Aristotle’s Politics is distinguished by the place of honour it accords to the concept of nature. At the outset, the political relations of ruling and being ruled are among the things that develop naturally (cf. Pol. 1.2, 1252a24–6). In addition, the polis or city-state exists by nature and a human being is by nature a political animal (e.g. 1253a2–3). Most of Book I is concerned to show that the household is natural because its constituent relations – master/slave, husband/wife, parent/child – are natural. Again, in Book III the inquiry into political constitutions commences with the significant remark that one must first make a hypothesis about the end of the polis and about the kinds of rule found in human communities. Aristotle recalls his earlier argument that a human being is by nature a political animal (III.6, 1278b15–19), and he observes that some forms of political rule are natural, namely, those whereby the rulers seek the advantage of the ruled (cf. 1279a8–13). These characterize constitutions which are correct or just without qualification (1279a17–21). This lays the ground for his detailed classification and evalustion of political systems. Finally, in his account of the best constitution (Politics VII–VIII) he states that the lawgiver must follow nature in planning the education of the citizens (VII.17, 1337a1–3).

Unfortunately, Aristotle does not offer an explicit analysis in the Politics of his use of the term phusis or ‘nature’ and derivstive terms, so thst it is difficult to interpret and evsluste his version of political naturalism. However, in the Metaphysics and works devoted to natural science, especially Physics II, he analyses the concept of nature and develops distinctions which resurfsce in the Politics and the ethical treatises.

A political movement?

In Acts 11.26 we are told that it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christianoi. It appears to have been a nickname given by others rather than the name chosen by those thus designated. The term occurs only three times in the New Testament. The form of this nickname, with its -anos ending, is Latinate, and words in Latin with this ending normally refer to members of a political faction, followers of a leader seeking power. So Acts implies that while the early Christians saw themselves as the pupils of a teacher (mathētai), they were perceived by outsiders as politically motivated.

This coheres with the Gospel evidence that Jesus was put to death on the ground that he claimed to be king of the Jews, and with indications in later material that the family of Jesus was caught up in endeavours to eliminate potential Messianic claimants. The fact that the Roman government faced two Jewish revolts in the first and early second centuries makes it likely that people claiming descent from King David would be suspect. It would appear that Jewish Christians made exactly this claim for Jesus and his family. Eusebius (Hist.Eccl. 111.12) reports Hegesippus as recording that ‘after the capture of Jerusalem Vespasian issued an order that, to ensure that no member of the royal house should be left among the Jews, all descendants of David should be ferreted out’

Approaches to Platonic interpretation

To introduce Socrates and Plato is to introduce the problem of the relation between them. Although other contemporaries left portraits of Socrates as well, it is Plato’s writings – primarily a body of dialogues in which Plato himself never appears – which stamped the figure of his teacher indelibly on the history of Western philosophy. Because Socrates is best known to us as a character in Plato’s writings, there arises what has been called the ‘Socratic problem’. Can a real or ‘historical’ Socrates, with distinctive beliefs, be identified on the basis of the testimony roughly contemporaneous with his life which survives from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and (a generation later) Aristotle? Or is, perhaps, the Socrates we value largely the portrayal Plato makes of him?

The ‘Socratic problem’ is complicated by the fact that Plato’s ‘Socrates’ seems to argue for contradictory positions in different dialogues. For example, in Protagoras (352–8) Socrates argues that because no one does wrong willingly, vice results simply from ignorance, an argument which assumes that only rational beliefs determine action. But in Republic IV he explains vice as due to the two irrational, or less than rational, parts of a tripartite soul when not stably governed, as they should be, by the third and rational part. This apparent contradiction has often been resolved by assuming that the Protagoras is one of a group of dialogues written early in Plato’s career (the ‘early’ dialogues), in which the character ‘Socrates’ is meant by Plato to represent the historical Socrates’ views, whereas the Republic is one of the ‘middle period’ dialogues in which Plato is using Socrates simply as a mouthpiece for his own theory.

