Plato's Statesman is a strange dialogue, possibly the strangest he wrote. In it an anonymous Eleatic Stranger not merely argues that a statesman is defined by his knowledge alone, and that it does not matter whether this “statesman” ever puts that knowledge into practice, even simply as an advisor to a ruler. The Eleatic goes so far as to suggest that human beings ought to be understood not in terms of our distinctive ability to reason or speak, but as featherless bipeds or two-legged pigs. He even asks his auditors to suppose that there was a time long in the past when the cosmos reversed the direction of its movements so that the cycle of the generation of animals was also reversed. Human beings sprouted from the earth full grown with gray beards and gradually became younger and younger until their seeds wasted away and the direction of the movement of the cosmos again changed.

Readers might be tempted to conclude that the dialogue is one big, if rather weird, joke. Such a conclusion would be rash, however, because Plato says more in the Statesman about the actual possibilities and limitations of political practice than in either of his other two dialogues explicitly devoted to politics: the Republic and the Laws.

NB: For a description of this database and its properties see Chapter 1, pp. 16–17. If a source is listed more than once, this means that it contained information on more than one benefaction. I have added this list with the sole purpose of providing the reader with the source references to the benefactions contained in the database. It is therefore but a crude summary of the actual database. For a key to the abbreviations employed here see the abbreviations list.

A CONTRIBUTIONS TOWARDS PUBLIC BUILDING

Agoras

Balland (1981) no. 67; Balland (1981) no. 67; IGRiii 66 = I.Prusias ad Hypium (IK 27) 20; I.Prusias ad Hypium (IK 27) 9; Wörrle (1988) = SEGxxxviii 1462; IGRiv 860 = I.Laod. Lyk. (IK 49) 82; I.Stratonikeia (IK 21–2) 229a; BCHxvii (1993) 279; I.Ephesos (IK 11–17) 3004; I.Ephesos (IK 11–17) 3008; IGRiv 636; I.Side (IK 44) 155; I.Tralleis (IK 36.1) 77; I.Tralleis (IK 36.1) 145; I. Arykanda (IK 48) 41.

Aqueducts

IGRiii 804; IGRiii 811; BCHxii (1888) 85 no. 10 = I.Stratonikeia (IK 21–2) 293; I.Prusias ad Hypium (IK 27) 20; I.Ephesos (IK 11–17) 435.

Arches

I.Perge (IK 54) 56.

Baths/gymnasia

I.Iasos (IK 28) 260; CIG 2782; SEGiv 263 = I.Stratonikeia (IK 21–2) 15; Balland (1981) no. 67; I.Keramos (IK 30) 26; IGRiii 833 and Mon. Ant.

In a Greek horoscope dating from the second century ad we read the following, apt, summary of an ancient success-story career:

There was, as I shall try to show, nothing accidental about the link the horoscope text makes between the accumulation of wealth, political dominance and munificence. In this chapter, we shall consider several long-term developments in imperial Greek civic society during the first two centuries ad that, I argue, provided the most important stimulus for the unprecedented proliferation of euergetism in the eastern cities at the time. These developments can be summarised as a growing accumulation and concentration of wealth and social and political power in the hands of elite citizens, and the social antagonism that resulted from this. We shall start with the first factor, the rise of elite incomes.

GROWING ELITE WEALTH

A simple neo-Ricardian model can easily account for slow but inexorably increasing inequalities of wealth between urban elites consisting of large estate-owners on the one hand and small landowners and the non-landowning population on the other during the first two centuries ad. In such a model, population is the crucial variable. If population grows, then land becomes scarce relative to labour. Owners of large estates, as were most members of urban elites in the Roman Empire, become better off because rents start to rise.

During the course of this study we have primarily discussed the unprecedented rise in the number of civic benefactions during the second century ad, and the reasons that may lie behind this trend. We saw that, in a context of increasing oligarchisation and growing disparities of wealth within the citizenry (due to a rapid, vast and sustained rise of elite incomes), euergetism tended to underwrite the continuing importance of the citizen status of the non-elite members of the civic community, and the entitlements this status entailed. At the same time, analysis of the honorific discourse found in inscriptions, and of the public rituals of praise in which the non-elite citizenry expressed their gratitude to generous elite members, reveals that euergetism contributed in important ways to the legitimation of the oligarchic political system in the cities.

While discussing all this, however, we have mainly been talking about roughly the left half of Fig. 1.2 (see Chapter 1, p. 18), the graph that gave us the chronology of the rise and decline of euergetism in Roman Asia Minor. It is however in the right half of that same graph that we are confronted with a trend that is in many ways as fascinating as the second-century boom in munificence, and that is the sharp decline in the number of recorded benefactions from the 220s ad onwards. How to account for this seemingly fundamental change?

