Notes

CHAPTER ONE

1. J. S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (London and Boston, 1989), 1–2.

2. Throughout this work I cite the Politics in the translation of Ernest Barker (Ox-ford, 1946).

3. Citations to the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians are modified from the Loeb Classical Library translation by H. Rackham, Aristotle: The Athenian Constitution, The Eudemian Ethics, On Virtues and Vices (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1935).

4. R. A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven and London, 1989), 2.

5. Jean Bodin, Six Livres de la République, translated as Six Bookes of a Commonwealth (1606), 702.

6. R. Filmer, Patriarca, in Patriarca and Other Political Works, ed. Peter Laslett (Ox-ford, 1949), 86–89.

7. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 2.29.

8. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, reprinted in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977).

9. Rendered in English as The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Grecians and Macedonians (Edinburgh and London, 1861), 1.16.

10. Rollin, Ancient History 1.184–85.

11. L’Abbé J. Barthélemy, Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Grèce dans le milieu du quatrième siècle avant l’ère vulgaire (Paris, 1782), translated as Travels of Anacharsis the Younger in Greece, 7 vols. (1794), 1.184–85.

12. Robert Bisset, Sketch of Democracy (London, 1796), xxv.

13. Victor Duruy, Histoire Grecque, 2d ed. (Paris, 1856), 3.613–14.

14. A. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens (1911; 5th ed., 1931; reprint, New York and Oxford, 1961), 367n.

15. T. Jones, From the Tigris to the Tiber (3d ed., 1969; (new ed., Homewood, Ill., 1983), 175, 174.

16. In The Closing of the American Mind (New York, 1987), 377.

17. S. Lakoff, Equality in Political Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 16.

18. In Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History within the Analytical Tradition (Princeton, 1970), 117.

19. W. Dray, On History and Philosophers of History (Leiden, 1989), 164.

20. A. Nevins, The Gateway to History (New York, 1938), cited in E. Nagel, “Some Issues in the Logic of Historical Analysis,” in Theories of History, ed. P. Gardiner (New York and London, 1959), 377.

21. For White’s arguments, see most recently the essays collected in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987).

22. In Historical Understanding, ed. B. Fay, E. Golob, and R. Vann (Ithaca and London, 1987), 186.

23. D. Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), 46, 61.

24. W. Dray, On History and Philosophers of History, 157.

25. W. H. Walsh, “The Intelligibility of History,” Philosophy 17 (1942); 128–43, and “Colligatory Concepts of History,” in Studies in the Nature and Teaching of History, ed. W. H. Burston and D. Thompson (London, 1967), 65–87.

26. D. Giannotti, Discorso intorno alla Forma della Repubblica di Firenze, in his Opere Politiche e Letterarie, ed. F.-L. Polidori (Florence, 1850), 1.17.

27. W. Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, N.J., 1988), ix–x.

28. On pp. 61–62 and 187.

29. E. Nagel, “Some Issues in the Logic of Historical Analysis,” in Theories of History, 373–86.

30. J. H. Hexter, “History, the Social Sciences, and Quantification,” Proceedings of the XIIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences (Moscow, 1970), 32.

31. Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 13.

CHAPTER TWO

1. The bibliographical citations offered in the notes to this chapter are designed to provide additional background for modernists unfamiliar with the history and government of classical Athens. Because it is a central tenet of this book that there is no such thing as objective history, I present these suggested readings with some hesitation. I do not mean for a moment to imply that with the dawning of the twentieth century quaint eccentricities were miraculously replaced by scientific scholarship in which readers may place unqualified trust. It is to be hoped that the biases represented hereunder may to some degree cancel one another out.

In addition to the readings listed in these notes, readers are referred to numerous entries in the Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1894–1980) under the names of important individuals and of various organs of Athenian government. Somewhat briefer notices appear in C. Daremberg and E. Saglio, eds., Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines (Paris, 1877–1919) and briefer ones still in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford, 1970). The principal bibliography of scholarship on classical antiquity appears annually in L’Année philologique, which follows listings for individual classical authors with listings for categories such as “Histoire grecque” and “Civilisation grecque,” where books and articles on Athenian government and society can be found. Abbreviations for scholarly journals cited in these notes follow the precedents set in L’Année.

2. On the Athenian constitution and its development, see U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Aristoteles und Athen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1893); G. Busolt and H. Swoboda, Griechische Staatskunde (Munich, 1920–26); R. Bonner and G. Smith, The Administration of Justice from Homer to Aristotle, 2 vols. (Chicago, 1930–38); C. Hignett, A History of the Athenian Constitution to the End of the Fifth Century B.C. (Oxford, 1952); J. Day and M. Chambers, Aristotle’s History of Athenian Democracy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962); W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy (New York and Toronto, 1966); and P. J. Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian “Athenaion Politeia” (Oxford, 1981). Conflicting modern assessments of Athenian democracy appear in P. Cloché, La démocratie athénienne (Paris, 1951); V. Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates: Greek History and Civilisation during the Sixth and Fifth CenturiesB.C. (London, 1968); C. Mossé, Histoire d’une démocratie, Athènes, des origines a la conquête Macédonienne (Paris, 1971); T. Tarkiainen, Die athenische Demokratie (Munich, 1972); J. K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (London, 1978); J. Bleicken, Die athenische Demokratie (Paderborn, 1985); M. Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986); R. Sealey, The Athenian Republic: Democracy or the Rule of Law? (University Park, Pa., and London, 1987); J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (Princeton, 1989); and D. Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1990). See also the works of M. Hansen cited in n. 6 here and Hansen’s The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology (Oxford, 1991). Particularly full and up-to-date bibliography can be found throughout Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty, and in Hansen, The Athenian Democracy (which also includes a valuable glossary).

3. Solon’s reforms are treated in the works cited in n. 2 and in I. M. Linforth, Solon the Athenian, University of California Publications in Classical Philology No. 6 (Berkeley, 1919); K. Freeman, The Work and Life of Solon (Oxford, 1926); W. J. Woodhouse, Solon the Liberator: A Study of the Agrarian Problem in Attika in the Seventh Century (Oxford, 1938); and A. Masaracchia, Solone (Florence, 1958).

4. The purpose and results of Cleisthenes’ reforms are discussed in the works cited in n. 2 and in J. Headlam, Election by Lot at Athens, 2d ed., revised by D. MacGregor (Cambridge, 1933); H. T. Wade-Gery, “Studies in the Structure of Attic Society: II. The Laws of Kleisthenes,” CQ 27 (1933): 17–29; P. Levêque and P. Vidal-Naquet, Clisthène l’Athénien (Paris, 1964); D. M. Lewis, “Cleisthenes and Attica,” Historia 12 (1963): 22–40; H. W. Pleket, “Isonomia and Cleisthenes: A Note,” Talanta 4 (1972): 63–81; J. Martin, “Von Kleisthenes zu Ephialtes: Zur Entstehung der athenischen Demokratie,” Chiron 4 (1974): 5–42; A. Andrewes, “Kleisthenes’ Reform Bill,” CQ 27 (1977): 241–48; and C. Meier, “Cleisthenes and the Institutionalizing of the Civic Presence in Athens,” now chap. 4 of The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. D. McLintock (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 53–81 and 235–46.

The late twentieth century has witnessed an explosion of interest in demes a hundred years after the appearance of Bernard Haussoullier’s La vie municipale en Attique in 1884: see R. Osborne, Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika (Cambridge, 1985) and D. Whitehead, The Demes of Attica, 508/7–ca. 250B.C.: A Political and Social Study (Princeton, 1985).

5. The fullest treatment of the boule appears in P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Boule (Oxford, 1972), which includes pertinent bibliography. See also R. de Laix, Probouleusis at Athens: A Study of Decision Making, University of California Publications in History no. 83 (Berkeley, 1973); and W. R. Connor, “The Athenian Council: Method and Focus in Some Recent Scholarship,” CJ 70 (1974): 32–50.

6. A series of close studies of the ekklesia by M. H. Hansen has been published in the two volumes of his The Athenian Ecclesia (Copenhagen, 1983 and 1989). See also the bibliography assembled there as well as in Hansen’s The Athenian Assembly (London, 1987) and his The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes.

7. Considerable controversy still surrounds the precise nature and extent of Ephialtes’ reforms. Bibliography on Ephialtes prior to 1966 is compiled in E. Ruschenbusch, “Ephialtes,” Historia 15 (1966): 369–76; see also R. Sealey, “Ephialtes,” CP 59 (1964): 11–21; J. R. Cole, “Cimon’s Dismissal, Ephialtes’ Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars,” GRBS 15 (1974): 369–85; R. Wallace, “Ephialtes and the Areopagus,” GRBS 15 (1974): 259–69 and The Areopagos Council to 307B.C. (Baltimore, 1985); and G. Audring, “Ephialtes stürtz den Areopag,” Altertum 23 (1977): 234–38. I have not yet been able to consult C. Meier, “Der Umbruch zur Demokratie in Athen (462/61 c Chr.)” in R. Herzog and R. Koselleck, eds., Epochenschwelle und Epochenbewusstsein, vol. Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 12 (Munich, 1987), 353ff.

8. On this bizarre Athenian institution see R. Bonner, “The Minimum Vote in Ostracism,” CP 8 (1913): 223–25; J. Carcopino, L’ostracisme athénien (Paris, 1935); A. E. Raubitschek, “Athenian Ostracism,” CJ 48 (1952–53): 113–22 and “The Origin of Ostracism,” AJA 55 (1961): 221–29; A. R. Hands, “Ostraka and the Law of Ostracism: Some Possibilities and Assumptions,” JHS 79 (1959): 69–79; D. Kagan, “The Origin and Purposes of Ostracism,” Hesperia 30 (1961): 393–401; E. Vanderpool, Ostracism at Athens: Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple (Cincinnati, 1970); R. Thomsen, The Origin of Ostracism: A Synthesis (Copenhagen, 1972); Podlecki, Life of Themistocles (Montreal and London, 1975): 185–94; and J. T. Roberts, Accountability in Athenian Government (Madison, Wis., 1982), 142–53. On the possible role of Cleisthenes in instituting ostracism see C. A. Robinson, “Cleisthenes and Ostracism,” AJA (1952): 23–26; and P. Karavites, “Cleisthenes and Ostracism Again,” Athenaeum 52 (1974): 326–36.

Several books on Themistocles have appeared in the past two decades: A. J. Podlecki, The Life of Themistocles: A Critical Survey of the Literary and Archaeological Evidence; R. J. Lenardon, The Saga of Themistocles (London, 1978); and F. J. Frost, Plutarch’s Themistocles: A Historical Commentary (Princeton, 1980).

9. The history of attitudes toward Sparta is analyzed in E. N. Tigerstedt, The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity (Stockholm, 1965), and E. Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford, 1969).

10. Recent overviews of the history of Greece from the Persian Wars to the Macedonian conquest may be found in N.G.L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322B.C. (Oxford, 1967); R. Sealey, A History of the Greek City-States, 700–338B.C. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976); J.V.A. Fine, The Ancient Greeks: A Critical History (Cambridge, Mass., 1983); and S. Hornblower, The Greek World 479–323B.C. (London and New York, 1983). Readers may also wish to consult the revision of the Victorian J. B. Bury’s 1900 History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great by Russell Meiggs (New York, 1975).

11. On the Athenian empire see B. D. Meritt, H. T. Wade-Gery, and M. F. Mac-Gregor, The Athenian Tribute Lists, 4 vols., vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1939) and vols. 2–4 (Princeton, 1949–53); R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford, 1972); W. Schuller, Die Herrschaft der Athener im Ersten Attischen Seebund (Berlin and New York, 1974); and most recently M. F. MacGregor, The Athenians and Their Empire (Vancouver, B.C., 1987).

12. Responses to the exclusivity of the Athenian democracy are discussed in detail in chap. 12.

13. On the politicians who succeeded Pericles see M. I. Finley, “The Athenian Demagogues,” Past and Present 21 (1962): 3–24, and W. R. Connor, The New Politicians of Fifth-Century Athens (Princeton, 1971).

14. For a discussion of this period in Athenian history and an ample bibliography of scholarship down to 1982, see P. Krentz, The Thirty at Athens (Ithaca and London, 1982).

15. Two scholars have re-created very engaging debates between Athenian democrats and detractors of the democracy—Kurt Raaflaub of the Center for Hellenic Studies in “Contemporary Perceptions of Democracy in Fifth-Century Athens,” Classica et Medievalia 40 (1989): 33–70; and Robert Dahl of Yale in Democracy and Its Critics, published by Yale University Press the same year.

16. These fragments and quotations are collected in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 10th ed. (Berlin, 1960–61), Greek text with German translation. An English translation appears in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratics (Cambridge, Mass., 1962). Commentary is available in Freeman’s Companion to the Pre-Socratics (Oxford, 1946). Selected texts and commentary appear in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957).

17. Good discussions of the nomos-physis controversy appear in F. Heinimann, Nomos und Physis: Herkunft und Bedeutung einer Antithese im griechischen Denken des 5. Jahrhunderts (Basel, 1945; reprint, 1965); Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven and London, 1957; reprint, 1964); W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge, England, 1971), chap. 4; G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge and New York, 1981); and H. D. Rankin, Sophists, Socratics, and Cynics (London and Totowa, N.J., 1983), chap. 4. See also the chapter on the sophists in W. Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet (New York, 1939; orig. German ed., 1933), l.286–331.

18. The reconstruction of democratic theory among the sophists has been attempted by scholars such as Alban Winspear in The Genesis of Plato’s Thought (New York, 1940), chap. 5, and Eric Havelock in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics, chap. 7. Although both efforts are heroic and enlightening, both Winspear and Havelock push the evidence as far as it will go if not farther. One is reminded of the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Sleeper, in which doctors are planning to reconstruct the late party leader based on the cells in the one part of his body that survives, his nose. The analogy, though bizarre, seems nonetheless apt. The political philosopher Leo Strauss offers a detailed critique of Havelock’s book in “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy” (chap. 3 in his Liberalism Ancient and Modern [Ithaca, 1968], 26–64).

19. Xenophon’s authorship of the first treatise (discussed in chap. 3, here) was widely accepted until the nineteenth century; the Aristotelian tract was uncovered only in 1880 and published for the first time in 1891, and its attribution to Aristotle is still debated (see chap. 3).

20. Works on the authenticity of the debate published prior to 1957 are listed in H. Apffel’s 1957 Erlangen dissertation Die Verfassungsdebatte bei Herodot (3, 80–82) (reprint, New York, 1979). Subsequent studies have appeared in M. Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy (Oxford, 1969), 107–16; R. Sealey, “The Origins of Demokratia,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 6 (1973): 272–77; and D. Lateiner, “Herodotus’ Historical Patterning: ‘The Constitutional Debate,’” QS 20 (1984): 257–84. Additional citations appear in R. Kranskopf, W. Marg, and W. Nicolai, “Literaturverzeichnis,” in W. Marg, ed., Herodot: Eine Auswahl aus der neueren Forschung (Darmstadt, 1982), 759ff.

The threefold classification of states also appears in somewhat different form in Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode, composed probably in the 470s but certainly no later than 467. The Pindaric reference to what was apparently a current idea is discussed by Ostwald (Nomos, 30–31) and Sealey (“Origins,” 273).

21. The appearance of isonomos as early as the drinking songs that celebrated the murder of the tyrant Hipparchus in 514 and the comparatively late appearance of demokratia, used only infrequently before the death of Pericles, have led scholars to speculate that isonomia was simply the original word for what was later called demokratia; that it began as an aristocratic catchword meaning the equality of noblemen as against the singularity of tyranny, but later came to mean democracy; or that it never meant democracy per se and referred throughout its existence to all constitutional governments. The quantity of ink spilt on this topic is equaled only by the quality of the minds that have applied themselves to the problem: V. Ehrenberg, “Isonomia,” RE Supplementband 7, “Eunomia,” Charisteria Alois Reich (Reichenberg, 1930), revised and translated into English in Aspects of the Ancient World (Oxford, 1946), and also “Origins of Democracy,” Historia 1 (1950): 515–48; A. Debrunner, “Demokratia,” Festschrift für E. Tieche (Bern, 1947), 11–24; J.A.O. Larsen, “Cleisthenes and the Development of the Theory of Democracy at Athens,” in M. Konvitz and A. Murphy, eds., Essays in Political Theory Presented to George H. Sabine (Ithaca, 1948), 1–16; G. Vlastos, “Isonomia,” AJP 74 (1953): 337–66 and “ISONOMIA POLITIKE,” in J. Mau and E. G. Schmidt, Isonomia: Studien zur Glecheitsvorstellung (sic) im griechischen Denken (Berlin, 1964), 1–35, reprinted in G. Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 2d. ed. (Princeton, 1981), 164– 203. I have nothing to add to the dialogue beyond the observation that unwitting tribute to the loss of sleep that the isonomia problem evidently occasioned these scholars is paid in Donald Kagan’s The Great Dialogue: History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to Polybius (New York and London, 1965), in which a printer’s error coined the appropriate conflation “insonomia” (77).

22. On Herodotus’s political thought in general see K. Wüst, Politisches Denken bei Herodot (Ph.D. disseration, University of Munich 1933; reprint, N.Y., 1979); H.-F. Bornitz, Herodot-Studien (Berlin, 1968); J. Cobet, Herodots Exkurse und die Frage der Einheit seines Werkes. Historia Einzelschrift 17 (Wiesbaden, 1971); C. Fornara, Herodotus: An Interpretive Essay (Oxford, 1971); W. Nikolai, Versuch über Herodots Geschichtsphilosophie (Heidelberg, 1986); K. Raaflaub, “Herodotus, Political Thought, and the Meaning of History,” Arethusa 20 (1987): 221–48; and B. Shimron, Politics and Belief in Herodotus (Stuttgart, 1989). The traditional view that Herodotus was a supporter of the Athenian (i.e., Periclean) democracy of his own day has been attacked by H. Strasburger, “Herodot und das Perikleische Athen,” Historia 4 (1955): 1–25. See, however, the brief response of F. D. Harvey, “The Political Sympathies of Herodotus,” Historia 15 (1966): 254–55.

23. Translated by Freeman in the Ancilla as 265 and 251. Cf. also Freeman, 252, 253, and 262. The long discussion of Democritus’s political and social ideology offered in chap. 6 of C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge, England, 1988) is useful though it often stretches the evidence farther than it can reasonably be asked to go. See the alternative argument in G. Aalders, “The Political Faith of Democritus,” Mnemosyne, 4th ser., 3 (1950): 302– 13, who cites fragments 49, 75, 254, 266, and 267. A certain amount hangs on whether a Democritean origin can be assigned to a fragment of the late fifth-/early fourth-century writer known as the Anonymus Iamblichi; this question is discussed in the context of the relationship between the thinking of Plato, Protagoras, and Democritus by A. T. Cole, “The Anonymus Iamblichi and His Place in Greek Political Theory,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 65 (1961): 127–63.

The connection between scientific speculation and political principle is central to Havelock’s Liberal Temper, in which chap. 6 is devoted to Democritus. A helpful discussion also appears in Winspear, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought, 147–60.

24. On the political opinions of Aeschylus see the relevant entries in n. 26. The climax of the trilogy in the matricide Orestes’ acquittal at the hand of an Athenian court also points to the essentially masculine value system of Greek democracy: not only is Orestes acquitted of his mother’s murder on the grounds that mothers have no genetic input into fetuses and are hence less important than fathers, but it is determined that the emotional and vindictive female Furies who have pursued him across Greece must bow to the wishes of Athenian juries. A detailed twentieth-century reading of the sexual politics of the Oresteia appears in F. Zeitlin, “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia,” in J. Peradotto and J. P. Sullivan, eds., Women in the Ancient World: The ARETHUSA Papers (Albany, 1984), 159–94.

25. Cited in the translation of F. W. Jones in D. Grene and R. Lattimore, eds., The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 4 (Chicago, 1958). I have made one small emendation; at the suggestion of Kurt Raaflaub, I have changed the translation of isaiteron in line 441 from “fair” to “equal,” because this more adequately reflects what I perceive to be Euripides’ political agenda here.

26. The subtlety with which the question of democracy was treated in Attic tragedy lies largely outside the scope of this book, because these subtleties, being subtleties, have not on the whole played a large role in the shaping of modern thinking about Athenian democracy. Indeed a case could be made that the significance of the entire phenomenon of tragedy for the development of the skills necessary in a democracy has been noticed only in the late twentieth century. Still, the subject is fascinating, and readers are referred to G. Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens (London, 1941); V. Ehrenberg, Sophocles and Pericles (Oxford, 1954); G. Zuntz, The Political Plays of Euripides (Manchester, 1955); M. Jameson, “Politics and the Philoctetes,” CP 51 (1956): 217–27; K. J. Dover, “The Political Aspect of the Eumenides,” JHS 77 (1957): 230–37; R. Y. Hathorn, “Sophocles’ Antigone: Eros in Politics,” CJ 54 (1958–59): 109–15; E. R. Dodds, “Morals and Politics in the Oresteia,” Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays [Oxford, 1973], 45–63); A. J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966); W. M. Calder III, “Sophokles’ Political Tragedy: Antigone,” GRBS 9 (1968): 389–407; C. Meier, “Aeschylus’ Eumenides and the Rise of the Political” in The Greek Discovery of Politics (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 82–139; D. K. Nichols, “Aeschylus’ Oresteia and the Origins of Political Life,” Interpretation 9 (1980): 83–91; C. W. Macleod, “Politics and the Oresteia,” JHS 102 (1982): 124–44; B.M.W. Knox, “Sophocles and the Polis,” Entretiens sur l’antiquité (Fondation Hardt) 29 (1983): 1–17; P. Burian, “Logos and Pathos: The Politics of the Suppliant Women,” in his Directions in Euripidean Criticism: A Collection of Essays (Durham, 1985); S. Goldhill, Reading Greek Tragedy (Cambridge, England, 1986); J. P. Euben, ed., Greek Tragedy and Political Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), and Euben’s The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton, 1990); Christian Meier, Die politische Kunst der griechischen Tragödie (Munich, 1988); and Farrar, Origins, 30–38.

27. English editions of Protagoras include W.K.C. Guthrie, Plato, Protagoras, and Meno (Harmondsworth, 1956); G. Vlastos, ed., Plato, Protagoras: Jowett’s Translation Revised by Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis and New York, 1956); and C.C.W. Taylor, Plato: Protagoras (Oxford, 1976.) See also L. Goldberg, A Commentary on Plato’s Protagoras (New York, 1983); and P. Coby, Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment: A Commentary on Plato’s “Protagoras” (Lewisburg, Pa., London, and Toronto, 1987). Discussions of the political theory in the dialogue appear in A. Levi, “The Ethical and Social Thought of Protagoras,” Mind n.s. 44 (1940): 284–302; J. S. Morrison, “The Place of Protagoras in Athenian Public Life,” CQ 35 (1941): 1–16; G. B. Kerferd, “ Protagoras of Plato,” JHS 73 (1953): 442–45; A.W.H. Adkins, “Arete, Techne, Democracy, and Sophists: Protagoras 316b–328d,” JHS 93 (1973): 3–12; E. and N. Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory (Oxford, 1978), 128–37; P. P. Nicholson, “Protagoras and the Justification of Athenian Democracy,” Polis 3 (1980–81): 14–24; and Farrar, Origins, chap. 3; see also Gregory Vlastos’s introduction to Ostwald’s revision of Jowett. Bibliography on the dialogue is collected in the Taylor edition and in Farrar, Origins. I have not yet been able to consult D. Loenen, Protagoras and the Greek Community (Amsterdam, 1941).

