It is not hard to find quotations from major politicians to justify the importance of any study of the history of political thought. ‘The principles of freedom and the topics of government…will always be interesting to mankind so long as they shall be connected in Civil Society’ was how George Washington put it (ap. Rahe 1992: 581; see Thomas Jefferson ap. Rahe 1992: 709). Modern students are just a little more disenchanted, perhaps, or disabused, yet even the severest critics, whether they realise it or not, are performing an agenda prescribed over 2,400 years ago by Socrates, as reported by his best-known and most brilliant student Plato: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being’ (Apology 38A).

There is, however, a major difficulty or set of major difficulties in writing a ‘history’ – in any continuous or seamless sense – of political thought. Suppose, for example, that we choose (as recommended by John Pocock in 1962) to try to write a history of political discourse, including or even privileging rhetoric in its particular discursive contexts, as opposed to a history of more abstracted political thinking.

LAW OF ELIS, 6TH CENTURY bce (TRANS. DILLON AND GARLAND 1994: 307, NO. 10.29, SLIGHTLY MODIFIED)

[the first tablet is lost]

If he commits fornication [?] in the sacred precinct, he shall pay the penalty by sacrificing an ox and by total purification, and the thearos [official] the same. If anyone gives judgement contrary to what is written, the judgement shall be invalid, and the rhêtra of the People shall be final in judging. Anything of what is written may be amended if it seems better with regard to the God [Zeus], by withdrawing or adding with [the approval of] the whole Council of 500 and the People in full assembly. Changes may be made three times, adding or withdrawing.

FROM THE ‘PERSIAN DEBATE’ IN HERODOTUS (3.80–2)

The speech of ‘Otanes’ (3.80):

To me it seems best that no single one of us should henceforth be ruler, for that is neither pleasant nor profitable. […] [H]ow should the rule of one alone be a well-ordered thing, given that the monarch may do as he desires without rendering any account for his acts? Even the best of all men, were he to be placed in this position, would change from his accustomed outlook. For insolence is engendered in him by the good things that he possesses and envy is implanted in man from the beginning; and, having these two things, he has all vice.

Monarchy runs like a red thread through Greek political history and thought (see also chapter 8). It was never normal or normative, though. Herodotus indeed (2.147) throws scorn on the Egyptians for their seemingly congenital incapacity to live without kings. There again, though, the same might be said of the – wholly Greek – Spartans, whose odd double kingship reminded Herodotus precisely of non-Greek royalty (Egyptian, Persian, Scythian) (see further chapter 10). The fact that there were always two Spartan kings, however, reigning jointly, from two different royal houses is, in a way, exactly the exception that proves the rule. The concentration of power that full-blooded monarchy represented was always at bottom felt to be incompatible with the fundamental polis principles of freedom and equality.

If the wanax of Mycenaean times is put on one side, the continuous story of Greek kingship begins in Homer; but the Homeric epics are as slippery as a historical source as they are outstandingly brilliant as literature. Was there a single ‘Homeric society’, locatable in a specific time and place, and, if so, when and where? If there was, what were its politics? Where, to put it more bluntly, is the polis in Homer? Alternatively, and perhaps more accurately, how was the political dimension expressed therein?

INTRODUCTION

In 1993, or thereabouts, the notional 2,500th anniversary of the reforms at Athens credited (or debited) to Cleisthenes in 508/7 bce was widely commemorated in the academies of the Western world. This was largely on the grounds that the introduction of these reforms was at least a strong candidate for marking the origin of democracy in the world tout court, not only at Athens. More recently, however, there have been powerful voices – both from within ancient history (Detienne 2007) and from without (Goody 2006) – arguing against what they see as inappropriate Hellenocentrism. The Greeks, they urge, are not our – or at any rate not our unique – ancestors in the political sphere, and exaggerated as well as falsely based homage to the ancient Greeks has, they believe, distracted attention from the no less, or even more, important fact that many other peoples in history have made breakthroughs, even revolutions, into forms of democracy. Without wishing to diminish let alone disparage these other alleged democratic or (often) ‘democratic’ advances, I submit that on sound comparative grounds the palm must still be awarded to the Greeks, and in terms of absolute priority to the Athenians specifically.

After thesis and antithesis, what else but synthesis? If there has been a single underlying theme running through this book, it is the difference – or, rather, the alterity (otherness) – of the Greek city. Whatever the ancient Greek polis and its politics were, they were emphatically not ‘liberal’ as that term is today understood in mainstream Western political theory. Any attempt to detect even a quasi-metaphorical ‘liberal temper’ in Greek politics is deeply misguided (Havelock 1957; cf. Brunt 1993: 389–94); but does that inevitably entail that the ancient Greek political experience has nothing to teach us today?

