Saving the City

Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms

Malcolm Schofield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134667970
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

Saving the City provides a detailed analysis of the attempts of ancient writers and thinkers, from Homer to Cicero, to construct and recommend political ideals of statesmanship and ruling, of the political community and of how it should be founded in justice. Malcolm Schofield debates to what extent the Greeks and Romans deal with the same issues as modern political thinkers.

1
EUBOULIA IN THE ILIAD

I. Introduction

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise (Prot. 318E–319A): ‘What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs—how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city—how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in speech.’ Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoêtheia (vicious disposition—he has just identified justice as ‘an altogether noble good nature (euêtheia)’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says (Rep. 348D): ‘No, I call it good judgement.’ But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia (Rep. 428B)—which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself—how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ (428C–D). It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word. But in the present instance we need have no qualms in doing so. Having assimilated euboulia (which was equated with political skill in the Protagoras (319A) to guardianship), Plato can abandon any further enquiry into the arts of good judgement and counsel and concentrate instead on guardianship. The ideal city is constructed as it is precisely to avoid the need for politics and its arts. What the guardians are required to know is how to keep the class structure intact (‘how the city may best have dealings with itself’)—and that involves keeping the education system going, lying well and truly about the basis of the class system, and maintaining a firm grip on the breeding arrangements. These administrative skills are ultimately grounded in the knowledge of the principles of stability, order and harmony which comes from the study of mathematics and dialectic. They have little in common with the arts of persuasion or the political judgement needed in an actual Greek state.

I begin this chapter with these reflections on Plato because I suspect his motivated neglect (or rather, utopian hijacking) of euboulia does much to explain its neglect by the most influential writers on early Greek intellectual history. What Plato is interested in is justice and moral excellence and the question of the unity or complexity of the human mind: these are the topics that preoccupy (for example) Snell and Dodds and Adkins.¹ But Protagoras was not the only figure in early Greek literature and thought who found it important to ponder euboulia. The qualities needed by a good politician or king or counsellor are explored by Thucydides, by the tragedians and, to begin at the beginning, by Homer—to name only the most important. Nor is it in the least surprising that they should be. It is a commonplace that the polis was not only the Greeks’ distinctive form of community but the indispensable cradle of those unique and extraordinary intellectual and artistic developments of the late archaic and classical periods which have shaped western civilisation. How could the creators of such an intensely political and powerfully creative institution not have reflected on the intellectual as well as the moral virtues required of a statesman or adviser? That tradition of reflection began with Homer. Yet on the whole Homeric scholars do not appear to be much interested in the euboulia of the Homeric hero. Here they differ from the ancient Greeks themselves, who as is well known regarded Homer not only as their greatest poet but as a teacher, a fount of wisdom on all the topics touched on or adumbrated in his poems. This is as true of kingship and euboulia as any other subject, as witness the very title of Philodemus’ fragmentary treatise On the Good King according to Homer, a work in which the names of Nestor and Odysseus evidently figured frequently as paradigms of phronêsis, practical understanding (col. XI.22ff.), and in which the importance of sunhedria (assemblies) and euboulia apparently occupied a whole section of its own (col. XIII.22–XIV).² Is kingship strictly speaking or ideally absolute? Or should kings be subject to their advisers? Dio Chrysostom appeals to Homer’s treatment of Agamemnon as relying on Nestor and the council of elders to support the latter alternative (Or. 56). Should old men engage in public affairs? Certainly, answers Plutarch in his essay on the subject; and he supports his argument that the old are superior in counsel, foresight, logos, good sense, prudent thought, soundness and experience by Homeric texts, and above all by the example of Nestor, of whom Agamemnon said (Il. 2.372): ‘Would that I had ten such advisers among the Achaeans’ (see especially Mor. 788–90, 795).