28. Bibliographical guides to the debate over the origins of the Platonic Protagoras are provided in E. Havelock, The Liberal Temper, 407–9 and W.K.C. Guthrie, The Sophists, 64n. See also J. P. Maguire, “Protagoras—or Plato?” Phronesis 18 (1973): 115–38, and 22 (1977): 103–22; and Farrar, Origins.

Withal it is curious that Protagoras, a citizen of Abdera, uses Athenian mores to bolster his view of the world while simultaneously using his worldview to justify the Athenians, who are Socrates’ compatriots and whom he mentions several times by name.

29. A prodigious amount of scholarship has been devoted to the question of the authenticity of the speeches in Thucydides’ history. A massive bibliography on the topic was compiled by William C. West III for Philip Stadter’s The Speeches in Thucydides (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1973) and includes 351 separate entries not counting book reviews; much could now be added to this by consulting entries under Thucydides’ name in L’Année philologique since 1972.

30. A detailed study of democratic ideology and the genre of the funeral oration appears in N. Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1986). J. Moravcsik contrasts the view of freedom articulated in Pericles’ oration with that held by Plato in “Plato and Pericles on Freedom and Politics,” in F. Pelletier and J. King-Farlow, eds., New Essays on Plato (Guelph, Ontario, 1983), 1–17. On the democratic ideology of liberty, see K. Raaflaub, Die Entdeckung der Freiheit (Munich, 1985), 258–312. Orlando Patterson in his Freedom, vol. 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York, 1991) devotes a great deal of space (47–180) to the development of the concept of freedom in preclassical and classical Greece.

31. My work in progress on the gender of democracy will take note of its masculinity in Aeschylus; Pericles’ defense of it against charges of effeminacy; allegations of effeminacy in the eighteenth century; and insistence on the masculinity of republicanism among America’s founding fathers and in Victorian Britain. Questions of gender and Athenian democracy are discussed in chap. 12 and in D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York and London, 1990). A variety of perspectives on related issues in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France are offered in L. Hunt, ed., Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore, 1990).

32. The notion that the word demokratia may originally have been coined by the enemies of democracy is supported in R. Hirzel, Themis, Dike und Verwandtes (Leipzig, 1907), 263n.; V. Ehrenberg, “Isonomia,” RE Supplementband 7, 297; and Larsen, Essays in Political Theory Presented to George H. Sabine, 13. Gomme (A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 2 [Oxford, 1956], 110) dismisses the idea, claiming that demos was “a very respectable word in all manner of states, including Sparta,” but I think he is mistaken about the significance of this respectability (respectability that I grant). Demos and demokratia are different words. On the way in which the usage of words for political programs evolved and changed in classical Athens see in its entirety Sealey’s long and witty essay “Origins.” It is often difficult for outsiders to understand the nuances of political terminology. American feminists will be the first to proclaim themselves believers in women’s liberation, but no feminist calls herself—or himself—a “libber.” The epithet is heard exclusively on the lips of outsiders (who frequently have no idea that the use of the word labels them as such). Subtle distinctions are powerful (cf. feminine, feminist, effeminate).

33. Cited in the Loeb Classical Library translation of J. H. Vince, Demosthenes against Meidias, Androtion, Aristocrates, Timocrates, Aristogeiton (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1935).

34. [Lysias] 2.18–19, cited in the Loeb Classical Library translation of W.R.M. Lamb (Cambridge, Mass., 1930.)

35. As Kurt Raaflaub has pointed out, tyranny, though obsolete in mainland Greece during the fifth century, nonetheless retained its “prominence in political thought on democracy because it served the useful function of representing a system that radically denied all the values and achievements of democracy. By refuting the negative features of tyranny, it was possible to emphasize through a stark contrast some of the positive aspects of democracy” (“Democracy, Oligarchy, and the Concept of the ‘Free Citizen’ in Late Fifth-Century Athens,” Political Theory 11 [1983]: 522–23.) On the use of antityrannical rhetoric in antidemocratic authors see B. Gentili, “Polemica antitirannica,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica n.s. 1 30 (1979): 153–56; and V. Rosivach, “The Tyrant in Athenian Democracy,” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultural Classica n.s. 30 (1988): 56–57.

CHAPTER THREE

1. The idea that power and prestige were the prerogatives of people from a few families that had possessed wealth for as long as anyone could remember was deeply ingrained in Greek thinking. Greek elitism is studied in R. Seager, “Elitism and Democracy in Classical Athens,” in F. C. Jaher, ed., The Rich, the Well-Born, and the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History (Urbana, Ill., 1973), 7–26; M.T.W. Arnheim, Aristocracy in Greek Society (London, 1977); W. Donlan, The Aristocratic Ideal in Ancient Greece: Attitudes of Superiority from Homer to the End of the Fifth CenturyB.C. (Lawrence, Kans., 1980); and J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, 1989). Although many scholars (myself included) will find his ideas about Socrates odd, I. F. Stone has provided a readable account of Greek elitism for popular audiences in his book on The Trial of Socrates (Boston, 1988).

2. Cited in the translation of Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951). Homer’s own views are more complex; see for example K. Raaflaub, “Homer and the Beginning of Political Thought in Greece,” Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 4 (1988): 1–33, with a reply by L. Edmunds.

3. See, e.g., A. R. Burn, The Pelican History of Greece (Harmondsworth, 1966), 122; and, in more detail, M. I. Finley, Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages (New York, 1970), 104.

4. Raphael Sealey has suggested that “Angry Young Man” might be a better term than “Old Oligarch” (“The Origins of Demokratia,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 6 [1973]: 262). Other discussions of the pseudo-Xenophontic Constitution appear in H. Frisch, The Constitution of the Athenians: A Philological-Historical Analysis of Pseudo-Xenophon’s Treatise de re publica Atheniensium (Copenhagen, 1942); J. M. Moore, ed., Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy (London, 1975); C. G. Starr, “Thucydides on Sea Power,” Mnemosyne 31 (1978): 343–50; the essay appended to Luciano Canfora’s Italian translation of the text that bears the pointed title, La democrazia come violenza, published at Palermo in 1982; and A. Fuks, “The Old Oligarch,” in his Social Conflict in Ancient Greece (Jerusalem and Leiden, 1984).

5. I cite the text in the translation that appears at the beginning of H. Frisch, The Constitution of the Athenians.

6. Herodotus has Megabyzus express similar ideas at 3.81 in the constitutional debate, but they are formulated much less analytically.

7. In Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), David Carr distinguishes between the narrative of the radio announcer, who, performing the functions of “chronicler,” offers a live description of a baseball game in progress (“ ‘There’s the pitch… the batter swings … line drive to center field!’ etc.”) and that of the person who, after the game is over, will tell the “story of the game … in full knowledge of who won,” mentioning only “the most important events, especially those that contributed to scoring points and thus to the outcome” (59). Looked at in this way, it is difficult for anyone who has read Thucydides to class him with the radio announcer rather than with the postgame narrative interpreter. Not surprisingly, even the so-called “Separatist” critics concede, as W. R. Connor has pointed out (Thucydides, [Princeton, 1984]), that “whatever the stages of composition” of Thucydides’ narrative, “the work is likely to have taken its present form amid the disputes and recriminations that followed the Athenian defeat” (10).

8. Because Thucydides’ work does not deal directly with constitutional questions, not a great deal has been written on his views of Athenian democracy. Mary Lefkowitz of Wellesley College is one among several scholars who have observed that Thucydides “describes the Athenian demos behaving as if it were an individual person rather than a collection of many different people”—hardly a promising approach to domestic politics. (Her remarks appear in her review of Eli Sagan’s The Honey and the Hemlock in the New York Times Book Review [3 May 1992]: 35.) Attempts to uncover Thucydides’ opinions about the government of his native city include J. H. Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass., 1942); A. W. Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K. J. Dover, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1945–81); M. F. MacGregor, “The Politics of the Historian Thucydides,” Phoenix 10 (1956): 93–102; the chapter on Thucydides in D. Kagan, The Great Dialogue: A History of Greek Political Thought from Homer to Polybius (New York and London, 1965); W. R. Connor, Thucydides, 24–230; S. Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore, 1987); and C. Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking (Cambridge, 1988) (where an interpretation strikingly different from my own is offered). Scholarly twentieth-century studies of Thucydides range from the conservative G. Grundy, Thucydides and the History of his Age (1911; 2d ed., Oxford, 1948), who endorses all Thucydides’ strictures on democracy, to the iconoclastic study of V. Hunter, Thucydides: The Artful Reporter (Toronto, 1973). Thucydides has also been extremely popular in the twentieth century with journalists, particularly those writing in the United States. On the significance of modern estimates of Thucydides’ work, see chap. 13, pp. 296–98.

The thoughtful article of Maurice Pope in Historia 37 (1988): “Thucydides and Democracy” (276–96) stresses the complexity of Thucydides’ views and argues that antidemocrats have been wrong to assume him as a legitimizing ancestor for their own opinions. Pope’s article is important not only for its close reading of Thucydides but for the emphasis it places on Thucydides’ co-optation into the antidemocratic tradition. As Pope observes in his first sentence, “Thucydides is often used to torpedo the cause of democracy.”

9. On ostracism see chapter 2, n. 8.

10. See, e.g., A. Fuks, The Ancestral Constitution: Four Studies in Athenian Party Politics at the end of the Fifth CenturyB.C. (London, 1953), 52. Speculation about the way in which late fifth- and fourth-century Athenians chose to interpret and/or recast their earlier constitutional history also appears in E. Ruschenbusch, “PATRIOS POLITEIA: Theseus, Drakon, Solon und Kleisthenes in Publistik und Geschichtsschreibung des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.” Historia 7 (1958): 398–424; and L. Boffo, “L’intervento di Efialte di Sofonide sull’Areopago nell’interpretazione del IV secolo,” Rendiconti della Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche dell’Accademia dei Lincei 31 (1976): 435–50. See also the relevant portions of P. J. Rhodes’s Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (Oxford, 1981) and the long chapter on the “Patrios Politeia” in Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law: Law, Society, and Politics in Fifth-Century Athens (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), 337–411.

11. On the political opinions of Isocrates, see (in addition to the works cited in n. 14 here) R. von Pöhlmann, Isokrates und das Problem der Demokratie (Munich, 1913); G. Mathieu, Les idées politiques d’Isocrate (Paris, 1925); M.L.W. Laistner’s introduction to his Isocrates: De Pace and Philippus, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology no. 22 (New York and London, 1927), 15–24; K. Bringmann, Studien zur den politischen Ideen des Isokrates, Hypomnemata Heft 14 (Göttingen, 1965), esp. 75–95; two recent articles, I. Labriola, “Terminologia politica isocratea I: oligarchia, aristocrazia, democrazia,” QS 4, no. 7 (1978): 147–68, and M. Silvestrini, “Terminologia politica isocratea, 2: L’Areopagitico o dell’ ambiguità isocratea,” QS 4, no. 7 (1978): 169–83; and A. Fuks, “Iso-crates and the Social-Economic Situation in Greece,” in Social Conflict in Ancient Greece, 52–79.

I have not yet been able to see the unpublished Ph.D. dissertation of Allan Bloom, “The Political Philosophy of Isokrates” (University of Chicago, 1955).

12. On the Panegyricus in its historical context see E. Buchner, Der Panegyrikos des Isokrates: Eine Historisch-Philologische Untersuchung, Historia, suppl. 2 (Wiesbaden, 1958).

13. For a Roman version of the notion that people in the old days competed only to outdo one another in public spirit see Sallust, De Bello Jugurthino 4.6–7.

14. The key passages in which Isocrates denigrates the Athenian government of his day in On the Peace and the Areopagiticus are collected by J. Kessler, Isokrates und die panhellenische Idee, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des Altertums 4.3 (Paderborn, 1911), 30–32. See also P. Harding, “The Purpose of Isokrates’ Archidamos and On the Peace,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 6 (1973): 137–49.

15. The text of Isocrates is cited with minor variations from G. Norlin and L. Van Hook, Isocrates, 3 vols. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1928–45).

16. Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1294b, 18ff.

17. Isocrates’ failure to use the expression patrios politeia escaped my notice in reading; it was kindly pointed out to me by Martin Ostwald.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Because of the key role of Plato and Aristotle in shaping the anti-Athenian orientation of Western thought, I have chosen to include rather more bibliographical references in this chapter than elsewhere. I hope the reader will find these more useful than burdensome.

Impressive work on the political thought of Plato and Aristotle began already in the nineteenth century with George Grote’s work on Plato (Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates, 3 vols.) and continued into the twentieth at the hands of thinkers as different as Sir Ernest Barker (Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle [London, 1906] and Greek Political Theory: Plato and His Predecessors [London, 1918]) and Leo Strauss (The City and Man [Charlottesville, Va., 1964]). Interesting thought has continued to unfold throughout the twentieth century.

Helpful modern works on Plato include G. C. Field, Plato and His Contemporaries (London, 1930; reprint, 1967); W. Fite, The Platonic Legend (New York, 1934); Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: The Spell of Plato (London, 1945; reprint, New York and Evanston, 1962, with additions and a response to the attack in Ronald Levinson, In Defense of Plato [Cambridge, Mass., 1953]; on Popper see also see also R. Bambrough, ed., Plato, Popper, and Politics [Cambridge, 1967]); John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago, 1953); Eric A. Have-lock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (London, 1957; reprint, New Haven and London, 1964); J. Luccioni, La pensée politique de Platon (Paris, 1958); H. D. Rankin, Plato and the Individual (London and New York, 1964); W.K.C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 4: Plato: The Man and His Dialogues: Earlier Period (Cambridge, 1975); Alvin Gouldner, Enter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theory (New York, 1965; reprint, New York, 1971); Terence Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory (Ox-ford, 1977); R. W. Hall, Plato (London, 1981); and G. Klosko, The Development of Plato’s Political Theory (New York, 1986). See also the collection of Gregory Vlastos’s essays on Plato in Vlastos, Platonic Studies, 2d ed., with corrections (Princeton, 1981). How Plato might have viewed modern cultures is explored in R.H.S. Crossman’s Plato Today (1937; reprint, New York, 1959). Excerpts from Crossman, Popper, Wild, John Hallowell, Leo Strauss, and Bertrand Russell appear in Thomas L. Thorson, ed., Plato: Totalitarian or Democrat? (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963). Additional responses to Popper appear in R. Robinson, “Dr. Popper’s Defence of Democracy” (1951, reprinted in Robinson’s Essays in Greek Philosophy [Oxford, 1969]) and in Jordan, “The Revolt against Philosophy: The Spell of Popper,” included in John Wild, ed., The Return to Reason (Chicago, 1953). Popper and Levinson are both analyzed in J. Neu, “Plato’s Analogy of the State and Individual: The Republic and the Organic Theory of the State,” Philosophy 46 (1971): 238–54. T. Gomperz, The Greek Thinkers, 4 vols., English translation by L. Magnus and C. G. Berry (London, 1901–12) remains a valuable work, as does Werner Jaeger’s Paedeia (1933): English translation by Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1939–45). The iconoclastic book of Ellen M. and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context (Oxford and New York, 1978) argues that the criticisms made of Athens by these three seminal thinkers are traceable to class bias and are not in fact valid. In this the authors follow the neglected side of Plato so carefully delineated in A. Winspear, The Genesis of Plato’s Thought (New York, 1940).

Bibliography of work on Plato appears in Lustrum 4 (1959) and 5 (1960) for 1950–57, Lustrum 20 (1977) for 1958–75, Lustrum 25 (1983) for 1975–80, and Lustrum 30 (1988) for 1980–85. A good working bibliography appears at the end of Robert W. Hall’s Plato (in the Geraint Parry “Political Thinkers” series [London, 1981]). Hall’s last chapter, on Plato in modern thought, is very useful. More recent work is listed in l’Année philologique.

2. The reliability of Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Oeconomicus as sources for the opinions of the historical Socrates has been variously estimated by scholars. I think both dialogues reflect primarily the views of Xenophon. As Barker has pointed out, “The Athenians would not have put to death the Socrates depicted by Xenophon” (Greek Political Theory, 107). The most intensive treatment of the question is probably that of A.-H. Chroust, Socrates, Man, and Myth: The Two Socratic Apologies of Xenophon (Notre Dame, Ind., 1957), but see also G. Vlastos, “The Paradox of Socrates” in G. Vlastos, ed., The Philosophy of Socrates (New York, 1971), 1–21, and the response of D. Morrison, “On Professor Vlastos’ Xenophon,” Ancient Philosophy 7 (1987): 9–22.

3. T. A. Sinclair observes wittily that it was natural for his contemporaries to think Socrates’ professed ignorance was “a sham and a pose” in view of his devotion to the quest for knowledge by the method of question and answer, since “one cannot help observing that if to the end of his days Socrates still knew nothing, the method cannot have been very effective” (A History of Greek Political Thought [1951; reprint, New York, 1968], 87).

4. A thorough bibliography of work on Crito down to 1983 appears in R. Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton, 1984).

5. An impassioned argument in favor of Socrates’ support for Athenian democracy appears in Popper, The Open Society, 128–29 and 189–91. The nature of Popper’s agenda is revealed by the terms in which he couches his argument. As a critic of Athens and her democratic institutions, Popper writes, Socrates

may have borne a superficial resemblance to some of the leaders of the reaction against the open society. But there is no need for a man who criticizes democracy and democratic institutions to be their enemy, although both the democrats he criticizes, and the totalitarians who hope to profit from any disunion in the democratic camp, are likely to brand him as such. There is a fundamental difference between a democratic and a totalitarian criticism of democracy. Socrates’ criticism was a democratic one, and indeed of the kind that is the very life of democracy. (Democrats who do not see the difference between a friendly and a hostile criticism of democracy are themselves imbued with the totalitarian spirit). (189)

Popper is answered directly by Kraut in the section on “Popper’s Socrates” on pp. 203–7 of Socrates and the State. The search for the historical Socrates is the subject of Alban Winspear and Tom Silverberg, Who Was Socrates? (New York, 1939). The authors conclude that from an early position as a liberal student of the sciences Socrates developed into a hardened conservative. Combining the evidence of Plato and Xenophon (see n. 2), Wood and Wood in Class Ideology (esp. in chap. 3) see Socrates as a class-conscious critic of the Athenian system.

The evidence concerning Chaerephon and Lysias is forcefully presented in G. Vlastos, “The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy,” Political Theory 11 (1983): 495–516, but just as cogently refuted by E. and N. Wood in “Socrates and Democracy: A Reply to Gregory Vlastos” in Political Theory 14 (1986): 55–82. On the political ambiguities of Socrates’ positions, see F. S. Whelan, “Socrates and the ‘Meddlesomeness’ of the Athenians,” History of Political Thought 4 (1983): 1–27. I cannot agree with Whelan that Plato never portrays Socrates as condemning Athenian imperialism. The question of Plato’s attitude toward the Athenian empire is extremely complex. An important article with valuable bibliography is S. Dusanic, “Plato’s Atlantis,” L’Anti-quité Classique 51 (1982): 25–52.

6. Useful twentieth-century editions of the Gorgias are that of Dodds, a revised Greek text with introduction and commentary (Plato Gorgias [Oxford, 1959]) and, more recently, of Terence Irwin, Plato Gorgias, translated into English with notes (Ox-ford, 1979). On political life and Gorgias see A. Saxonhouse, “An Unspoken Theme in Plato’s Gorgias: War,” Interpretation 11 (1983): 139–69, and B. Calvert, “The Politicians of Athens in the Gorgias and Meno,” History of Political Thought (Exeter), vol. 5 (1984): 1–15.

7. I have profited enormously from conversations about Gorgias with a number of colleagues, most particularly Stephen Carter, Elaine Fantham, Andrew Ford, Barry Goldfarb, Michael Miller, C. Jan Swearingen, and Peter Euben, who was kind enough to provide me with a copy of some work in progress.

8. Editions of Plato’s Laws include E. B. England, ed., The Laws of Plato, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1921), and R. G. Bury, ed. and trans., The Laws, 2 vols. (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1926) (Loeb Classical Library, with facing English translation; this is the translation I have cited in the text. The Budé edition by E. Des Places and A. Dies with Greek text and French translation includes important commentary. The Laws have been translated into English by T. Saunders (Harmondsworth, 1970) and Thomas Pangle (New York, 1980, with interpretive essay). Studies of the Laws appear in Glenn Morrow, Plato’s Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the Laws (Princeton, 1960); Leo Strauss, The Argument and Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago, 1975); and R. F. Stalley, An Introduction to Plato’s Laws (Indianapolis, 1983). A useful review of Morrow is by C. Hahn, Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 418–24.

Bibliography up to 1975 on the Laws was compiled by T. Saunders, Bibliography on Plato’s Laws (New York, 1976).

9. On Greek attitudes toward naval power see Momigliano’s “Sea Power in Greek Thought,” Classical Review 58 (1944): 1–7. Momigliano suggests that Thucydides was familiar with the pamphlet of the Old Oligarch and that Pericles’ last speech (2.60–64) was directed at its arguments about naval power, and argues that Thucydides 4.85.4 is a rejoinder to the Old Oligarch’s 2.5. Aristotle, Momigliano contends, was more positive about sea power. “A famous passage of the Politics (VIII. 3, p. 1327a II),” he writes, “obviously aimed at the Laws, waters down Platonic intransigence into typical Aristotelian compromise” (5).

10. Editions of the Republic include J. Adam, ed. The Republic of Plato, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1902); D. J. Allan, ed., Plato, The Republic Book I (London, 1940; reprint, London, 1953); and Paul Shorey, ed. and trans., The Republic of Plato, 2 vols. (London, 1930) (Loeb Classical Library, with facing English translation). Helpful English translations include F. Cornford, The Republic of Plato (Oxford, 1941), and the very different rendition of A. Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York, 1968).

A great deal has been written on the Republic. The best and most important works for the purposes of studying Plato’s attitude toward Athenian government are Barker, Greek Political Theory, 168–313; T. A. Sinclair, A History of Greek Political Thought, chap. 8; H. Rankin, Plato and the Individual; J. Neu, “Plato’s Analogy of the State and Individual,” Philosophy 46 (1971): 238–54; J. Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford, 1981); and M. Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate (Albany, 1987). See also C.D.C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s “Republic” (Princeton, 1988), and S. Benardete, Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic (Chicago and London, 1989), 189–213.

11. On Plato’s eugenics and the noble lie, see H. Rankin, Plato and the Individual, chaps. 3–4. J. Faris, “Is Plato’s a Caste State?” CQ 44 (1950): 38–43, takes issue with Popper’s contention (with which I agree) that citizens born into the wrong class by mistake may be moved down but not up.