A reading of Nietzsche in sombre mood would indeed suggest so: ‘The classicist is the great skeptic in our cultural and educational circumstances’, since ‘if we understand Greek culture, we see that it is gone for good’ (‘Wir Philologen’, as cited by Williams 1993: 171 n. 10; emphasis in original).

It has been well said that we tend to forget the value of freedom – until we have lost it. Freedom itself is an essentially contested concept (there is no universal agreement on one single core meaning), but there would, I imagine, be widespread assent to the proposition that for the West one particular freedom, freedom of speech, is the most fundamental civil liberty. Without it, there can be no others – or at any rate only in a distinctly weakened sense. There is a high price to be paid for free speech, however: the price of offence, even though feelings of being offended can arguably never by themselves justify any kind of official, state-imposed or state-directed censorship. The trial of Socrates, it has been often thought, constitutes a standing insult to that democratic civil liberty principle. One modern interpreter indeed (I. F. Stone [1988]) has gone so far as to claim that in trying and then condemning Socrates, a man of politically directed speech rather than political action, the democratic Athenians sinned against their own free-speech credo.

Stone was himself a major supporter of the Athenian style of democracy in general, but most intellectuals from Socrates' own day onwards have not been; indeed, they have pretty often been the reverse of supportive (Roberts 1994). One thinks, at once and above all, of Plato and his pupils, not excluding Aristotle, though the Stagirite was far more tolerant than his mentor had been of the majoritarian principle of decision-making as such.

Athens was the first Greek, and the world's first, dêmokratia. Most of the rest of the Greek world was at first very slow to catch on to democracy's supposed benefits, however. Indeed, in the eastern Mediterranean at any rate, there was something of a revival of tyranny in the first quarter of the fifth century, inspired by the looming menace of an autocratic Persian empire that preferred to deal, as most empires in history always have, with one or a few loyal supporters in its subject communities rather than with a potentially volatile, even disloyal, crowd. In the far west of Hellas, too, in Sicily, the early fifth century was a great age of family-based dynastic tyranny centred on the two major cities of Gela and Syracuse. There personal tyranny could be backed by a triumphant political argument from military success, since under Gelon of Syracuse the Sicilian Greeks repulsed an attempt by the Phoenicians, colonisers of Carthage and western Sicily, to ‘barbarise’ the entire island.

That success coincided precisely (480–479) with the successful resistance of a handful of loyalist Greek cities to an attempted conquest of mainland Greece by Persia under Great King Xerxes. The leaders of that resistance were, by land and by sea respectively, Sparta and Athens. For Athens, the Graeco-Persian Wars gave a huge boost to the lower orders of ordinary citizens, who (together with some slaves, perhaps) had supplied the muscle power to propel the triple-banked trireme warships (170 rowers in each one) at the victorious naval Battles of Salamis (480) and Mycale (479).

Polybius (c. 200–120 bce) is the major extant Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period. He was a citizen of Megalopolis, literally the ‘Great City’, which had been created in the early 360s, out of some forty pre-existing communities, as both a consequence and a perpetuation of Sparta's humiliation at the hands of Thebes. He spent a good deal of his adult life in futile pursuit of his city's independence from the federal Achaean League, until, by a stroke of irony, he was forcibly removed to Rome as a hostage precisely for the good behaviour of the Achaeans – who had had the temerity to try to escape from under Rome's ever-lengthening and ever-strengthening grip on the Greek peninsula. Rome's victory in the Achaean War, following on a generation after its victory at Pydna in 168 over the last of the Antigonids, meant that from 146 bce mainland Greece south of Macedonia was a Roman protectorate, a province in everything but name. (The name and formal status were imposed in 27 bce, under the new Roman emperor Gaius Julius Octavianus Caesar, known to us by his adopted surname of Augustus – in Greek ‘Sebastos’, ‘the Revered One’.)

Polybius, who in effect ‘crossed the floor of the House’ (that is, went over to the Roman side) during his loose captivity, sealed his conversion by writing a pro-Roman Greek history in forty books (most of which do not survive).

UTOPIANISM ANCIENT AND MODERN

Under the former Soviet-backed regime, the Hungarian writer György Konrád published in 1985 a stinging polemic against the intrusion of the State and of reason of state into every sphere of existence in ‘Mitteleuropa’. He entitled it Antipolitik. The ancient Greeks too had their exponents of anti-politics, although their targets and attacks were, of course, radically different. Indeed, the critical and reflexive nature of the Greek tradition of political thought, from its inception in the poems of Homer and Hesiod onwards, had always encouraged resistance to the dominant constructions of politics as the true end of man and of the polis as the unique source of the truly good life. Broadly speaking, negative reactions took one of two forms: either advocacy of a total withdrawal from politics into a privatised existence beyond the reach of the polis, or the imagining of alternative political Utopias.