The fate of Aristotle’s writings

Aristotle evidently intended only some of his works for wider circulation, or ‘publication’; these were the so-called ‘exoteric’ works, mainly dialogues, which are now lost apart from some fragments. The genuinely Aristotelian parts of our corpus Aristotelicum represent an assemblage of collections of notes on particular topics, or more finished treatises, which evidently would only have been available for consultation by individuals, especially (we might suppose) members of his school; if in principle they might have been more widely available, it is hard to imagine a large demand for such a large body of relatively intractable material. It is thus possible to argue that other schools might not have had the direct access to Aristotle’s work that, living in a different age, we might incautiously presume; nor indeed are the fragmentary remains of the later Peripatetics sufficient to prove that in later periods of the school, after Theophrastus, even they had a complete collection in Athens. The first systematic edition was evidently that of Andronicus of Rhodes, at Rome, in the first century bc. Aristotle left his library, which also included a large collection of other books, to Theophrastus, and Theophrastus left it to another Peripatetic, Neleus; and reports in Strabo (XIII. 1, 54, 608–9) and in Plutarch (Life of Sulla 26) suggest that at some point between then and Andronicus’ editorial activity at least a proportion of the corpus was sufficiently ‘lost’, or inaccessible, to need to be ‘rediscovered’ – or to be capable of being described in such terms – when Sulla brought Aristotelian manuscripts back with him to Rome from Asia Minor.

A singular work

The Laws can be considered the first work of genuine political philosophy in the Western tradition. Admittedly it was conceived within an already complex tradition of philosophical legislation and speculative constructions, in which the Republic holds an important place. But so far as we can judge, the Laws’ combination of an investigation into the foundations of legislation with the concrete elaboration of detailed laws is without precedent. From this point of view, the Republic is at best a sketch, whereas the Laws breaks ground for future political thought.

Part of the work’s importance lies in its having created a new genre, or rather two, by combining two approaches which posterity would come to distinguish. The Laws is at once an exposition of political principles (comparable to Rousseau’s Social Contract or Hegel’s Principles of the Philosophy of Right), and a treatise of applied legislation (comparable to the Project for the Constitution of Corsica or the proposal for a German Constitution). Moreover, several concepts elaborated in the Laws have proved of lasting value to political philosophy. The so-called principle of Lord Acton, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, is already formulated in the Laws. More positive philosophical ideas first articulated in the Laws include the ‘mixed constitution’, the ‘rule of law’, and last but not least the ‘legislative preamble’. Plato himself presents this last item as his greatest legislative innovation (722e1–4).

Discussion of the ethical and political views of Democritus of Abdera (born c. 460 bc) cannot avoid preliminary consideration of our evidence for that area of his thought. In all other areas except ethics and epistemology we are virtually wholly dependent on doxographical evidence. When we come to ethics, by contrast, the doxography is meagre (see DK 68 a 166–70), but on the other hand we possess over two hundred purported quotations from Democritus on ethical topics. Yet far from giving us greater confidence in our judgments in this area, the problematic character of these quotations has the opposite effect. This is because the great majority of those quotations are contained in two collections, those of Stobaeus and the so-called ‘Sayings of Democrates’ (sic), where they are presented in isolation from any context and without attribution to any specific work. It is therefore necessary to undertake a brief consideration of the authenticity of this material before proceeding to discuss the content of Democritus’ ethical and political views.

Scepticism about the authenticity of the ethical fragments is grounded in two primary considerations, first the silence of Aristotle and Theophrastus on Democritus’ ethical writings and secondly the fact that our sources for the bulk of the fragments, the collections of Stobaeus and ‘Democrates’, cannot plausibly be thought to have been compiled from direct access to texts of Democritus. Stobaeus’ anthology is clearly based on earlier collections which included, besides excerpts from extant texts of authors such as Plato and the tragedians, anecdotes and maxims attributed to such famous figures as Pythagoras and Socrates, which cannot have had their origin in works written by their supposed authors.

Introduction

‘If Aristotle could have returned to Athens in 272 bc, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death’, speculate Long and Sedley, ‘he would hardly have recognised it as the intellectual milieu in which he had taught and researched for much of his life.’ It had been eclipsed as a cultural centre by Alexandria, thanks to the patronage extended by the Ptolemies to a galaxy of scientists and literary men. In philosophy Athens remained the magnet. But the leading thinkers in the Academy and the Lyceum had in the interval been challenged by a host of rivals, some still active or influential: as well as the Cynics we may instance the younger Aristippus and his followers (known to later writers at least as Cyrenaics), various dialecticians such as Stilpo, Philo and Diodorus, and above all the Stoics and Epicureans. These philosophers did not pretend to the encyclopaedic range of scientific and cultural interests characteristic of the Academy and the Lyceum. Philosophy as practised by Stoics and Epicureans started to resemble the specialist discipline of modern times. And their systems of thought have often been perceived as constituting the deracinated philosophies of life one might expect in an age when political power was ebbing away from the city-state to the cosmopolitan courts of the Hellenistic kings. On this view the individual and his happiness become the new exclusive focus of moral reflection, displacing obsolescent questions about the best political order for the city.

