1. Rousseau, ‘Ninth Letter from the Mountain’, published in 1764, as translated in Rousseau 2001, pp. 292–3.
2. Ibid., p. 293.
3. Viroli 1992.
4. Figures for territory size are conveniently summarized in Ober 2008a, pp. 43–8, 84–6, who draws on a range of sources, including the important inventory of 1,035 different poleis, the plural of polis (or, strictly, communities that were ‘definitely, probably or possibly’ to be classed as such, in Hansen and Nielsen 2004 (quotation, p. 53)).
5. This translation is coined by Hansen 1993, pp. 7–29.
6. On the different forms of manumission in Rome, noting that only those involving civil procedures (as distinct from merely the wilful decision of the master) conferred citizenship, see Arena 2012, pp. 16–19, and Bradley 2011, pp. 254–5.
7. On Athenian water-clocks, Allen 1996; on Roman augurs, Ogilvie 2011.
1. WD 189: the phrase translates a single Greek word, cheirodikai, literally ‘hand-justice’, meaning the justice imposed by force of fists. For this gloss and translation, see EGPT, p. 15.
2. This is also observed by Ryan 2012, Vol. 1, p. 13.
3. On Solon’s achievement, see Wallace 2007.
4. In the Constitution of the Athenians produced by Aristotle or his school in the mid to late 4th century, and rediscovered in the late 19th century, which offers an interpretative political history and analysis of Athenian political arrangements, this is described as abolishing ‘lending on the body’ (AP 6.1). I follow Harris 2002 in interpreting this as the abolition of debt-slavery between individuals, while still allowing debt-bondage understood as the obligation to work at a creditor’s will until a debt is paid off, but this is a matter of scholarly debate (for the view that Solon rather abolished debt-bondage, see Finley 1985, p. 166 and passim; I am grateful to Paul Cartledge for discussing these matters with me, though we don’t fully agree). Debt-slavery for debts to the polis persisted in any case. Also debated is the meaning of the more general abolition of private and public debts, the so-called seisachtheia (or shaking off of burdens, from the same root as ‘seismic tremors’, or earthquakes) with which Solon is also credited in the same section of the text.
5. Patterson 1991, p. xiii (‘freedom was generated from the experience of slavery’) and p. xv (‘freedom, as a core value, was first socially constructed in ancient Athens’); these conclusions are especially striking, given the broad historical and ethnographic sweep of Patterson’s study.
6. Florentinus, Digest 1.4.5.1, as translated in Garnsey 1996, p. 14.
7. For authoritative overviews of slavery in classical Athens and republican Rome, see the chapters by Rihll 2011 and Bradley 2011 in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Vol. 1. A useful brief discussion is in Hansen 1991, pp. 120–23; on p. 124 he notes that the public slaves (demosioi) could bring suits before the courts.
8. Ober 2000, Vlassopoulos 2007.
9. On Athens into the 4th century, Rihll 2011, p. 54, citing the ‘Old Oligarch’ 1.10; on Rome, Bradley 2011, p. 261, citing Appian, B. Civ. 2.122.
10. J. Paul Getty Museum object 85.AA.352.
11. Bernard Williams 1993, pp. 111–17, 124–9.
12. Less accepted in theory, perhaps, but just as ingrained in practice, are the modern forms of bondage prevalent in many parts of the world that apply to certain groups of domestic workers, sex workers and various kinds of indentured labourers, especially those trafficked or brought into foreign countries.
13. Tereus, TGF, p. 591, in the translation given in EGPT, p. 56.
14. Cartledge 2002, p. 148.
15. Hansen 1991, pp. 116–20.
16. Nomos is the word usually translated as ‘law’, but it can also mean ‘rule’, ‘custom’ or ‘way of life’: all of these are intimately related in ancient Greek thought.
17. My translation. This passage is also quoted in Balot 2006, p. 21; Balot sees justice and the oppression it remedies as central to Greek political thinking, as is also argued here.
18. KRS 101A, for Greek text and translation.
19. These enthusiasts ‘supposed … the whole heaven to be an attunement and a number’, so Aristotle later reported: KRS 430, quoted and discussed by Schofield 2003, p. 55. Not all Greek thinkers agreed that justice ordered the cosmos. One dissident was the philosopher Empedocles, born in Sicily not far from the Pythagorean settlements, who claimed that love rather than justice was what fundamentally unified the conflict-stricken cosmos.
20. For an overview of the political context and contribution of Greek tragedy, see Hesk 2007, or, at greater length, Goldhill 1986.
21. Having stipulated in advance that a tie will count as an acquittal, Athena can be described as casting the deciding vote in the sense that her vote, coming twelfth, is the sixth to find Orestes innocent.
22. Gagarin 1986, pp. 12–14, 19–20, and passim.
23. Gagarin 2008, p. 155.
24. Euripides, Phoen. 536–8, my translation. The word translated here as ‘Fairness’ is actually isoteta, which is literally ‘equality’. The mathematical precision of what is ison favours a translation of ‘equality’, but sometimes words involving ison are used in a broader sense of fairness.
