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Acknowledgments vii
List of Contributors ix Introduction 1
PART ONE: Theory and Practice
1. The “Great Leap” in Early Greek Politics and Political Thought: A Comparative Perspective—Kurt A. rAAfl Aub 21
2. Pericles’ Utopia: A Reading of Thucydides and Plato— Emily GrEEnwood 55
3. How to Turn History into Scenario: Plato’s Republic Book 8 on the Role of Political Office in Constitutional Change—mElissA lAnE 81
4. “Cyrus appeared both great and good”: Xenophon and the Performativity of Kingship—CArol AtACK 109
5. Jurors and Serial Killers: Loneliness, Deliberation, and Community in Ancient Athens—Al AstAir J. l. bl AnshArd 137
PART TWO: Economy and Society: Violence, Gender, and Class
6. The Sparta Game: Violence, Proportionality, Austerity, Collapse—JosiAh obEr and bArry r. wEinGAst 161
7. Marx and Antiquity—wilfriEd nippEl
8. Marxism and Ancient History—KostAs Vl Assopoulos
9. Building for the State: A World-Historical Perspective—wAltEr sChEidEl
THREE: Source Pluralism
10. Picturing History: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Tyrannicide in the Art of Classical Athens and Early Imperial China—JErEmy tAnnEr
11. Imaginary Intercourse: An Illustrated History of Greek Pederasty—robin osbornE
12. The Boys from Cydathenaeum: Aristophanes versus Cleon Again—Edith hAll
13. How to Write Anti-Roman History—tim whitmArsh
Acknowledgments
wE thr EE E ditors of this volume must begin by thanking Paul Cartledge not only for his distinguished scholarship, dedicated teaching, and sterling example of how to live the intellectual life, but also for his willingness to listen to two days’ worth of papers and comments directed at dissecting and analyzing him. With characteristically puckish good humor, he engaged each contributor on his or her own terms and turf, while also always pushing to turn static pictures into analyses of processes; interpretations of thought into records of thinking; accounts of power into narratives of othering.
This volume, too, has been a process of thinking and doing, and we are grateful for all who have contributed so generously: all the authors of chapters; the anonymous readers; the staff in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge, the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics; and copy-editing assistants at Dartmouth College, most notably Patrick Flathers. The Classics Faculty and the cast gallery at Cambridge provided marvelous spaces for our convening and conversing; Downing’s great hall, a glorious evening for our celebration of Cartledge.
We are also grateful to the editors and team at Oxford for having faith in a project that has required an unbecoming amount of time to reach completion and, finally, we thank our readers for joining us in a journey across sub-fields and from Sparta to China as we proceeded in search of how to do things with history.
List of Contributors
danielle allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is the author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), Education and Equality (2016), and Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light). Allen is also the principal investigator for the Democratic Knowledge Project, a distributed research and action lab at Harvard University.
carol atack is a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the “Anachronism and Antiquity” project at the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford and a Junior Research Fellow at St Hugh’s College, and previously held teaching positions at St. Hugh’s College and the University of Warwick. She is completing a monograph based on her PhD thesis, “Debating Kingship: Models of Monarchy in Fifth- and Fourth-Century bCE Greek Political Thought,” supervised by Paul Cartledge and Malcolm Schofield at the University of Cambridge. She has published articles on Athenian historiography and Aristotle’s Politics, and is currently investigating the manipulation of time in ancient political thought and intellectual history.
alastair j. l. blanshard is the Paul Eliadis Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Hercules: A Heroic Life (2007), Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (2010), and Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome on Film (2011, with K. Shahabudin). He is currently working on a project on early travelers to Greece. His PhD on the Attic orators was supervised by Paul Cartledge.
