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This book asks an important question often ignored by ancient historians and political scientists alike: Why did Athenian democracy work as well and for as long as it did? Josiah Ober seeks the answer by analyzing the sociology of Athenian politics and the nature of communication between elite and nonelite citizens. After a preliminary survey of the development of the Athenian \"constitution,\" he focuses on the role of political and legal rhetoric. As jurymen and Assemblymen, the citizen masses of Athens retained important powers, and elite Athenian politicians and litigants needed to address these large bodies of ordinary citizens in terms understandable and acceptable to the audience. This book probes the social strategies behind the rhetorical tactics employed by elite speakers. A close reading of the speeches exposes both egalitarian and elitist elements in Athenian popular ideology. Ober demonstrates that the vocabulary of public speech constituted a democratic discourse that allowed the Athenians to resolve contradictions between the ideal of political equality and the reality of social inequality. His radical reevaluation of leadership and political power in classical Athens restores key elements of the social and ideological context of the first western democracy.

For Danielle Allen, punishment is more a window onto democratic Athens' fundamental values than simply a set of official practices. From imprisonment to stoning to refusal of burial, instances of punishment in ancient Athens fueled conversations among ordinary citizens and political and literary figures about the nature of justice. Re-creating in vivid detail the cultural context of this conversation, Allen shows that punishment gave the community an opportunity to establish a shining myth of harmony and cleanliness: that the city could be purified of anger and social struggle, and perfect order achieved. Each member of the city--including notably women and slaves--had a specific role to play in restoring equilibrium among punisher, punished, and society. The common view is that democratic legal processes moved away from the \"emotional and personal\" to the \"rational and civic,\" but Allen shows that anger, honor, reciprocity, spectacle, and social memory constantly prevailed in Athenian law and politics. Allen draws upon oratory, tragedy, and philosophy to present the lively intellectual climate in which punishment was incurred, debated, and inflicted by Athenians. Broad in scope, this book is one of the first to offer both a full account of punishment in antiquity and an examination of the political stakes of democratic punishment. It will engage classicists, political theorists, legal historians, and anyone wishing to learn more about the relations between institutions and culture, normative ideas and daily events, punishment and democracy.

From household gossip to public beatings, this social history explores the many channels through which Athenian maintained public order. Virginia Hunter draws mostly on Attic court proceedings, which allowed for a wide range of evidence, including common rumors about a defendant's character and testimony, obtained under torture, of slaves against their masters. She describes Athenian \"policing\" as a form of social control that took place across a range of private and public levels. Not only does policing appear to have a collective enterprise, but its methods were embedded in a variety of social institutions, resulting in the blurring of the line between state and society.Hunter's inquiry into topics such as household authority, disputes among kin, the presence of slaves in the house, gossip in the home and neighborhood, and forms of public punishment reveals a continuum extending from self-regulation among kn and punititve actions enforced by the state. Recognizing the bias of legal documents toward the wealthy, Hunter concentrates on exposing the voices of the less powerful and less privileged members of society, including women and slaves. In so doing she is among the first to address systematically such important issues as the authority of women, self-help, and corporal punishment.Virginia J. Hunter is Professor of History at York University. She is author of Past and Process in Herodotus and Thucydides (Princeton) and Thucydides, the Artful Reporter (Toronto).Originally published in 1994.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Machiavelli's Ethics challenges the most entrenched understandings of Machiavelli, arguing that he was a moral and political philosopher who consistently favored the rule of law over that of men, that he had a coherent theory of justice, and that he did not defend the \"Machiavellian\" maxim that the ends justify the means. By carefully reconstructing the principled foundations of his political theory, Erica Benner gives the most complete account yet of Machiavelli's thought. She argues that his difficult and puzzling style of writing owes far more to ancient Greek sources than is usually recognized, as does his chief aim: to teach readers not how to produce deceptive political appearances and rhetoric, but how to see through them. Drawing on a close reading of Greek authors--including Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch--Benner identifies a powerful and neglected key to understanding Machiavelli.