Why did elite benefactors give what they gave? This will be the central question of the present chapter. In previous chapters we saw that euergetism was not driven primarily by economic or charitable impulses. But if this is true then what did drive it? I will argue that the strain put on the polis model of society by the growing accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of small coteries of rich families encouraged elite benefactors to emphasise the continuing importance of the citizen community. Public munificence thus constituted a celebration of citizenship and the civic ideal, but it also helped to modify that ideal by allowing benefactors, whether deliberately or unconsciously, to move the focus away from the Classical notion of political egalitarianism towards a glorification of hierarchy within the citizen community. This latter aspect can be seen particularly clearly when we study the festivals and public handouts organised by members of the elite. In this way, euergetism served to re-emphasise the age-old collectivist ideal of the polis as a community of citizens in the face of the threats posed by contemporary economic and socio-political developments (for which see the previous chapter), while at the same time providing legitimation for the increasingly hierarchical and oligarchic nature of Greek civic society under the Empire.

BENEFACTIONS: THE CIVIC IDEAL AND CIVIC HIERARCHY

The old polis ideal, which defined the city essentially as a community of people, of citizens, had remained central to Greek civic ideology during the Roman imperial period.

This volume is a companion to Greek “political thought,” rather than “political philosophy” or “political theory” - why? One reason will be apparent from the table of contents: the chapters have a broader scope than the terms “philosophy” and “theory” would suggest, and their authors have been trained and teach in a variety of fields, including philosophy, classical literature and history, and political theory. But there is a more substantial reason behind the choice of title. There are three propositions that unite these chapters and that define a central tendency in recent interpretive work on Greek political thought:

1. Our consideration of fundamental questions about politics in the world of ancient Greece must be pursued in texts that cross the standard modern genre distinctions among philosophy, history, and literature. Taking these modern academic distinctions too seriously as a guide to inquiry is an anachronistic mistake and can result in serious distortions of the Greek texts. Treating Plato as a post-Kantian systematic and doctrinal philosopher is one important example of such a distortion; treating Thucydides as a proto-“scientific” historian is another.

2. But the purpose of studying these Greek texts and practices is not archival or antiquarian, nor is it a romantic longing to escape from modernity to a lost idyllic world; instead, the ultimate goal inspiring these studies is to bring voices embodied in these ancient texts into our contemporary discussions of political thought and action.

3. At the same time, this attempt to bring ancient Greek voices into modern discussions will itself be anachronistic unless we are very careful to place the Greek texts in the context of debate and action in which they were written.

The concept of rights is a prominent feature of modern political thought. The principle that all human beings possess inalienable or imprescriptible rights was endorsed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Previously, natural rights were central to influential political treatises by Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), John Locke (1632- 1704), and others. There is a growing consensus that the origins of rights theory can be found in the later Middle Ages, with Marsilius of Padua (c. 1280-c. 1343), William of Ockham (c. 1285-1349?), or Jean de Gerson (1363-1429), or still earlier with twelfth and thirteenth century canon lawyers such as Rufinus, Ricardus, Huguccio, and Alanus.

Some scholars view the rights tradition as reaching all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, or even to the ancient Hebrew Bible, while others regard it as a strictly modern phenomenon, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre: “[T]here is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century.” This suggests that the issue involves, in part, the meaning of words.

The Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics present themselves to us as a single course of lectures, the former anticipating the latter, the latter expanding on and referring back to the former. But it is still too often the case that the two texts are taught and studied as if they were utterly separate treatises, concerned with two different subject matters. Aristotle tells us in the first book of the Ethics (1.2, 1094a-b) that his subject matter in that book as well as in the Politics can be classified as an especially comprehensive kind of political science (politikē), and yet, in spite of this clear statement of Aristotle's pedagogical intention, for many years it was a commonplace to assign the two works to separate academic departments. The NE was there to be taught and argued over by members of philosophy departments, while the Politics required the attention of political theorists. For a variety of reasons, this is now, fortunately, not always the case; while it is not quite yet the norm, one frequently finds interpretations of one text drawing on the other. But pedagogy has lagged behind scholarship on this point, and my aim here is to help correct that gap by proposing a way of reading the NE and the Politics that ties the two together in terms that are accessible to students, and readers in general, who approach the works from different backgrounds and levels of theoretical sophistication.

Two Influential Metaphors

In his work On Laws (De legibus), Cicero seeks to imitate Plato and portray a discussion of the best laws, just as he imitated Plato when he offered a dialogue concerning the ideal state in On the Commonwealth (De re publica) (Leg. 1.15 and 2.14). His discussants agree that laws should be based on a “science of right,” and they seek to ground his account not in the Twelve Tables of Roman history - the traditional foundation of Roman laws - but on “deepest philosophy” (Leg. 1.17).

Here Cicero identifies right reason as a foundation for civic laws. Cicero seems to say (at least at first) that this right reason occurs not independent of human minds but only in the perfected reason of some humans; he goes so far as to identify the “mind and reason of the wise” as “the rule of right and wrong” (Leg. 1.19). Even if right reason does not occur in nature independent of human minds, however, there remains on this view a natural determinant of right and wrong, and human beings who perfect their reason have access to it.

Many scholars adopt an economic explanation to account for the proliferation of euergetism in the cities of the early and high Roman Empire. In outline, the argument runs like this: the imperial government, greedy for taxes, left the provincial cities few revenues of their own. Hence, provincial civic governments suffered an endemic shortage of cash and were by and large unable to finance the necessary urban infrastructure and public amenities for their communities. Members of the local elite stepped in, however, to pay for the required amenities out of their own pocket. Thus elite public benefactions were crucial to the long-term economic survival of the cities of the Roman world. This explanation of public benefactions in fact forms part of most textbook descriptions of euergetism. It gives, however, a distorted picture of the nature and functioning of elite public generosity in the Roman world. In this chapter and the following one I shall argue that none of the elements that make up the economic explanation stands up to close scrutiny.

I start with the observation that even if we base our estimate of the elite's average annual expenditure on munificence on a collection including some of the largest individual gifts on record it still amounts to no more than a small percentage of aggregate annual elite income. This might still be a sizeable sum, but it does not square with the traditional picture of euergetism as a dominant force in the urban economy.

Plato did Homer no favors. When Plato banished Homer from his republic, he posited a split between epic and philosophic knowledge that would remain a part of a Western philosophical tradition. For Plato, the problem with the Homeric epics was that they were imitations of phenomenal appearance because they depicted the shadowy world of human action and emotion. Though tempered in recent years by examinations of both the philosophic contributions of literature and the literary basis of philosophy, what has often emerged is a distinction, made both implicitly and explicitly, between political thought - which is depicted as a systematic, reasoned, reflective, and critical account of the political world - and the epics - which are often characterized as uncritical appropriations of myths, legends, stories, and superstitions. As evidence, commentators point to a seemingly irrational cosmology alive with divine forces, inconsistencies in the stories that comprise the epic, and the oral nature of epic verse in which the aim was to tell a particular story and not to analyze the foundations of thought.

In this chapter, I approach Homer as a political thinker. By this I mean both that the epics are engaged in critical reflection and that this reflection is political in nature. The chapter will proceed in several parts. First, I will examine two major obstacles to approaching the epics as works of political thought: the ideas that oral poetry lacks a critical dimension and that Homeric society is pre-political. I end these sections by making an argument about what is critical and what is political in the epics. In the subsequent sections, I engage in a series of forays into Homeric political thought, taking up contending notions of power, rights, the people, gender, and ethics.

The Opening Scene

The first scene of Plato's Republic foreshadows the political questions that the remainder of the dialogue addresses in enormous detail. Socrates has the opening line (which he delivers to an unnamed character): “I went down to the Piraeus yesterday with Glaucon.” The Piraeus was the seaport of Athens, a few miles southwest and lower in elevation than the city proper. Most important, it was the setting of the resistance movement that fought against the Tyranny of the Thirty, the brutal group of Spartan sympathizers who in 404 B.C.E., at the end of the Peloponnesian War, had overthrown the Athenian democracy, which had been proudly in place for a century. The democracy was soon restored (in 403), but the trauma suffered by the Athenians was profound. Plato was twenty-five years old at the time, and at least two of his close relatives (Charmides and Critias) were among the Thirty and their henchmen. (The dialogue, which was probably written around 380, is set in approximately 410.)

This book concentrates on a central paradox of Roman social and political life under the Empire: how a society of such breathtaking inequality could produce an elite whose generosity towards their communities was, in terms of its sheer scope and extent, probably unique in the history of pre-industrial civilisations. The book focuses on Roman Asia Minor, an area particularly rich in cities, inscriptions and benefactors, but I wish to suggest tentatively that at least some of its conclusions could serve as working hypotheses for the study of euergetism in other regions of the Empire.

The boom in elite public giving visible in the cities of the Roman Empire from the later first century ad onwards was unprecedented. When it was over, in the early third century, it was never repeated on the same scale, although euergetism remained an element in civic politics during the later Empire. Historians have often sought to explain euergetism by interpreting it as the economic cornerstone of civic life. According to this (very common) interpretation, the private wealth of elite benefactors was instrumental in financing the public infrastructure of the Empire's cities, which themselves were unable to draw in sufficient revenues to pay for the necessary amenities from public money. Other scholars have viewed euergetism as an ancient precursor to Christian charity and the modern welfare state.

The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oedipus, Antigone, Clytemnestra, and Electra all offer us visions of heroes and villains, personalities and psychologies caught in the labyrinthine consequences of their own characters and of fate. Yet, ancient tragedy goes well beyond the portrayal of the actions and choices of these commanding figures. Through the presentation of an Antigone or an Oedipus or an Orestes, it explores as well the challenges entailed in the founding of political communities. Today, whether we turn to the newly democratizing states or the issues surrounding the creation of a political union in Europe, our understanding of political beginnings and communal life often resides in the process of constitution making, the creation of institutions, and legal safeguards intended to provide for the security and protection of individual freedom. The ancient Athenians, writing long before the legalistic language of constitutions came to define political foundings, grappled with a range of issues that force us to reflect on the beginnings of political communities and to take those concerns well beyond the abstract legalistic focus that dominates the contemporary process. The tragedians recognize the myths, the gender-laden choices, the exclusions at the base of assertions of political order.