List of Contributors
paul christesen is William R. Kenan Professor of Ancient Greek History in the Department of Classics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Sport and Democracy in the Ancient and Modern Worlds (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and A New Reading of the Damonon Stele (Histos Supplement 8, 2018). He is also co-editor, with Donald Kyle, of The WileyBlackwell Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, and author of more than 30 articles. He is currently working with Paul Cartledge on the Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World.
emily greenwood is Professor of Classics at Yale. She is the author of Thucydides and the Shaping of History (Duckworth, 2006) and AfroGreeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010), which was joint winner of the 2011 Runciman Award. She has also coedited two volumes (both 2007): Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (with Barbara Graziosi) and Reading Herodotus: A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (with Liz Irwin).
edith hall , after teaching at Oxford, Reading, Cambridge, Durham, and Royal Holloway Universities, took up a Chair of Classics at King’s College London in 2012. She is Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford, and Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust. She broadcasts frequently on radio. She has published more than twenty books on ancient Greece and Rome and their continuing presence in modernity, the most recent being Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Random House, 2015). She was awarded the 2015 Erasmus Prize by the European Academy and an Honorary Doctorate by Athens University in February 2017.
melissa lane is the Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton, where she is also the Director of the University Center for Human Values and an associated faculty member in the Departments of Classics and of Philosophy. Previously, she taught in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Fellow of King’s College. Her books include Method and Politics in Plato’s Statesman (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Plato’s Progeny (Duckworth, 2001), Eco-Republic (Peter Lang/ Princeton University Press, 2012), and Greek and Roman Political Ideas (2014; revised edition published as The Birth of Politics, Princeton University Press, 2015). She has also coedited two volumes, including Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy, with Verity Harte (Cambridge University Press,
2013). Among the honors she has received are a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of classics in 2012 and appointment as the Carlyle Lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2018. She holds an AB summa cum laude from Harvard University and an MPhil and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar and Truman Scholar, and as the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellow of Phi Beta Kappa.
paul millett is University Senior Lecturer in Classics and Vice-Master of Downing College at the University of Cambridge. He studies the intersection of economy and society in the ancient Greek world with a particular focus on the Classical period. His work on money, banking, credit and debt in ancient Athens (e.g., Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens, Cambridge University Press, 1991) illuminates how lending and borrowing created connections of reciprocity between friends, neighbors, and fellow-citizens in general. He has also worked on peasant communities in early Greece, the character of Athenian democracy, and on Theophrastus’ Characters (Theophrastus and His World, Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is currently transforming a paper on the Agora of Athens into a book on the ancient city of Athens. Another ongoing project is the presentation of Classical themes in Punch magazine across its hundred-and-fifty-year history. This will include a chapter demonstrating Winston Churchill’s manipulation through his life of his alleged antipathy towards the Classics.
wilfried nippel is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at HumboldtUniversität Berlin. He has published widely on Greek and Roman history, ancient political theory and its reception, and the history of historical scholarship. His books include Public Order in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Johann Gustav Droysen: Ein Leben zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Beck, 2008), Klio dichtet nicht: Studien zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Althistorie (Campus, 2013), and Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty? (Cambridge University Press, 2015 [translated by Keith Tribe, revised and enlarged version of a book in German published in 2008]).
josiah ober is the Constantine Mitsotakis Professor in the departments of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. He works at the intersections of democratic theory, ancient Greek history, institutional economics, and classical philosophy. His most recent books are Democracy and Knowledge (2008), The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), and Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism (2017).
List of Contributors
robin osborne is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has dabbled in issues of iconography ever since his second publication, “The Myth of Propaganda and the Propaganda of Myth,” Hephaistos 5–6 (1984): 62–70. His latest book is The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece (2018).
kurt a. raaflaub is David Herlihy University Professor and Professor of Classics and History Emeritus at Brown University. He was Co-Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, from 1992 to 2000, Director of Brown’s Program in Ancient Studies from 2000 to 2009, and Royce Professor in Teaching Excellence from 2006 to 2009. His research interests focus on Archaic and Classical Greek and Roman Republican social, political, and intellectual history; the social history of ancient war; ancient peace; political thought; and the comparative history of the ancient world. His publications include Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-century Athens (coeditor, 1998), The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (author, 2004, recipient of the American Historical Association’s James Henry Breasted Prize), The Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece (coauthor, 2007), Social Struggles in Archaic Rome (editor, 2005), War and Peace in the Ancient World (editor 2007), A Companion to Archaic Greece (coeditor, 2009), Epic and History (coeditor, 2010), Thinking, Recording, and Writing History in the Ancient World (editor, 2014), Peace in the Ancient World: Concepts and Theories (editor, 2016), The Adventure of the Human Intellect: Self, Society, and the Divine in Ancient World Cultures (editor, 2016), The Landmark Julius Caesar (editor, 2017).
walter scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. The author or (co)editor of seventeen books, he has published widely on ancient social and economic history, historical demography, and the comparative history of state formation and inequality.
jeremy tanner is Professor of Classical and Comparative Art at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He is the author of The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece (2006). He is the editor of The Sociology of Art: A Reader (2003) and, with Robin Osborne, of Art’s Agency and Art History (2007). He gave the 2012 J. H. Gray Lectures at the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge, on “Art as Institution in Early Greece and China.”
List of Contributors
kostas vlassopoulos is Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the University of Crete. He is the author of Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History Beyond Eurocentrism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (Oxford University Press/Tauris, 2010), and Greeks and Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is coeditor of Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the author of several scholarly articles on slavery and the social history of the ancient world.
barry r. weingast is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He received a PhD in economics from Caltech (1977). Weingast served as Chair of Stanford’s Department of Political Science from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has won numerous awards, including the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics and the William H. Riker Award for contributions to political economy. Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets. He has written extensively on development, federalism, the rule of law, and democracy.
tim whitmarsh is the second A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He also holds honorary roles at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and the Universities of Pretoria and Exeter. He is the author of seven books, including most recently Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, which has been translated into several languages. He has written over seventy academic articles on ancient Greece, and appears regularly in newspapers such as The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, as well as on BBC radio and TV.
How to Do Things with History
Introduction
All of us, presumably—whether we are ancient historians, political philosophers, or just plain citizens—are mainly interested in explaining, or understanding, the ways in which political concepts are negotiated through discourse and implemented in institutional or other forms of practice.
pAul CArtlEdGE, Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice
Beliefs are rules for action. both Charles Sanders Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” and William James,Pragmatism1
t h E histori A n CA n make the rare claim to understand how change comes about, how societies shift and settle, how contestation passes into brief periods of authoritative calm before the churn begins again. In order to understand such things, the historian must trace the transit of beliefs, values, and interests across webs of theoretical and practical conversation and social hierarchies into practices and institutions, across social agendas, and into dynamic patterns of alliance creation and the organization of power. Contrary to the common view that the past is dead, that antiquity lies buried beneath layers of time and soil, its origins obscured in early modern, modern, and postmodern imaginings of classical antiquity, the object of an ancient historian’s inquiry is a living thing. In the evolutions in rhetoric, poetry, and law, we see adjustments in the concepts that frame decisions and in the hierarchies that structure social life. In the evolving shapes of a cup or forms of an image, we see fluid, malleable shifts in social and political possibilities. The historian makes one
1. Cartledge 2009, 6; Peirce 1970 (originally published in 1878), 85; James 1955 (originally published in 1907), 43.
interpretive pass, and then another, at rendering such shifts understandable, and seeks to capture not the fixity of the past but its dynamism, the living of a society that was.
Who is this “historian” that we invoke so abstractly and broadly? There have been many other kinds of historians than the one described above. There were the annalists of antiquity who sought mainly to name and catalog the people and events of a specific place. There were the nineteenthand twentieth-century historians who ransacked the past for evidence to support theories—social, economic, and political—devised to suit their own circumstances. Plenty of historians pluck out and lovingly render one strand of a society—its economy or religion, practices of gender or sexuality, and so on—leaving the rest of the time and place well out of focus. Even within a category—say, historians of political thought—there are recognizable approaches that, though ambitious, are not as ambitious as that described above. For instance, there is the method of J. G. A. Pocock, who sought to record “political discourse,” privileging rhetoric and not limiting himself to high theory.2 There is also “Skinnerian” historicism that places the burden of historical work on reading texts in their original dialogue with one another.3 Both of these intellectual historians have dwelled largely in the domain of theory, tracing an intellectual history, but not the transit of ideas through contestation to implementation in institution and practice.
The historian described above, then, is distinctly ambitious, seeking somehow to find the connections in the intellectual and material, the institutional and cultural, the agential and structural, that give the city—Athens or Sparta—or place—Macedonia or Rome—its own, unique principle of life. This historicism is not deterministic; in contestation there is a great deal of room for agency, even if the contest must be fought within structural constraints. Nor, in this historicism, are ideas epiphenomenal, mere ideologies painting underlying material realities in pretty colors. Instead, concepts are integral to history and historical change. Political concepts contribute to making the worlds, and structures, within which historical agents conduct their skirmishes, battling among other things to change the structuring concepts. Nor are societies utterly walled off from one
2. Pocock 2009.
3. On Skinner’s work, see Tully 1989.
another. The reigning concepts and contests of one can spill easily into another, contributing to the ongoing churn of the receiving society.
This historicism may be relativistic; it aspires to no Archimedean point from which to judge any given society or set of political concepts for their final and absolute human value. Yet this historicism does not give up on judgment. Its work is of interest not just to the political philosopher or ancient historian, but also to citizens who can find in it, not least in the comparative possibilities visible in other societies, resources for understanding the intersections of theory and practice, the structures of class and status, in their own time and place. Those resources may well empower them to intervene in the social and political contests that surround them in ways that help ensure that they and those around them flourish. Charles Peirce and William James both argued that “beliefs are rules for action,” and the historicist working in the mode here described supplies the tools of pragmatism in the form of a capacity to see beliefs in action—a living history.
The essays in this volume were all inspired by the work of Paul Cartledge, who practiced just this type of ambitious historicism. Cartledge astutely recognized that when Plato banished the poets from the city in the Republic, he set up the conditions in which future generations would be confused by the relations among theory and practice, beliefs and organizational power. Plato seems to suggest that legislation, and the order of society, will flow from pure thought. And much work in the history of political thought proceeds from the premise that the student of the history of political systems should study mainly the high theory of courtiers who had the prince’s ear. Yet before Plato and before prose, poets were, as Cartledge writes, turning Percy Byshe Shelley’s apothegm on its head, “the acknowledged legislators of the world.”4 If we restore for ourselves a pre-Socratic sensibility, we can learn to see how poetry, material culture, fragmentary and episodic forms of legal development, and economic and contestatory political realities made worlds of meaning for those who lived within their contexts. While this line of sight helps us write Archaic history, it helps us too with the Classical world, and even the postclassical, modern, and postmodern worlds. We are able to put theory itself in context, and to see political concepts in living color. 4. Cartledge 2009, 2.
For the better part of four decades, Cartledge has spearheaded intellectual developments in the study of ancient Greek culture in both scholarly and public contexts. From his earliest work on Sparta, Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300–362 bc (2nd ed. Routledge, 2002; 1st ed., 1979), to his most recent work on Greek culture broadly, in for instance, Ancient Greece: A History in Eleven Cities (Oxford University Press, 2009), Cartledge has combined insightful historical accounts of particular places, periods, and thinkers with a keen focus on methodology. With Hellenistic and Roman Sparta: A Tale of Two Cities (coauthored with Tony Spawforth) he helped inspire a new era of comparative work. With numerous edited volumes on historiography, for instance CRUX: Essays in Greek History Presented to G. E. M. de Ste. Croix on his 75th Birthday (Duckworth, 1985) and Hellenistic Constructs: Essays in Culture, History, and Historiography (University of California Press, 1997), he helped orient a generation of scholars to analysis of practice—to study not, for instance, the history of thought but of thinking in action and through action. These two sets of commitments came together beautifully in books such as the newest, Democracy: a Life (Oxford University Press, 2016), and the classic, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others (2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 2002; 1st ed. 1993), in which Cartledge sets Greek texts and practices side by side to illuminate how the Greeks went about comparing themselves to others.
A recent seminar at Cambridge seeks to “compare the comparative cultures of different periods, beginning with the Greeks and coming forward to the present.” One sees Cartledge’s methodological DNA in such an effort. The conjoint focus on comparativism and practice established an important framing paradigm for a generation of work in law, religion, economy, and society.5 The juxtapositions of elite philosophical texts and lay discourses, which results from the focus on “thinking” instead of thought, transformed the history of ancient ideas, and the study of ancient society. Over the course of a remarkable and wide-ranging oeuvre, Cartledge has practiced as he preached—contextualizing texts; setting high theory in relation to conceptual systems emergent from practice; drawing on sources ranging from poetry and drama to inscription and monument, from history and rhetoric to philosophy; tracing always how systems of belief intersect with patterns of status and hierarchy; and
5. This is evident in two volumes, coedited by Cartledge: Cartledge, Millett, and Todd 1990 and Cartledge, Millett, and von Reden 1998.
comparing the delicate social and conceptual relations emerging into view in one society with those of another. Few historians can command this array of tools, sources, and theoretical frames as masterfully as Cartledge. In this volume, it takes a village to do what Cartledge’s corpus exemplifies. That last point requires a bit more explication. In what sense does it take many hands and lines of inquiry to achieve the mode of analysis that Cartledge has continuously effected across his body of work? Classics, like all disciplines, has long cultivated ever increasing refinement in its many subfields—philology, philosophy, history, archaeology, visual culture, literary criticism, and so on. Each of these subfields takes responsibility for only one component of the dead but once dynamic societies and cultures of antiquity. Each subfield of necessity effects a flattening, a reduction of the object of inquiry into a form amenable to analysis by the tools of that discipline. Cartledge’s interest has always been instead in the dynamic whole and its multidimensionality. He has been able to deploy the tools of these several subfields both in single pieces of scholarship and across his oeuvre. This is exceptionally rare.
In order to build on the methodological lessons that Cartledge has laid out, most of us also have to add a dimension of teamwork to the endeavor. We have to learn how to juxtapose, sometimes even in arrangements that are at first uncomfortable because unfamiliar, work emerging from our different subfields. This is what we have done in this volume. The essays in this volume explore the complex dynamics linking ideas developed in high theory with those that emerge from practice. They probe the issues of structure, status, and hierarchy that define contestation over the beliefs that will shape practice. They widen the aperture beyond text and event— to take in image and the small traces of suppressed dissent—so that we equip ourselves as richly as possible to map the contests of ideas and power that structure life in a given society. Historians here work alongside philosophers alongside art historians alongside literary critics. We have the same object of inquiry—how contests among ideas and struggles over hierarchy shape each other and mutually determine the limits in which the members of a particular society seek to thrive. Yet we bring different tools to bear in pursuing this inquiry. From chapter to chapter, the reader will find herself asked to consider the object of inquiry from yet another, slightly different, methodological perspective. This is perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid to the power of Cartledge’s work. His questions and methodological range have yielded fruit across the subfields of our discipline and, working in teams, perhaps only by working in teams, we
can continue to activate the sort of intellectual power his work so beautifully exemplifies.
Our volume begins, in Part I, with the relationship between theory and practice.
In “The ‘Great Leap’ in Early Greek Politics and Political Thought,” Kurt Raaflaub argues that political patterns affecting communal thought, life, and institutions, and widely shared by Greeks and Near Eastern societies, are still visible in the Homeric and Hesiodic epics, and thus into the early seventh century. Soon thereafter, though, the Greeks diverged from that common tradition; they embarked on a path of radical innovation that took their fledgling political life and thinking in a decidedly new direction. That shift enabled them to discover ideas, values, institutions, and procedures that had a profound and long-lasting impact on the development of Western political traditions. The chapter describes this breakaway moment and tries to explain this great leap.