A concern for the art of persuasion, as rhetoric was anciently defined, was a principal feature of Greek intellectual life. In this study of the complex of subjects labeled \"rhetoric,\" the author explores rhetorical theory and practice from the fifth to the first centuries B.C. Beginning with the creative rhetoric of the pre-Socratic era, the study progresses through the time of Aristotle and the Attic orators and concludes with the ossification of rhetoric into a pedantic discipline during the Hellenistic period. Originally published in 1963. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This book is a concise, readable introduction to the Greek author Thucydides, who is widely regarded as one of the foremost historians of all time. Why does Thucydides continue to matter today? Perez Zagorin answers this question by examining Thucydides' landmarkHistory of the Peloponnesian War, one of the great classics of Western civilization. This history, Zagorin explains, is far more than a mere chronicle of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, the two superpowers of Greece in the fifth century BCE. It is also a remarkable story of politics, decision-making, the uses of power, and the human and communal experience of war. Zagorin maintains that the work remains of permanent interest because of the exceptional intellect that Thucydides brought to the writing of history, and to the originality, penetration, and the breadth and intensity of vision that inform his narrative. The first half of Zagorin's book discusses the intellectual and historical background to Thucydides' work and its method, structure, and view of the causes of the war. The following chapters deal with Thucydides' portrayal of the Athenian leader Pericles and his account of some of the main episodes of the war, such as the revolution in Corcyra and the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The book concludes with an insightful discussion of Thucydides as a thinker and philosophic historian. Designed to introduce both students and general readers to a work that is an essential part of a liberal education, this book seeks to encourage readers to explore Thucydides--one of the world's greatest historians--for themselves.

Scholars have long noticed in Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War a concern with the collective 'character' of cities. Thucydides and his Greeks appear to rely in understanding the course of the war on consistent Athenian and Spartan character traits. Focusing on the protagonist of the History, and drawing in part on an Arendtian notion of identity, I offer a re-conceptualization of Athenian character as characteristic action and as the subject of political rhetoric. This view, I suggest, more fully reveals what Thucydides has to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics and complexities of democratic politics

This chapter examines Thucydides’ treatment of the problem of democratic citizenship. A number of scholars conclude that the History presents Pericles’ style of leadership as a model. Questions are raised about this conclusion and it is suggested that the speech of Diodotus in the debate over Mytilene offers a picture of democratic citizenship that is both more useful and more provocative. Diodotus claims that the work of the good citizen is civic persuasion in the context of political equality. In pointing to the importance of political speech in deliberating problems about justice and injustice, Thucydides’ treatment of citizenship encourages comparisons with Aristotle's investigation of human beings as political animals in the Politics. This chapter suggests that Thucydides’ book reveals both the importance and the hazards of a democratic citizenship understood in this way. Indeed, the History itself can be read as the practice of this kind of citizenship and therefore as a work that depends on reception for its value and influence.

This chapter examines two Athenian speeches on opposite sides of an issue: how to treat the Mytileneans who revolted trying to seek greater freedom from Athens. In his speech, Cleon denounces the defects of democracy and argues that Mytilene should be punished. Diodotus insists that the Athenians should consider what treatment of Mytilene will be to their advantage in dealing with future revolts. The chapter first discusses the debate in Athens concerning Mytilene before describing the events surrounding the fall of Plataea to the Spartans and their allies. It then compares the ways that Sparta treats the fallen city of Plataea with how Athens treats Mytilene, highlighting the ambiguities in Athens's treatment of Mytilene and Plataea. It also explores Diodotus's account of the power of the passions and Thucydides's portrayal of Diodotus in which he illustrates a politics cognizant of both the advantageous and the just, ennobled by the generosity or liberality that Pericles presented as a defining feature of Athens's excellence.

The speakers in Thucydides who give voice to the sophistic thesis that might is right do not generally think that what they are releasing upon the world is a war of all against all. On the contrary, they are hopeful, like the modern utilitarians they anticipate, that their realistic assessment of human motives can serve as the foundation of an inter-state order based not on justice but on clear and certain power relations. The most perceptive of these speakers is Diodotus, who addresses his theory of imperial management to the difficult problem of the rise and fall of states. But the psychology upon which this theory rests points toward confederation in place of empire and toward constitutional government in place of democracy, run by demagogues. It also implies a reasoner, perhaps Diodotus himself, who is master of his own desires. In the end Diodotus seems somewhat at odds with the sophistic rationalism he so ably espouses. Les rhéteurs de Thucydide qui soutiennent la thèse sophistique qui veut que la force passe droit ne pensent pas en général que l'application de leurs idées équivaudrait à la guerre de tous contre tous. Au contraire, tout comme les utilitaristes modernes qui les suivront, ils croient que leur évaluation réaliste des motivations de l'humanité peut fonder un ordre inter-étatique reposant non sur la justice mais sur des rapports de puissance lucides et sûrs. Le plus perspicace de ces rhéteurs est Diodote, dont la théorie de ja gestion impériale s'attaque au difficile problème de la grandeur et de la décadence des États. Or, les bases psychologiques sur lesquelles cette théorie se fonde sont orientées vers la confédération plutôt que l'empire, le gouvernement constitutionnel au lieu de la démocratie des démagogues. Elle suppose un maître à pensée, peut-être Diodote lui-m≖me, qui contrôle ses propres impulsions. Au bout du compte, Diodote s'accorde assez mal avec le rationalisme sophistique dont il se reclame habilement.