25. The ties of kinship between brother and sister were thought by the Greeks to be especially deep. Herodotus (3.119) tells the story of a Persian woman who is given the choice by King Darius of saving just one of her male kinsman from death. Out of her brother, husband and sons, she chooses her brother, on the grounds that she could remarry and bear more children, but with her parents dead, she could never have another brother. The king honours her choice by sparing the life of her eldest son as well as her brother.
26. Not all of those whom we call sophists presented human justice and law as having no roots in divine intentions. Protagoras, for example, took a version of the Hesiodic approach, recounting in a myth the origins of justice as a gift from Zeus together with ‘awe’ (aidos). Justice sets the terms of fairness among humans; awe makes humans fear the gods and feel shame in breaching the laws and customs in which justice is embodied. Together, awe and justice ‘bring order to cities and [are] the communal bonds of friendship’ (this is the view ascribed to Protagoras in Plato, Protagoras 322c, as translated by Lombardo and Bell in Cooper 1997).
27. As described in Garnsey 1996, pp. 75–6, who notes that he was perhaps defending the Messenian helots, many of whom achieved freedom from their Spartan overlords in 369 BCE.
As Garnsey also notes there, Aristotle refers to a group of people who think this way in Pol. 1253b20–23, but he names no names.
28. We know that this was the view of the sophist Lycophron as reported by Aristotle, Pol. 1280b10–12, and it was also apparently that of the sophist Antiphon: DK 87 B44. We will see in Chapter 4 that it is the view put forward for refutation in Book 2 of Plato’s Republic.
29. This is the argument of Denyer 1983.
30. Rep. 359a, translated by Grube, revised Reeve, in Cooper 1997.
31. Ober 2008b.
1. The imperial constitutiones were given the force of law (lex) by Hadrian in the 2nd century CE: Stein 1999, p. 28. They were collected into a single codex by Justinian in 529 CE and revised in 534 CE into a definitive second edition: Humfress 2005, pp. 162–6.
2. Pol. 1295a40.
3. Ibid., 1290a7–8.
4. Hdt. 9.33. More precisely, this is the ‘first extant occurrence [of politeia] in a non-fragmentary text of known authorship’, as put in Harte and Lane 2013, p. 1, on which this paragraph draws more generally.
5. I owe these points to Schofield 2006, pp. 30–35, discussing the surviving fragments of Critias’ prose and verse writings titled Politeia of the Spartans; Xenophon’s prose work of the same name; and Hippodamus of Miletus’ account of the ‘best politeia’.
6. For an influential analysis, see Fornara 1971.
7. Hornblower 2006, p. 306.
8. Winton 2000, p. 102.
9. Hornblower 2006, pp. 306–7.
10. There can be no doubt that the specific vocabulary of ideas and institutions used in this debate, especially in the speech by Otanes about popular regimes, are 5th-century Greek rather than 6th-century Persian, contrary to Keane 2009. For a judicious discussion of the possibility of some kernel of 6th-century Persian concern with equality among nobles, and for the best way to interpret the related passage of Hdt., 6.43, in that context, see Evans 1981.
11. See Chapter 3, and Hoekstra forthcoming.
12. The dates of the three seemingly earliest surviving writings to use demokratia – by the ‘Old Oligarch’, Herodotus and Democritus – are all contested, but probably all date from about the 430s or soon afterwards in terms of their composition and circulation: see Raaflaub 2007, p. 108, though he suggests other indirect evidence for a circulation of the term in Athens from the 460s.
13. Morwood 2012, pp. 557–8.
14. As translated in EGPT, modifying ison from ‘fair’ to ‘equal’ and adjusting syntax accordingly.
15. As translated in EGPT.
16. Hdt. 5.78, using a word from the same root as the verb ‘to speak in the assembly’ and the noun agora, a place of assembly.
17. The phrase is due to the analysis of modern political and ideological debate in Hirschman 1991.
18. Alcaeus, fragments 70.10–11, as translated in Anderson 2005, p. 182.
19. Morris 2003, p. 1.
20. The most powerful and influential Spartan kings were Cleomenes I, ruling from c. 590 to 490, and Agesilaos II, ruling from 399 to 360.
21. There was also a lineage of Greek kings governing the colony of Cyrene, established in the area of modern-day Libya, which ruled (though under the thumb of the Persians from the last quarter of the 6th century onwards) until being deposed in favour of a democracy in about 440 BCE: Sacks 1995, pp. 73–4. And there seems to have been a monarchy in Taras, in southern Italy, a city that identified itself as a Spartan colony: Hall 2014, pp. 116–20.
22. I am drawing on, but going somewhat beyond, Anderson 2005, who asserts at p. 177: ‘For most of the archaic era, a turannis was not a “regime” at all. The term referred rather to a conventional, if unusually dominant style of leadership that flourished in early Greek oligarchies.’
23. Anderson 2005, pp. 211–14.
24. See Monoson 2012.
25. Plutarch, Nicias 29.2–3, cited in Bosher 2012, p. 116.
26. This Constitution of the Athenians, discovered in the late 19th century and identified with Aristotle’s school, should not be confused with the more polemical text written by the anonymous author now called the ‘Old Oligarch’, which is also sometimes titled Constitution of the Athenians (especially in older scholarship, in which it was often credited to Xenophon, among whose writings it was preserved).
27. The evolution of the democracy in Athens will be considered in more detail in Chapter 3.
28. Hoekstra forthcoming.
29. As we saw in Chapter 1, the exclusion of slaves and foreigners from citizenship, and the problematic and partial exclusion of women, was practised by all Greek regimes, including even full-blown democracies.
30. 2.18–19, Greek in TLG, translated as in Benson and Prosser (1972), modified: I translate ‘all those sharing in the constitution’, as opposed to their ‘all those sharing in citizenship’: their translation of this phrase cannot be correct, since the conclusion of the extract quoted is that the multitude in an oligarchy will be citizens but will be excluded from office. I have made other small modifications to their translation as well. This text is now believed to be the work of Anaximenes of Lampsacus. For further discussion, see Lane forthcoming.
31. Gabrielsen 1981, p. 113.
32. Thuc. 5.84.3.
33. For an overview of the distinctiveness of the Spartan constitution, see Cartledge 2001, pp. 21–38.
34. Some of the inhabitants of Laconia (the perioikoi), however, enjoyed local forms of self-government under Spartan dominance.
35. Notice that, contrary to the prevalent myth of an unchanged Spartan constitution, Herodotus mentions at least one law introduced at a particular time in the middle of the Persian Wars: that one of the two kings had to stay home when the other was out on military campaign (5.75). Scholars argue that many of the other customs described by Plutarch as Lycurgan were still later innovations of the 3rd century BCE: see Flower 2002.
36. Crete, too, which shared Doric kinship with Sparta, had common meals (indeed, Lycurgus is said to have borrowed many of the laws he imposed from Crete). Aristotle, in the Politics (1271a–1272a), contrasts the method of providing such meals by individual contributions in Sparta unfavourably with the method of having common lands and supplies in Crete, which made such meals more genuinely ‘of the common’.
37. Plato and Aristotle noted in the 4th century that this ban hadn’t worked, with Spartans secretly hoarding money, perhaps accumulated on military campaigns abroad. See for example Aristotle, Pol. 1271b5.
38. Apophth. and Lacae., cited in this paragraph, can both be found in Plutarch 1931.
39. I follow here the dating suggested by Marr and Rhodes 2008, p. 5, with reference to certain earlier scholars’ arguments, although they themselves acknowledge the wide range of dates suggested by others (pp. 31–2). The text was preserved along with writings by Xenophon, and was from later in antiquity attributed to him; its author is therefore sometimes referred to as ‘pseudo-Xenophon’, though most scholars today (including Marr and Rhodes 2008, pp. 6–12) consider Xenophon unlikely to have been the author.
40. As translated by and according to the Greek text in Marr and Rhodes 2008.
41. Ibid.
1. For the view of Athenian democracy as a form of popular sovereignty, see Lane forthcoming.
2. For measures of Athens’ economic and cultural influence, see Ober 2008a.
3. The details of the new property qualification are disputed; for a brief overview, see Williams 1983.
4. In fact, scholarly opinion is divided about whether this is the best answer: Christian Meier 1990, pp. 82–4, and Kurt Raaflaub 2007, for example, have argued that the beginning of ‘democracy’ is better credited to the 460s and the reforms of Ephialtes, described below.
5. Post-Cleisthenes, citizens were identified as members of their demes, for example, ‘Antigenes of Xypete’, mentioned in Lycurgus’ speech prosecuting Leochares. Another way in which Cleisthenes is said in the AP to have extended democracy was by introducing ostracism: this is discussed below.
6. In addition, a hero of the battle of Marathon in the Persian Wars, Aristides, is credited in the AP with having subsequently instituted public pay for soldiers, sailors and certain magistrates, all funded by imperial tributes. This gave the ordinary Athenian a financial stake in the empire.
7. Per., 37.
8. On the facts and significance of methods of voting in Athens and to a lesser extent Sparta, see Schwartzberg 2010.
9. Staveley 1972, pp. 93–4, and 78–100, for Athenian voting procedures generally.
10. Hansen 1991, pp. 153, 166–7.
11. As noted in Lane forthcoming, the phrase ‘dead letter’ is used by Rhodes 1981, p. 146 (AP 7.4), Sinclair 1991 (1988 edition), p. 17, n. 64, and Hansen 1991, pp. 88, 107, 227. But both the passages on which all of these authors lean heavily – AP 7.4 and 47.1 – suggest that the ban on the lowest class (thetes) holding office had some life to it as an official policy, even if it was sometimes or often evaded in practice.
12. The Quiet Athenian is the title of Carter 1986.
13. Ober 1989.
14. Isocrates 20.5–6; see Allen 2000 for a discussion of anger in democratic Athens.
15. Ober 1989 and 1998.
16. Diodotus’ advice narrowly carried the day: the assembly decided to rescind the order to put the men to the sword. To do so, it sent out a second ship with that countermanding order, which overtook the first ship with murderous instructions in the nick of time.
17. The decision was made to consider the guilt of the Arginusae generals as a group, rather than individually, which violated proper procedures; Socrates says in the Apology that he protested against this in his role as member of the council at the time.
18. For one account, see Dunn 2005.
19. Paine 2000, p. 180.
20. In contrast, Hansen considers Athens and some other Greek democracies (though he notes, not all of them) to have been forms of ‘direct democracy in which every major political decision automatically has to be debated and voted on by the people’ (2005, p. 46). While the role of the open popular assembly in Athenian decision-making is vital, I think that labelling it ‘direct democracy’ is unhelpful and has become misleading, for the reasons given in the main text.
21. Hansen 1991, p. 230.
22. On election as anti-democratic, see Manin 1997, though one must remember that the Athenians, too, chose to elect certain officials.
23. To pass the scrutiny (dokimasia) prior to taking up a post to which he had been appointed by lottery, a citizen had to prove that he was properly enrolled as a citizen and to establish ‘whether he does well by his parents, fulfils his tax obligations and has served as a soldier when required’ (AP 55.3).
24. Constant 1988.
25. For a valuable discussion of Athenian religion and politics in the context of Socrates’ trial, see Cartledge 2009, pp. 76–91.
26. I follow Forsdyke 2005, pp. 281–4 (Appendix 1), who reviews the arguments for and against attributing the introduction of Athenian ostracism to Cleisthenes, and suggests that, on balance, its Cleisthenic origins can be defended, while at the same time pointing out that other cities, and Athens itself, already had elite practices of exile that bear similarity to ostracism without being identical to it.
27. This is argued by Forsdyke 2005, pp. 144–204.
28. Endangered in his exile in Argos by Spartan plotting, Themistocles eventually left Greece altogether and ended his life – ironically – in the service of the Persian king.
29. Ober 2000.
30. As translated by and according to the Greek text in Marr and Rhodes 2008.
1. Grg. 452e, translation by Zeyl in Cooper 1997.
2. Ibid., 452d, 452e.
3. Translation by Grube in Cooper 1997.
4. Krentz 1982, p. 65: ‘The excluded (those outside the 3,000 [who remained on the citizen rolls under the oligarchy]) were banned from living in the city.’
5. Weiss 2006 brings out this perspective well, though her argument does not exhaust what the dialogues are doing.
6. He seems to go further, suggesting that knowledge is not only necessary but also sufficient for virtue: whether and how he argues for this is a disputed matter among scholars.
7. On Socrates as more apparently virtuous than any others of his generation, Plato, Phaedo 118a, discussed by Nehamas 1998 and Lane 2007.
8. Monoson 2000 details Plato’s intellectual debts to Athenian democracy (with Saxonhouse 1992 specifically on frank speaking also); Wallach 2001 argues that he is no more critical of Athens than of other regimes; while Ober 1998 suggests that he should be understood contextually as one of a circle of radical ‘rejectionist’ critics of Athens.
9. Translation by Grube in Cooper 1997.
10. There is a large and contentious literature on how to read the Apology; I am developing my own reading here. For one perspective on key elements in the text, see McPherran 2002. For a distinctive reading of Socrates as committed to following an expert rather than his own judgement, see Hatzistavrou 2005.
11. There is also a large and contentious literature on how to read the Crito, in particular as to how the speech of the ‘Laws’ imagined by Socrates in the Crito relates to his own views. The most influential reading of that speech in recent English-language literature is Kraut 1984. For various challenges to the broad view accepted by Kraut that the views of the ‘Laws’ and those of Socrates coincide, see Harte 1999, Lane 1998a and Weiss 1998.
12. Xenophon, in Hellenica 1.7, records the illegality – of sanctioning all six generals collectively rather than considering their deeds individually – and Socrates’ opposition. It’s worth noting that Socrates must have let his name go forward in order to be chosen by lot to serve as a member of his deme’s council contingent for that year.
13. DL 3.46.
14. Even in the Laws, there is an Athenian Visitor whom some think a disguised portrait of either Socrates or of Plato himself.
15. The essential reference work about Plato’s characters by Debra Nails 2002 dates his birth 424/423.
16. I owe the identification and exploration of this connection to Allen 2010.
17. On Thrasymachus, a real person and rhetorician who is serving as an ambassador from Chalcedon to Athens in the moment that he is purportedly a participant in the discussion of the Republic, see White 1995.
18. Translation by Grube, revised Reeve, in Cooper 1997.
19. From here on, I will often use the conventional translation ‘soul’ for psyche, in common with many English translations and discussions.
20. The centrality of guarding in the Republic is emphasized by A. [Alexander] Long 2013.
21. Lane 2011/2012.
22. On the ‘noble lie’, see Schofield 2006, pp. 292–309, and Tarnopolsky 2010.
23. See Lane 2001. In the case of communism, as Garnsey 2007 has shown, the Republic’s case for depriving some of property was misreported by Aristotle in his Politics as a case for abolishing private property in favour of common ownership by all in a city. That misunderstanding (perhaps fostered by Plato’s Laws 739c–e, in which communism of property and family for all is called the first-best regime) led to a long legacy of Plato being thought of as the father of positive communism – in which all own property in common – and serving as the inspiration for Thomas More in his Utopia (1516) and for French revolutionaries like Gracchus Babeuf. In fact, Plato’s argument in the Republic is for only a limited negative communism, in which none of the rulers own anything, but ownership relations are not abolished overall.
24. Rep. 517a, translation by Grube, revised Reeve, in Cooper 1997.
25. There is an alternative reading of the Republic claiming that its point is rather to show that philosophical rule and its requirements are impossible (Strauss 1964, Bloom 1991). I have argued in Lane 1999 that this interpretation discounts the explicit analysis of possibility offered by Socrates in Book 5; for more on Platonic ideas of possibility, see Laks 1990.
26. Lane 2007.
27. Ley-Pineda 2009.
28. Lane 2001.
29. Lane 1998b and Lane 2013d.
30. Lane 2013a.
31. On the second-best status of the city of the Laws, Laks 1990. At Laws 739c–e, the best city is said to abolish property and family for all citizens (unlike what is proposed for Kallipolis in the Republic).
32. Translation by Saunders in Cooper 1997.
33. On self-rule in the Laws, see Bobonich 2002, criticized in part by Lane 2010. On law and writing, see Nightingale 1993 and 1999.
34. For a judicious assessment of the status of the text, see Brunt 1993, pp. 282–342.
35. As translated in Plutarch 1973, p. 119.
36. Once: Diodorus Siculus; twice: Cornelius Nepos; three times: the ‘Seventh Letter’ and Plutarch. Unfortunately none of the works by historians of Sicily on which the later writers themselves were drawing has survived.
37. The argument of this paragraph draws on and is indebted to Allen 2010.
1. This is the project of, among others, Ober 2005.
2. For an excellent overview of Aristotle highlighting this starting point, see Lear 1988.
3. EN 1103b, closely following but modifying the translation in Barnes 1984.
4. For an excellent analysis of this aspect of Aristotle’s ethics, see Burnyeat 1980.
5. On the ways in which the family and household are encompassed within the polis, see Cooper 2012, pp. 70–143.
6. Here I draw on and follow Schofield 1999a, pp. 115–40.
7. On the use of Aristotle in the Spanish conquest in the Americas, Pagden 1995; in the antebellum South, Monoson 2011.
8. The question was famously put in this form by Amartya Sen 1982.
9. For a valuable discussion of the ways in which the family and household are for Aristotle encompassed within the polis, see Cooper 2012, pp. 70–143.
10. Lane 2013e, Lane forthcoming. Note that I consider this worth counting as a conception of popular sovereignty, even though it is articulated without the legal vocabulary of the rights of the people to control and manage their own affairs and interests that characterizes the theory of popular sovereignty developed in Cicero (Schofield 1999a, pp. 178–94).
11. Pol. 1281a–b, as translated in Reeve 1998.
12. Collective feasts in Athens were generally provided by collective monies of a panel of citizens; in cities like Crete by the city’s general funds; in Sparta by individual contributions of foodstuffs, both levies of basic provisions and also occasional gifts of hunted meat or side-dishes. For a reading focused on aggregation of quantity, see Lane 2013d, versus the usual reading of the passage as primarily about potluck meals and more generally about qualitative diversity, which is influentially found in Waldron 1995 and well defended in Wilson 2011 and Ober 2013. For a related line of scepticism to my own, see Cammack 2013.
13. On the contribution of Plato and Aristotle to articulating the ideal of the ‘rule of law’, see Allen 2000.
14. Pol. 1282b, as translated in Reeve 1998.
15. Ibid., 1323a, 1323b for the quotations respectively.
16. The approach taken here is influenced by Frank 2005.
1. Aristotle does talk at one point about the prospects that the Greeks could rule all the other neighbouring peoples, should they chance to develop ‘a single politeia’ (Pol. 1327b31–3). But, while it is enticing to read this as along the lines of Alexander’s imperial vision, as does Meier 2011, p. 41, it is better interpreted to mean all Greek cities adopting the same constitution rather than merging into a single city (with Reeve 1998, p. 202, n. 31).
2. Schofield 1991, pp. 104–11, argues that Plutarch is here misconstruing Zeno’s idea of something like the Spartan politeia by assimilating it to the political programme of Alexander the Great. However, for my limited purposes in making this introductory point, the absence of distinctive city walls and laws would hold true also of Schofield’s own reconstruction of Zeno as defining a politeia in terms of shared social norms (Schofield 1991, p. 73).
