socrates: I'm really very grateful to you, Theodorus, for introducing me to Theaetetus. And thanks for the introduction to our visitor as well.

theodorus: You'll probably be three times as grateful, though, Socrates, when they've completed their portraits of the statesman and the philosopher as well.

socrates: All right – if this is what you want us to report as the view of our foremost arithmetician and geometer, Theodorus.

theodorus: What, Socrates?

socrates: That he counted each of the men as equivalent, when their relative values progress by leaps that are too great for you mathematicians with your ratios.

theodorus: That's a good point, Socrates. I call on Ammon, the god of my race, to witness that I admit it. You're quite right to tell me off for my mathematical mistake. Thanks for the reminder. I'll get my own back on you another time, but for now I'd like to ask our visitor to continue his kindness and next to pick either the statesman or the philosopher, whichever he likes, and give us an account of him.

visitor: Yes, I'd better, Theodorus. I mean, once we've undertaken a project, we oughtn't to give up until we've reached the end. But what should I do about Theaetetus here?

theodorus: What do you mean?

visitor: Shall we give him a break and instead get Socrates here to join us in our exertions? What do you suggest?

It is perhaps appropriate for the Statesman to be the first of Plato's works to come out in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought; it is certainly the most neglected of Plato's political works, and the one most in need of a fresh presentation. The new translation provides a more accessible version than any hitherto available in English, and the introduction attempts to locate the dialogue in Plato's political thought, taking advantage of the enormous improvements in our understanding of this that recent discussions have produced. Few of these directly concern the Statesman itself, and we hope that this new translation will help to bring the work more centrally into discussions of Plato's political thought, along with the more familiar Republic and Laws.

The translation and textual notes are by Robin Waterfield, and the introduction and other notes by Julia Annas. Each of us, however, has read and commented on the other's work, and the result is the product of a harmonious collaboration that has been interesting and profitable for both of us. We hope that its fruits will introduce others to this uneven, often puzzling but seminal dialogue.

By the standards of any contemporary western political culture, ancient societies, both Greek and Roman, were strikingly hierarchical. Only in the programmatic dreams of the most wild-eyed reformers could we expect to find an ideological commitment to general social equality. Of course, the notion that there should be equality of political rights among those fortunate enough to be classed as full citizens was somewhat commoner. But what we might call the ‘real world’ of social relations was based on dramatic differences in status, power, and wealth, which few if any could seriously imagine challenging.

From the fourth century BC onwards political and social thinkers were reflectively aware of the important role played in such a society by the doing of ‘good deeds’, services or gifts to other members of society for which some sort of return, even if only the expression of gratitude, was normally expected. Although the idea is in some form as old as Greek culture itself, it is fitting that we find clearly expressed in a pseudo-Aristotelian letter to Philip of Macedon the notion that such good deeds and the return for them served to ‘hold together’ (sunechein) society.

Polybius' History book VI contains the most complete text of Hellenistic Greek political theory that has survived from antiquity and the only extended example of applied political theory. Polybius, an Achaean statesman turned historian, developed a political theory not to justify a political position, advocate an ideal constitution, or speculate on the nature of law, justice, political authority, or the relation of man to the state, but for the practical purpose of explaining and predicting historical events.

Polybius explicitly tells us that the sixth book of his History was intended to serve two functions: (1) to explain Rome's rise to power, specifically, ‘how and by what type of constitution nearly the whole of the inhabited world, in less than 53 years, was overpowered and brought under one rule, that of the Romans’ (1.1.5; III.1.4, 2.6; VI.2.2–3; cf. VIII.2.3; XXXIX.8.7); and (2) to enable astute readers to make intelligent, informed political decisions in a world dominated by Rome (VI.2.8–10), and, in the particular case of political leaders, to govern in such a way as to upgrade and perfect the constitutions of their several states (III.118.10–12). Polybius' attention was therefore directed toward the nature, effectiveness, and destiny of the Roman constitution (VI.11–57).