In work of recent years I have discovered only one substantial treatment of euboulia in Homer: a brilliant, trenchant and provocatively dismissive passage of a few close-packed pages in Sir Moses Finley’s The World of Odysseus³ Finley’s view of boulê (counsel, judgement) in Homer is diametrically opposed to that of a Dio or a Plutarch. It is not just that where Dio expatiates on Agamemnon’s submissiveness to Nestor and the elders, Finley lays stress on the fact that the Homeric king was free to ignore the expressions of sentiment voiced in council or assembly and go his own way, although at the risk of revolt;⁴ or that where for Plutarch Nestor was ‘the prototype of the wisdom of old age, the voice of experience’, for Finley he ‘was not that at all’, but simply a storehouse of heroic exempla useful not for clarifying men’s minds but for bolstering their morale.⁵ The heart of the matter is that on Finley’s interpretation of Homer’s system of values, there is no room for euboulia, or more accurately for anything Thucydides or Aristotle would have recognised as genuine euboulia, at all.

In what follows I shall first present a survey of the evidence in the text of the Iliad that prima facie tells against Finley’s account, which I then go on to report and discuss. The rest of the chapter will develop an alternative analysis of the themes he introduces. I make no apology for approaching the subject via a book that is now over forty years old. Perhaps the very authority of The World of Odysseus has helped to create an impression that euboulia not only has little weight in the Homeric scheme of values but is not even worth investigation. I am sure Finley hoped rather to provoke curiosity and argument.

It will already have been becoming apparent that I come to Homer as a student of Greek intellectual history and political theory, not as a Homeric scholar. In my patchy reading of the secondary literature the work I have found much the most helpful and stimulating in exploring Homeric euboulia is James Redfield’s ‘long, subtle and complex’ book Nature and Culture in the Iliad.⁶ Indeed, anyone familiar with the method and main theses of that work could probably construct the argument of this chapter for himself. At the same time, I must acknowledge a more general debt to some well-known studies of the quality of human rationality in early Greece, notably books by G.E.R. Lloyd, G.S.Kirk, and—on mêtis—M.Détienne and J.-P.Vernant.⁷ Mêtis, cunning intelligence, is not identical with euboulia: it has roughly the same relationship to it as demotês, cleverness, has to phronêsis in Aristotle’s plotting of the intellectual virtues.⁸ But it is an essential ingredient of the euboulia of a Nestor or an Odysseus, and consequently the present chapter should be read as complementary to chs 1 and 10 (especially) of Cunning Intelligence.⁹

II. Some evidence

The Iliad is full of assemblies (agorai) and councils (boulai), in heaven, in Troy, and above all in the Greek camp before Troy. To rehearse them all would be tedious and needless for our purposes; let it suffice simply to recall six Greek parleys particularly notable for their length or their weight in the development of the poem. First of these, of course, in position and in significance is the assembly to which Achilles summons the host at the beginning of Book 1 (53 ff.), for it is the forum in which his great quarrel with Agamemnon takes place. It is followed by a council and then a further assembly in Book 2: at the council Agamemnon reports his dream and explains to the Achaean chieftains his plan to stir the Greeks to battle again; when that plan fails disastrously, Odysseus and Nestor address Agamemnon before the assembled forces and advise him and them on what to do next. Third, and a direct sequel to the assembly of Book 1, is the assembly of Book 9, followed by a council, at which the Argives look for remedies for their worsening position and Nestor prevails upon Agamemnon to send an embassy to Achilles—which in turn engages in a massive parley with the sulking hero. Immediately afterwards, in Book 10, the nocturnal prowlings of the Greek leaders culminate in the council that results in the Doloneia. Book 14 begins with an informal council at the point in the story when Greek fortunes are at their lowest ebb; as in Book 9, so here once again Agamemnon is dissuaded from returning home (or more strictly from making as if to do so). Finally, balancing the assembly of Book 1 is the further assembly called by Achilles at the opening of Book 19, at which Agamemnon and Achilles are reconciled and Achilles is restrained from taking immediate revenge for Patroclus. All these discussions and debates have this at least in common: they are not mere episodes, relaxations from the real action of the poem; they are its motive forces, of greater intrinsic interest, and generating more tension, than most of the passages which retail the actual fighting. Assemblies and councils have a similar structural and dynamic function in much heroic poetry.¹⁰ For example, the plot of The Song of Roland is launched and in part shaped by the sequence of deliberations which begin the poem: Marsilion’s council at Saragossa, Blancandrin’s embassy to Charlemagne, and then—at much greater length—‘that council which came to such sore grief, when Roland and Ganelon quarrel at Charlemagne’s court.