We move from the Archaic to the Classical with Emily Greenwood’s chapter, “Pericles’ Utopia: A Reading of Thucydides and Plato.” Greenwood looks afresh at the genealogy of utopias and utopianism in Classical Greek political thought (traditionally seen as originating with Plato’s Republic). She presents an argument for Thucydides’ Pericles as a utopian political thinker (supplemented by other sources for Pericles’ life and thought— chiefly Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Plutarch), who offers a version of the imperial democratic polis as utopia. Given Pericles’ characterization as a “philosophical” politician, Plato felt the need to differentiate Pericles and Socrates strongly and to downgrade Pericles’ philosophical credentials. Theory fights back against practice, and by scrutinizing this contest we learn valuable things about each. Greenwood argues that to conceive of Pericles as a utopian thinker is not to make his funeral oration—a vital text for Athenian civic ideology—less accessible for the history of Athenian democracy. Instead, in dialogue with Antonio Gramsci’s notes on “indirect sources for the history of subaltern social groups” in Notebook 25,6 she analyzes the extent to which Periclean utopianism articulates the aspirations of the Athenian demos with the ugly irony (seldom absent from utopias) that these aspirations depended on making other classes of people subaltern to their desires.
6. Specifically Gramsci 1985, 238–41.
Melissa Lane picks up the Platonic theme—and the issue of the relationship between theory and practice—from the other end of the relationship, focusing on Plato’s use of theory not only to critique practice, but also to revolutionize it. In “How to Turn History into Scenario,” she argues that if Thucydides’ project is construed as developing a logic of social change out of the material of history, then it is Plato in Republic Book 8 who is precisely his successor, and his developer, insofar as Plato there emancipates the logic of social change from the past, while infusing it with normative content.
Indeed, Plato might be said to invent a logic of intelligible choice to explain social change in the form of explanatory model rather than history. Whereas Herodotus and Thucydides investigated the record of observable social changes in the past and present, it is Plato who here invents a new intellectual enterprise: an exploration of the mechanisms of social change that is not merely adduced from the happenstance character of those events that have actually occurred. Furthermore, what Plato offers is a form of sociopolitical explanation that is premised on and permeated by a normative account of the objective moral good, centered on the role of law as a principle of order oriented to the good, and on rule as essentially aiming to serve the good of the ruled.
Like all models, Plato’s model of intelligible choice engenders certain blind spots as well as insights. But the insights are real nevertheless. They include a powerful analysis of rule and office as intrinsically ordered by their nature toward the good of the ruled, and of what happens when that good order is disrupted or corrupted; of the fluid interplay between forms of economic, political, and military power, and of how ideas and ideologies shape propensities that can be interpreted in their light rather than simply in terms of statistical distributions; overall, of how, while all happy regimes are alike, each unhappy regime is unhappy in its own way—yet in a way that can be interpreted as a distinctive kind of deviation from the ideal. Plato’s theoretical ideals, then, in Lane’s account become a measuring stick for evaluating practice and driving revolution from the realm of concepts.
After Lane on Plato, Carol Atack takes us to Xenophon. In “ ‘Cyrus appeared both great and good’: Xenophon and the Performativity of Kingship,” she argues that, for Xenophon, performativity, not high theory, may hold the resources for driving social change. As she argues, Xenophon’s depiction of the performance of kingship by Cyrus (Cyropaedia), Agesilaus (Hellenica, Agesilaus), and other kings contains an
evaluative model that explores alternative techniques a ruler can use to persuade others to be ruled. By deploying frameworks of performativity and spectacle derived from Judith Butler and Guy Debord respectively, this chapter analyzes these narratives of kingship and connects them to other Greek political and ethical concerns about the role of the outstanding individual within society, linking Xenophon more closely to both Plato and Aristotle as a political and ethical theorist.7 Yet Xenophon’s orientation toward performativity also pulls him in the direction of analysts of status and structure. In its performative aspects, Xenophon’s concept of kingship operates like gender, which is also established through performance and bears a troubled relationship to essence. Indeed, gender is another central preoccupation of Xenophon’s, something recognized by Paul Cartledge and explored by scholars such as Sarah Pomeroy and Vincent Azoulay.8 Just as kingship can be performed in different ways (evident in the implicit contrast between the extravagant display of Cyrus and Astyages and the ascetic style of Agesilaus), so can gender (as with the contrast between Virtue and Vice in the story of Choice of Heracles, Mem. 2.1). Xenophon explicitly connects kingship and gender in his Oeconomicus, but the alignment of kingship and womanhood seems unstable.9 Atack thus effects a transition in our volume from the tension between theory and practice to an investigation of the problem of status and hierarchy. We are at this point prepared to transition to the theme of the active political contestation of just such structures.
We first transition to the active spaces in which the Athenians deployed their power, foremost among them the law courts. Alastair Blanshard, in “Jurors and Serial Killers: Loneliness, Deliberation, and Community in Ancient Athens,” reverses our common story about the power of the Athenian jury, exploring instead the trauma of having to deliberate alone. His chapter examines one of the peculiarities of Athenian deliberative practice, namely the tendency for decision-making to occur within the supportive presence of a network of peers. No major life decision, whether it related to the marriage of children, the sale of property, or the arrangements of funerals, was taken without wide consultation among friends and family. Even in the Assembly, we know that citizens sat
7. Butler 1990, 1993; Debord 1994.
8. Cartledge 1993; Pomeroy 1994; Azoulay 2007.
9. Pomeroy 1984.
with their friends and would often act and vote together. All the major state festivals encouraged collective participation by members of the same demes and tribes. This means that when individuals were forced into situations of decision-making without the presence of their support networks, those decisions became, at the least, unsettling and potentially traumatic.
One of the few occasions where we find such isolated decisionmaking is the Athenian lawcourt. The process of jury-sortition, combined with randomized seating allocation within the lawcourt, meant that the Athenian juror when he sat to deliberate was uniquely alone. Analysis of forensic rhetoric reveals how orators played up this sense of isolation and confusion. By contrasting the juror’s experience in the lawcourt with other deliberative environments, Blanshard shows us how the rhetorical strategies of advocates served to complicate the function of the jury as a manifestation of democratic sovereignty. This final chapter in Part I, then, on the practice of jury decision-making points to a possible need to revise our theoretical understanding of democratic sovereignty, and of the power of the people, perhaps the fundamental Athenian conceptual abstraction. Practice itself, then, has the last word in our exploration of high theory, and its links to political thinking in action. Cartledge would approve.
In Part II, “Economy and Society: Violence, Gender, and Class,” we turn fully to the topic of class and/or status and hierarchy and their relevance to explaining political dynamics and behavior. Sparta was Cartledge’s starting point, and has served for millennia as the first stop in any journey into the problem of domination, and its material and conceptual underpinnings. We too start with Sparta as our contributors juxtapose different tools for thinking about hierarchy: game theory and evolutionary biology; Marxism; and comparative study of economic systems. The methodological range, in this case, moves even beyond methodologies Cartledge himself has deployed, but each takes its inspiration from the aspiration to understand the dynamism of social hierarchies. We start and end with new approaches to structure, domination, and class, with the the chapters by Josh Ober and Barry Weingast and by Walter Scheidel—examples of a new Stanford version of historicism, we could say. In between, we return to the question of Marx’s legacy for thinking about issues of power in antiquity, in chapters by Wilfred Nippel and Konstantinos Vlassopoulos. Ober and Weingast lead off, in “The Sparta Game.” Although Archaic/ Classical-era Sparta shared many features in common with other Greek