One of the most original aspects of the Epicurean theory of justice, and one which has not yet been adequately explained, is the distinction which it introduces between the concept of justice and that of law. In the philosophical tradition before Epicurus law itself constituted one form of justice, namely legal justice (dikaion nomikon), sometimes contrasted with a superior form, natural justice (dikaion phusikon). Some rejected the idea of natural justice, and simply equated just conduct with conformity to law. ‘Justice is not to transgress the laws (nomima) of the city in which one lives as a citizen’, says Antiphon (On truth, fr. 44B, col. 1). And Thrasymachus (in Plato, Rep. 1 338c–339a) repeats that justice consists in promoting the interests of your ruler, in other words, in obeying the laws imposed by your ruler in his own interests. On the other hand, when Plato maintained that laws which do not deserve the name ‘just’ are not real laws (Laws 715b2–6) — that is, when he identified law with just law — he was confirming that same Sophistic equation of nomos and dikaion at the same time as turning its meaning upside down. And closer to the time of Epicurus, we still find Aristotle asserting that ‘justice is conformity to law’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1129a34), and defining universal justice (as distinct from particular justice) as observance of the law.

Oikonomikē technē, the art of household management, has not much been studied, so far as the Hellenistic period is concerned. Histories of economic thought, when they refer to ancient thought, usually pass directly from Aristotle or his immediate successors to medieval economic Aristotelianism; even the most recent and up-to-date of these are no exception. It would seem that ancient economic thought, having reached its zenith in Aristotle's Politics, disappeared, only to reappear as a catalyst for the reflections of medieval commentators. However, several post-Aristotelian texts on the topic of oikonomikē exist such as the Economics of Ps.-Aristotle and the so-called Economics of Philodemus of Gadara; from a later age there are the Economics of the Neopythagoreans Callicratides and Bryson, the Economics of Dio of Prusa, the Economics of Hierocles and various other documents which, though not called Economics, are concerned with subjects connected with oikonomikē technē.

As far as I know, a general overview of the subject matter with which I am concerned is not available. Only the products of some of the schools, especially Ps.-Aristotle's Economics, have stimulated a sufficiently wide debate. I would like here to make a comparably broad study of the whole subject, with a view to a comprehensive synthesis.

‘Live unknown’, said the Epicureans, enjoining abstinence from politics. The Stoics, by contrast, believed that the wise man should go into public life if the circumstances were right, but held notoriously utopian and in the end depoliticized conceptions of the good community. Neither school debated the merits of oligarchy and democracy or tried to work out detailed prescriptions for the best constitution. These intellectual postures have sometimes been seen as appropriate and indeed inevitable responses to the decline of the polis in the age of the Hellenistic kingdoms: no polis, no political philosophy.

There is of course a grain of truth in this conventional picture of political thought — or its absence — in the Hellenistic period. But the present volume tells a more nuanced and complex story. One reason is that it reflects theorizing undertaken from a Roman perspective. Rome was the greatest of the Mediterranean cities of the time, and Rome was not a monarchy but an independent republic governed according to a distinctive constitutional structure which invited analysis along broadly Aristotelian lines. The principal surviving analyses, albeit fragmentarily preserved, come from the pens of Polybius, writing in the mid-second century BC, and Cicero, a hundred years later. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the way in which these two authors draw on a wide range of Greek intellectual models to devise accounts of constitutional development (ch. 1) and of the moral and intellectual requirements the statesman — conceived as the magistrate of a republic — must satisfy (ch. 2), which are then applied to the case of Rome.

What was the Cynic attitude towards politics? How did Cynics use the lexicon of politics? Was there a range of Cynic attitudes? Did Cynicism influence the political thought of others? Can one talk of Cynic political theory? My treatment of these questions will be chronological, to allow for development in Cynic thought, though Cynicism did not develop linearly (there were always Cynics who thought and behaved like Diogenes) and the notion of development is problematic (Cynicism was more a way of life than a system of thought). The treatment must also be selective: this essay presupposes the importance of the whole topic, and the more significance one attaches to Cynicism, the larger the topic will be, especially because in a fundamental sense, as we shall see, Cynic ‘politics’ are simply the Cynic way of life itself.

DIOGENES

Since Antisthenes did not found Cynicism, we begin with the problems of the ‘cosmopolitan’ sentiments anciently attributed to Diogenes. The two most important passages are in Diogenes Laertius. In VI.63 is recorded a saying: ‘Asked where he was from, he said: “[I am] a citizen of the universe”.’ The word kosmopolites is extremely rare and is first attested in Philo of Alexandria (De opif. mundi 3, Mos. 1.157).