3. New fragment 21.1.4–14, quoted here in LS 22S translation. The inscription (ironically, carved into the city walls, covering in toto about 100 metres) was commissioned by Diogenes of Oenoanda in about 200 CE (he is not to be confused with Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic). This is among the fragments highlighted by the overview and review of Clay 2007, p. 288; it is published in Smith 2003.
4. Alexander’s generals would break up his empire into parts after his death, making themselves rival monarchs and elaborating ideals of kingship that had some continuity with Alexander’s aspirations to empire. For an overview of the history and politics of the Hellenistic period, see Walbank 1981.
5. See Moles 2000.
6. Alexander is said to have been accompanied by another Cynic philosopher, Onesicritus, and other Cynics in later periods were also court-philosophers, however improbable this may sound. Kindstrand 1976, pp. 14–15, discusses this in the context of the relation between Bion, a philosopher born a slave who studied in the old Academy at the end of the 4th century and became a popular, Cynic-identified teacher, and Antigonus Gonatas, the general ruling Macedon.
7. Indeed the counter-cultural aspect of the parables about Jesus have led some scholars to speak – controversially – of ‘Jesus the Cynic’. We can identify the Cynic life as one of the powerful inherited images within which some understandings of the life of Jesus – and later the preaching of Paul – were fashioned. See Bosman 2008 and Downing 1992.
8. Alex. 14.
9. These accounts of Chrysippus’ writings are found in Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions 1044F–1045A, as translated in LS 67F; Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3.247–8, as translated in LS 67G.
10. The approach here and in the account of the Stoics in this chapter generally owes much to Schofield 1991.
11. This account of Zeno, presented by his critics, is in DL 7.32–3, as translated in LS 67B.
12. The general account of the Stoics in DL is usefully collected and translated in sequence in Inwood and Gerson 2008.
13. Arius Didymus, as reported by Eusebius: passage excerpted and translated in LS 67L.
14. D 2.10.7–12.
15. Ibid., 2.10.3, as translated in Text 144 (p. 200), Inwood and Gerson 2008.
16. Appiah 2006.
17. DL 10.117–20, as translated in LS 22Q.
18. DL 10.119, as translated in Inwood and Gerson 1997, p. 42.
19. Ammianus Marcellinus, 30.4.3 (51 Usener), as translated in Inwood and Gerson 1997, p. 96.
20. Reported in Porphyry, On Abstinence 1.71.–9.4, as translated in LS 22M.
21. DL 10.139–54, as translated in Inwood and Gerson 1997, p. 35.
22. The early Stoics, too, had celebrated friendship among the sages, classing it as among those things that are to be ‘chosen for their own sakes’ (according to Fin. 3.70, as translated in Inwood and Gerson 1997, p. 242) rather than merely as a means to something else. Still, they tended to stress the commonality and community among sages more than the particular ties of friendship.
23. Epicurus, Key Doctrines 7. 27, as translated in LS 22C, 22E.
24. Cicero, Fin. 1.66–70, as translated in LS 22O.
25. Ibid.; followed by DL 10.120, as translated in LS 22Q.
26. According to Seneca, Ep. 19.10, as translated in LS 22I.
27. New fragment 21.1.4–14, as translated in LS 22S.
28. Fragments 3.2.7–3.6.2, Smith. This is among the fragments highlighted in the overview and review of Clay 2007, pp. 286–7; it is published in Smith 1993.
29. All translations from De Re Publica are from Cicero 1991, according to the system of numbering the fragments used there, which are not always printed in numerical order, so I shall cite fragment numbers together with page numbers; here 3.33, at pp. 71–2. As with other incompletely surviving ancient texts, many of the fragments are quoted or reported by later ancient sources and may be shaped by the agendas of the latter.
30. All translations in this paragraph are from 3.21a, in Cicero 1991, p. 63.
31. Ibid., 3.13.
32. Ibid., 3.17, p. 65.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 3.24b, p. 66.
35. Admittedly, the shadowy figure of Pyrrho – a contemporary of Epicurus and Zeno, whose life and teachings recounted by his student Timon were appropriated by the later Sceptic Aenesidemus as a forebear – was said to have applied the theory in a more radically incautious way, ‘going out of his way for nothing, taking no precaution, but facing all risks as they came, whether carts, precipices, dogs, or what not’ (DL 9.11, as translated by Hicks in Diogenes Laertius 1925). But Pyrrho was more dogmatic in his Scepticism than some of his later self-proclaimed ‘Pyrrhonist’ followers.
1. On the meaning of res publica, I draw on Schofield 1999a, pp. 178–94, though in then eliding this with ‘republican’ for my own purposes I depart from his more cautionary approach.
2. Brunt 1988, p. 283, and generally pp. 281–350.
3. McCormick 2011 offers a democratic and populist reading of republican Rome, one that he finds in Machiavelli’s reflections on Livy’s history.