The surviving evidence for the withdrawal syndrome is largely Athenian, partly because ancient democracy was premissed on endless open debate but also because Athens' radical form of democracy aroused fierce opposition from its articulate anti-democratic critics (Ober 1998). Virulently opposed to the ideal of democratic participation advocated famously in the Periclean funeral speech in Thucydides, they redescribed such participatory politics as polupragmosunê or ‘meddlesomeness’, an excess of engagement in pragmata (affairs of state) by the unfitted masses (Rahe 1992: 224 & n. 8).

Debates about government and the state go back to the very beginnings of extant Greek literature in c. 700. What concerns me here, though, is a narrower and sharper definition of political theories properly so called, according to which they ‘are, by and large, articulate, systematic, and explicit versions of the unarticulated, more or less systematic and implicit interpretations, through which plain men and women understand this experience of the actions of others in a way that enables them to respond to it in their own actions’ (MacIntyre 1983).

The moment dividing such articulate, theoretical systematisation from implicit practical interpretation is hard to pin down precisely, but its terminus post quem (earliest possible date of invention) was the pioneering intellectual activity, from the first half of the sixth century on, of the Milesian School of historia (‘enquiry’; historiê in Ionic Greek dialect), represented above all by Thales, Anaximenes and Anaximander, all of Miletus. In Homer we found political thought, of a sort, but no polis to provide its context. In Hesiod we found both the polis and a more developed form – and in a more precise sense – of political thought. The beginnings of the transition from political thought to theory may perhaps be traced as early as the Athenian Solon in c. 600 bce (see Vlastos 1946, Irwin 2005 and Lewis 2006), though he looks backwards rather than forwards, partly for intellectual, and partly for political, reasons.

Two of Socrates' former pupils, Xenophon and Plato, drew unambiguously negative lessons from the outcome of Socrates' trial: democracy, they believed, or at any rate democracy Athenian-style, was an irredeemably bad thing. In the real world, however, democracy achieved its widest reach and most powerful embrace precisely during the first half of the fourth century bce. True, the democracies that were either now established for the first time, or re-established, perhaps after yet another bout of stasis, very rarely belonged to the species that Aristotle was to dub the ‘last’ or most extreme version of democracy. They were, instead, more or less ‘moderate’ democratic regimes, combining features of pure unfettered democracy, people-power, with more or less oligarchic features of government such as the imposition of a property qualification for eligibility to hold office or/and the use of election (not the lottery) to fill the highest executive offices.

Two of the most striking of the ‘new’, fourth-century democracies were the island state of Chios and the landlocked polis of Thebes, both of which would also become founder members of the Athenians' Second, mainly naval, League, which was established exactly a century after the First, in 378. Thucydides (8.24) had praised the Chian oligarchy of the fifth century for its self-restraint and stability amid prosperity; presumably by that he meant that the richest few Chiots had not abused their position of wealth and power by unduly exploiting or politically oppressing the masses.

‘QUEEN OF INSCRIPTIONS’

In the opening chapter of his Annals, Tacitus briefly outlines the changes in political structure that Rome experienced from the regal period onwards, and maps onto these changes the ways in which history has been written. He comments, ‘But the successes and failures of the Roman people of old have been recorded by famous writers, and there was no lack of people of fair talent for telling of the times of Augustus, until they were scared off by the flattery that was swelling up’ (sed veteris populi Romani prospera vel adversa claris scriptoribus memorata sunt, temporibusque Augusti dicendis non defuere decora ingenia, donec gliscente adulatione deterrerentur). Although we cannot be sure which authors Tacitus had in mind here, we do know of histories about the civil wars and the earlier years of Augustus' era written by Asinius Pollio, Livy, Cremutius Cordus, Seneca the Elder, and Titus Labienus. It is unlikely that these were unduly influenced by flattery: Horace remarked upon the hazardous nature of Pollio's undertaking to write about the civil wars between 60 bc and 42 bc, whilst Cremutius Cordus praised Brutus and Cassius in his histories that covered the period from the civil wars down to at least 18 bc, and was later condemned under Tiberius; Labienus was otherwise known as ‘Rabienus’ because of his violent style, and his books were burned for their libellous content during Augustus' later years.

EXPLANATORY NOTE

This edition provides a composite text of both Latin and Greek versions, as derived from the inscriptions surviving from Ancyra, Pisidian Antioch, and Apollonia. The aim is to provide as full a text as possible, sometimes including letters that are no longer extant on the inscriptions but that have been read in the past, indicating editorial supplements where the letters have never been legible to modern eyes. In cases where letters have been faintly discerned by only a single modern viewer, but appear secure from the context or by comparison with the version in the other language, these letters have not been bracketed. These composite texts are indebted to the exemplary recent edition by John Scheid (2007), to which the reader is directed for a full presentation of the epigraphic texts, with apparatus criticus. See Appendix for a list of readings that diverge from Scheid's composite text (Scheid (2007) 4–25).

The following standard symbols are used: