A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought

Ryan K. Balot

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118556689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

A COMPANION TO GREEK AND ROMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT

Justice, virtue, and citizenship were at the center of political life in ancient Greece and Rome and were frequently discussed by classical poets, historians, and philosophers. This Companion illuminates Greek and Roman political thought in all its range, diversity, and depth. Thirty-four essays from leading scholars in history, classics, philosophy, and political science provide stimulating discussions of classical political thought, ranging from the Archaic Greek epics to the final days of the Roman Empire and beyond. These essays strike a judicious yet thought-provoking balance between theoretical and historical perspectives.

A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought is an authoritative guide to the ancient Greek and Roman political questions that continue to shape and challenge the modern world.

PART I

The Broad View

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Rethinking the History of Greek and Roman Political Thought

Ryan K. Balot

The present Companion is designed to introduce the central concepts of Greek and Roman political thought to students and teachers of political science, classics, philosophy, and history. Over the past 20 years, scholars in these distinct fields have begun to communicate with one another intensively across traditional disciplinary lines. This cross-fertilization has led to a significantly deeper understanding of ancient political thought as a product of, and response to, the political world of classical antiquity. More important, perhaps, scholars have also come to recognize that classical political thought provides unique resources for helping us grapple anew with the permanent questions of political life. The time is right, therefore, to integrate these scholarly developments into a comprehensive vision of classical political thought and to ask where we should go from here.

The present volume aims to provide such a vision by incorporating the best recent work on Greek and Roman political thought from a wide variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. Yet contributors to this volume have ambitions that go well beyond the work of consolidation and survey. While providing helpful introductions for the uninitiated, they also ask fresh questions. Their essays illustrate the ways in which ancient political thought can inspire us to challenge the conventional political wisdom of late modernity. Contributors to the present volume share the belief that classical political thought constitutes a powerful, if internally diverse, tradition that is capable, even now, of opening us to novel political possibilities. In order to deepen our political understanding, and to expand our political imagination, the authors of the following essays have creatively transgressed their traditional disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, they have begun to delineate the contours of ancient Greek and Roman political thought as a new and distinct subfield – one that draws on traditional frames of reference in classics, history, and ancient philosophy, but also brings ancient political texts into contact with broader currents of political theory and an enlarged understanding of political life.

Ancient Greek and Roman Distinctiveness

If the following essays do indeed point toward a new subfield, then they begin to accomplish this goal by uncovering the distinctiveness of ancient Greek and Roman political thought. The Greeks and Romans already stood out within the ancient Mediterranean world, because, unlike their Mediterranean neighbors, they gave a specifically political interpretation to ideals such as freedom and “law and order” (Raaflaub, chapter 3). What is important, however, is not any triumphal claim that the Greeks originated the political, but rather the exploration of why communal political activity became special or even primary for Greeks and Romans. By contrast with other ancient Mediterranean peoples, as Raaflaub shows, the Greeks and Romans erected their conception of the political on the basis of egalitarian practices of political power (to be sure: among the citizenry, not universally) and a concern with collective aims such as justice, well-being, law and order, freedom, and equality. Their political practices came to light as the most useful responses to the Greek experience of life in small-scale, independent, nonhierarchical, and materially and militarily struggling Mediterranean communities.

Even if the Greeks and Romans created newly political ideals, they never settled on immutable and determinate understandings of what politics was for, or what constituted its central activities. Dean Hammer’s essay (chapter 2) is an exemplary exploration of these points. Through examining the most important modern treatments of ancient politics, Hammer illustrates that ancient Greco-Roman politics should not be reduced to institutional functioning or any Weberian “monopoly of legitimate force” (cf. Herman 2006). (This is one area where the anachronistic importation of modern terminology or concepts can be particularly misleading.) Instead, as Hammer shows, the Greeks and Romans recognized coercive state authority while also understanding individual citizens, including their bodies, as penetrated by the multifarious workings of power. Hammer’s clear-minded interpretation of the ancient political experience through the lens of postmodern social theory pays particular dividends for students of politics as they struggle with the inevitably fuzzy dimensions and chaotic landscapes of political life. At all events, Hammer demonstrates more clearly than ever before that the political must be understood contextually, as a feature of the particular times and places in which politics was recognized and practiced. Yet in doing so Hammer also shows that his emphasis on historical particularity can make certain unfamiliar, and perhaps disquieting, political ideas available for our consideration and use.