12. My translations from the Republic are taken from Cornford, The Republic of Plato.

13. Opinions about whether or not Plato intended to describe Athens in his portrait of the democratic state range from Barker’s contention “that Athens is the basis of his sketch of democracy is obvious” (Greek Political Theory, 290) to Wild’s insistence that “no safe conclusion concerning Plato’s attitude toward his mother city can be drawn from the formalistic discussions of Book VIII of the Republic” (Thorson, 106). (Living two generations before Wild, Barker could not have been expected to heed his caveat.) The best discussion to my mind is that of Julia Annas in The Republic of Plato, 299–305. Although most of my own conclusions were reached independently, still the similarity of my own line of thinking to that of Annas is evident in the text. On Plato and the historical Athens see also Field, 128–29; Popper, 189ff. and 294; Winspear, Genesis, 168–70; and Fite, Platonic Legend, 152. I have not yet been able to consult S. Dusanic, “Platon et Athènes,” Ziva Antike (Skopje), vol. 31 (1981): 135–56, where it is apparently argued that Plato’s attitude to Athens is not fundamentally negative.

14. On the controversy over the status of women in classical Athens, see chap. 12.

15. These possible historical foundations for Plato’s reasoning here are explored in Morrow, Plato’s Cretan City.

16. The wise judgment of Sinclair on Plato comes to mind: “His talents were altogether remarkable…. What indeed in the intellectual or artistic sphere could he not have been, except a historian?” (“For Plato,” he goes on, “historical truth hardly deserved the name”) (History of Greek Political Thought, 121–22).

17. I have chosen to omit the discussion of Athenian democracy in Plato’s Menexenus because of the tremendously vexed question of the dialogue’s genre: strong arguments can be made out in favor of both straightforwardness and parody. The difficulties standing in the way of determining Plato’s purpose here seem to me overwhelming. The Menexenus is treated at length in Nicole Loraux’s The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (orig. French ed., 1981; English trans. by A. Sheridan, Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

18. Bibliography on the controversy over the authority of the seventh letter appears in H. Tarrant, “Middle Platonism and the Seventh Epistle,” Phronesis 28, no. 1 (1983): 92–93.

19. J. Moravcsik argues that many of Plato’s social and political views represented “a conscious attempt to contrast with Periclean conceptions of freedom and democracy a new point of view” (“Plato and Pericles on Freedom and Politics,” in F. Pelletier and J. King-Farlow, New Essays on Plato [Guelph, Ontario, 1983], 1). On the connection between freedom and democracy, see K. Raaflaub, “Democracy, Oligarchy, and the Concept of the ‘Free Citizen’ in Late Fifth-Century Athens,” Political Theory 11 (1983): 517–44.

20. On the political thought of Xenophon see J. Luccioni, Les Idées politiques et sociales de Xenophon (Paris, 1948), and W. Higgins, Xenophon the Athenian (Albany, 1977).

21. Despite his enormous influence on European thought, considerably less has been written on the political work of Aristotle. Helpful works include C. I. McIlwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the West (London, 1932); A. E. Taylor, Aristotle (rev. ed., London, 1943); M. Hamburger, Morals and Law: The Growth of Aristotle’s Legal Theory (New Haven, 1951); E. Vögelin, Order and Society, vol. 3: Plato and Aristotle (Baton Rouge, 1957); D. J. Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle (London, Oxford, and New York, 1970); A.-H. Chroust, Aristotle: New Light on His Life and on Some of His Lost Works, 2 vols. (London, 1973); John B. Morrall, Aristotle, in the Geraint Parry “Political Thinkers” series (London, 1977); R. G. Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory: An Introduction for Students of Political Theory (Oxford, 1977); C. Lord, Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca and London, 1982); W. von Leyden, Aristotle on Equality and Justice: His Political Argument (New York, 1985); S. Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1990); and M. Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (Savage, Md., 1992).

A number of articles on the Politics are collected in La Politique d’Aristote, Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique XI (Geneva, 1965). Other useful articles include M. Wheeler, “Aristotle’s Analysis of the Nature of the Political Struggle,” AJP 72 (1951): 145–61; J. de Romilly, “Le Classement des constitutions d’Herodote a Aristote,” REG 72 (1959): 81–99; G. Morrow, “Aristotle’s Comments on Plato’s Laws,” in I. Düring and G. E. Owen, eds., Aristotle and Plato in the Mid–Fourth Century (Göteborg, 1960), 145–62; M. Chambers, “Aristotle’s ‘Forms of Democracy,’” TAPA 92 (1961): 20–36; W. T. Bluhm, “The Place of the Policy in Aristotle’s Theory of the Ideal State,” Journal of Politics 24 (1962): 743–53; R. G. Mulgan, “Aristotle and the Democratic Conception of Freedom,” in B. Harris, ed., Auckland Classical Essays (Auckland and Oxford, 1970), 95–111; S. Cashdollar, “Aristotle’s Politics of Morals,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 145–60; R. Brandt, “Untersuchungen zur politischen Philosophie des Aristoteles,” Hermes 102 (1974): 191–96; F. Rosen, “The Political Context of Aristotle’s Categories of Justice,” Phronesis 20 (1975): 228–40; D. Dobbs, “Aristotle’s Anti-communism,” American Journal of Political Science 29, no. 1 (1985): 40–41; G. Huxley, “On Aristotle’s Best State,” History of Political Thought 6 (1985): 139–49; and L. Rubin, “Aristotle’s Criticism of Socratic Political Unity in Plato’s Republic,” in Politikos (Selected Papers of the North American Chapter of the Society for Greek Political Thought), vol. 1 (Pittsburgh, 1989), 93–121. Bibliography on Aristotle’s political theory appears in Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 139–52; subsequent work is listed in L’Année philologique.

22. The fascination that peasants held for conservative Greek thinkers is treated wittily by L. B. Carter in The Quiet Athenian (Oxford and New York, 1986).

23. I cite the Politics in the translation of Ernest Barker (Oxford, 1946). Other translations into English include those of Sinclair (rev. T. Saunders, Harmondsworth, 1981); C. Lord (Chicago, 1984); and S. Everson (Cambridge, 1988).

24. Aristotle’s equivocation about the role of the banausoi in the ideal politeia is discussed in C. Johnson, “Who Is Aristotle’s Citizen?” Phronesis 29, no. 1 (1984): 73–90, esp. 84–86. On the whole, Johnson takes a different view of Aristotle’s position from the one I do, grounding it in the inconsistencies of citizenship rights among the various existing Greek constitutions.

25. On Aristotle’s response to the Laws in particular, see G. R. Morrow, “Aristotle’s Comments on Plato’s Laws,” in I. Düring and G.E.L. Owen, eds., Aristotle and Plato in the Mid–Fourth Century, 147–62. Morrow may well be right in suggesting that Aristotle had access to an earlier draft of the Laws that differed in some respects from the one available today. Aristotle’s response to Plato in the matter of political theory is discussed in Nichols, Socrates and the Political Community, 153–80.

26. On the different kinds of equality (with particular reference to Aristotle) see D. Keyt, “Distributive Justice in Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics,” Topoi 4 (1985): 23–45, and chap. 3, “Justifiable Inequality and the Different Kinds of Civic Excellence,” in W. von Leyden, Aristotle on Equality and Justice: His Political Argument (New York, 1985).

27. On Aristotle and democracy, see D. H. Frank, “Aristotle on Freedom in the Politics,” Prudentia 15 (1983): 109–16, and Barry Strauss, “On Aristotle’s Critique of Athenian Democracy,” in C. Lord and D. O’Connor, eds., Essays on the Foundations of Aristotelian Political Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991). I have not yet been able to consult M. Bastit, “Aristote et la démocratie,” Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique (Caen University), no. 2, (1982): 7–9. Conflicting modern views of this subject are discussed by Nichols in Socrates and the Political Community, 1–6.

28. On Aristotle’s equivocation concerning citizenship see C. Johnson (cited in n. 24) as well as H. von Arnim, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Aristotelischen Politik (Vienna, 1924), 35–37; C. Mossé, “La Conception du citoyen dans la Politique d’Aristote,” Eirene 6 (1957): 17–21; E. Braun, Das Dritte Buch der Aristotelischen “Politik” (Vienna, 1965); E. Levy, “Cité et citoyen dans la Politique d’Aristote,” Ktema 5 (1980) 223–48; P. Gauthier, “La citoyenneté en Grèce et Rome,” Ktema 6 (1981): 167–79; and most recently L. Bescond, “Remarques sur la conception aristotelicienne de la citoyenneté,” Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique (Caen University), no. 4 (1983), 23–24.

29. On the different kinds of mousike suited to people with and without capacity for growth, see C. Lord, Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle (Ithaca and London, 1982), 138–46.

30. I cite the Ethics in the translation of J.A.K. Thomson, The Ethics of Aristotle (1953; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1973).

31. Aristotle’s unsystematic use of evidence is treated in G.J.D. Aalders, “Die Mischverfassung und ihre historische Dokumentation in den Politica des Aristoteles,” La Politique d’Aristote, 219–37. See also G. Huxley, “On Aristotle’s Historical Methods,” GRBS 13 (1972): 157–69; R. Weil, Aristote et l’histoire (Paris, 1960); and K. Adshead, “Aristotle, Politics v. 2. 7 (1302B34–1303A11),” Historia 35 (1986) 372–77. The relationship of Aristotle’s dicta on democracy and his thinking about Athens itself is discussed in B. Strauss, “On Aristotle’s Critique of Athenian Democracy.”

CHAPTER FIVE

1. On the Roman view of the comparative antiquity of the Roman republic and classical Athens see e.g., Cicero, Brutus 10.39–41.

2. Greek attitudes toward Romans throughout the republic and empire are discussed in Bettie Forte, Rome and the Romans as the Greeks Saw Them, Papers and Monographs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 24 (Rome, 1972); on Roman attitudes toward Greeks see chap. 3.1 of J.P.V.S. Balsdon, Romans and Aliens (London, 1979).

3. I cite the Aeneid from Allen Mandelbaum’s translation (New York, 1961), 6.1129–37 (lines 6.837–53 of the original).

4. Early points of contact between Greeks and Romans have been traced in Forte, Rome and the Romans as the Greeks Saw Them, 5–93; N. Petrochilos, Roman Attitudes to the Greeks (Athens, 1974), 15; and Erich Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), 1.253–55. The unfolding of relations between Greeks and Romans is treated in R. Syme, “The Greeks under Roman Rule,” in his Roman Papers, ed. E. Badian (Oxford, 1979), 566–81. A modern perspective with particular reference to the interaction of ethnic groups in South Africa is provided in T. J. Haarhoff, The Stranger at the Gate: Aspects of Exclusiveness and Co-Operation in Ancient Greece and Rome, with Some Reference to Modern Times (London and New York, 1938).

5. W. W. Tarn (Alexander the Great, vol. 2 [Cambridge, 1948], 21–26) offers a strong argument against the historicity of the embassy. Discussion of the problem along with comprehensive bibliography appears in Piero Treves, Il mito di Alessandro e la Roma d’Augusto (Milan and Naples, 1953), 27–29.

6. Examples are attested in Forte, Rome and the Romans as the Greeks Saw Them, 9–11.

7. See Mostellaria, 20–24, 64–65, 958–60; Bacchides, 742–43, 812–13; Truculentus, 86–87; Poenulus, 600–603.

8. Cicero De Oratore 2.4, 1.82, 1.102, 1.105, cited by Gruen, The Hellenistic World 2.264.

9. As Gruen points out (The Hellenistic World, 257). Cato’s position on Greek studies has been difficult for scholars to pin down. A recent discussion and bibliography appears in Alan Astin, Cato the Censor (Oxford, 1978), chap. 8, “Cato and the Greeks.”

10. Pro Flacco, 62. I cite the oration in the translation of L. Lord in the Loeb Classical Library’s Cicero, In Catilinam, Pro Flacco, Pro Murena, Pro Sulla (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1978). Praise of Athens as the flower of Greece, mother of eloquence, the arts, and intellectual cultivation in general also appear at, e.g., De Natura Deorum 3.82; De Legibus 2.36; Brutus 26, 39, 50, and 332; De Oratore 1.13; De Optimo Genere Oratorum 7.

On the background of the trial see T.B.L. Webster, ed., M. Tulli Ciceronis Pro L. Flacco Oratio (Oxford, 1931).

11. It was inevitable that as anxious and complex a Roman as Cicero should have suffered from painful ambivalence about the Greeks. A tremendous number of valuable citations on this topic are collected in the doctoral thesis of Sister M. A. Trouard, O. P., “Cicero’s Attitude towards the Greeks” (Chicago, 1942). See also the thoughtful article by the same name by H. Guite in Greece and Rome, 2d ser., 9 (1962): 142–59, especially the last page, on which Guite describes Cicero as a “novus homo, forever looking over his shoulder.”

12. Contiones and their relationship to the Roman political process are discussed in L. R. Taylor, Roman Voting Assemblies (Ann Arbor, 1966), 15–33; appendix A to the Loeb edition cited in n. 10; and in F. Metaxaki-Mitrou, “Violence in the Contio during the Ciceronian Age,” L’Antiquité Classique 54 (1985): 180–87.

13. Cicero’s references to Themistocles are listed s.v. “Themistocles” in I. C. Orelius and I. G. Baiterus, Onomasticon Tullianum (Hildesheim, 1965); see also H. Berthold, “Die Gestalt des Themistokles bei M. Tullius Cicero,” Klio 43–45 (1965): 38–48; and A. Podlecki, The Life of Themistocles, 115–17.

14. I cite De Republica in the Loeb Classical Library translation of C. W. Keyes (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1928).

15. The careful schema of the six constitutions, which Polybius sees as a cycle rather than as the progressive decline suggested by Plato, may in fact have been developed without knowledge of Aristotle. Kurt von Fritz in his important study of The Theory of the Mixed Constitution in Antiquity: A Critical Analysis of Polybius’ Political Ideas (New York, 1954) argues that Polybius, though influenced by Plato’s Republic, had not read the Politics, and that the cyclical concept originated in any event with Polybius.

16. On the lost historians of classical Greece, see n. 22.

17. I suspect Wardman (Rome’s Debt to Greece [London, 1976], 79) is a little hard on Nepos in arguing that his “apparent tolerance for Greek ways” is essentially a stratagem designed to facilitate flattering comparisons with Rome. Wardman is probably correct, however, in ascribing the general indifference to Greek political history among Nepos’s contemporaries to the Romans’ conviction that Greeks were liars anyhow (Rome’s Debt to Greece, chaps. 1, 4); why would such notoriously eloquent characters confine themselves to the truth in recounting the exploits of their own people? Sallust was not alone in suggesting (Bellum Catilinae 2.2) that the glories of Greek history had gained a good bit in the telling.

18. For a later allusion to Solon’s purported exile, see chap. 6, p. 340, n. 12.

19. Cf. Cicero’s Scipio in De Republica 1.35.55 on the differing motivation of aristocrats and democrats (p. 103).

20. A detailed discussion of Aristides’ relationship to his sources in the Panathenaic oration appears in J. W. Day, The Glory of Athens: The Popular Tradition as Reflected in the Panathenaicus of Aelius Aristides (Chicago, 1980).

21. The speeches of Aristides are cited in the translation of C. A. Behr, P. Aelius Aristides: The Complete Works, vol. 1 (Leiden, 1986).

22. The theory that Plutarch followed primarily a single Hellenistic source that served as a transmitter of earlier sources was advocated in 1899 by Eduard Meyer (“Die Biographie Kimons,” Forschungen zur alten Geschichte, vol. 2 [Halle], 1–87) and enjoyed respectability for a while because of Meyer’s distinguished reputation, but it does not seem likely to me, and it has been rejected by several twentieth-century scholars including F. Frost (Plutarch’s Themistocles [Princeton, 1980]).

Good recent discussions of Plutarch’s sources (now lost) for Athenian politics appear in A. J. Podlecki, The Life of Themistocles: A Critical Survey of the Literary and Archaeological Evidence, and P. Stadter, A Commentary on Plutarch’s Pericles (Chapel Hill and London, 1989); see also G. L. Barber, The Historian Ephorus (Cambridge, 1935); F. Jacoby, Atthis (Oxford, 1949); and W. R. Connor, Theopompus and Fifth-Century Athens (Cambridge, Mass., 1968).

23. On Plutarch and Plato see R. M. Jones, The Platonism of Plutarch (New York, 1916); and A. Wardman, Plutarch’s Lives (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), 203–11.

24. The political opinions of Plutarch are discussed in R. Hirzel, Plutarch (Leipzig, 1912); R. H. Barrow, Plutarch and His Times (London, 1967); C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome (Oxford, 1971); and Wardman, Plutarch’s Lives, 197–220. A good recent discussion of Plutarch’s connections between Greek democracy and Roman political life appears in C.B.R. Pelling, “Plutarch and Roman Politics,” Past Perspectives (Cambridge, 1986), 159–87.

25. Pericles 1–2. With the exception of the life of Phocion, from which I have made my own translations, citations from Plutarch’s lives of Athenian statesmen are cited in this chapter from the translation of I. Scott-Kilvert, Plutarch: The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives (London, 1960).

26. On Themistocles and Plutarch see the studies of Podlecki and Frost cited in n. 22.

27. On Plutarch and Pericles see A. Podlecki, Plutarch: Life of Pericles (Bristol, 1987); and Stadter, Commentary.

28. The silence of Thucydides, the absence of harsh verdicts on Athenian generals prior to Paches’ trial, and the rarity of suicide in fifth-century Athens cast considerable doubt on Plutarch’s melodramatic account of this development.

29. Ephialtes, he alleges (citing Plato) had “poured out neat a full draught of freedom for the people and made them unmanageable, so that they nibbled at Euboea and trampled on the islands, like a horse which can no longer bear to obey the rein” (Pericles 7.6, citing Plato, Republic 562c). He ascribes the demotion of the Areopagus from its original position of prestige to the people’s breaking loose from all control while Cimon was away, and Cimon’s subsequent ostracism he attributes to demagogues trying to stir up the populace against him by reviving old scandals. Pericles in his earlier demagogic days was ready to give way to the people’s caprices “which were shifting and changeable as the winds” (Pericles 15.2). Cleon, he maintains (citing the comic poets), bought the favor of the multitude and made “the basest and most unsound element of the people his associates against the best” (Praecepta Rei Publicae Aerendae 806E–F. I cite the Precepts of Statecraft in the Loeb Classical Library translation of H. N. Fowler, Plutarch’s Moralia [14 vols.], vol. 10 [Cambridge and London, 1936]).

30. To be sure, it is not always possible to peg the Athenians as the particular object of Plutarch’s censure when he is discussing democracy—when, for example he writes that “the masses always smile upon him who gives to them and does them favours, granting him an ephemeral and uncertain reputation” (Praecepta 821F) or that an ochlos “is not a simple and easy thing for any chance person” to control but rather one “must be satisfied if the multitude accept authority without shying, like a suspicious and capricious beast, at face or voice,” or that there is “in every democracy a spirit of malice and fault-finding directed against men in public life” (813A). Still, it is no coincidence that it is the Athenian comic dramatists whom he quotes when he is lambasting democracies for their choice of leaders (e.g., 801A–B).

31. Petrochilos (Roman Attitudes to the Greeks) offers some particularly sensitive remarks about this phenomenon on pp. 197–200. Certainly the orator and historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote a long history of Rome in twenty books around the time of the birth of Christ, used Greek history chiefly for rhetorical effect, to flatter the Romans by comparison. An admirer of Rome for the longevity of its imperial sway, Dionysius was quick to point out the short-lived nature of both the Athenian and the Spartan empires (1.3.2–3). A contextual treatment of Dionysius and the Greeks appears in H. Hill, “Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the Origins of Rome,” Journal of Roman Studies 51 (1961): 88–93.

32. Frank Frost writes eloquently that the Lives “became the plaything of an intellectual haut monde that shared Plutarch’s preoccupation with virtue and his interest in man as a moral animal” and ascribes his popularity to the fact that “Plutarch is unique in his ability to be inoffensive without being dull. His strictures against inhumanity and abuse of privilege have warmed liberal spirits to a degree comfortably below the point of combustion while his obvious preference for enlightened autocracy has found him a favored position in the libraries of the most unenlightened despots” (Plutarch’s Themistocles, 40–41).

CHAPTER SIX

1. Portions of this chapter appeared in Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 15 (1987): 25–41, although the conclusions I have reached here are somewhat different.

2. On the state of Greek in the Western empire during the Middle Ages, see J. E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship from the Sixth Century B.C. to the End of the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 1906), 458–68; as well as L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (Oxford, 1968.)

3. A general survey of medieval writings about ancient history is offered in E. M. Sanford, “The Study of Ancient History in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Ideas 5 (1944): 21–43. For demokratia as chaos in the streets, see G. I. Bratianu, “Empire et ‘Démocratie’ a Byzance,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 37 (1937): 86–111, esp. 86–91, followed by A. Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford, 1976), 305–6. The new meanings of demos and its derivatives at Byzantium are discussed in Cameron, 34–44.

4. 2.16–26. The text was edited by Hofmeister and appears in the Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum (Hanover and Leipzig, 1912.) It has been translated into English with notes and introduction by C. C. Mierow as The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146A.D. by Otto, Bishop of Freising (New York, 1928). Mierow calls attention to Otto’s difficulties with Orosius (171n–73n).

5. J. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1908), 20.

6. On the discovery of the Greek world during the Italian Renaissance, see R. Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1988), 131–44.

7. De Institutione Reipublicae Libri IX, ad Senatum Populumque Senensem Scripti (ca. 1460) and De Regno et Regis Institutione Libri IX, ad Alphonsum Aragonium inclytum ac celeberrimum Calabriae Ducem Scripti (ca. 1485): reprinted together in 1608.

8. De Institutione 62, 369.

9. Ibid., 43.

10. Ibid., 268.

11. De Regno, 306–7.

12. Ibid., 17–18, 430.

13. These rallying cries of antiquity are examined in such works as M. Pohlenz, Griechische Freiheit (Heidelberg, 1955); E. Bickerman, “Autonomia,” Revue Internationale des Droits de l’Antiquité 5 (1958): 313–44; C. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge, 1960); J. Bleicken, Staatliche Ordnung und Freiheit in der Römischen Republik (Kallmünz, 1972); M. Ostwald, Autonomia: Its Genesis and Early History, (Chico, Calif., 1983); and K. Raaflaub, Die Entdeckung der Freiheit (Munich, 1985). On the use of libertas by Bruni and Salutati, see R. G. Witt, Coluccio Salutati and the Public Letters (Geneva, 1976).

14. Elizabeth Rawson (The Spartan Tradition in European Thought [Oxford, 1969]) sees medieval chronicles as unwittingly paving the way for this parallel by crediting Athens alone with the victory over the Persians, but she cites no sources.

15. From the Risponsiva, reprinted in D. Moreni’s edition of the Invectiva Lini Colucci Salutati in Antonium Luschum Vicentinum (Florence, 1826), 246–47.

16. Editions of the Laudatio appear in Studi medievali, 3d ser., 8 (1967): 529–54; and H. Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago, 1968), 217–65. An English translation can be found in The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society, ed. B. Kohl, R. Witt, and E. Welles (Philadelphia, 1978), 135–75. Bruni’s use of Aristides is discussed at length by Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1955), chap. 9. A good bibliographical background to the Laudatio has been assembled by Witt in The Earthly Republic, 121–33.

