those of democracy, with its axiomatic components of freedom and equality (see in particular Barber 1984, Euben, Wallach and Ober 1994, and chapter 11, below). For political theory can entertain also the legitimate ambition to affect the world outside the academy (e.g. Held 1991; Tuck 1991).

It is a moot point whether Alexander was the first ‘Hellenistic’ ruler, or the last great monarch of the ‘classical’ age. At any rate, Alexander's reign both spanned the transition between the two epochs and hugely hastened the full flowering of the post-classical dispensation. ‘Hellenistic’ as a term of art carries a number of different notions and applications: a fusion of some sort between Greek and – especially oriental – non-Greek cultures; a culture that was Greek-ish, in which, though the language of government and high culture was Greek, ‘native’ cultures not only survived but actually contributed something positive to the mix; and, perhaps above all, an epoch of transition, during which Greeks were less and less masters of their own destiny, and within which indeed they succumbed ultimately to the imperial power of Rome.

The wars of the Alexandrine succession lasted at least twenty-two years, until the Battle of Ipsus in 301 or even the Battle of Corupedium in 281. The resulting ‘Hellenistic’ political pattern saw a vastly enlarged Greek world that now embraced Egypt on the continent of Africa and stretched as far east in Asia as Pakistan, parcelled up into a relatively small number of territorial monarchies. The two most considerable of these, the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, were based respectively in Syria and in Egypt, and more or less inevitably doomed to clash repeatedly.

THE PRIMACY OF POLITICS?

In my own relatively short lifetime at least two so-called ‘Ends’ have been widely canvassed – the End of Politics (in the 1950s) and the End of History (in the late 1980s) – not to mention several ‘post's (postmodernism, -structuralism, etc.). Is politics really ending, though – or is it rather evolving, possibly out of all recognition? Does the fact (if it is a fact) that hierarchy, certainty, bureaucracy, homogeneity, class affiliation, centralisation and the State are giving way, to some degree, in developed Western polities to market egalitarianism (so-called), uncertainty, diversity, heterogeneity, multiple identity, decentralisation and globalised confusion mean or imply a terminus of politics? Or, rather, does it mean the opposite – that is, more individualism, more democracy (however defined precisely), in the service of a genuinely consensual and free-willed politics? Advances in an undoubtedly democratic sense can most obviously be detected in the politics of, say, Germany, Japan and Italy, especially as compared to their dictatorships or authoritarian regimes of the 1930s.

Between the world of the prehistoric Mycenaean Greek palace and the world of the historical Greek polis there was a gulf fixed. That makes a convenient aphorism, no doubt, but nevertheless it is a tellingly accurate distinction too. Strictly, the world of Mycenaean or Late Bronze Age Greece (c. 1600–1100 bce) was protohistoric rather than prehistoric, in that it was an age that possessed a form of literacy dedicated to the keeping of records. That literacy was of a special or restricted kind, however, practised only by skilled record-keeping scribes who were familiar with the 200 or so signs and pictograms devised to transcribe an early form of the Greek language. What the scribes recorded were interminable lists of people and things on a short-term basis; it was only an accident of destruction by (presumably hostile) fire that transformed the temporary clay tablets on which the ‘Linear B’ script was deployed into permanently legible baked artefacts.

The masters whom the scribes and their script served were sole rulers who called themselves high kings and lorded it over kingdoms of varying size, shape and power – from Thessaly in the north of mainland Greece to the island of Crete in the south-eastern Mediterranean, midway between Europe and Africa. We call the culture and period ‘Mycenaean’ because Mycenae in north-east Peloponnese was archaeologically the richest and most powerfully defended of these central sites, and because in the West's earliest literary fiction, the Iliad, it takes pride of place as the seat of great King Agamemnon, the overall leader of a united Hellenic expedition against Troy.

The foregoing text was inscribed on a humble block of schist limestone some time in the second half of the seventh century bce. It was laid out in boustrophedon (‘as the ox ploughs’) style, back and forth across the stone. It has a good claim to constituting the oldest extant inscribed law from Greece, as old almost as the laws ascribed to the earliest lawgivers that are attested by (usually much later) literary sources. One of those lawgivers reputedly came from Crete: an entirely plausible claim, insofar as a large number of the earliest physically attested laws do also. The text we have quoted is from Drerus in eastern Crete.

Drerus was never any great shakes in the larger picture of ancient Greek history, never a major player on any big or bigger stage. The presence in this early text, therefore, of three words (kosmos, polis; the third is Damioi, from damos = ‘people’) with deep significance for the development of Greek political thinking and practice tells its own story.

Like the work itself, its conventional English title – due to Gilbert Murray – is distinctly odd. It has been handed down wrongly attached to Xenophon's completely extant corpus, but, though certainly Attic (Athenian) in dialect, it is not Xenophontic in style. Possibly already in antiquity, it was given the same title as other works on Athens' constitution (politeia), but this can be very misleading, because it is very different in both approach and content from the Aristotelian Athenaiôn Politeia of the 330s. So different is it, in fact, that it has been seen as a work of epideixis, a purely rhetorical display piece, glorying in both the discovery and the incipient codification of rhetoric by mid-fifth-century bce Sicilian rhetoric masters, and in the clever-clever proto-philosophical sophistical reasoning that takes its name precisely from the movement associated with the rhetoricians (and other skills-mongers) labelled collectively – and pejoratively – Sophists, with a capital ‘S’, who also began to make their presence felt at Athens and elsewhere in the Greek world from the mid-fifth century on (see chapter 6).

Greek political thought (and theory) did not die with the early Stoics of the third century bce. After Panaetius of Rhodes (2nd century) and Poseidonius of Apamea in Seleucid Syria (1st century bce), however, the torch passed firmly to Rome, in the massy shape of Cicero. His writings, thanks to his golden style, were preserved in bulk and have come down to us more or less intact – minus, somewhat ironically, his treatise De Re Publica, which survives only fragmentarily.

Cicero actually translated Xenophon's Oeconomicus and other more or less philosophical Greek works into Latin, and was in other ways heavily indebted to Greek thinkers for the development of his own brand of philosophising, which, in accordance with Roman pragmatic norms, retained a very close connection indeed to political actuality. For example, in one of his many private letters to Titus Pomponius, nicknamed Atticus (‘the Athenian’), his publisher as well as friend, he made a sneering reference to Cato the Younger – a figure whom he in many ways deeply admired and probably envied for his unbending moral rectitude. Cato spoke, he wrote, as though he were living in the ideal utopian state of Plato's Republic (the Latin translation of Politeia), whereas actually he lived in the Sin City (literally ‘dregs’, faex, plural faeces) of Romulus! Even more than Aristotle, Cicero based his political philosophy on his perception of the world as it really was, and perhaps we should be grateful to him for the unblinking and unflinching manner in which he explicitly identified his personal class interest with the moral welfare of the entire Roman world.