4. Polyb. 1.1.5. I have made my own translations from the Budé text: Polybius 2004. The standard English translation is by Evelyn S. Shuckburgh (Polybius 1962), which I have also consulted and sometimes followed or adapted.
5. For an overview of Polybius’ life on which this account draws, see Walbank 1962.
6. Baronowski 2011, pp. 2–3.
7. The last three sentences of this paragraph draw on Schofield 1999b, p. 746.
8. Polybius uses no such shorthand label, but describes the equilibrating of the elements of the regime at length. His idea would be better described as ‘balanced’ than as ‘mixed’; as Paul Cartledge vividly suggested to me, it is more ‘seesaw’ than ‘pudding’.
9. Thuc. 8.97.2.
10. Plato, Laws 691e. The translations from the Laws in this paragraph are by Saunders in Cooper 1997.
11. Ibid., 693d.
12. The relevance of this Aristotelian passage is noted (pp. v–vi) in the course of the general helpful guide to Polybius on the mixed constitution in Fritz 1954.
13. For the later influence of the Roman constitution in the history of political thought, see Millar 2002.
14. Drogula 2007.
15. The translation is in Arena 2012, p. 201, who also cites the two sources using the phrase: Caes., B. Civ. 1.5, and Livy 3.4.9.
16. For a review of the debate, see North 1990.
17. Cic. 3.7, translated by J. L. Moles in Plutarch 1998.
18. Zetzel 1999, p. vii.
19. Off. 1.77, as translated by Margaret Atkins in Cicero 1991.
20. As translated by J. L. Moles in Plutarch 1988.
21. Zetzel 1999, p. viii.
22. Cic. 42. 2–8.
23. For the Latin text of Quintus’ instructions, see Q. T. Cicero 2001, and for an accessible recent translation, Q. T. Cicero 2012.
24. Cicero adds the caveat that rhetoric is elevated above moral philosophy (ethics) only, not above the whole of philosophy; and we may add the caveat that Plato’s Phaedrus includes a qualified defence of rhetoric, in contrast with his Gorgias.
25. De Rep. 1.1 and 1.12, for the respective quotations, as translated in Cicero 1999, p. 6.
26. On Cicero’s Latin philosophical vocabulary and the influence of Roman law in shaping it, see Griffin 2013.
27. This is the translation offered in Schofield 1999a, p. 183, omitting the clause numbering that he introduces; his account of the passage influences mine here and in what follows. In Cicero 1999, the fragment is numbered 1.39a.
28. Interestingly, however, for a paragon of republican statesmanship, Scipio expresses a personal endorsement for monarchy over the other two simple forms if one must choose one simple form of the original three, comparing it with the single master of a household, and Platonically to the rule of reason in the mind.
29. This fragment is numbered thus in Cicero 1999, p. 56.
30. Similar efforts had been made before and would be made again: Julius Caesar would succeed in passing two agrarian laws in 59, despite the vehement opposition of Cicero, Cato and others.
31. My translation, from De Lege Agraria, second speech, 2.7.17, 2.7.16, for the respective quotations in this sentence (Latin in Cicero 2002a); the ideas expressed in the preceding two sentences are found in the first speech of the three. For the broader context in which the optimates, including Cicero, opposed land redistribution as an attack on liberty, see Arena 2012, pp. 220–43.
32. Cicero’s De Legibus is also clearly modelled on Plato’s Laws, though the relationships posited in their respective texts on law to their respective texts on commonwealth and constitution are not identical.
33. ‘Party walls and gutters’ is the pungent phrasing in Harries 2006, p. 15, of this quotation from De Leg. 1.14.
34. De Leg. 1.20, as translated by Zetzel in Cicero 1999.
35. De Leg. 1.23, my translation.
36. Off. 1.21, my translation.
37. Off. 2.73, my translation.
38. My translation, from the Latin text in Cicero 2002b.
39. All quotations in this section from this work, unless otherwise marked, are as translated by Atkins in Cicero 1991.
40. This paragraph draws on and is closely related to my account in Lane 2011. There I quote the telling remark by A. A. [Anthony A.] Long 1995, p. 240: ‘The De officiis, not the De re publica, is Cicero’s Republic.’
41. See Cic. 41. 3–4 in Plutarch 1988.
42. These claims are challenged in Chapters 16 and 18 of The Prince respectively; the intermediary Chapter 17 of The Prince targets not any work by Cicero but rather Seneca’s De Clementia (On Mercy), a text to be discussed in Chapter 8.
1. Here I follow Mackay 2004, p. 165, quoting his translation of Octavian’s new title.
2. Mackay 2004, pp. 167–8. The key moment in Octavian’s defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony was the battle of Actium in 31 BCE; in extinguishing the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, this also marked the fall of the last of the Hellenistic kingdoms that had been set up by Alexander’s generals, after which Egypt became a province of the Roman empire.