17. Reprinted in E. Baluze and G. Manzi, Miscellanea novo ordine digesta et … aucta (Lucca, 1761–64), 4.2–7.

18. Il Paradiso degli Alberti, ed. A. Lanza (Rome, 1975), esp. 43–44.

19. The essay of Alamanno Rinuccini is translated by Reneé Neu Watkins in her anthology Humanism and Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence (Columbia, S.C., 1979), 186–224. Corsi’s depiction of Florence as “Athenae alterae” appears in the dedication to his life of Ficino, reprinted in P. Villani, Liber de Civitatis Famosis Civibus ex codice mediceo laurentiano nunc primum editus et fr Florentinorum litteratura principes fere Synchroni scriptores, ed. Gustavus Galletti (Florence, 1847), 189.

20. See, e.g., Baron, Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice (Cambridge, Mass., 1955), 5; Robert Lopez, The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance (Charlottesville, 1970), 72; James Cleugh, The Medici: A Tale of Fifteen Generations (Garden City, N.J., 1975), 1.

21. Reprinted in Florence, 1529.

22. N. Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, cited in the edition of S. Bertelli, Il Principe e Discorsi (Milan, 1960), 3.6. Machiavelli also imagines (Discorsi 3.31) that the Persian king with whom Themistocles sought refuge was Darius rather than Artaxerxes.

Long passages from Machiavelli’s Discorsi cited in English are from the translation of Luigi Ricci, revised by E.R.P. Vincent, in The Prince and the Discourses (New York, 1950), with the exception of the epigram to this chapter, which is translated by Allan Gilbert in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others (Durham, 1965).

The literature on Machiavelli is vast. In addition to the works cited below, I have drawn particular profit from J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). The Discorsi are discussed there on pp. 183–218, but see also the discussion of Il Principe, 156–82.

23. Did Machiavelli know Greek? The answer is uncertain and hangs in part on the availability in Latin of book 6 of Polybius and of Plutarch’s Praecepta regendae reipublicae.

24. Discorsi 1.2; Ricci, 110. Machiavelli also mentions the alleged eight-century duration of Lycurgus’s unchanged system earlier in this same chapter (129–30).

25. Discorsi 1.2; Ricci, 115.

26. Incisive remarks concerning this ambivalence appear throughout Mark Hulliung’s Citizen Machiavelli (Princeton, 1983) (see n. 33) and in Philip Ralph, The Renaissance in Perspective (New York, 1973), 57–58.

27. Discorsi 2.2; Ricci, 282, and Discorsi 1.58; Ricci, 264.

28. Discorsi, 2.59; Ricci, 268.

29. Discorsi, 2.53; Ricci, 249–50.

30. Discorsi, 1.2; Ricci, 115.

31. The Machiavellian Moment, 54, 53.

32. For all his iconoclasm, Machiavelli in reality embodied in many ways what Pocock identifies as the late medieval and Renaissance tendency to find the particular “less intelligible and less rational than the universal” (The Machiavellian Moment, 4).

33. Mark Hulliung, Citizen Machiavelli, 47–48.

34. Praise of Pericles appears, for example, in the Discorso di Logrogno (in the Opere Inedite, ed. P. and L. Guicciardini [Florence, 1958], the edition to which further citations to Guicciardini refer), 287; in the Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze, 434; in the Oratio Consolatoria, 494; in the Oratio Defensoria, 576; and in the Considerazioni sui Discorsi del Machiavelli, 666.

35. Dialogo del Reggimento di Firenze, 402. On this work, see Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 219–71, and the more general discussion of Guicciardini, 114–55.

36. Opere Inedite, 258–59.

37. The evils of popular trials are discussed ibid., 621.

38. Ibid., 258–59.

39. Ibid., 295, 625, 443.

40. Giannotti’s remarks appear in his Discorso intorno alla Forma della Repubblica di Firenze in his Opere Politiche e Letterarie, ed. F.-L. Polidori (Florence, 1850), 1.137–38.

41. In the Opere 1.200.

42. Reprinted ibid., vol. 2.

43. Zera Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, 1945), 33.

44. On the truly astonishing proportions that the myth of Venice attained in the Renaissance, see, for example, the chapter “The Most Serene Republic” in Fink, Classical Republicans; “Venice and the Political Education of Europe,” in William Bouwsma’s Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968); Oliver Logan, “The Mythology of Venice,” in Culture and Society in Venice, 1470–1790: The Renaissance and Its Heritage (New York, 1972); Myron Gilmore, “Myth and Reality in Venetian Political Theory,” in J. R. Hale, ed., Venice (Totowa, N.J., 1973); and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 272–330.

45. Gasparo Contarini, De Republica Venetorum libri V (1543); Trajano Boccalini, Ragguagli di Parnaso and Pietra del paragone Politico, both published in 1613 when Boccalini was dead and translated into English in 1626 as The new-found politicke, wherein the governments, greatnesse and power of the most notable kingdomes and common-wealths of the world are discovered and censured.

46. The treatise Della perfettione della Vita Politica Libri Tre, Ne’ quali si ragiona delle virtù Morali, e di tutto ciò, che s’apartiene alla Felicità civile was published in 1579; the Discorsi Politici, in 1599.

47. I cite from the Venice, 1586, edition of the Perfettione and from the Venice, 1629, edition of the Discorsi. References to the virtues of Sparta: Perfettione, 439, Discorsi, 13, 25, 156, 209.

48. Discorsi, 439.

49. Ibid., 19.

50. Ibid., 26.

51. Perfettione, 70; Discorsi, 211, 229.

52. Discorsi, 118–20.

53. Trattato, 74.

54. Cited in Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1980), 195. On humanists and history, see the observations of Paul Kristeller in Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York, 1965), especially pp. 27 and 65.

55. On Machiavelli’s classical sources, see Leslie J. Walker, S.J., The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli (New Haven, 1950; new ed., London, 1975). Vital information concerning the availability and use of historical texts is gathered in Peter Burke, “A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 135–52; on Plutarch in particular, see Burke, 142–43, and R. Hirzel, Plutarch (Leipzig, 1912).

56. Philip Ralph, The Renaissance in Perspective, 57.

57. Benedetto Croce comments on “the difficulty that philologists and critics [during the Renaissance] experienced in persuading themselves that the Greek and Roman writers had perhaps been able to deceive themselves, to lie, to falsify, to be led astray by passions and blinded by ignorance, in the same way as those of the Middle Ages” (History: Its Theory and Practice [1915], trans. D. Ainslee [New York, 1960], 227).

58. Opere, vol. 1, 17.

59. Figures are cited in Martines, Power and Imagination, 148; see also F. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, 1965), 20.

60. Fink, The Classical Republicans, 12. I wonder whether it is to this calculated oversimplification as well that we should trace not only Machiavelli’s failure to consider the helots—which may be interpreted more simply as an attempt to give the Spartans a better press—but also his repeated contention in the Discorsi that the Spartans had only one king, than which he had every reason to know better.

61. Instructive illustrations of the Renaissance reduction of history to anecdote are collected and analyzed in Paul Grendler, “Francesco Sansovino and Italian Popular History, 1560–1600,” Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 139–80.

62. Felix Gilbert, “The Renaissance Interest in History,” in C. Singleton, Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance (Baltimore, 1967), 373; Paul Grendler, “Francesco Sansovino,” 176.

63. L. Bruni Epistolarum libri VIII, e.g., 1.5, 2.1.

64. C. C. Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence (Toronto, 1961), 396.

65. The passage is cited in translation by E. Emerton in Humanism and Tyranny (Cambridge, Mass., 1925), 47. The comparative indifference of many of Bruni’s contemporaries to the fine points of Hellenic history may perhaps be indexed by Matteo Palmieri’s reference to Epaminondas—the Lacedaemonian! (Della Vita Civile [1st extant ed., Florence, 1529], 46). But none of these lapses should blind us to the significant improvement in the understanding of Hellenic civilization ushered in by the discovery of the Greek language—and by the translation of Greek texts into Latin: the lapses of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars do not on the whole compare to the fourteenth. Witness, for example, the opening of Salutati’s essay De Tyranno, in which the word is derived from the Greek tyros, meaning brave, and, according to Salutati, was used by the early Greeks and Italians to signify their kings, coming to have a pejorative connotation only as kings came to rule oppressively (cited by Emerson, 74–75).

66. Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), 7.

67. Historiarum florentini populi libri xii (reprint, Florence, 1855–1860), 3.8.

68. De Regno, 96.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1. The origins of classical studies in Britain are traced in M. Creighton, The Early Renaissance in England (Cambridge, 1895), and in Sandys’s History of Classical Scholarship 2.219–50.

2. The Governor 1.10 (p. 28 in S. E. Lehmberg’s modernized Everyman edition) (London and New York, 1962).

3. Ibid., 1.2 (Everyman ed., 6).

4. Ibid., (Everyman ed., 10).

5. Ibid., 1.14 (Everyman ed., 56).

6. De Republica Anglorum 1.3. I cite the tract in the 1970 Scolar Press facsimile reprint (Menston, England) of the first published edition of 1583.

7. Ibid., 1.4.

8. On the perceived value of Greek studies in sixteenth-century England, see Sandys, History 2.230, 235. Elizabeth, Ascham reports, never missed a day in her Greek studies, working on Demosthenes and Isocrates and using Ascham’s method of daily translation.

9. Starnes maintains that what Floyd did not garner from Elyot was pirated from Nicholas Ling’s Politeuphuia, Wits Commonwealth (1597) (“The Picture of a Perfit Common Wealth” [1600]: Studies in English, no. 11, University of Texas Bulletin 3133 [1 September 1931]: 32–41).

10. Floyd, 15.

11. Ibid., 19.

12. Ibid., 83–84 and 120. Floyd may be confusing Solon’s voluntary travel with the involuntary travel of exile and ostracism; see chap. 5, p. 106, here, on Valerius Maximus’s description of Solon as dying in Cyprus profugus. He makes a more conspicuous error at p. 292 where he cites Plutarch as maintaining that Antiphon, when asked by Dionysius the tyrant what the best kind of copper was, replied that “in his opinion that was the most excellent, whereof the Athenians had made the pictures of the two tyraunts, Armodius and Aristogiton.” The reference is to the life of Antiphon in the Lives of the Ten Orators (probably not by Plutarch), 833B, where of course Harmodius and Aristogiton are not called tyrants. Perhaps “tyraunts” replaced “tyrannicides” at the hands of a distracted copyist.

13. I cite the Methodus in the translation of Beatrice Reynolds, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (New York, 1945). All page references are to the Reynolds translation. On the political thought of Bodin in its context, see J. H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973); and N. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1980) (with comprehensive bibliography).

14. Method, 267.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 187. Bodin’s independence of mind, it should be noted, did not prevent him from falling from time to time into errors of a factual nature. Confusing the historian Thucydides, son of Olorus, with the conservative politician Thucydides, son of Melesias, he was surprised to find the author of the history of the Peloponnesian War so charitable toward Pericles, who was responsible for his exile (ibid., 56; Six Books, 430. I cite the Six Books in K. D. McRae’s 1962 facsimile edition of Richard Knolles’s 1601 translation [Cambridge, Mass.]). More surprisingly, he writes that “Hipparchus and Hippias, the sons of Peisistratus, maintained their rule by force for seventy years, as Aristotle wrote, until one was killed. The other having died, popular power was first established by Solon” (Method, 237).

17. Ibid., 218.

18. Ibid., 218–19.

19. Six Books, 430.

20. Method, 248–49.

21. Six Books, 531–32.

22. Ibid., 530–31.

23. Ibid., 423.

24. Ibid., 424.

25. Ibid., 544; cf. “the seditious declamations of Ephialtis” (392).

26. History, 265. Page numbers for the History refer to the text that appears in vol. 5 of The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh (Oxford, 1829).

27. Ibid., 156, 185, 180.

28. Ibid., 178.

29. Ibid., 185, 188.

30. Leviathan 2, 21; similarly thirty years later in Behemoth.

31. “Of the Life and History of Thucydides,” in Hobbes’ Thucydides, ed. and with an intro. by Richard Schlatter (New Brunswick, 1975), 13.

32. In his edition of Patriarca and Other Political Works (Oxford, 1949).

33. In Directions for Obedience to Government in Dangerous or Doubtful Times, in Laslett, Patriarca, 231.

34. The Machiavellian Moment, 54.

35. Patriarca, 86. The intensity of Filmer’s opposition to popular participation in government is attested by his insistence that the Romans should not have expelled Tarquin the Proud for his son’s rape of the matron Lucretia: “To say truth,” Filmer writes of this famous turning point in Roman history, “we find no other cause of the expulsion of Tarquin, than the wantonness and licentiousness of the people of Rome” (Observations Touching Forms of Government, in Laslett, Patriarca, 210).

36. In The Art of Lawgiving, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Cambridge, 1977), 676. Pocock also discusses Harrington and Oceana in The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 383–400.

37. Oceana (in Political Works), 343.

38. Ibid., 257, 259.

39. Ibid., 268.

40. Ibid., 324.

41. Excellencie, 38. I cite from the London, 1767, edition. On Nedham, see J. Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper (Cambridge, Mass., 1961); and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 381–83.

42. Excellencie, 55, 50.

43. See for example ibid., 72, 80–81; 132–33.

44. Ibid., 80.

45. Ibid., 23.

46. Ibid., 40.

47. Algernon Sidney, Discourses (reprint, New York, 1805) 2.311–12.

48. Ibid., 2.155.

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid., 2.158.

51. Ibid., 3. 289, 319, 357.

52. Paradise Regained 4.268–69. Milton also prefaced to the Areopagitica his own rendition of lines 436–41 of Euripides’ Suppliants (Theseus’s paean to Athenian political principles; see above pp. 38–39). Unquestionably inspired by classical republicanism in its most generic form, Milton seems not to have thought very hard about what Athens in particular had or had not achieved; on his involvement with classical republicanism in general, see Z. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (Evanston, 1945).

53. Swift’s essay appears in Jonathan Swift, A Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome with the Consequences They Had upon Both Those States, ed. Frank H. Ellis (Oxford, 1967), along with elaborate background material and the other contemporary works discussed in the following material.

54. W. Scott, The Works of Jonathan Swift (1883): 3.196; Ellis, 135.

55. Ellis, 97.

56. Ibid.,125. So far from suggesting that Britons are likely to do a better job of popular government than the Athenians, he concedes, while granting the Athenians grudging praise for their recall of Aristides during the invasion of Xerxes, that “it must be still confessed on behalf of the Athenian People, that they never conceived themselves perfectly infallible, nor arrived to the Heights of modern Assemblies, to make Obstinacy confirm what sudden heat and temerity began” (ibid., 94).

57. The pertinent portions of Drake’s History of the Last Parliament (1702) are reprinted in Ellis.

58. Ellis, 216.

59. Ibid., 218–19.

60. Ibid., 220.

61. Also reprinted ibid.

62. Ibid., 229, 231.

63. Ibid., 244.

64. Ibid., 234–35.

65. On opposition to Walpole in the British press see C. B. Realey, The London Journal and Its Authors 1720–1723, Bulletin of the University of Kansas, Humanistic Studies 5.3 (Lawrence, 1935); W. Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth-Century England to the Fall of Walpole (New York, 1936); L. Hanson, Government and the Press, 1695–1763 (Oxford, 1936); C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Common-wealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); and the introduction to D. L. Jacobson, ed., The English Libertarian Heritage from the Writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in “The Independent Whig” and “Cato’s Letters” (Indianapolis, New York, and Kansas City, 1965).

66. On Trenchard and Gordon, see, in addition to the references cited in n. 65, the entry s.v. Trenchard in the Dictionary of National Biography. I have cited Cato’s Letters in the London, 1755, edition (reprint, New York, 1969, 4 vols. in 2) Cato’s Letters; or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects.

67. London Journal, 3 December 1721.

68. Cato’s Letters 4.63; cf. 3.317 and 4. 117. The letters are discussed in Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 467–77.

69. Cato’s Letters 4.104–17.

70. Ibid., 4.104.

71. Ibid., 4.105.

72. Ibid., 4.109.

73. Ibid., 4.112.

74. Ibid., 4.113–14; similarly at 1.72.

75. Ibid., preface, 1.xxvi–xxvii.

76. Swift, in The Examiner (3 November–30 November 1710), in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. (London, 1902), 9.101–2.

77. Cited in C. R. Realey’s University of Pennsylvania thesis “The Early Opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, 1720–1727” (Philadelphia, 1931), 200.

78. Craftsman (17 February 1727): 21–22.

79. Ibid., no. 201, (9 May 1730): 21; cf. vol. 221 (16 September 1730): 41.

80. Ibid., no. 216, (22 August 1730): 279–83.

81. Ibid., nos. 325 and 326 (23 and 30 September 1732): 242–52.

82. Roman history could also be very useful in British politics: see Frank Turner’s “British Politics and the Demise of the Roman Republic 1700–1939,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 577–99.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1. An engaging collection of passages illustrating the spectrum of views about the value of the classics in eighteenth-century Britain appears in P. Crutwell, “The Eighteenth Century: A Classical Age?” Arion 7 (1968): 110–32; a detailed study of vacillating French attitudes toward Athens and Sparta is offered in L. Guerci, Libertà degli antichi e libertà dei moderni: Sparta, Atene e i “philosophes” nella Francia del Settecento (Naples, 1979).

2. In Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), 28–30.

3. Cited from the preface to vol. 2 of The Grecian History (1739 ed.).

4. On Plutarch in the eighteenth century, see M. W. Howard, The Influence of Plutarch in the Major European Literatures of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill, 1970).

5. On the debate over decadence in France as it affected perceptions of Greek antiquity see Guerci, Libertà degli antichi, 167–92.

6. Stanyan, Grecian History 1.180.

7. Goldsmith, The Grecian History from the Earliest State, to the Death of Alexander the Great, cited from the 13th ed. (London, 1820), 1.54.

8. Tucker, A Treatise Concerning Civil Government (reprint, New York, 1967), 222.

9. Goldsmith, 1.193; Stanyan, 1.328. An English translation of Tourreil’s Several Orations of Demosthenes appeared in 1702.

10. Hume, “Essay X, Of Some Remarkable Customs,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1742): 498.

11. Mably, Observations sur l’Histoire de la Grèce, 72–89. On Mably see n. 30.

12. Condillac, Histoire Ancienne, reprinted in Oeuvres Complètes de Condillac, vol. 7 (Paris, 1821), 190–91. On Condillac’s views of classical Greek states see Guerci, Libertè degli antichi, 205–12.

13. In the Last Reply to the critics of his First Discourse, translated in V. Gourevitch, ed., J.-J. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses Together with the Replies to Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages (New York, 1986), 78, par. 46.

Of the enormous literature on Rousseau, works most pertinent to Rousseau’s orientation to Greece include J. N. Shklar, Men and Citizens: A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge, 1969); R. Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, 1968); D. Leduc-Fayette, J. J. Rousseau et le mythe de l’antiquité (Paris, 1974); L. Lehmann, Mably und Rousseau: Eine Studie über die Grenzen der Emanzipation im Ancien Regime (Frankfurt, 1975); S. Ellenburg, Rousseau’s Political Philosophy: An Interpretation from Within (Ithaca, 1976); R. A. Leigh, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Myth of Antiquity in the Eighteenth Century,” in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on Western ThoughtA.D. 1650–1870 (Cambridge, 1979), 155–68; and J. Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy (New Haven, 1984).

14. Stanyan 1.136.

15. Rollin, The Ancient History, cited in the English translation of 1861, 1.366; Goldsmith, 1.187.

16. Goldsmith 1.224; Stanyan 1.379.

17. Hearne, 320.

18. Ibid.; Rollin, 2.410.

19. Observations, 88.

20. Stanyan 2.226; Rollin 1.586.

21. Rollin, ibid.

22. Ibid., 1.587; Stanyan 2.204; Goldsmith 1.410.

23. Rousseau, in his Letter to Grimm responding to Gautier’s refutation of his First Discourse in Gourevitch, 82, par. 57.

24. Stanyan 1.69.

25. Goldsmith 1.168.

26. Condillac, 212. Condillac seems to lean at times to the English republican view of a decent Athens oppressed by a self-seeking Pericles. The more one admired Periclean Athens, Condillac maintained, the more one praised Pericles. Consequently, as the Athenians were more eloquent and articulate than other peoples, Pericles’ name had passed on to posterity along with the praises his fellow citizens had bestowed on him, “and the historians, who have reiterated these praises, have not examined whether he merited them.” One would understand eras such as those of Pericles better “if the noise made by those who celebrate them allowed the moans of the people to be heard.”

27. Montagu, cited from the 3d ed. of 1769, 8.

28. Ibid., 12.

29. Ibid., 132–33, 144.

30. A good treatment of Mably’s political ideals and their relationship to his views of classical states appears in T. Schleich, “Mably e le Antiche Costituzioni,” QS 23 (1986): 173–97.

On Mably’s life and work see E. Whitfield, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1930, reprint, New York, 1969); Aldo Maffey, Il pensiero politico del Mably (Torino, 1968); Brigitte Coste, Mably: pour une utopie du bon sens (Paris, 1975); L. Guerci, Libertà degli antichi, 105–39; and a variety of articles cited on p. 391 of P. Vidal-Naquet, La démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs (Paris, 1990).

31. Mably, Observations, 127.

32. Ibid., 128.

33. Rousseau, Restoration of the Sciences and Arts, in Gourevitch, 8, par. 18.

34. Ibid., 10, par. 24.

35. Ibid.

36. Rousseau, Epistle Dedicatory to Inequality, in Gourevitch, 121–22, par. 9.

37. Ibid., 122, par. 10.

38. Mably, Entretiens de Phocion, cited from the 1804 edition, 236.

39. Ibid., 133.

40. Ibid., 12, 13, 76, 168.

41. Ibid., 167–68, 77.

42. Ibid., 94, 167–68, 72–73, 12–13, 186.

43. Ibid., 94.

44. Ibid., 72.

45. Ibid., 125.

46. Ibid., 120.

47. Ibid., 119.

48. Ibid., 122.

49. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), 286.

50. Rousseau, Last Reply to the critics of his First Discourse, in Gourevitch, 76, par. 41.

51. Ibid., 78, par. 46.

52. Valerius Maximus 2.6.

53. From Oceana, in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of John Harrington (Cambridge, 1977), 259.

54. Defensio Secunda (1654), in Works (New York, 1931–38), 8.49.

55. Cited from his Essay on the Roman, and on the Lacedaemonian, Governments (without page reference) in Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Ox-ford, 1969), 201.

56. Dialogues des morts, vii, xvii.

57. J. J. Burlamaqui, Principes du droit politique 2.2.24–36, available in the English translation of Thomas Nugent (Cambridge, 1807).

58. The influence of Montesquieu outside France was enormous. See, for example, on England L. Landi, L’Inghilterra e il pensiero politico di Montesquieu (Padua, 1981); and on America P. Spurlin, Montesquieu in America (University, La., 1940), and S. Wolin, “Montesquieu and Publius: The Crisis of Reason and The Federalist Papers,” in Wolin’s The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore and London, 1989), 100–119.

59. Cited from the London 1774 translation of An Essay on Public Happiness (re-print, New York, 1969), 1.xviii. Chastellux’s orientation to classical Greek states is discussed in Guerci, Libertà degli antichi, 205–12.

60. On Public Happiness 1.69.

61. Ibid., 1.73.

62. Ibid., 1.75.

63. Goguet, cited from the English translation published at Edinburgh in 1761, The Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences and Their Progress among the most Ancient Nations, vol. 3: From the Establishment of Monarchy among the Israelites, to Their Return from the Babylonish Captivity, 222–23.

64. Dictionnaire, 291–92. Voltaire’s notes to Chastellux’s essay on public happiness express frequent frustration with his rejection of Athens (Guerci, Libertà degli Antichi, 214–15).

65. Chastellux, 1.66.

66. Ibid., 1.76.

67. Ibid., 1.77.

68. Ibid., 1.93.

69. Ibid.

70. Goguet 3.37.

71. Ibid., 3.36.

72. Ibid., 3.180.

73. Ibid., 3.38, 180.

74. Ibid., 3.231.

75. Ibid., 3.224.

76. The Encyclopédie was reprinted in Stuttgart in 1966.

77. Cited from the translation of Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer in Encyclopedia: Selections (Indianapolis, 1965), 161.

78. Ibid., 160.

79. On Le Mondain, the Défense du Mondain and Voltaire’s treatment of antiquity in the context of the debate over “le luxe,” see A. Morize, L’apologie du luxe au dix-huitième siècle et “Le Mondain” de Voltaire: étude critique sur “Le Mondain” et ses sources (1909; reprint, Geneva, 1980); and Ellen Ross, “Mandeville, Melon, and Voltaire: the Origins of the Luxury Controversy in France,” in Theodore Besterman, ed., Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 155 (Oxford, 1976), 1897–1912.

80. Philosophical Dictionary, in The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version (Paris, London, New York, and Chicago, 1901), 8.75–83.

On Voltaire and Greek government see Michele Mat-Hasquin, Voltaire et L’Anti-quité Grecque, Studies on Voltaire, vol. 197 (Oxford, 1981), 237–46; and Guerci, Libertà degli Antichi, 212–20.

81. Twentieth-century thinkers are less generous toward what George Steiner has termed a “pedagogic fantasy” that was “one of the major works in the history of European taste” (in Antigones [New York and Oxford, 1984], 7).

82. Cited in the English translation of 1794, 4.483. On Anacharsis in its context, see Maurice Badolle, L’Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélemy (1716–1795) et l’Hellenisme en France dans la Seconde Moitié du XVIIIe Siècle (Paris, 1927).

83. Anacharsis 4.479.

84. Ibid., 1.184; 2.253, 258, 263; 1.436–37, 443.

85. On De Pauw, see Michaud, Biographie universelle, 2d ed., vol. 32 (Paris, 1861), 321–22. Largely ignored by modern scholars, his important work is discussed in Guerci, Libertà degli antichi, 263–72.

86. Philosophical Researches 1.xv; 2.36, 169–70, 192.

87. Ibid., 2.169–70. At heart a patrios politeia man, Montesquieu throughout his work evinced enthusiasm for a certain generic republicanism along with revulsion from a system that allowed the poor to hold office. On Montesquieu and Athens, see Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris, 1989), 55–61.

88. Philosophical Researches, 2.167.

89. Ibid., 1.iv, xv.

90. Ibid., 2.3, 165.

91. Ibid., 2.3, 12–13.

92. Ibid., 2.162.

93. Ibid., 2.141–46.

94. Ibid., 2.179.

95. Ibid., 2.141–46.

96. From the Correspondence, cited with bibliography on Voltaire and the masses in Mat-Hasquin, Voltaire et l’Antiquité Grecque, 242; see also Guerci, Libertà degli Antichi, 216–20.

CHAPTER NINE

1. The study of the founding fathers’ attitudes toward classical civilization would be far more arduous than it is were it not for the labors of numerous painstaking scholars working during the second half of the twentieth century. The most useful book for classicists is Meyer Reinhold’s Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, 1984). Valuable studies also appear in Richard Gummere, The American Colonial Mind and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Comparative Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1965); and Paul Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992). I have also profited a great deal from Richard Johnson’s essay “Hellas and Hesperia: Ancient Greece and Early America,” in Carol Thomas, ed., Paths from Ancient Greece (Leiden, 1988), 140–67. On the question of the founders’ relationship to classical history and politics specifically, see Charles F. Mullett, “Ancient Historians and ‘Enlightened’ Reviewers,” Review of Politics 21 (1959): 550–65; Richard Gummere, “The Classical Ancestry of the United States Constitution,” American Quarterly 14 (1962): 3–18; William Gribbin, “Rollin’s Histories and American Republicanism,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29 (1972): 611–22; and Edwin A. Miles, “The Young American Nation and the Classical World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 259–74. Much valuable insight is also to be gleaned from the introductory material in Bernard Bailyn’s Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750–1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965.) Useful collections of primary sources in addition to Bailyn’s Pamphlets include H. Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (reprint, New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, 1876); M. Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven and London, 1937); and C. Hyneman and D. Lutz, eds., American Political Writing during the Founding Era (Indianapolis, 1983). More general background concerning the intellectual heritage of the revolutionary period can be found in Bailyn’s Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1967); in F. MacDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans., 1985); and in T. Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke (Chicago and London, 1988).

This chapter also owes much to Angelo and Sofia Tsakopoulos, who generously funded a conference on the Greek heritage of the American constitution in 1987, and to the organizer of the conference, Theodore Brunner.

2. Classica Americana, 24.

3. Originally 1693, cited from The Fruits of Solitude and Other Writings (London, 1915), 28.

4. Both cited by Reinhold in Classica Americana, 157–58. It is interesting to note, however, that as Richard Johnson has pointed out (“Hellas in Hesperia,” 150), colonial American enthusiasts of antiquity did not, like their European counterparts, deploy the classics and their pagan associations in any broad campaign against the church and never sought to enthrone classicism as “an alternative to Christian belief.”

5. In a letter to John Adams cited in R. Johnson, “Hellas and Hesperia,” 160.

6. Cited by Gummere, The American Colonial Mind, 128. Despite his periodic dismissal of ancient history, Franklin’s investment in craftsmanship owed much to the ideals of fifth-century Athens, which he recognized were not separable from the democratic system. I very much hope that the late Michael Shute’s manuscript exploring these connections in Franklin’s thought will be published posthumously.

7. Murray, Political Sketches (London, 1787), also published in American Museum 2 (September, 1787): 228–35; “Agrippa,” in two different letters, one of 23 November 1787 and another of 14 January 1788, reprinted in H. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (Chicago, 1981), 4.6.6 and 4.6.49.

8. Cited in Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 568, and 1047, n. 96.

9. “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” in Thomas Woody, The Educational Views of Benjamin Franklin (New York, 1931), 167.

10. Cited by Reinhold in Classica Americana, 156, 41.

11. Farrand, Records 1.74.

12. Ibid., 1.135.

13. Ibid., 1.310.

14. Ibid., 1.448.

15. Ibid., 1.456.

16. Ibid., 1.459. As the summer wore on, Mason adduced the “dangerous insurrections of the slaves in Greece and Sicily” as proof of the inherent perils in the slave system, while Charles Pinckney maintained that “if slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world,” and he cited the cases of Greece, Rome, and other ancient states as well as “the sanction given by France, England, Holland & other modern States” (ibid., 2.370–71. These remarks are preserved in the notes of Madison). Gouverneur Morris on 15 August argued for a veto power in the executive as one way of guarding against “encroachments of the popular branch of the Government” such as that of the ephors at Sparta, who became “in the end absolute” (ibid., 2.299).

17. Cited by Harry S. Good in Benjamin Rush and His Services to American Education (Berne, Ind., 1918), 236.

18. Reprinted in Hamilton’s Papers, ed. H. Syrett, vol. 3 (New York, 1962), 103.

19. A discourse delivered to the Religious Society in Brattle Street, Boston, 2d ed. (Boston, 1798), 18–19.

20. Welch, “Oration delivered at Boston, March 5, 1783,” in Niles, Principles and Acts, 76; the anonymous New Hampshire pamphleteer, in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 391; Maxcy, “An Oration,” in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 1047.

21. On the debate at the Continental Congress over the efficacy of the Amphictyonic League, see Gummere, American Colonial Mind, chap. 6, “Colonies Ancient and Modern,” 97–119.

22. Smith, A General Idea of the College of Mirania (New York, 1753), cited by Reinhold in Classica Americana, 38; Adams in his Diary and Autobiography, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 2.58.

23. “Liberty Described and Recommended: in a Sermon Preached to the Corporation of Freemen in Farmington” (Hartford, 1775), in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 307.

24. Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 21.

25. Ibid., 397.

26. In The Rights of Man, Part II (1792; reprint, London, 1915), 176.

27. Ibid., 177.

28. In The Way of the Churches of Christ in New England (London, 1645), cited by Richard Gummere in “Church, State and Classics: The Cotton-Williams Debate,” CJ 54 (1959): 175–83.

29. “An Oration on the Anniversary of the Independence of the United States of America” (Worcester, 1802), in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 1212.

30. From her History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), in H. Storing, The Complete Anti-Federalist 6.14.122 and 6.14.135.

31. Federalist 14, in The Federalist Papers, ed. C. Rossiter (New York and Scarborough, Ontario, 1961), 100.

32. Ibid., 342.

33. Ibid., 384.

34. In Syrett, ed., Papers, vol. 2 (New York, 1961), 657. In the Continentalist no. 1 of 1781 Hamilton compares the history of the Greek states (except Sparta)—a history that “no friend to order or to rational liberty can read without pain and disgust”—with the bright future of an America that had discovered such phenomena as checks and balances and popular representation.

35. Rossiter, Federalist Papers, 71.

36. John Dickinson in the fifth of his “Letters of Fabius” moved swiftly from antiquity to Florence in his excoriation of the “encroachments of the people” that destroy states (reprinted in P. L. Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States Published during Its Discussion by the People 1787–1788 [1888], 190).

37. “The Natural and Civil History of Vermont” (Walpole, N.H., 1794), chap. 15, reprinted in Hyneman and Lutz, American Political Writing, 963.

38. C. F. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States (Boston, 1850–56), 4.285.

39. Ibid., 5.9.

40. Charles Francis Adams later felt the need to emend his grandfather’s works in the light of Grote’s History; see chap. 11, p. 248.

41. Works 4.479.

42. Ibid., 4.480–85.

43. Ibid., 4.486; 6.101.

44. Ibid., 4.490.

45. Ibid., 6.9.

46. Ibid., 6.100.

47. Ibid., 6.102.

48. Ibid., 5.37.

49. To be sure, Adams censures Aristotle for the limitations he placed on the franchise, but his position seems to derive from a major misunderstanding of the sociology of ancient society and the assumption that Aristotle would exclude practically everyone (ibid., 4.526).

50. Cited in Gummere’s chapter “The Classical Ancestry of the Constitution,” in The American Colonial Mind, 176.

51. The holdings of colonial libraries are discussed in Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience, 199–232. Inevitably views of Athens were also colored for the Americans by recent works on ancient history such as Potter’s Antiquities and Rollin’s Ancient History. Cato’s Letters appeared regularly in American libraries, though the discordant opinions voiced there about classical Athens went unremarked; the same is true of the Craftsman. On Rollin in early America see W. Gribbin, “Rollin’s Histories and American Republicanism,” 611–22; Montesquieu’s influence in the United States is discussed in P. Spurlin, Montesquieu in America (University, La., 1940). Though in time Jefferson developed a revulsion for what he considered Montesquieu’s elitism, on the whole the shapers of the constitution found his views eminently congenial.

52. 21 May 1782, in Works 7.593.

53. The 1786 letter appears in Jefferson’s Papers, ed. J. Boyd (Princeton, 1950–), 10.305–9.

54. In J. Catanzariti and E. J. Ferguson, eds., The Papers of Robert Morris (Pittsburgh, 1973), 6.213.

55. For Philadelphiensis, see Storing, The Complete Anti-Federalist 3.9.76; other references can be collected from the excellent index. Significantly, some of the negative observations of the Athenians concern insufficient rather than excessive democracy; George Clinton of New York looked ahead to the strictures of George Grote (see chap. 11) in complaining not of the Athenians’ excessive readiness to impeach their officials but rather of their “unbounded confidence in their statesmen and rulers,” which he contended “caused the ruin of Athens” (2.6.48).

56. Reprinted in Political Writings of Joel Barlow (New York, 1971), 63–64, 27.

57. I owe much in these observations to the suggestions of Ellen Wood and J. Peter Euben, who read the manuscript for Princeton University Press.

58. In a letter to Dupont de Nemours written on 24 April.

59. In “Historical Judgments,” cited from Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in W. Dray, On History and Philosophers of History (Leiden, 1989), 177–78.

60. Hume, essay 10, “Of Some Remarkable Customs,” in Essays (1742): 403, 498.

61. See n. 20. Some anti-Federalists questioned the validity of any such new “science”; cutting references appear to “axioms in the science of politics… as irrefragable as any in Euclid” in George Clinton’s letters of “Cato” (Storing 2.6.13) and the “Mary-land Farmer” cited at 5.1.21 who contended that “there is no new discovery in this most important of all sciences, for ten centuries back.”

62. In The Presence of the Past (Baltimore, 1989), 72, 96–97.

63. In Federalist 10, for example.

64. In Rossiter, Federalist Papers, 57; see n. 31.

65. Federalist 10, in ibid., 84. A good discussion of Madison’s critique of democratic government and his preference for republican institutions appears in M. White, Philosophy, “ The Federalist,” and the Constitution (New York and Oxford, 1987), 136–45.

66. Some of the issues involved in near vs. far history are explored in the section “Reason, Long Experience, and Short Experience,” in White, Philosophy, 45–49.

Not everyone was comfortable generalizing about mobs and their vices; Robert Coram in his 1791 “Political Inquiries: to which is Added, a Plan for the General Establishment of Schools Throughout the United States” distinguished between European and American mobs, contending that in reality “the mob that burnt the tea at Boston, and even that under Shays, was a regular and orderly body, when compared with that of Lord George Gordon or any of the late mobs in France. We know of no such outrages committed in America” (reprinted in F. Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic [Cambridge, Mass., 1975], 124–25).

67. J. S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (London and Boston, 1989), 100.

68. On Adams and property see p. 183 here.

69. From “Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, etc.” in Ford Pamphlets, 57–58.

70. “An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education, Adapted to the Genius of the Government of the United States,” reprinted ibid., 304, 342.

71. To Harold Parker’s learned study of classical antiquity in the French Revolution, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago, 1937), should now be added Claude Mossé’s lively book L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris, 1989). The chapter on the Revolution in Rawson, The Spartan Tradition is also extremely valuable, and Rawson is more sensitive than Parker to the hostility of many of the revolutionaries to Sparta. See also F. Díaz-Plaja, Griegos y Romanos en la revolución francesa (Madrid, 1960); Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Tradition de la Démocratie Grecque,” published as the introduction to Monique Alexander’s translation of M. I. Finley, Démocratie antique et démocratie moderne (Paris, 1976), 7–44, esp. 15–35; Nicole Loraux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “La Formation de l’Athènes Bourgeoise: Essai d’Historiographie 1750–1850,” in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on Western Thought A.D. 1650–1870 (Cambridge, 1979), 169–222, esp. 183–98; and the chapters “La Place de la Grèce dans l’Imaginaire des Hommes de la Révolution” and “Paris-Athènes et Retour” in P. Vidal-Naquet, La Démocratie Grecque Vue D’Ailleurs (Paris, 1990), where “La Formation de l’Athènes Bourgeoise” is reprinted.

72. Cited in Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 162, 166.

73. Ibid., 167.

74. Buzot, Mémoires sur la Révolution Française, ed. and with an intro. by M. Guadet (Paris, 1823), 23.

75. Jeanne-Marie Phlipon Roland de la Platière, Mémoires de Madame Roland écrits durant sa captivité, ed. C. Perroud (Paris, 1905), 2.22.

76. Brissot’s Mémoires (1754–1790), ed. C. Perroud (Paris, 1911), contain several references to the author’s identification with Phocion (e.g., 1.9–10, 1.42, 2.227).

77. Regnaud de Saint-Angély’s remark is cited in Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 2; Volney’s attack on the emulation of antiquity runs throughout his Leçons d’Histoire (discussed here on pp. 198–99).

78. In Souvenirs et fragments (Paris, 1906), 1.17.

79. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 30.

80. Surely misogyny lies at the root of some of the condescension with which Madame Roland has been treated in modern literature. Although her enthusiasm for antiquity may have been tied up with immaturity, neurosis, and a personal agenda, of what male revolutionary is the same not true?

81. Cited in Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 48.

82. Chronique de Paris 6 (6 January 1793): 22.

83. The remarks of Billaud-Varenne and Vergniaud are both cited in Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française, 92–93.

84. E. Lévy, Le Manuel des prénoms (Paris, 1922).

85. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 17–21.

86. On the debate among the revolutionaries as to the desirability of a Spartan-style agoge, see Rawson, 278–84.

87. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 75–76.

88. Le Vieux Cordelier, ed. Henri Calvet (Paris, 1936), no. 7, 232.

89. Ibid., no. 4, 124.

90. Ibid., no. 5, 148–49.

91. Ibid., no. 6, 188–91.

92. Ibid., no. 7, 230; cf. similar remarks in the Discours de la Lanterne Aux Parisiens, reprinted in M. Jules Claretie, ed. Oeuvres de Camille Desmoulins (Paris, 1874), 1. 174.

93. M. Robespierre, Le Défenseur de la Constitution (1792): reprinted in G. Laurent, ed., Oeuvres Complètes de Robespierre, vol. 4 (Paris, 1939), 36, 117.

94. Cited by Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 177.

95. Buzot, Mémoires sur la Révolution Française, 45–46; Parker, The Cult of Antiquity, 175–76.

96. Chateaubriand, Itineraire de Paris à Jerusalem et de Jerusalem à Paris, en allant par la Grèce, et revenant par l’Egypte, la Barbarie et l’Espagne, 3 vols. (1811): 1.169.

97. Archives Parlementaires de 1787 à 1860; recueil complet des débats legislatifs et politiques des chambres françaises, 1st ser., 1787–99 (Paris, 1862–93), vol. 8 (12 August 1789), 407–10.

98. Ibid., vol. 11 (23 February 1790), 684.

99. Ibid., vol. 15 (7 May 1790), 419.

100. Ibid., (18 May 1790), 560–62.

101. I owe both the reference to Rouzet’s suggestion and the citation of Glotz’s observation to Vidal-Naquet, La démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs, 220–21; Rouzet’s efforts are discussed at greater length in Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française, 100–101.

102. The most detailed study of the role of festivals in the ideology of the revolution remains M. Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire (1789–1799) (Paris, 1976).

103. Parker, 67.

104. Discussed ibid., 97.

105. 18 July 1790 (Lettres 2.107–8).

106. Volney in his relationship to antiquity is discussed by the Italian Marxist Luciano Canfora in Ideologie del Classicismo (Turin, 1980).

107. Volney, Leçons d’Histoire Prononcées a l’École Normale, en l’An III de la République française (1795): in Oeuvres Complètes 6 (Paris, 1821), 124.

108. L. de Bonald, Théorie du Pouvoir Politique et Religieux dans la Societé Civile, Demonstrée par le Raisonnement et par l’Histoire (1796; reprint, Paris, 1843), 1.125, 128.

109. Ibid., 1.166.

110. Ibid., 1.200, 199.

111. J. Gillies, ed., The “Orations” of Lysias and Isocrates (1778): lxii–lxiii.

112. Gillies, The History of Ancient Greece, Its Colonies, and Conquests, Part the first; from the earliest accounts till the Division of the Macedonian Empire in the East, 6th ed., 4 vols. (London, 1820), 2.1.64, 121–22, 126; 3.1.473.

113. Gillies, ibid., 3.1.13, 4.1.174. Were Gillies’s text on disk, a word search on “licentious” would generate a long list.

114. Ibid., 2.283; Gillies writes comfortably of the “natural malignity” and “tumultuous passions” of the “vulgar” (2.1.150, 283; 3.1.79).

115. Ibid., 3.1.474.

116. Tucker, A Treatise (reprint, New York, 1967), 226.

117. Ibid., 237–38.

118. Ibid., 207. Tucker’s introductory paragraph about Athens concerns the evils of ostracism, than which nothing “could have been better calculated for gratifying the Caprice and Licentiousness of a Mob” (220).

119. Ibid., 212.

120. Ibid., 215–16.

121. Young, British Constitution, 3; Bisset, Sketch of Democracy, 20.

122. Young, British Constitution, 8–10.

123. Ibid., 10–12.

124. Ibid., 53.

125. Ibid., 53, 44.

126. Ibid., 62.

127. Bisset, Sketch, 127–28 and 33.

128. Ibid., 24, 27.

129. Ibid., 95.

130. Ibid., 119.

131. Ibid., 73.

132. Ibid., 127.

133. Ibid., 144.

134. Mitford expatiates on the excellences of Philip in The History of Greece (1822 ed.), 8.458–73.

135. Ibid., 5.219 and 1.278.

136. Ibid., 5.337–38, 373.

137. Ibid., 5.373.

138. Ibid., 9.74.

139. Ibid., 4.353–54. France continued to be drawn into the debate about Athens for some time after the publication of Mitford’s History; for the discussion of Mitford in the Quarterly Review’s essay on Étienne Clavierès Histoire des premiers Temps de la Gréce, see p. 358, n. 21 here.

140. Mitford, History of Greece 5.31, 34; 3.4.

141. Ibid., 5.219.

142. Bisset, Sketch of Democracy, 59.

143. Young, History of Athens, 66.

144. On the importance of property in the ideology of the English Country Party, see H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York, 1977). French thinkers of the same era approached the question of property rather differently; see for example chap. 9, “Equality and Property,” in K. Martin, The Rise of French Liberal Thought: A Study of Political Ideas from Bayle to Condorcet (New York, 1929).

CHAPTER TEN

1. In a letter to Dupont de Nemours written on 24 April.

2. Although it would be flattering to have the reader think otherwise, the fact is that (nearly all) the observations in this paragraph are derived from R. R. Palmer, “Notes on the Use of the word ‘Democracy’ 1789–1799,” Political Science Quarterly 68 (1953): 203–26.

A rich collection of passages reflecting different notions of democracy has been assembled in A. Naess, J. Christophersen, and K. Kjell, Democracy, Ideology, and Objectivity: Studies in the Semantics and Cognitive Analysis of Ideological Controversy, the product of a Unesco ideology research project (Oslo, 1956).

3. Cited in Palmer, “Notes on the Use,” 215.

4. On the origins of classical scholarship and the Hellenic revival in Germany, see Sandys, History, 3.1–101; G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1893; reprint, Boston, 1959), 24–38; U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, History of Classical Scholarship, trans. A. Harris (London, 1982, from the German ed. of 1921), 92–117; H. Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks (Cambridge, 1941), 1–14; the biography of Heyne by his son-in-law Heeren (Christian Gottlob Heyne, biographisch dargestellt [1813]); and the long discussion in C. Bursian, Geschichte der classischen Philologie in Deutschland von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (1883).

5. Cambridge, 1935.

6. See for example Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), translated by G. Henry Lodge, M.D., as The History of Ancient Art (Boston, 1872), 2.10, 14.

7. The relationship of Herder’s thought to that of Winckelmann is discussed in chap. 3, “Due giudizi su Winckelmann,” in M. Pavan, Antichità Classica e Pensiero Moderno (Florence, 1977), 57–80. On Herder and Greece more broadly see the chapter “Weimar Theories of Culture” in W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775–1806 (Cambridge, 1962), and F. M. Barnard, Herder’s Social and Political Thought: From Enlightenment to Nationalism (Oxford, 1965).

8. I cite Herder’s Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit) in the 1800 translation of T. Churchill (reprint, New York [Bergman], n.d.), 368.

9. Ibid., 373.

10. Ibid., 376.

11. Ibid., 375.

12. Ibid., 376.

13. Ibid.

14. On Herder’s pluralism and cultural relativism and on his relationship to other eighteenth-century thinkers, see I. Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London, 1970).

15. Schiller’s orientation to the Greek state is discussed in P. Kain, Schiller, Hegel, and Marx (Kingston and Montreal, 1982), 13–33.

16. Letter 6, cited from Nathan H. Dole, ed., Aesthetical and Philosophical Essays (Boston, 1902), 1.19.

17. Ibid., 1.18.

18. Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurg und Solon (1790; reprint, Vaduz, 1956), 82.

19. On the cultural context of Hölderlin’s hopes of reviving ancient Greek ideals in Germany, see D. Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge, 1984).

20. On Hölderlin’s Antigone see George Steiner’s Antigones (New York and Oxford, 1984), 66–103, and accompanying bibliography.

21. Hyperion, 70. References to Hyperion are to Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece, trans. Willard Trask (New York, 1959). On the context of Hyperion in Hölderlin’s work, see C.C.T. Litzmann, F. Hölderlins Leben (1890), J. Claverio, La Jeunesse d’Hölderlin jusqu’au roman d’Hyperion (1922), and M. Montgomery, Hölderlin and the German Neo-Hellenist Movement (Oxford, 1923). The treatment of Hölderlin in Butler’s Tyranny of Greece over Germany is perceptive. See also Franz G. Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom: Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel and the Crisis of Early German Idealism (The Hague, 1971), esp. chaps. 3–5.

22. Hyperion, 92.

23. Hölderlin’s foster father apparently ascribed his madness to his “enthusiasm for those blasted heathens” (cited by Butler in The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, 239).

24. A particularly full treatment of Hegel and the Greek state appears in Kain, Schiller, Hegel, and Marx, 34–74. See also J. Hoffmeister, Hegel und Hölderlin (Tübingen, 1931); M. Foster, The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (Oxford, 1935); Martin Heidegger, “Hegel und die Griechen,” in Dieter Henrich, ed., Die Gegenwart: Der Griechen im Neueren Denken, Festschrift für Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 60. Geburtstag (Tübingen, 1960); J. Glenn Gray, Hegel and Greek Thought (New York, 1941; reprint, New York and Evanston, Ill., 1968); J. d’Hondt, ed., Hegel et la pensée grecque (Paris, 1974); D. Janicaud, Hegel et le destin de la Grèce (Paris, 1975); Judith Shklar, Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Cambridge, 1976), esp. 69–95; Merold Westphal, History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1979), esp. 30–36, 138–60; and George McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy (Savage, Md., 1990), 123–68 and notes. On Hegel’s political universe more generally, see George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics, and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge, 1969), and Nauen, Revolution, Idealism and Human Freedom, esp. 69–97.

25. Cited in the translation of T. M. Knox in Hegel’s Early Theological Writings (Chicago, 1948), 146–47.

26. In Lectures on The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (reprint, New York, 1956), 254–55; see chap. 12 here, p. 268.

27. See, for example, 262–65.

28. Ibid., 258.

29. Ibid., 260.

30. Ibid., 261.

31. History of Philosophy, cited in the 1892 translation of E. S. Haldane and F. Simson (reprint, Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1955), 1.444, 445.

32. Ibid., 448. Similarly Hegel distinguished (265) between the happy era of Objective morality (Sittlichkeit), which he isolates during the fifty-year period between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, and the subsequent era of decay, the era of Subjective morality (Moralität), brought on by the questioning of Socrates and the sophists, when the principle of subjective morality introduced during the Peloponnesian Wars became “the germ of corruption” at Athens.

33. Philosophy of History, 253.

34. Philosophy of History, 269–71.

35. The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1952), 114, 263, 116.

36. J. Hodge, “Women and the Hegelian State,” in Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche, ed. E. Kennedy and S. Mendus (New York, 1987), 152. In my discussion of Hegel and Antigone I have drawn deeply on Hodge’s insights; I also owe a great debt to Juliet Floyd, my colleague at the City College of New York, who took time to discuss these matters with me but is in no way responsible for the arguments I have put forward here. For other perspectives on this crux, see Shklar, Freedom and Independence, esp. 82–86, and J. Loewenberg, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind (La Salle, Ill., 1965), esp. 190–201, 326–33.

37. P. Kain, Schiller, Hegel, and Marx, 67, 71, 72.

38. The evolution of Hegel’s attitude to Christianity is discussed in Kain, ibid., 34–54.

39. Philosophy of History, 255–56, 252.

40. J. G. Gray, Hegel and Greek Thought, 41.

41. Cited from the London 1815 translation, 59–61.

42. In the Quarterly Review for March 1813, 144.

43. Essay, 28.

44. Ibid., 24, 26.

45. Ibid., 40; cf. 54.

46. Cited in Holmes’s Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven and London, 1984), 25. I am greatly indebted to Holmes’s eloquent and persuasive book. Most of what I have said about Constant has also said by Holmes, and he has said it better. Like many thinkers cited in this book as secondary sources, Holmes also published his own opinions about Greece; see, for example, “Aristippus in and out of Athens,” American Political Science Review 73 (1979): 113–28.

47. Henri Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, De la Liberté des Anciens Comparée a Celle des Modernes, in Cours de Politique Constitutionelle ou Collection des Ouvrages Publiés sur le Gouvernement Représentatif, ed. M. Edouard Laboulaye (Paris, 1861), 2.550.

48. De la Liberté, 553.

49. Benjamin Constant, 193.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1. A. P. Stanley, The Life of Thomas Arnold, D.D. (1844), 1.129; T. Arnold, The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, 4th ed. (1857), 3.xiv. “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Matthew Arnold’s inaugural address as professor of poetry at Oxford, was published in 1869 and can be found in R. H. Super, ed., On the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor, 1960), 18–37.

2. J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander (1874), 1–3; cf. the parallels drawn by Jowett in his edition of the Dialogues of Plato (see 1.xxv in the 3d ed. [5 vols., New York, 1892]).

3. The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), 15. Those who have read Turner’s book will recognize my enormous debt to it throughout this chapter; those who have not will certainly want to do so. Much of the material in pp. 229–30 above came to my attention in the course of my reading of Turner’s work.

4. The selectivity with which the literature of ancient Greece was preserved by subsequent generations has fostered a vaguely analogous development in the verbal arts. As Richard Jenkyns has pointed out, only the nature and extent of the tiny surviving corpus made possible the beliefs of thinkers like Virginia Woolf, who could contend that Greek was an “impersonal literature,” a “literature of masterpieces” in which “there are no schools; no forerunners; no heirs.” (The Victorians and Ancient Greece [Cambridge, Mass., 1980], 78). This chapter owes a great deal to my reading of Jenkyns’s work.

Thoughtful reviews of Jenkyns and Turner by classicists include ones by Peter Green in the Times Literary Supplement, reprinted in Classical Bearings (New York, 1989), 31–44, and by Bernard Knox, in the New York Review of Books, reprinted in his Essays Ancient and Modern (Baltimore, 1989), 149–61.

5. J. Reynolds, Discourses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, ed. R. Fry (London, 1905), 264; J. E. Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (1885), 189.

6. P. Gardner, Grammar of Greek Art (New York, 1905), 14.

7. The Antiquities of Athens, vol. 1 (1762), x. On Stuart and Revett and the Greek revival, see R. Stoneman, Land of Lost Gods: The Search for Classical Greece (Norman, Okla., and London, 1987), 120–30. Stoneman’s book offers a lively account of the modern attempt to recapture Greek antiquity in Greece itself.

8. R. Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, 14.

9. C. Austin, Westminster Review 7 (January 1827): 258.

10. “Panegyrical Oratory of Greece,” a review of Oeuvres complètes de Démosthène et d’Eschine, en Grec et en Français. Traduction de l’Abbé Auger, new ed., J. Planche, vols. 1–4, Quarterly Review 27, no. 54 (1822): 382–404.

11. “Panegyrical Oratory,” 392.

12. Ibid., 385–86; cf. the observations on Isocrates, 394–95.

13. Response to “Quarterly Review—Articles on Greek Literature,” Westminster Review 3 (January 1825): 233, 235.

14. Ibid., 3.242.

15. Is marriage so exclusively the province of the Church, the Westminster writer asks, “that to write even about old Helen (or rather, to have written full two thousand years before the martyrdom of Archbishop Laud) is apt to bring it into hazard? The papal government long disturbed the happiness of mankind, and defiled the purity of religion, by the exercise of this jurisdiction, and the Protestant church succeeded to it nearly entire.” Following this train of thought, the Westminster reviewer takes the Quarterly writer to task for the way he blamed Athens for discounting the importance of Egypt in history. The Athenians, the Quarterly reviewer had complained, often forgot Egypt as the ambitious man may forget the ladder he kicks out from beneath him once it has served his purpose of rising in the world. Surely, the Westminster reviewer observed, “The Church of Rome gained the power, which the reformed Church adopted, and then called her mother bad names, and scarlet names; surely this was kicking the ladder, and kicking it rather hard too?” (259–60).

16. See chap. 8, p. 172 and n. 93.

17. Westminster Review 3.241.

18. Ibid., 3.257.

19. The example here cited is the devious use—so the reviewer maintains—the theologian Conyers Middleton had made of early customs regarding the use of incense in church in his attempt “to make the Protestants detest the Roman Catholics, and to widen more and more the breach between them.” This parallel is developed at some length, as the reviewer lambasts “the hot zealot, who cries ‘let us not wash our bodies; for thus did the publicans and the harlots’: and the sour protestant, whose commands are, ‘Comb not; for the idolaters, and after them the church of Rome, used the comb.’ ” These misrepresentations on the part of Middleton concerning the use of incense, the reviewer contends, are “an apt illustration of the proceedings of the Quarterly-reviewer.” The Westminster writer also attacks Thomas Mitchell, whose approach to Aristophanes the Quarterly reviewer had approved, for citing the words of Martin Joseph Routh, president of Magdalen College at Oxford, who had claimed that the Greek sophists infected people with a “puerile appetite for disputing”: “The schoolmen of the middle age were Catholics,” the Westminster writer summarizes derisively, “and erroneous Sophists, but Martin Joseph Routh, is a protestant, and seems to hint, with admirable self-complacency, that he is the true philosopher: they erred in discoursing about every thing, he will avoid this error by discoursing of nothing” (Westminster Review 4 [1825 July: 235–37, 248).

20. “Greek Courts of Justice,” Quarterly Review 33 no. 66 (1826): 335–36, 344, 355.

21. “Greek Courts of Justice,” 338, 355. For a French perspective on Mitford, Athens, and the evils of the revolution in France, see a review of Étienne Clavier’s Histoire des premiers Temps de la Grèce in the Quarterly Review 5, no. 9 (1811): 30–33.

22. “Mitford’s History of Greece,” Edinburgh Review 12 (July 1808): 491.

23. Ibid., 505–6.

24. Ibid., 517.

25. T. B. Macaulay, “On the Athenian Orators,” cited from the Complete Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Trevelyan (New York and London, n.d.), vol. 8, 153–55.

26. “On Mitford’s History of Greece,” reprinted from the November 1824 issue of Knight’s Quarterly in Trevelyan, ed., Complete Works of Lord Macaulay, vol. 3, 183–86.

27. “On Mitford’s History,” 190–91.

28. Ibid., 194.

29. Ibid., 202. Paeans to the glorious achievements of democratic Athens appear in this same essay on pp. 196 and 208–9.

30. Ibid., 208–9.

31. Cited in Turner, Greek Heritage, 206.

32. G. Grote, “Institutions of Ancient Greece,” Westminster Review 5 (April 1826): 278–80. Ostensibly a review of Fynes Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici, the essay’s chief subject matter was in fact Mitford’s work in particular and Greek government in general.

33. “Institutions,” 282.

34. Ibid., 285–86.

35. Ibid., 292.

36. Ibid., 330.

37. T. Keightley, History of Greece (1839): 395.

38. Quarterly Review 51.144.

On classical education in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century see J. W. Donaldson, Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning (Cambridge and London, 1856).

39. “Institutions,” 281.

40. On Böckh and Wachsmuth, see p. 251 here.

41. Niebuhr’s complaints appear in the notes for his Lectures on Ancient History (translated into English by L. Schmitz in 1852), 2.216, 299.

42. M. L. Clarke, George Grote: A Biography (London, 1962), 22.

43. Edinburgh Review 138 (1873): 221, cited in Clarke, George Grote, 21.

44. A. Bain, John Stuart Mill (1882): 83.

45. The outlines of Grote’s argument here were the traditional Benthamite ones; the question of “The English Utilitarians and Athenian Democracy” is discussed in a general way by H. O. Pappé in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on Western Thought 1650–1870 (Cambridge, 1979), 295–307.

46. H. Elliott, ed., Letters of John Stuart Mill (London and New York, 1910), 1.58.

47. G. Grote, A History of Greece from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great, orig. 1846–1856, cited in the ten-volume edition of 1907, 3.395.

48. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet has pointed out, the traditional view that Grote was the first to notice the importance of Cleisthenes in the evolution of the Athenian state is somewhat exaggerated; Cleisthenes was also singled out by Thirlwall and by a number of Germans—Niebuhr (1811), Hermann (1831), and Droysen (1847). Vidal-Naquet’s remarks appear in his introduction to the French edition of Sir Moses Finley’s Democracy Ancient and Modern (Paris, 1976), 38.

49. History 7.271.

50. Ibid., 7.46–48 (Alcibiades).

51. Ibid., 5.330.

52. Ibid., 5.19.

53. Ibid., 7.116.

54. Ibid., 7.184.

55. Ibid., 3.396.

56. Ibid., 3.378.

57. See p. 245 and n. 66 here.

58. History, 4.168.

59. Ibid., 5.247–48.

60. Ibid., 5.332–3.

61. Ibid., 3.469–79.

62. Ibid., 6.7.

63. B. Niebuhr, Lectures, 2.115.

64. History 7.49–50.

65. Ibid., 6.12.

66. Ibid., 6.37.

67. “George Grote and The Study of Greek History,” delivered at University College, London, in 1952 and reprinted in Momigliano’s Studies in Historiography (New York, 1966), 62. Thirlwall’s orientation to Greece is discussed in his biography by John Connop Thirlwall, Connop Thirlwall: Historian and Theologian (London, 1936).

68. See p. 250 and n. 87 here.

69. Turner, Greek Heritage, 232.

70. G. C. Lewis, “Grote’s History of Greece,” Edinburgh Review 91 (1850): 118–52.

71. Autobiography, drafted in 1853–54 and published posthumously, cited in the New York, 1924, edition with a preface by J. Coss, 8–9.

72. J. S. Mill, “Early Greek History and Legend: A Review of the First Two Volumes of ‘Grote’s History of Greece,’” reprinted from the October 1846 issue of the Edinburgh Review, vol. 84, in Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions and cited from Essays on Philosophy and the Classics in vol. 11 of his Collected Works (Toronto, 1978) as “Grote’s History of Greece [I],” 273.

73. Autobiography, 163.

74. From Mill’s review of Grote’s later volumes, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for October 1853 (vol. 98), reprinted as “Grote’s History of Greece [II]” in Essays on Philosophy and the Classics, 316, 302–3.

75. Ibid., 316.

76. E. Freeman, “The Athenian Democracy: A History of Greece. By George Grote,” reprinted in Historical Essays, 2d ser. (1873): 136–37. Freeman also concedes in his review of Curtius that Grote had “political bias” and “a certain love of novelty for its own sake,” but he maintains that “such a tendency on his particular subject does much more good than harm” (reprinted in Historical Essays, 155).

77. “The Athenian Democracy,” 131.

78. Cited p. 349, n. 38 here.

79. P. Mérimée, “De l’Histoire ancienne de la Grèce: History of Greece by G. Grote,” Revue des Deux Mondes, n.s., 6, no. 2 (1850): 846.

80. Ibid., 854.

81. V. Duruy, Histoire Grecque, 2d ed. (1856): 3.613–14, also cited in chap. 1, p. 12 and n. 13, here.

82. J. P. Mahaffy in the introduction to V. Duruy, History of Greece, and of the Greek People, from the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest, trans. M. M. Ripley (1890). Much can be learned about both the impact of Grote’s work and political currents in late nineteenth-century Britain from the pessimism Mahaffy expressed about persuading his fellows of the weaknesses of democracy. “The love of political liberty,” he wrote, “and the importance attached to political independence, are so strong in the minds of Saxon nations that it is not likely I or any one else will persuade them, against the splendid advocacy of Grote, that there may be such losses and mischiefs in a democracy as to justify a return to a stronger executive and a greater restriction of public speech” (73). In his own day, he maintained, “To utter anything against Demosthenes … is almost as bad as to say a word in old Athenian days against the battle of Marathon” (69).

83. J. Grote, “A Few Remarks on a Pamphlet by Mr. Shilleto Entitled ‘Thucydides or Grote’” (1851).

84. G. W. Cox, A General History of Greece from the Earliest Period to the Death of Alexander the Great, 2 vols. (1874): 1.448.

85. Ibid., 2.229.

86. Ibid., 1.184. On occasion Cox’s desire to illuminate Athenian society by placing it in the fabric of European history as a whole gets the better of him, and on at least one occasion he appears transported into another world entirely. The foresight of Hippias and Hipparchus, he writes, “failed to guard them against dangers arising from their pleasant vices; and Hipparchos in an evil hour sought to form with the beautiful Harmodios the shameful intimacy into which James VI. wished, it would seem, to decoy Alexander Ruthven and which disgraced his relations with Ramsay and Carr.” Thus far the text: but Cox goes on to express himself more forcefully and at considerable length in the footnote attached. “The only difference between these cases,” he writes,

is that by his attempt Hipparchos brought about his own death, while James, to hide his own guilt, wrought the death of his victim. That the whole of King James’ story on the subject of the so-called Gowrie conspiracy is a tissue of falsehoods and contradictions, is undeniable. It is enough to say that his tale was altogether disbelieved by archbishop Spottiswoode and Robert Bruce of Kinnairs; but less than this could not in fairness be said on a subject in which historians are still content to wrong the memory of the two boys in order to save the credit of one of the worst tyrants that ever disgraced a throne.” (1. 213, 262)

All this, it must be remembered, in a history of ancient Greece.

The prolific Reverend Cox also wrote widely on a variety of other subjects ranging from the history of the crusades to the shoeing of horses.

87. T. May, Democracy in Europe: A History (1877): lxii–lxiii.

88. Ibid., 63–64.

89. Ibid., 93.

90. Ibid., 106; cf. 98.

Grote’s influence was also plain in the most popular one-volume Greek history text of the second half of the century, William Smith’s 1855 History of Greece from the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest.

91. Lewis, “Grote’s History of Greece,” 122.

92. A. Böckh, The Public Economy of Athens, trans. G. C. Lewis, 2d ed. (1842): 613, 194.

93. Ibid., 226; for other criticisms, see, e.g., 193–94, 271, 603–4.

94. I cite from the 1837 English translation of E. Woolrych, The Historical Antiquities of the Greeks, with Reference to Their Political Institutions 2.201.

95. Ibid., 2.198. Other flaws of the Athenians (including an “immoderate desire” for self-government) are cited at 2.28–29, 201, 456, 353, 82, 200, and 196.

A similar orientation had characterized G. F. Schömann’s Dissertations on the Assemblies of the Athenians, which appeared in Latin in 1819 and was translated into English in 1838. After Pericles’ institution of state pay for jurors, Schömann argued, the republic once so well constituted by Solon degenerated into “an abominable democracy” (17). Schömann also attributed Athens’s decline to the unsavory types with whom naval commerce had filled the city—merchants, innkeepers, sailors, and others who lived by “haunting the ports and marketplaces,” a crew that was by its very nature “naturally fickle, seditious and idle” (17–18).

96. On Burckhardt, Meyer, and the survival of the anti-Athenian tradition in Germany, see chapters 12 (Burckhardt) and 13 (Meyer), here.

97. E. Curtius, Griechische Geschichte (1857–67). For Freeman’s review of Curtius see n. 76.

98. Cited in the English translation The History of Greece from its Commencement to the Close of the Independence of the Greek Nation (London and New York, 1900), 3.194–97.

99. Ibid., 3.196.

100. Ibid., 3.197.

101. Ibid.

102. Ibid., 3.197–98.

103. Ibid., 2.530.

104. Democracy in Europe, 1.42.

105. “Subversion of Ancient Governments,” Quarterly Review 45 (June 1831): 468–70, 454.

106. M. Arnold, “Democracy,” reprinted in Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Others (New York, 1883), 29–30. On Arnold, democracy, and America, see J. Roper, Democracy and Its Critics: Anglo-American Democratic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1989), 156–66.

107. H. Maine, Popular Government: Four Essays (1885; cited from the New York, 1886, ed.), 42–43.

108. Bernal’s arguments are presented in his controversial Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, 1987).

109. M. Arnold, “Equality,” reprinted in Mixed Essays, 65.

110. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, excerpted in H. Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time (Garden City, 1959), 171.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1. These and other citations are assembled in Gregory Vlastos’s article “Slavery in Plato’s Thought,” Philosophical Review 50 (1941): 289–304 (esp. p. 294).

2. See, for example, the contention of Robert MacIver that “the limited democracy had an anti-democratic base” and that under these circumstances “the principle of democracy could never find its true expression or its true justification” (from The Web of Government [published first in 1947 when MacIver taught at Columbia, cited from the New York, 1965, edition], 134). It is easy to assemble a collection of similar formulations. In his study of Greek culture, The Will of Zeus (Philadelphia and New York, 1961), Stringfellow Barr of Rutgers extended the principle of exclusion even to indigent citizens, warning that at Athens “the dream of equal freedom under law was far from realized: the poor man, the man who was not well-fathered, the slave, the woman, the metic were all in varying degrees shut out” (125). Textbooks are particularly prone to this sort of disclaimer. In 1954 Philip Ralph of Lake Erie College in Ohio cautioned readers of his survey text The Story of Our Civilization that in the premodern world democracy at its best, in Athens, was “coupled with an arbitrary discrimination between the sexes, condoned slavery, and was soon tarnished by imperialistic ambitions.” Even the democratic Athenians, Ralph alleged, operated within “the confines of a callow provincialism.” (The Story of Our Civilization [New York, 1954], 119, 51). (For Ralph’s observations on Machiavelli, see chap. 6, p. 131, here). For more recent texts, see Frank Frost of the University of California at Santa Barbara in Greek Society (Lexington, Mass., and Toronto, 1987), 86; and William H. McNeill, onetime president of the American Historical Association, in his History of the Human Community (Engle-wood Cliffs, N.J., 1987), 134, the outgrowth of a long series of texts on Western and world history.

3. R. Bisset, Sketch of Democracy, 104, 107.

4. Ibid., 73.

5. Ibid., 117–18.

6. Mitford 5.31, 7.336ff.; see also chapter 9, pp. 204–5, here.

7. Leçons, 131; see pp. 198–99, here.

8. Reprinted Port Washington and London (Kennikat Press, 1962), 1.374.

9. See, for example, Greenidge’s Handbook of Greek Constitutional History (1896): 203.

10. J. Cramb, The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain (published posthumously in London in 1915), 95–97, 110.