Introduction

With the rise of persuasive public speech as a distinctive field of endeavour in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries bc, Greek political thought becomes deeply involved with democratic Athenian political practice and with Athenian legislative and judicial institutions. Significant political ideas and a distinctive form of political/ethical reasoning were developed by Athens’ practising political orators (rhētores); evidence for their ideas and style of reasoning survives in their preserved public speeches. Certain of the political ideas developed by practising orators challenged, and were in turn challenged by, teachers of formal rhetoric (rhētorikoi); this critical rhetorical tradition survives in some of the speeches of Isocrates. The political ideas and reasoning propounded by rhētores and the counter-arguments of the rhētorikoi in turn provided an important part of the intellectual context for the development of the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.

The Athenian rhētores are noteworthy as the primary surviving source of ancient political writing that is genuinely sympathetic to democracy. The speeches of Athens’ public orators were written to influence large public bodies, especially the citizen assembly (ekklēsia) and people’s courts (dikastēria); another important venue was the (nearly) annual epitaphios: a public oration spoken over Athenians who had died in battle during the previous year. When addressing democratic audiences, composed primarily of ordinary citizens, the Athenian speaker necessarily paid close attention to the established social and political notions, opinions, and beliefs (i.e. the political ideology) common to most members of the Athenian citizen body (dēmos). Assembly and courtroom speakers who ignored or too overtly contravened their audiences’ deeply-entrenched ideological convictions were unlikely to win many votes.

The place of political thought in Josephus’ writings

The historian Josephus succeeds Philo as the exponent of a political theory centred on Judaism and expressed in Greek. The two writers are intellectually far apart, and Josephus had little penchant for philosophical speculation. Nonetheless, their backgrounds and experience are comparable. From a base within the small Jewish social elite of the Roman east, each acted for a period as political leader, defender of the Jews and delegate to the emperor; in Josephus’ case, the mission marked the beginning of his career. Josephus’ literary output, almost as much as Philo’s, belongs to the diaspora: transferring from Jerusalem to Rome, he addressed readers in the Greek world. Admittedly, unlike Philo, who probably knew no Hebrew, Josephus, of priestly and royal stock and brought up in an Aramaic/Hebrew milieu, had to labour, he informs us, to perfect his grasp of the language in which he wrote. But this he successfully did, and, for all his Roman patronage, the framework and the intellectual agenda of his writings are primarily Greek.

It is commonly thought that Josephus knew and exploited Philo. Thus, part of the discussion of Jewish practices in the Against Apion reveals a close dependence on Philo’s now fragmentary Hypothetical. At the same time, the bulk of Josephus’ extensive output is historical; there theory emerges, as we would expect, as analysis in the context of the narration of events – whether distant, recent or contemporary.

In the Hellenistic age changing political conditions set the stage for refinement and adaptation of the classical analysis and evaluation of forms of government. The most significant development was the rise of powerful autocratic monarchies on the model of the Persian and Egyptian kingships.

By the second century bc even the traditional kingships of mainland Greece, such as the Macedonian elected kingship and the limited dual kingship of Sparta, had been transformed into the autocratic Hellenistic type. Greek city-states continued to exist, but had to work out a new relationship with the monarchs, whose imperial ambitions encompassed the entire eastern Mediterranean. Most either settled for reduced autonomy under the authority of one of the monarchies, or banded together into an independent regional league. The development of regional leagues, chiefly on the Greek mainland, was another development that affected Hellenistic thought.

A third was the disappearance of the distinction between democracy and aristocracy or oligarchy. In the wake of intervening political and economic developments, the typical free city-state remained a democracy, but with a strong executive component, dominated by a narrow group of old wealthy families. Since such cities regarded themselves as democracies despite their aristocratic orientation, the classical distinction disappeared. The significant difference was now between a city with a high degree of self-rule and one administered by an agent of one of the Hellenistic kings, often in the shadow of a military garrison.

As a political work, the Politicus is generally regarded as a poor relation of the Republic and the Laws: on the standard view, it reflects rather scrappily on issues arising out of the Republic (especially in relation to the idea of philosopher rulers), and somehow prepares the way for the Laws. But such an approach fails to do justice to its argument. Once its twists and turns are properly understood, it stands out as a major document of Platonic political theory in its own right; less bulky though it may be than either of the other two works, and certainly less appealing than the Republic, it offers real illumination of some central themes, and adds some important new elements which are not in any way superseded in the Laws.