3. Mackay 2004, pp. 183, 185.
4. Brunt 1977, who explains that this is better understood as a senatus consultum though presented as a lex.
5. On the significance of this speech ‘To Rome’ by Aelius Aristides, which has been variously dated between 144 and 155 CE, see Ando 1999 and Richter 2011. For the text, see Lenz and Behr 1976, and for a translation, see Behr 1981, Vol. 2.
6. The Histories chronicle 68–96 CE; the Annals, charting 14–68 CE, were written after the Histories as a kind of prequel. Both survive only in parts.
7. Tacitus wrote other works that would significantly shape later political thought, including his Germania, describing the customs of the German groups on the outskirts of the empire in his day, and a book about his father-in-law, the eponymous Agricola, a Roman who had become governor of Britain.
8. Gibbon 1837, p. 30 (Chapter 3). In fact, Gibbon accorded this accolade to a longer period including this one: from ‘the death of Domitian to the accession of Constantine’.
9. As translated in Tacitus 2003, pp. 6–7.
10. See Sailor 2008, pp. 33–6, on different paths to protecting autonomy and social standing in Tacitus’ time, including his own distinctive combination of historiographical and political activities.
11. On the Dialogue on Oratory, see Saxonhouse 1975 (an article devoted to this theme) and Kapust 2011, pp. 122–33.
12. Translation of De Clementia here and below by J. F. Procopé in Seneca 1995.
13. Translation of De Otio here and below (title often translated as On Leisure, but in this edition as On the Private Life) by J. F. Procopé in Seneca 1995.
14. It is in this sense that it is right to say that Seneca, despite being an adviser to an emperor, was ‘apolitical’: Cooper and Procopé 1995, p. xxiv.
15. Translation of this and all other letters of Seneca mentioned are by Brad Inwood in Seneca 2007.
16. Translation of De Ira here and below by J. F. Procopé in Seneca 1995.
17. As this letter is not included in Inwood’s edition of selected letters, it is quoted here from the translation in Inwood and Gerson 2008.
18. Roberts 2013, pp. 25–8.
19. Ibid., p. 144.
20. Inwood 2005, pp. 303, 319.
21. For an influential perspective on this practice, though one stressing self-fashioning more than self-rule, see Foucault 2010.
22. I say ‘in part’ to register Brad Inwood’s perceptive admonition that Seneca wrote not only as a therapist or ‘spiritual and moral guide’, but also as a ‘man of letters’. See Inwood 2007, p. xviii. On Stoic and other Hellenistic therapies, see Nussbaum 1994, and on ancient philosophy generally as a way of life, see Hadot 1995 (emphasizing spiritual exercises) and Cooper 2012 (emphasizing philosophical argument).
23. For an overview of the Roman Stoics on the theme of self-rule and society, see Reydams-Schils 2005.
24. D 1.4.23, 1.4.26 respectively, as translated in Text 139 (p. 196), Inwood and Gerson 2008.
25. D 1.17.23 (‘hindrance’ …), 1.17.24 (‘it is not because’ and ‘your opinion’, as translated in Text 140 (p. 198)), Inwood and Gerson 2008.
26. Gill 2007, p. 175.
27. Translation here and below by A. S. L. Farquharson (Meditations) and R. B. Rutherford (Letters) in Marcus Aurelius 1989. Here, at p. 10.
28. Ibid., p. 34.
29. Ibid., p. 11.
30. Ibid., p. 118.
31. Platonism would animate one of the last consuls in the Western empire, the Christian Boethius (he held the consulship in 510 CE, his sons in 522), in his own search for philosophical consolation while imprisoned awaiting execution.
32. Musonius Rufus, Fragment [Lecture] 3, as translated in Lutz 1947, pp. 38–41.
33. Ibid.
34. Fragment [Lecture] 14 is titled ‘Is marriage a handicap for the pursuit of philosophy?’, and is quoted here as translated in Lutz 1947, pp. 90–97.
35. Clearly the first position would be called feminist today; whether the second would also depends on what today is taken to be a feminist position on marriage, a controversial question. In context in Roman and Greek philosophical debates, to support married philosophers was to oppose ascetic stances that in practice tended to denigrate the value of concerning oneself with women (qua wives) and children.
36. Fragment [Lecture] 14, as above.
37. This is from section 827BC of a fragment entitled in Greek Peri Monarchias kai Demokratias kai Oligarchias (On Monarchy, Democracy and Oligarchy); its Latin title in the traditional corpus of Plutarch’s works is much longer, beginning with the words De Unius, by which the fragment is typically identified. Its authenticity is disputed, but it can be found in Plutarch 1949.
38. Praecepta Gerenda Reipublicae (Political Advice) 813E (Plutarch 1949), quoted in the translation given in Whitmarsh 2005, p. 12.
39. On Plutarch’s Lycurgus, Lane 2013c; and for a comparison to Jewish Platonizers, Lane 2013b.
40. The discussion of Plutarch on statesmen and demagogues draws on and summarizes Lane 2012.
1. Cartledge 2002, p. 4.