11. I owe the citations to Pickard-Cambridge and MacNeice to Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 335–36. Jenkyns also quotes from Cramb.

12. The Glory That Was Greece (London, 1911), 145.

13. Hopper’s remarks appear on p. viii of the preface, and the revised sentence is on p. 139 (The Glory That Was Greece, 4th ed. [London, 1964]).

14. The appearance of the placards is cited in F. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, 1981), 187, from Graham Wallas, Our Social Heritage (New Haven, 1921), 166.

At times it was the Athens of Pericles that modern anglophones sought to emulate, preserving democratic values against the likes of totalitarian Sparta; at times it was the Athens of Demosthenes, holding the line against Philip redivivus in the guise of Hitler. For the Oxford classicist and man of letters Gilbert Murray, it was both. Seeing a parallel between the plight of his own nation facing a German threat and the Athenians’ situation before the might of Macedon, he compared Demosthenes’ Philippics to Churchill’s “Arms and the League” speeches; but the confrontation with Sparta also seemed pertinent. “Just as in 1914 or 1939,” he wrote of the Peloponnesian War,

a rich democratic sea power with a naval empire, full of interest in all forms of social, artistic, and intellectual life, was pitted against a reactionary militarist land power, which had sacrificed most of its earlier culture to stark efficiency in war. The broad similarity is obvious, and it leads to similarities in detail which are at times almost fantastic. At one time, for example, the Spartans, their blockade baffled by the Athenian command of the sea, decided to sink at sight every ship they found afloat, of whatever nationality. Admiral Tirpitz’ “unrestricted submarine campaign” was evidently not entirely his own invention.

(The citation is from Greek Studies [Oxford, 1946], 200–202.) The German analogy can work both ways, since Athens was the more obviously imperial power among the two Greek hegemons. Illustrative parallels scattered throughout the English scholar N.G.L. Hammond’s study of The Classical Age of Greece (London, 1975) line the Germans up alternately with Athens and with its enemies (70, 110, 123–24, 140–41, 153, 157). For the analysis of the World War I parallel by a German scholar, see E. Bethe, “Athen und der Peloponnesische Krieg im Spiegel des Weltkrieges,” Neue Jahrbücher für das Klassische Altertum, Geschichte und Deutsche Literatur 20 (1917): 73–87; a Swiss perspective is offered in W. Déonna, “L’éternel present: Guerre du Péloponnèse (431–404) et Guerre Mondiale (1914–1918),” Revue des Études Grecques 35 (1922): 1–62. I have not been able to consult Déonna’s apparently longer work by the same title published in Paris in 1923. In a chapter entitled “The World War of 431–404,” Prentice of Princeton portrayed Athens as resembling England in its democratic politics, commercial basis, and naval empire but similar to Germany in the public perception of the menace it presented to the prosperity and independence of other nations (though Prentice makes plain that he believes this perception was misguided) (The Ancient Greeks: Studies towards a Better Understanding of the Ancient World [Princeton, 1940], 153).

15. Greek Imperialism (Boston and New York, 1913), 77. Others questioned the dependence of the democracy on imperial revenue, adducing the fact that the democracy outlived the empire; see for example the British scholar T.B.L. Webster (then teaching at Stanford) in Athenian Culture and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), 16.

16. Jones, From the Tigris to the Tiber (1969; reprint, Homewood, Ill., 1983), 157.

17. MacGregor, The Athenians and Their Empire (Vancouver, British Columbia, 1987), 176–77.

18. Ibid., 166.

19. Ibid., 175.

20. R. Campbell, “How a Democracy Died,” Life 30 (1 January 1951): 96.

21. B. Gallagher, “Hope and History,” Saturday Review 36 (4 July 1953): 24–25.

22. W. Karp, “The Two Thousand Years’ War,” Harper’s 262 (March 1981): 80.

Some, of course, have approved of imperialism without approving of democracy. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a school sprang up in Germany that identified Frederick of Prussia and later Otto von Bismarck with Philip of Macedon, and the comparisons were intended to flatter all parties. A number of enthusiasts for imperialism ancient and modern were decidedly lacking in sympathy for Athens. Though Curtius, for example, had little use for Greek democracy, he saw no problem with the Athenian empire. He complains of the unreasonableness of the subject cities, who, “incapable of real independence,” were nevertheless “unwilling to obey the stronger,” and of the ingratitude of the Hellenes who were willing to set aside the services of the Athenians and undertake the Peloponnesian War to bring their empire to an end (Griechische Geschichte 3.37; cf. 3.517, where similar ideas are expressed). Wilamowitz in his 1921 history of classical scholarship praised the Athenian empire as a model for the German empire of his own era, though he had little sympathy with Athenian democracy (cited on p. xviii of Hugh Lloyd-Jones’s introduction to A. Harris’s translation of the History of Classical Scholarship [London, 1982]). In Britain, on the other hand, one of Athenian democracy’s most impassioned defenders decried the Athenian empire in the strongest of terms. Macaulay, the soaring eloquence of whose paean to Athens at the end of his review of Mitford in Knight’s Quarterly has never been equaled, nonetheless in his essay on the Athenian orators complained that the Athenians, once the deliverers of Greece, “became its plunderers and oppressors”: the Athenian sword, he maintained, “unpeopled whole islands in a day,” and the Athenian plough swept over the ruins of once renowned cities (“Athenian Orators,” in Trevelyan, ed., Complete Works of Lord Macaulay [New York and London, n.d.], 8.161). Most frequently, however, fans of the democracy were, if not fans of the empire, at least its apologists.

23. On the whole the treatment of metics at Athens has escaped censure; after all, metics were free to leave or to become affluent and respected if they stayed. An exception to the trend is Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, who has recently condemned the Athenians for their exploitation of metics as “live-in servants” and compares them in this respect to women in many societies (Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality [New York, 1983], 53–55).

24. In T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, eds., David Hume: The Philosophical Works, vol. 3 (London, 1882; reprint, 1964), 385.

25. Tucker, Treatise, 214ff.; Mitford 1.404. A similar indictment appears in the radical Vindication of Natural Society evidently penned in 1756 by (mirabile dictu) the young Edmund Burke. There Burke billed the history of Athens as “but one Tissue of Rashness, Folly, Ingratitude, Injustice, Tumult, Violence, and Tyranny,” and he pointed up the hypocrisy of including slaveholding societies under the rubric of free states: since, he claimed, the freemen in these states were “never the twentieth Part of the People,” the truth is that the so-called free states of antiquity were “no better than pitiful and oppressive Oligarchies” (reprint, F. Pagano, ed. [Indianapolis, 1982]), 65). I accept Burke’s indignation as sincere, though some have viewed the Vindication as satire.

26. Mitford 1.270.

27. This allegation appears regularly in works for the general reader, textbooks, and scholarly writings—most strikingly, perhaps, in those published in Great Britain, but widely in works appearing in other countries as well. The comparatively gentle treatment of slaves in Athens was remarked as early as 1697 by Potter, who roundly condemned ancient slavery and rejoiced that Christianity had arrived to produce kinder masters. “Slaves,” Potter wrote, “were treated with more humanity at Athens than in other places,” and though their lot was “in itself deplorable enough, yet, if compared with that of their fellow-sufferers in other cities, seems very easy, at least tolerable, and not to be repined at” (Antiquities of Greece, 2 vols., [reprint, Edinburgh, 1813], 66–67, 76, 79, 82). The popular notion that Christianity improved attitudes toward slavery is attacked fiercely by the twentieth-century English Marxist Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1981), 419. Antislavers in England encouraged a literary competition at Cambridge in 1785 on the subject of slavery, and the prize was taken by Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African; Clarkson duly contended that slaves were better treated in Athenian society than in any other ancient state (Essay, 1785 [published 1788], 10). Not surprisingly, much of the literature produced on the crest of Victorian euphoria over Athens found slavery there to be mild in comparison with parallel servitude elsewhere and considered it in any event a small price to pay for the creation of the glory that was Greece. (Some, like Grote, dealt with it by glossing over it with remarkable thoroughness. Grote leaned toward the South in the American Civil War.) In 1896 G. Lowes Dickinson published his glowing paean to The Greek Way of Life—a way of life that, among other things, accorded a tolerance to homoerotic attachments between men that would have made his personal psyche more at home than in his own repressive era. Lowes Dickinson argued that “the freedom and individuality that was characteristic of the Athenian citizen, appears to have reacted favourably on the position of the slaves,” who, he maintains, were “allowed a license of bearing and costume which would not have been tolerated in any other state.” Taking in deadly earnest the complaint of the Old Oligarch about the license of slaves at Athens and the impossibility of distinguishing them on the street from citizens, he cites this same writer as an authority for the fact that it was open to Athenian slaves “to acquire a fortune and live in ease and luxury.” Slavery at best, he concludes, “is an undemocratic [i.e., wicked] institution; but in Athens it appears to have been made as democratic [i.e., nonwicked] as its nature would admit” (The Greek Way of Life [reprint, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1958, with a preface by E. M. Forster], 119). The belief that slaves in Athens were treated better than in other ancient states survives into the twentieth century but has been questioned by the American feminist Eva Keuls, who maintains that in fact Athenian slaves were singularly abused (The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens [New York, 1985]).

28. Beginning at least as early as Hume, the debate over the proportion of slave to free at Athens and the role of slavery in the Athenian state has continued well into the twentieth century; much of the bibliography of work done during the first half of this century is summarized in the exchange that appeared in the Journal of Economic History in the late 1950s between Chester Starr, an ancient historian then at the University of Illinois, and Carl Degler, an Americanist then at Vassar College in upstate New York. For Starr, who made analogies with black slavery in America, both nineteenth-century humanitarianism and twentieth-century Marxism had led to an overestimation of the role of slavery in antiquity. From Degler’s perspective, Starr’s American analogy sank his case, since, in Degler’s view, slavery was in fact integral to the economy of the antebellum South. Notions about the role of slavery in the Athenian state have been closely bound up with the question of the Greek attitude toward labor and with the relationship of slavery to the lack of significant technological progress in the ancient world as a whole. See Starr, “An Overdose of Slavery,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958): 17–32; Degler, “Starr on Slavery,” Journal of Economic History 19 (1959): 271–77.

The answer to these questions has been of more than academic interest, for Athens’s claims to the kinds of achievement for which it has been admired have seemed to many to be vitiated by the possible dependence of Athenian civilization on slave labor. The more slaves there were in Athens, the more the Athenians are suspected of having “cheated” in their quest for excellence. In one of the few doctoral dissertations on Athens written by women in the 1920s, Rachel Sargent, a student at the University of Illinois, accumulated an amusing number of passages in which the ratio of slave to free at Athens was calculated variously at three, four, and five and a half, and the inference drawn that citizens did not work. H. M. Hyndman’s Evolution of Revolution (London, 1920) proposed a ratio of fourteen slaves to one adult citizen (Sargent, The Size of the Slave Population at Athens during the Fifth and Fourth Centuries before Christ [Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, 1923; Westport, Conn., 1924], 9–11). Writing in 1840, De Tocqueville in his Democracy in America claimed that Athens boasted only 20,000 citizens for 350,000 inhabitants, and Engels in 1884 pegged the ratio at eighteen slaves to every adult male citizen (De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, reprinted in the “Classics of Conservatism” series, trans. H. Reeve [New Rochelle, N.Y., n.d.], 2.64; F. Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, translated for International Publishers [New York, 1942], 107).

29. From The Limits of State Action, ed. J. W. Burrow (Cambridge, 1969), 28; and Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Schriften zur Anthropologie und Bildungslehre, ed. A. Flitner [Düsseldorf and Munich, 1956]), 271.

30. A. Heeren, Ancient Greece, trans. George Bancroft (London, 1841), 127.

31. In The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. O. Levy, vol. 2 (trans. M. A. Muegge), 7, 15.

32. Cited from Treitschke’s Der Socialismus und seine Gönner (Berlin, 1875), 10, 17, 40, in Thomas Wiedemann’s translation of Joseph Vogt’s Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 208. Despite pious disclaimers, Vogt himself is plainly sympathetic to the notion that slavery was an acceptable price for the Greek achievement. Discussion of the evolution of attitudes to ancient slavery appear in Vogt; in Finley’s Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (London and New York, 1980); and in G. Cambiano, “Dalla polis senza schiavi agli schiavi senza polis,” Opus 1 (1981): 11–32.

33. Review on the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 (reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970), 112.

34. Ibid., 130.

35. E. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), 128. The second of the two long essays concerns Fitzhugh. On Fitzhugh see also the biography by H. Wish, George Fitzhugh: Propagandist of the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1943); and C. Vann Woodward’s introduction to his edition of Cannibals All! Or Slaves without Masters (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).

36. Slavery Justified, by a Southerner (1850): 8.

37. Cannibals All, ed. Woodward, 220.

38. On the importance of Greek models to the rhetoric of proslavery ideology see (as well as pp. 274–76, here) V. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 2 (Norman, Okla., 1927); S. F. Wiltshire, “Jefferson, Calhoun, and the Slavery Debate: The Classics and the Two Minds of the South,” Southern Humanities Review 11 (special issue, 1977): 33–40; H. Temperley, “Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology,” Past and Present 75 (1977): 94–118; J. D. Harrington, “Classical Antiquity and the Proslavery Argument,” Slavery and Abolition 10 (1989): 60–72; and L. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701–1840 (Athens, Ga., 1988). A discussion of classical ideology and antebellum architecture appears in R. Gamble, “The White-Column Tradition: Classical Architecture and the Southern Mystique,” Southern Humanities Review 11 (1977): 40ff.

39. Life in Ancient Athens (London, 1906): 43–45.

40. Originally published in 1951 (reprint, Harmondsworth, 1981), 132.

41. At 1.270, for example (moral condemnation of slavery), and 1.406 (practical advantages of slavery).

42. Some revolutionaries, of course, had expressed concern about slavery. See, for example, Vidal-Naquet, La democratie grecque vue d’ailleurs (Paris, 1990), 223.

43. Volney, Leçons d’Histoire, 125–26.

44. Constant, “De la Liberté des Anciens comparée a Celle des Modernes” (1819): in Cours de Politique Constitutionelle, ou Collection des Ouvrages publiés sur la Gouvernement Représentatif, ed. E. Laboulaye, vol. 2 (1861): 545.

45. Reprinted in the new 1829 eight-volume edition, 1.vi–xlii, esp. pp. xv–xxii.

46. Marx-Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, against Bruno Bauer and Company (1845): English translation published by Progress Publishers (Moscow, 1975), 151. On Marx’s reaction against the late eighteenth-century idealization of antiquity in France see F. Furet, Marx et la Revolution Française (Paris, 1986). Furet (24, 33) is followed by Vidal-Naquet (La Democratie Grecque, Vue d’Ailleurs, 212) in his conviction that Marx was strongly influenced by Constant.

47. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study in the Popular Mind (English translation reprinted New York, 1960), 104.

48. Wallon, Histoire de l’esclavage dans l’antiquité, 1.61. Similar arguments were put forward by abolitionists on the other side of the Atlantic. Adam Gurowski, writing in 1860, saw slavery as deeply at odds with the Athenian democracy. For him, both slaves and slave-owners stood outside the democratic system, since the slaves could not vote, and the slave-owners, he contended, were disloyal oligarchs. Despite the prevalence of slavery, Gurowski writes, on the eve of the Peloponnesian War “democracy still prevailed. The oligarchs, proud of their slaves, mines, plantations and estates, scorned the democracy of Athens.” It was the increase in the proportion of slaves, Gurowski argues, after the death of Pericles that ultimately accounted for the Macedonian conquest (Slavery in History [New York, 1960], 117–19).

49. E. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London and New York, 1988; paperback, 1989), 5–41.

50. Letters between J.-F. Deluc and Baron Albrecht von Haller, MSS. Haller xxv, Burgerbibliothek, Berne, cited in R. Leigh, “J.-J. Rousseau and the Myth of Antiquity in the Eighteenth Century,” in R. R. Bolgar, ed., Classical Influences on Western Thought, 1650–1870 (Cambridge, 1979), 163–64.

51. Cited in C. Mossé, L’Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris, 1989), 102.

52. Bisset, 132.

53. Rejected Essay, 33–34.

54. Condorcet, Esquisse d’un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l’Esprit Humain (1793; reprint, Paris, 1970), ed. O. H. Prior and Y. Belaval, 59.

55. In Lectures on The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (reprint, New York, 1956), 254.

56. Heeren, Ancient Greece, 127.

57. W. Warde Fowler, The City-State of the Greeks and Romans (1893; reprint, London, 1966), 178–79.

The appeal to Aristotle was particularly common in nineteenth-century America, especially in the work of George Frederick Holmes and George Fitzhugh; and Aristotle had received high marks from Calhoun (cited and discussed in Wiltshire, “Jefferson, Calhoun, and the Slavery Debate,” 35ff.). In a rambling piece published in the proslavery journal De Bow’s Review in 1857, Fitzhugh pointed up the similarities in thought between Calhoun and Aristotle and recommended that the classical economists such as Adam Smith be replaced with Aristotle in the American curriculum. Censuring the fundamentally Platonic cast of the “wild and profane political philosophy” that had lately been working its wiles in Europe and lamenting that “the minds of Franklin, Jefferson, Paine and probably many others who gave tone and direction to public opinion” around the time of the revolution “were tinctured with this rash philosophy,” he was greatly relieved to come to Aristotle, who “took human nature as he found it” and tried to adapt government to man rather than the other way around (“The Politics and Economics of Aristotle and Mr. Calhoun,” vol. 23 [1857], 164). After extensive praise of Aristotle, Fitzhugh proceeded to Calhoun, who, he claimed, had in his Disquisition on Government maintained “much of the doctrines of Aristotle” (169).

Fitzhugh’s friend Holmes, who taught at the University of Virginia for forty years, not only made frequent appeal to the authority of Aristotle in his defenses of slavery but composed a long article that appeared in the 1850 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger entitled “Observations on a Passage in the Politics of Aristotle Relative to Slavery.” There he set out at length Aristotle’s views regarding slavery, concluding that it was a “necessary consequence of social organization” and “consonant with the laws of nature” (196).

58. Mitford, History of Greece 4.1–2, 1.270.

59. Böckh, The Public Economy of the Athenians (1842 ed.), 614.

60. Ibid., 45.

61. Heeren, Ancient Greece, 127, 112.

62. J. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, ed. R. Marx (Leipzig, 1929), 1.254–55. On Burckhardt and Greek slavery see Wood, Peasant-Citizen, esp. p. 26.

63. N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (1864; English translation, Baltimore, 1980), 330.

64. These and other examples are collected in R. Sargent, The Size of the Slave Population, 9–11.

65. Herself often employing Marxist approaches, Wood is critical of the Marxists’ preoccupation with the importance of slavery in the Athenian economy.

66. From the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (London, 1973), 111. A later period of antiquity could provoke nostalgia as well; in the Grundrisse Marx comments on the moral tenor of ancient economic debates, observing that in the ancient world wealth is not identified as aim of production, but rather “the question is always which mode of property creates the best citizens.” The old view, he contends, in which “the human being appears as the aim of production” is in many respects loftier than the modern construct in which “production appears as the aim of mankind and wealth the sum of production.”

67. Cited from the Writings of the Young Karl Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. L. Easton and K. Guddat (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 206.

68. Above, p. 266. Despite the similarity of his thinking to that of Schiller and Hegel, Marx mentions Greece much less often than they, and Athens almost never. For all Aristotle’s disdain for banausic labor, however, Marx admired his work and drew deeply on it. On Marx and the Greeks, see Kain, Schiller, Hegel, and Marx (Kingston and Montreal, 1982), 75–158; and G. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients (Savage, Md., 1990), with ample bibliography. I have not yet been able to consult McCarthy’s collection of essays Marx and Aristotle (Savage, Md., 1992).

69. M. I. Finley is right, of course, that Marxists and anti-Marxists have spent considerable time in affirming or denying the premise that ancient society was based on slave labor and that “the question which is most promising for systematic investigation is not whether slavery was the basic element, or whether it caused this or that, but how it functioned,” but I think he underestimates the degree to which, despite all the distracting polemics, the intrusion of Marxism into classical studies actually did contribute to a focus on the function of slavery in ancient society (“Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” Historia 8 [1959]: 69).

The role of Marxism in the study of Greek slavery is examined in the introduction to Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece (French ed., Paris, 1982), trans. Janet Lloyd (Ithaca, 1988). A discussion of Marxist approaches to Athens and a bibliography of works written in Russian appears in E. Frolov, “Griechische Geschichte bis zum Zeitalter des Hellenismus,” in H. Heinen, ed., Die Geschichte des Altertums im Spiegel der sowjetischen Forschung (Darmstadt, 1980), 69–123, esp. pp. 111–17. See also Padelis Lekas, Marx on Classical Antiquity: Problems of Historical Methodology (Sussex and New York, 1988), 86–129 and notes. Marxist approaches to classical history in general are discussed in H. F. Graham, “The Significant Role of the Study of Ancient History in the Soviet Union,” Classical World 61 (1967): 85–97; R. I. Frank, “Marxism and Ancient History,” Arethusa 8 (1975): 43–58; G.E.M. de Sainte Croix, “Karl Marx and the History of Classical Antiquity,” Arethusa 8 (1975): 7–41; D. Lanza and M. Vegetti, “L’ideologia della città,” QS 1, no. 2 (1975): 1–37; M. Mazza, “Marxismo e storia antica,” Studi Storici 17 (1976): 95–124; and L. Canfora, “Antiquisants et marxisme,” Dialogues d’Histoire Ancienne 7 (1981): 429–36. A bibliography down to 1975 appears in R. Padgug, “Select Bibliography on Marxism and the Study of Antiquity,” Arethusa 8 (1975): 201–25.

I have not been able to consult R. Sannwald, Marx und die Antike (Staatswissenschlaftliche Studien, N. F. 27; Zurich, 1957), or D. Lanza et al., L’ideologia della città (Naples, 1977).

70. I have consulted only the French translation, Histoire de l’Antiquité, Editions en Langues Etrangères (Moscow, n.d. [but apparently 1959]). The work was assembled under the direction of V. Diakov and S. Kovalev, with the sections on Greece evidently done by A. Berguer, A. Dekonski, D. Noudelman, and O. Rotberg. F. Korovkin’s History of the Ancient World originally appeared in 1981; the English translation was published in Moscow in 1985.

A bibliography on Soviet work concerning Greek slavery appears in Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, 8.

71. This paradox too, of course, has shaped much Western twentieth-century thinking as well.

72. The authors’ footnotes by and large restrict themselves to Lenin, Marx, and in particular Engels (primarily The Origins of Private Property, the Family, and the State).

73. In discussing intellectual life in ancient Greece, Korovkin writes that “Democritus’ teaching which destroyed the belief in the gods and the immortal human soul provoked the anger of many Greek slave-owners” (171).

74. Pp. 149–50.

Ellen Wood has reminded me that not all scholars working in what has until recently been the communist world stress the centrality of slavery in Athens; see, for example, the downplaying of slavery in Athenian production in two articles in the East German journal Klio: Gert Audring, “Grenzen der Konzentration von Grundeigentum in Attika während des 4. Jh. v. u. Z.,” Klio 56 (1974): 445–46; and Lea Gluskina, “Zur Spezifik der klassischen griechschen Polis im Zusammenhang mit dem Problem ihrer Krise,” Klio 57 (1975): 415–31. Cf. also V. N. Andreyev, “Some Aspects of Agrarian Conditions in Attica in the Fifth to Third Centuries BC,” Eirene 12 (1974): 5–46.

75. “Was Greek Civilization Based on Slave Labour?” 72.

76. The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture (Cambridge, 1984), 187–88.

77. Rejected Essay (pp. 268, 277–79 here), 33–34.

78. Morgan’s essay has been reprinted in S. Katz and J. Murrin, eds., Colonial America: Essays in Political and Social Development (3d ed., New York, 1983), 527–96. The first chapters of Oakes’s book, which explores the nature of slave status, is entitled “Outsiders.”

79. Although the notion of a “men’s club” is associated with Pierre Vidal-Naquet and reflects twentieth-century sensibilities, the idea of a club had itself been articulated by a number of earlier thinkers and appeared, for example, Barker’s 1918 Greek Political Theory (16) and in Van Loon’s 1921 Story of Mankind, where students could read that “ancient Athens resembles a modern club” (66). Vidal-Naquet contends that “the Greek city in its classical form was marked by a double exclusion: the exclusion of women, which made it a ‘men’s club’; and the exclusion of slaves, which made it a ‘citizens’ club’ ” (The Black Hunter: Forms of Thought and Forms of Society in the Greek World, [trans. A Szegedy-Maszak [1981; reprint, Baltimore, 1986], 207).

80. Patterson, Freedom, volume 1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York, 1991), 99.

81. Ibid., 110. Vidal-Naquet’s words appear in The Black Hunter, 211.

82. Whether Fitzhugh had actually read Marx has been sharply contended. His biographer, Harvey Wish, was convinced that he had (George Fitzhugh: Propagandist, 182–83), whereas Genovese (The World the Slaveholders Made, 182 [sic]) insists he had not.

83. Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 116.

84. In his thoughtful book Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1990), Stephen Salkever questions traditional notions of Aristotle’s misogyny and stresses Aristotle’s concern to distinguish between slaves and women in the role they played in the lives of free men; he also sees Aristotle (and Plato) as championing a complex of virtues that is more a blend of traditional masculine and traditional feminine merits than the more “macho” ideology of his contemporaries (chap. 4). I am more persuaded by the arguments of Wendy Brown in Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Totowa, N.J., 1988), who emphasizes Aristotle’s role in a long tradition that saw politics as intimately bound up with masculinity.

85. A. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford, 1911), 333. The shift in thinking over the past century is indexed by the insistence of Paul Rahe of the University of Tulsa in 1992 that Athens’ exclusivity was intrinsic to its ethos and that “Athens was not a liberal democracy occasionally subject to fits of aberrant behavior” (Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution [Chapel Hill, N.C., 1992], 197).

86. Hume, Essay X, “Of Some Remarkable Customs,” in Essays (1742): 403, 498. “The republic of ATHENS,” Hume wrote, “was, I believe, the most extensive democracy, which we read of in history: Yet if we make the requisite allowances for the women, the slaves, and the strangers, we shall find, that that establishment was not, at first, made, nor any law ever voted, by a tenth part of those who were bound to pay obedience to it. Not to mention the islands and foreign dominions, which the ATHENIANS claimed as theirs by right of conquest.”

87. Tucker, Treatise, 214 (“why the adult Females should be excluded, is impossible to say”); Gillies, The History of Ancient Greece (1820 ed.), 2.1.155.

88. Mitford, History of Greece 3.3–5. A different perspective on women and democracy is offered in chaps. 9 through 12 of the third book of De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.

89. “Quarterly Review.—Articles on Greek Literature,” Westminster Review 4 (1825): 249. “How,” he asks, “could a people be great and excellent, who despised, and who had reason to despise, their mothers, their sisters, and their wives?” But of course Mitford did not consider the Athenians great and excellent. Similar observations were made half a century later by James Donaldson of the University of St. Andrews, who wrote that “the student of the history of women is continually reminded of the fact that when men lose their dignity and eminence, woman disappears from the scene, but when they rise into worth, she again comes on the stage in all her power and tenderness” (in “The Position and Influence of Women in Ancient Greece” [1878], reprinted in Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, and among the Early Christians [New York, 1973], 35). The same level of generalization was evident in Sir Thomas Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe. For May, the Greeks’ reverence for women attested their superiority to the Asiatic races, for, he contended, “Respect for women has ever been the characteristic of free races, and contempt for them the mark of a lower civilization, and of slavery” (Democracy in Europe [London, 1877], 48).

90. St. John, Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece (1842): 2.39–40. St. John’s impassioned introduction suggests that his concern for the character of women lay in a certain preoccupation with mothers. The “great sources of a nation’s happiness,” he maintains, “must always lie about the domestic hearth,” for “men are everywhere exactly what their mothers make them” (1.xv). Writing of Athenian patriotism later in this same introduction, he maintains that because the Athenians believed that they had sprung “from the bosom of the earth” of their city, “it stood, therefore to them in the dearest of all relations, being, to sum up everything holy in one word,—their MOTHER” (1.xx).

91. A. W. Gomme, “The Position of Women in Classical Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries,” CP 20 (1925): 1–25.

92. The Greeks, 235.

93. Ibid., 222.

94. J. P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece from Homer to Menander, 139.

95. Ibid., 137.

96. G. Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 205; cf. “Southern Thought Again,” De Bow’s Review 23 (1857): 449–62.

97. G. Fitzhugh, “Black Republicanism in Athens,” De Bow’s Review 23 (1857): 27.

98. Cannibals All! 198.

99. 12 September 1852.

100. W. G. Simms, Morals of Slavery, in The Pro-Slavery Argument; as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (1852): 248.

101. Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics, in E. N. Elliott, ed., Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments (1860): 601.

102. Harper, Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics, 605.

103. See chap. 11, n. 86, here.

104. G. Cox, General History of Greece 2.100–101.

105. F. Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884): English translation for International Publishers (New York, 1942), 107, 58. The belief in the primary role of slavery in the collapse of Athenian society has been affirmed by numerous Marxists of the twentieth century, such as the Englishman George Thomson, who contended in 1955 that slavery, by replacing the old nobleman/commoner tensions with a sharper conflict between slave-owners and slaves, “destroyed democracy” (Studies in Ancient Greek Society, vol. 2: The First Philosophers [London, 1955], 227).

106. Engels, Origins, 69–72.

107. P. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston, 1968), chap. 1 and 450–51.

On the whole Slater’s work was not received well by classicists. See, for example, the review by Helene Foley of Barnard (then at Stanford), in Diacritics 5, no. 4 (1975): 31–36.

108. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York, 1985), 1, 12.

109. Reprinted in Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers (Albany, 1984), 37, 36.

110. DuBois, Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago, 1988), especially chap. 3.

111. Young, History of Athens 1.70.

112. “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour,” Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, 149.

113. “Classical Greek Attitudes,” 143–57; see also Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, Mass., 1978). Specifically, Dover argues that a boy could offer his lover a variety of means of gratification but was not to allow himself to be penetrated anally, on pain of forfeiting citizenship rights in the future.

114. L’Usage des plaisirs (1984): cited in the English translation of Robert Hurley, The Use of Pleasure (New York, 1985), 151.

115. Ibid., 82.

116. Ibid., 22–23.

117. D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York and London, 1990), 95–96.

118. Pp. 128–33.

119. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982), 60–61.

Notions parallel to those of duBois crop up in a variety of places. Yvon Garlan in Slavery in Ancient Greece contends that slavery in Athens and elsewhere in Greece was “the necessary element” for Greek society to “affirm its identity” (144); Edith Hall’s study of Athenian tragedy, Inventing the Barbarian (Oxford, 1989), portrays the notion of the barbarian as formulated not in contrast to what is Greek but specifically as a foil to the Athenian democracy of the fifth century and hence as a crucial building block of the rhetoric of tragedy. Hall’s subtitle is Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy.

120. The pun on “just,” though suggested by duBois’ argument on p. 123 and throughout, is my own.

121. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), 78. The new thinking about Athens has even crept into works intended for a general or undergraduate audience; a construct similar to that of Pomeroy only with the emphasis on slavery appears in the Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece: An Introduction of Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Michel Austin. The preface to the 1977 English edition identifies the book as “aimed in the first place at an undergraduate audience, though it is hoped that it will also be of interest to a wider, non-specialist readership interested in the history and civilization of ancient Greece.” The authors make much of the crucial role played by outsiders in the insiders’ quest for both self-definition and economic success. Slavery, they argue, made Greek society possible “by guaranteeing the freedom of the citizen.” The growth of democracy at Athens, they maintain, made it particularly important for members of the egalitarian community to define themselves in contradistinction to those who did not belong (Economic and Social History of Ancient Greece [original French edition, 1972; trans., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977], xii, 23, 94).

122. Cited by Rousseau in “J.-J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva to Monsieur d’Alembert,” in J.-J. Rousseau, Politics and the Arts, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, 1973), 16.

123. W. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, 1991), 64, 160.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1. Ducoudray, Cours d’études a l’usage de l’enseignement secondaire moderne, Histoire de l’ancien Orient et de la Grèce, Classe de sixième, conforme aux programmes de 1891, 223, 235; L. Dussieux, Histoire Ancienne: La Grèce (Paris, 1877), 37–39; T. Bachelet, Cours d’histoire a l’usage des établissements d’Instruction Publique, Histoire Grecque (Classe de cinquième) (cited from the 5th ed., of 1881), 177.

2. N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (English trans. Baltimore, 1980), 213. Fustel was also distressed by the outlook of Plutarch.

3. R. Latham, In Quest of Civilization (London and New York, 1946), 197.

4. E. Davis, “Remarks on the Perfect State,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine 153 (1 November 1926): 695, 686–87, 694.

5. See, e.g., Simon Hornblower’s The Greek World, 479–323 BC (London, 1983), 183, 104–5.

6. W. Durant, The Life of Greece, The Story of Civilization, part 2 (New York, 1939), 87.

7. On the adulation of Fustel by l’Action Française, see Jane Herrick’s Catholic University dissertation, “The Historical Thought of Fustel de Coulanges” (Washington, D.C., 1954), 106–112.

8. The Italian Marxists have reprinted Maurras’s piece in “L’Action Française et la démocratie athénienne” in their journal Quaderni di Storia, 2, no. 4 (1976), with a preface by Bertrand Hemmerdinger of Paris (pp. 7–18); see pp. 302–3 here.

9. “L’Action Française,” 7.

10. H. Müller-Strübing, Aristophanes und die historische Kritik (1873); E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums (1884–1902; reprint, Stuttgart, 1954), 3.228; R. von Pöhlmann, “Zur Beurteilung Georg Grotes und seiner Griechischen Geschichte” (Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1890), reprinted in Aus Altertum und Gegenwart (Munich, 1911), 315–42.

11. See chapter 12, n. 22, here.

12. J. G. Droysen, Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (1833): esp. p. 13.

13. E. Drerup, Aus einer alten Advokatenrepublik, 189.

14. J. R. Knipfing, “German Historians and Macedonian Imperialism,” American Historical Review 26 (1921): 657–71.

15. Cited from the 1940 American edition of Strasser’s Hitler and I, trans. G. David and E. Mosbacher (Boston, 1940), 214–15.

16. R. Watt, “‘Wanderer, kommst du nach Sparta’: History through Propaganda into Literary Commonplace,” Modern Language Review 80 (1985): 871–73. Watt also follows the motif through the German literature that unfolded for a generation after the war (877–83).

17. Popper’s association of Plato’s political thought with Nazism was not crazy; during the war, the expatriate Karl Lehmann-Hartleben of New York University described German classicists suddenly discovering under government pressure that “Greek education, for instance Plato’s Laws, constituted a Bible of Nazi philosophy.” Lehmann-Hartleben also contended that “while one professor of ancient history formerly had proved that Sparta had been great only in the archaic period, when it was not militaristic or reactionary, he now recanted and proved that Athens after all decayed because of democracy, while Sparta developed the really great values of heroic Nazi-humanity” (K. Lehmann-Hartleben, “United Front of Humanism,” Classical Weekly 36 [1943]: 173). On the study of ancient history in Nazi Germany, readers will want to consult V. Losemann, Nationalsozialismus und Antike: Studien zur Entwicklung des Faches Alte Geschichte 1933–1945 (Hamburg, 1977), which I have not yet been able to obtain.

18. It is ironic that while Popper recoiled from the foreshadowing of Nazism in Plato, E. M. Blaiklock in the lecture “The Decline and Fall of Athenian Democracy” he gave in 1948 at Auckland University College in New Zealand pitted Plato on the side of the struggle against totalitarianism. Quoting from the Republic (485) Plato’s rhetorical question whether the same nature can love both wisdom and falsehood, he glosses the response: “ ‘Never!’ Never! The word stands over Plato’s work like the great NO marked in stone on the Greek hillside for the skies to see during the days of Nazi tyranny.” (The Decline and Fall of Athenian Democracy [Auckland, 1949], 15).

19. M. Westington, “Nazi Germany and Ancient Sparta,” expanded and published in Education magazine in November 1944, 152–64.

20. C. E. Robinson (not Brown University’s more famous C. A. Robinson), Hellas: A Short History of Greece (Boston, 1948), 35–36, 123, 160.

21. W. K. Prentice, The Ancient Greeks: Studies towards a Better Understanding of the Ancient World, (Princeton 1940), 150, 151.

22. U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Aus Kydathen (1880): 6.

23. The influence of German scholarship on America (largely through German émigrés) is discussed in W. Calder, “Die Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Vereinigten Staaten” (1966): reprinted in Calder’s Studies in the Modern History of Classical Scholarship, Antiqua 27 (Naples, 1984): 15–42.

24. In “Plato’s Modern Friends and Enemies” (Philosophy 37 [1962]: 97–113), Ren-ford Bambrough discusses some of the issues in what he labels the “Thirty Years’ War” between the two camps; see also the works cited in n. 1 of chap. 4 here and L. Versenyi, “Plato and His Liberal Opponents,” Philosophy 46 (1971): 222–37.

25. The debate over the utility of the past has not, of course, limited itself to classical authors; the perceived value of the recorded history of classical antiquity (such as it is) has waxed and waned with the passing of time. Heated debate has surrounded the question whether the fortunes of Athens afford useful instruction for modern times. Many thinkers of the Renaissance and eighteenth-century England and France were convinced that Athens provided powerful lessons in how not to do things. Germans writing around 1800 were troubled about the prospects of resurrecting Greek ideals in the modern world, but the happy liberals of Victorian England had no doubt that Athens provided a shining model of unity and generosity. Eighteenth-century Americans were deeply divided about whether the values of Greece and Rome were helpful, destructive, or simply passé, and as the revolution receded into the past, reservations about the perpetuation of the classical ethos increased. The learned Jefferson himself began to question the usefulness of ancient history, and the happy classicism of John Adams’s Defence of the Constitutions of the United States was attacked by Jefferson’s friend John Taylor in his Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, published in 1814 but begun a few years after the constitutional convention. Arguing that ancient history “is invariably treacherous in some degree, and comes, like an oracle, from a place into which light cannot penetrate,” Taylor, who accused Adams of “diving after wisdom into the gloom of antiquity,” exhorted his fellow Americans not to be “intimidated by apparitions of departed time” (cited in Reinhold, Classica Americana, 7). Writing several generations later, Emerson addressed the American conflict about the desirability of preserving classical values by maintaining somewhat defensively that “our admiration of the Antique is not admiration of the old but of the natural,” contending that “we admire the Greek in an American ploughboy often” (cited in Johnson, “Hellas in Hesperia,” 164–65). Both the French Revolution and the First World War, however, ushered in eras in which questions were raised about the utility and relevance of classical values. After the revolution Volney decried the pretended egalitarianism of the ancients; Chateaubriand found the project of resurrecting classical virtues to be impossible in decadent France; Constant stressed the differences between ancient and modern liberty. In early twentieth-century Ireland, the poet Louis MacNeice stressed the crushing weight of the differences that divided ancient from modern society. “It was all so unutterably different,” he wrote, “and all so long ago.”

26. In the introduction to his translation (1629).

27. On 20 August 1777, cited in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), 320–21.

28. Two Dialogues Concerning the Manner of Writing History (English trans., 1783), 43.

29. Gildersleeeve’s essay appeared in the Atlantic for September 1897 (80.330–42).

30. Citations of the sinning articles of Lang, as well as complaints about Hunter’s book Thucydides: The Artful Reporter (Toronto, 1973), appear in Hunter Rawlings’s more orthodox study The Structure of Thucydides’ History (Princeton, 1981), 267–69.

31. M. Wason, Class Struggles in Ancient Greece (Rome, 1972), 137. It is interesting to compare Wason’s strictures with those of a Victorian male, J. P. Mahaffy, who denied the significance of the war but reiterated the merit of the historian. The Peloponnesian war itself, he contended, “had little import in the world’s history, even in its largest crisis,” and he maintained that the fact that “the little raids and battles, the capture of a couple of hundred Spartans, or the defeat of twenty ships should still be studied with minuteness, and produce libraries of modern criticism, is due solely to the power of the historian and of the famous language in which he wrote his book.” Mahaffy’s remarks appear on p. 52 of his introduction to M. M. Ripley’s English translation of Duruy’s History of Greece, and of the Greek People, from the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest (1890).

32. N. Cousins, “Still Required Reading,” Saturday Review 24 (7 June 1941), 8; R. Campbell, “How a Democracy Died,” Life magazine 30 (1 January 1951): 88–96 (see p. 260 here). Davis’s original piece “Required Reading,” advocating perusal of Thucydides as an aid in understanding both World War I and World War II, had appeared in the Saturday Review for 14 October 1939; Davis had also written about analogies with the Peloponnesian War in 1917.

33. G. Johnson, “God Was Bored,” New Republic 145 (11 September 1961): 10. In their belief in the relevance of Thucydides’ work to their own times journalists have been joined by academics whose chief focus is not classical antiquity. Thus for example in 1991 Westview Press published a collection of essays entitled Hegemonic Warfare: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age, ed. by R. Ned Lebow and Barry Strauss. Strauss is a classicist, but his Cornell colleague Lebow is not, and the essays that appear represent a variety of nonclassicist perspectives.

34. Democracy Ancient and Modern (1973; reprint, London, 1985), 23.

35. D. Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy (Oxford and New York, 1990), 187.

36. J. Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton, 1989), 9.

37. Reprinted in Giants and Dwarfs, Essays 1960–1990 (New York, 1990), 235–55.

38. I. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston, 1988), xi.

39. L. Morgan, Ancient Society: or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress From Savagery, through Barbarism (1877): 85, vii.

40. Ibid., 247.

41. Ibid., 254.

42. R. Padgug, “Classes and Society in Classical Greece,” Arethusa 8 (1975): 101–2.

43. B. Hemmerdinger, “L’esclavagisme antique vu par le thermidorien Volney,” QS 1 (1975): 115–16, and “L’Action Française et la démocratie athénienne,” QS 2, no. 4 (1976): 7–18.

44. W. G. Forrest, The Emergence of Greek Democracy 800–400 B.C. (New York and Toronto, 1966), 16.

45. The difficulties Finley experienced in his career extended well beyond anti-Semitism. He was dismissed from teaching positions in the United States during the McCarthy era because of suspected leftist leanings and because of his appeal to the fifth amendment in avoiding questions put to him by the U. S. Internal Security Committee. He then moved to England, where he spent most of his life until his death in 1986. After his dismissal from Rutgers was finally invalidated, he returned there in the 1970s to deliver the lectures that were then published as Democracy Ancient and Modern.

46. La démocratie grecque, vue d’ailleurs (Paris, 1990), 215.

47. Skinner’s remarks appear in her introduction to Rescuing Creusa: New Methodological Approaches to Women in Antiquity, Helios, n.s. 13, no. 2 (1986): 4.

48. W. Durant, The Life of Greece, 87.

49. Johnson’s remarks are cited by Macaulay in his “Athenian Orators,” 153; Brougham’s observations are from his Political Philosophy, part 2 (1843): 234.

50. Mahaffy in his introduction to Ripley’s translation of Duruy’s Greek history (1890): 63, makes this contention and cites Freeman’s History of Federal Government as an authority.

51. Mitford and Rollin (see chaps. 8 and 9 here); Ferguson, Greek Imperialism (Boston and New York, 1913), 57.

52. C. Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics (English trans. D. McLintock; London and Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 145; K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), 39–40.

53. M. I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern (1973; 2d ed., New York, 1985), 23.

54. In J. Winkler and F. Zeitlin, eds., Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context (Princeton, 1990), 243.

55. Handbook of Greek Constitutional History (reprint, London and New York, 1902), 179.

56. The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, translated for International Publishers (New York, 1942), 97. Engels conceded that Solon had attacked property and argued that some such attack had been intrinsic in all revolutions to date, contending that “from the first to the last, all so-called political revolutions have been made to protect property—of one kind; and they have been carried out by confiscating, also called stealing, property—of another kind. The plain truth is that for two and a half thousand years it has been possible to preserve private property only by violating property” (103).

57. De Pauw, Philosophical Researches 2.141–46.

58. In The Politics of History, Howard Zinn cites the case of a priest on trial for burning draft board records who traced the genesis of his subversive tendencies to reading a book on the participation of Germany’s practicing Catholics in the extermination of Jews. “I was trained in Rome,” the priest related. “I was quite conservative, never broke a rule in seminary. Then I read a book” that “told how SS men went to mass, then went out to round up Jews. That book changed my life. I decided the church must never behave again as it did in the past; and that I must not.” This line of development, Zinn observed, “is unusually clear,” for “in most cases, where people turn in new directions, the causes are so complex, so subtle, that they are impossible to trace” (H. Zinn, The Politics of History [Boston, 1970], 35).

59. Cited in Luciano Canfora’s Ideologie del Classicismo (Torino, 1980), 4.

60. In David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, 1986), 4.

61. M. Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, 1987).

62. Popular Government (1885; reprint, Indianapolis, 1976), 79.

63. R. Wollheim, “Democracy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 19 (1958): 233.

64. Around the middle of this century American sociologists and political scientists were positively tripping over themselves describing the psychological characteristics of the “democratic man” in glowing terms that would have no doubt have intrigued Plato, who first developed the notion. The democratic man, they explained, was characterized by all the traits one would generally associate with maturity and health. See, for example, Harold Lasswell’s Power and Personality (New York, 1946), Seymour Lipset’s Political Man (Garden City, N.Y., 1960) and the discussion of these works in G. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963).

65. Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 247. Dunn also discusses the universal appeal to the rhetoric of democracy at the opening of his Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future (Cambridge and New York, 1979).

66. The passage comes from Hitler’s Speeches (London, 1942), 1.254, and is cited as Item 193 in A. Naess, J. Christophersen, and K. Kjell, eds., Democracy, Ideology, and Objectivity: Studies in the Semantics and Cognitive Analysis of Ideological Controversy (Oslo, 1956).

67. Cited as the Quotation of the Day in the New York Times for 22 May 1991.

68. Vidal-Naquet has observed in connection with the French revolutionaries’ attitude to antiquity that “the Revolution invented nothing—but it did make choices” (La démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs [Paris, 1990], 239).

69. W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London, 1964), 66.

70. E. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York, 1985), 12.

71. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), 9.