Ancient and Modern

Initially, at least, those who boldly assert the importance of classical political thought might be greeted with either skepticism or revulsion or both. Skepticism, because our contemporaries will naturally wonder whether the highly particular, remote, and often alien Greco-Roman political experience can shed light on modern political life and thought. How should scholars and citizens “locate” classical political thought within the contemporary world of technological progress, religious pluralism, universal human rights, and multiculturalism? Revulsion, because virtually all ancient Greek and Roman writers were politically intolerant, illiberal slave-owners who would have scoffed at the idea of universal human rights. They would have failed to understand why they should tolerate, much less respect, the diverse standards of different cultural traditions. What relationship do we now bear, or want to bear, to the highly particular ancient Mediterranean political world?¹

Modern political thought can neither ignore nor simply embrace Greek and Roman political analysis. On the one hand, we study classical political thought in the shadow of early modern efforts to reject the claims of antiquity. The seventeenth century founders of modern liberalism, such as Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke, aspired to create an utterly new, even Utopian, vision of political order and human freedom. Their sanguine attitudes toward modern progress were based as much on faith in scientific and technological advancement as on the creation of new and supposedly more realistic political ideals. As noble as their ambitions may have been, however, the goal of “routing the ancients,” of eliminating classical political thought from the theoretical road map of modernity, is not a wise option. Whatever their shortcomings or mistakes, the ancient thinkers captured central truths about political psychology and about the social character of human beings. Even now, the ancient thinkers offer us theoretical and imaginative opportunities to improve our political understanding. We can take advantage of these opportunities without endorsing every feature of the classical thinkers’ outlook.

On the other hand, the act of recovering ancient voices or ideas should not be enlisted in the conservative project of establishing orthodoxies that have no real place in the modern world. Political hierarchy, gender inequality, unreflective respect for certain traditions combined with neglect or contempt of others, and the anti-individualistic emphasis on “community” – these are not attractive possibilities for our time. At all events, such projects, if based on claims to the cultural authority of classical antiquity, represent only partial and incomplete recoveries of classical political thought. They do not do justice to the traditions of merciless self-criticism practiced by many of the authors of ancient Greek and Roman political texts (see below, “The Provocation to Self-Criticism”).

Without lapsing into either form of extremism, this collection reflects upon the best ways to understand and perhaps reappropriate classical political thought. Our responses derive from the ethical commitment to making our academic work meaningful to inhabitants of the post-enlightenment nation-state. We hope to have addressed the issues in ways that people should care about. In accordance with this commitment, I asked contributors to adopt a self-consciously two-tiered outlook on the ancient material. At least as an initial goal, contributors have located ancient political ideas in their particular historical contexts. This emphasis on historical context grows out of the belief that ancient thinkers offered creative responses to political conventions that they regarded as useless, stultifying, or harmful. These responses were “local.” They were particularly meaningful, and perhaps unsettling, to contemporaries familiar with the urgent questions of ancient political life. Yet ancient political writers were not prisoners of particular historical contingencies. Nor did they understand themselves as unshakably entrenched in particular historical moments. Instead, both systematic philosophers and unsystematic thinkers typically regarded themselves as exponents of what they took to be a natural or unchanging order, an order that was not historically contingent but satisfied the basic requirements of our human nature. As the following essays amply illustrate, contributors to the present volume understand that the ancients’ ambitions in this regard are worthy of careful consideration and intellectual respect.

Particular and General

Yet one might wonder how, if at all, these two modes of analysis – which might be called “particular” and “general,” or sometimes “historical” and “philosophical” -work together. At first glance, the historical emphasis on particularity appears to conflict with any effort to elicit generalized teachings from classical political thought. Is it realistic to think that the gap between particular and general can be bridged by imaginative reflection? Can we avoid mistaking “is” for “ought” in making the transition from history to theory? Is it responsible for scholars and thinkers to put classical political thought to use in the vastly different conditions of late modernity?

To each question, our answer is a resounding yes. Despite the apparent tensions between particular and general, it will emerge that these approaches can cooperate successfully and so produce illuminating results. Study of the ancient city implies neither nostalgia for classical antiquity nor envy of the political lives of ancient citizens. Instead, the ubiquitously rich and deeply alien world of classical antiquity can be recovered as a repository of imaginative and theoretical resources. Recovering the deep history of political thought will remind us of forgotten dimensions of political experience and challenge us knowingly to resist the tyranny of our modern preconceptions. In undertaking such a project of recovery, the difficulty is to avoid either ham-fistedly wrenching classical ideas from their roots in their own native soil or gazing worshipfully on ancient ideas as the wondrous products of a definitively superior era. The appropriate metaphor is rather that of transplanting a healthy tree, with its roots intact, to an alien environment, where it can flower for us to enjoy or perhaps even bear fruit.

To understand why a two-tiered framework of analysis is helpful, consider the fruitlessness, if not impossibility, of writing the history of political thought without employing both analytical modes. On the one hand, purely general and abstract discussions of ancient texts, unanchored in historical understanding, run the risk of anachronism. We can easily distort the ancients’ own political vocabulary and outlook. Such distortions inevitably blunt the force of any theoretical challenges or provocations offered by the ancients. This happens all too frequently, as when scholars have anachronistically imported the modern language of sovereignty or social contract theory into study of ancient political ideas or ideology. More specifically, politically central ancient concepts such as hubris (arrogance), aidōs (shame), or pietas (duty) cannot be simply or easily “translated” into the modern political vocabulary. They cannot be communicated to modern audiences apart from historical investigation of the particular communities of meaning in which those concepts played a decisive role.

On the other hand, purely contextual analyses, uninformed by larger questions about political life as such, often result in either meaningless dead ends or reverential “appreciation.” Either form of antiquarianism runs the moral and political risk of promoting doctrinaire claims to cultural authority that ignore the elements of self-criticism in Greek and Roman political thought. Such risks can be accentuated if antiquarian history is reinforced by the naive idea that classical antiquity provides uncontaminated moments of origin for later political developments. One and all, the present contributors heed Nietzsche’s warnings against simplistic notions of uncor-rupted or innocent “starting-points” (On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1967); cf Foucault 1977).

Instead of segregating historical and philosophical, or particular and general, approaches, it is most productive to synthesize these modes of analysis. If we envision them as mutually supportive and dialectical, then each approach might teach the other. Neither will have to remain ancillary. In the first instance, our understanding of the history of ancient Greek and Roman political thought can be immeasurably improved if we learn to ask the right questions – questions motivated by broad awareness of political thought and practice in other geographic regions and chronological periods, including European modernity. Modern students of comparative politics have repeatedly illustrated the epistemological value of studying both like and unlike cases, in all their diversity, and they have shed light on how to examine historical comparanda with methodological sophistication and self-consciousness (e.g., Katznelson 1997; Lich-bach 1997; Landman 2000: 27–32; for an application in ancient history, Pritchard 2007: 349–52). I discern three ways in which our understanding of classical political thought, specifically, can be improved through conducting comparative studies of political thought and political life in other regions and periods.

First, doing comparisons between different periods and regions helps to render visible certain frequently unacknowledged features of the classical political experience. Consider, for example, our understanding of the relationship between Greco-Roman polytheism and classical political life. Despite their theological beliefs and symbols (Osborne, chapter 8), the Greeks regarded their political practices and ideals as human constructs dependent on human effort. In particular, by contrast with political life in other ancient Mediterranean regions, the Greeks and Romans did not, in general, view the political world as a divinely controlled world, nor did they invest their political leaders with transcendent religious authority (see Raaflaub, chapter 3; cf. Lincoln 2007). Authority in Greek and Roman politics derived from the communal power of citizens.

By contrast with politics in early modern Europe, moreover, Greek and Roman citizens were not subject to politically independent and frequently coercive clerical authority. Greeks and Romans had no need of the great modern theorists of toleration, such as Locke; they had no need to be liberated from religious orthodoxy by a Spinozistic Theological-Political Treatise. To the contrary, as Robin Osborne (chapter 8) demonstrates, Greek and Roman religion was subject to the authority of politics. Greek and Roman polytheism had no systematic orthodoxy or dogma; Greek and Roman political life was free of the religious controversies that so beset early modern political life. To put the point most provocatively, Greek, and to a lesser extent Roman, religion did not obstruct political rationality.² Many of these features of ancient religion, and generally of ancient political life, would be invisible without the points of reference provided by far-ranging scholarly “time travel.”

Second, by using analytical vocabularies developed in modern social science, political theory, and philosophy, we can inform our understanding of the classical political experience with a more useful set of interpretative tools (cf. Morley 2004; Ober 2008). In this belief, for example, certain contributors have utilized the vocabularies of modern political science and modern feminism to excellent effect. Josiah Ober (chapter 5) and Craige Champion (chapter 6) use the social-scientific language of collective action theory and international relations theory to explore uncharted territory in the ancient political experience (for other recent examples, see Low 2007; Eckstein 2006; Ober 1998). These chapters successfully defamiliarize certain scholarly commonplaces and make the ancients’ political discourse available to us for the improvement of our own political understanding. In a similar vein, Giulia Sissa (chapter 7) uses the conceptual tools of modern feminism to shed light on the distinctive ways in which the classical political experience was “gendered.” Sissa (chapters 7 and 18) and Champion, in particular, provide frameworks within which we can understand and evaluate the relationship between Greco-Roman “manliness” and ancient bellicosity, against the background of ancient Mediterranean culture at large.

Third, we improve our historiographic self-consciousness through becoming increasingly aware of our own location within histories of political life and thought. To be sure, we risk anachronism if we allow our interpretative lenses to be clouded with inappropriate terminology (cf. Rhodes 2003a). Yet our modern reconstructions of past practices and discourses are inevitably, though often undetectably, shaped by our twenty-first century vantage-points. If we are not conscious of the impact of our own highly contingent positions as late-modern observers, then we will not be able to take a properly self-critical perspective on our own ways of writing the history of classical political thought (cf. Osborne 2006: 14–2...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• Abbreviations
• PART I: The Broad View
• PART II: Democracies and Republics
• PART III: The Virtues and Vices of One-Man Rule
• PART IV: The Passions of Ancient Politics
• PART V: The Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle
• PART VI: Constructing Political Narrative
• PART VII: Antipolitics
• PART VIII: Receptions
• References
• Index of Subjects
• Index Locorum