The first, and perhaps chief, problem for the interpreter is to understand the structure of the argument, and its outcome or outcomes. The dialogue has four main components: a long series of ‘divisions’ aimed at defining the politikos, the ‘politician’ or (more traditionally) the ‘statesman’, together with his ‘art’ or expertise (‘statesmanship’); a cosmological myth, inserted into the divisions at an early stage, which allegedly helps take them forward; a discussion of the role of law in ideal and actual societies, which similarly interrupts the process of division, though it is formally motivated by it; and, after the divisions have been completed, a description of the role of the statesman in ‘weaving together’ complementary character traits or kinds of temperament among the citizens.

Isolating ‘political thought’ in Latin historical narratives is more difficult than in the works of historians who wrote in Greek. Explicit theorizing was not a Roman characteristic. But that does not mean that what Roman historical writers wrote did not reflect their conceptions of political institutions and structures and of how they changed over time. The further that a particular statement about historical events deviates from ‘real’ history (as in the analyses which we find in Plato or Aristotle, or in the Greek elements in Cicero), the easier it is to identify – and isolate – such a statement as ‘political thought’; but statements that correspond to the collective morality of a culture represent ‘political thought’; too.

Rome was a society used to accepting authority, whether that of the head of the household (paterfamilias) at home (domi) or the commander (imperator) in war (bello, militiae). From the fourth century bc on, warfare became the most important element in the Roman value-system. In war, obedience to the commander could not afford to be challenged; but the language in which domestic political issues were discussed was equally based on authority – that provided by the speaker’s virtus (proved by his own great deeds or those of his ancestors) or by ancestral tradition, mos maiorum, from which the speaker selected those precedents (exempla) which supported his argument. When the consul Cornelius Scipio Nasica at a contio (formal public gathering) in 138 bc heard views with which he disagreed, he did not try to persuade, but told his assembled fellow-citizens: ‘Please be silent. I know better than you what is best for the state.’

Terminology

Much of our political terminology is Greek in etymology: aristocracy, democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy, tyranny, to take just the most obvious examples, besides politics itself and its derivatives. Most of the remainder – citizen, constitution, dictatorship, people, republic and state – have an alternative ancient derivation, from the Latin. It is the ancient Greeks, though, who more typically function as ‘our’ ancestors in the political sphere, ideologically, mythologically and symbolically. It is they, above all, who are soberly credited with having ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ not only city-republican forms but also politics in the strong sense: that is, communal decision-making effected in public after substantive discussion by or before voters deemed relevantly equal, and on issues of principle as well as purely technical, operational matters.

Yet whether it was in fact the Greeks – rather than the Phoenicians, say, or Etruscans – who first discovered or invented politics in this sense, it is unarguable that their politics and ours differ sharply from each other, both theoretically and practically. This is partly, but not only nor primarily, because they mainly operated within the framework of the polis, with a radically different conception of the nature of the citizen, and on a very much smaller and more intimately personal scale (the average polis of the Classical period is thought to have numbered no more than 500 to 2,000 adult male citizens; fifth-century Athens’ figure of 40,000 or more was hugely exceptional). The chief source of difference, however, is that for both practical and theoretical reasons they enriched or supplemented politics with practical ethics (as we might put it).

Julian and Themistius

In November ad 355 the emperor Constantius II elevated his twenty-four-year-old cousin Julian to the rank of Caesar, or number two in the hierarchy. On hearing the news one of Julian’s old teachers, the philosopher Themistius - author of surviving paraphrases of various Aristotelian treatises - wrote from Constantinople a letter to the new Caesar congratulating him and celebrating the advent of a Platonic philosopher king, comparable with a Dionysus or a Heracles. The letter does not survive, but we can infer quite a lot of what Themistius must have said in it from the successive extant panegyrics he addressed to emperors from Constantius on, and above all from Julian’s reply in his Letter to Themistius (probably ad 356), which is also extant. Themistius seems to have appealed both to history and to theory: Julian is to emulate and indeed surpass Solon, Lycurgus and Pittacus; and in switching from ‘indoors’ to ‘outdoors’ philosophy (Ep.Them. 262e-263a) he is not only following in the steps of philosophers like Thrasyllus and Musonius Rufus, who took up positions at court, but he is also living up to Aristotle’s ideal in the Politics, where in a discussion of the rival claims of the active and the leisured life statesmen are praised as ‘the architects of external actions’ (263d; cf. Pol. VII.3, 1325 b21-3).

Julian’s reply is not exactly uncivil, but it is lacking in grace, and it is highly critical. Consider the question of the comparative merits of the philosophical and the political life, or - as Themistius sometimes puts his contrast between ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ philosophy elsewhere (e.g. Or.8.104a-b, 31.352b-c) - the choice between two paths of philosophy: the more divine and the human, more beneficial to the community.