The prominence of councils and assemblies, and in general parleys, in the Iliad reflects the fact that life, and in particular life at the front, is a difficult practical business, demanding intelligence and judgement as well as prowess. And since parleys are needed to cope with that business, it comes as no surprise to find euboulia recognised as a pre-eminent virtue of the Homeric chieftain.¹¹

Excellence in counsel is often coupled with prowess in fighting as one of the two chief ways in which a man may outshine his peers. Nestor, attempting to reconcile Achilles and Agamemnon, describes them flatteringly to their faces as excelling the Danaans equally in counsel and in fighting (1.258). He employs a similar technique with Diomedes (9.53–4), when in response to a stirring speech made by him he establishes the tone and something of the direction of his reply with the words: ‘Son of Tydeus, you are exceedingly valiant in war, and in counsel you are the best among all your contemporaries.’ Odysseus likewise employs the same contrast in upbraiding each of the plebeian loudmouths of Book 2 with the charge (200–2): ‘My good man, sit still and listen to the words of others who are better than you, whereas you are a weakling, not fit for war, of no account either in war or in counsel.’ He himself, on the other hand, earns extravagant admiration for his beating of Thersites, and provokes in the common soldier the following words (2.272–4): ‘Heavens, Odysseus has in truth performed fine deeds countless in number, initiating good counsels and preparing for war, but now is this deed the best by far that he has done among the Argives.’ Here the opposition is less sharp: preparations for war have as much if not more in common with counsels as with war itself; and Odysseus’ initiatives in counsel and preparation are implicitly reckoned themselves as notable deeds. Indeed, what these lines reflect is the fact that ability in fighting and excellence in counsel are not so much opposed as interdependent qualities.

Let it not be thought that the coupling of euboulia and prowess is confined to contexts in which Nestor and Odysseus, Homer’s paradigms of euboulia, figure. We find Helenus urging Aeneas and Hector to make a stand and rally the Trojan host ‘since on you above all of the Trojans and Lycians the burden of toil lies, because in every enterprise you are best both at fighting and at thinking’ (6.77–9). And we are told that when Achilles sat in wrath by the swift-plying ships ‘he never went into the assembly which brings glory to a man nor ever into the war’ (1.490–1), although it was abstinence from war and the war-cry that caused him pangs of longing. Again, Peleus sent Phoenix with Achilles to the war to teach him ‘to be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds’,¹² because he ‘did not yet understand equal war nor assemblies where men win pre-eminence’ (9.438–43). Nor does Achilles reject the notion that excellence requires a man to perform superbly in counsel as well as in battle, although he admits that that is not the sphere in which he himself is pre-eminent (18.105–6). In his reply to Odysseus’ attempt on the embassy to persuade him to relent he couches his refusal in these words: ‘I will not join in considering counsels with him, nor yet deeds’ (9.374).

The idea that a hero will ideally be distinguished in both wisdom and valour is one the Iliad shares with other heroic poetry.¹³ Blancandrin is introduced as ‘for valour a mighty knight withal, and fit of wit for to counsel his l...

Table of contents

• ISSUES IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• PUBLICATION DETAILS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 EUBOULIA IN THE ILIAD
• 2 THE DISAPPEARING PHILOSOPHER-KING
• 3 ZENO OF CITIUM’S ANTI-UTOPIANISM
• 4 PLATO ON THE ECONOMY
• 5 POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP AND THE IDEOLOGY OF RECIPROCITY
• 6 EQUALITY AND HIERARCHY IN ARISTOTLE’S POLITICAL THOUGHT
• 7 IDEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY IN ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF SLAVERY
• 8 SHARING IN THE CONSTITUTION
• 9 MORALITY AND THE LAW The case of Diogenes of Babylon
• 10 CICERO’S DEFINITION OF RES PUBLICA
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX