§ 3. Greek political thought

§ 3. Greek political thought

This cannot be examined before the earliest Greek literature, the Iliad and Odyssey, and the poems of Hesiod, of the late eighth or early seventh century BC. Whatever political thinking there may have been in the preceding millennia is wholly lost, in the absence not only of belles-lettres but also of such epigraphical texts as the royal inscriptions and annals familiar in contemporary Egypt and the Middle Eastern kingdoms. It is impossible exaggerate the difficulty of analysing the beginnings of Greek intellectual thought: source material before plato (writing in the first half of the fourth century BC) either is restricted to fragmentary or marginal texts embedded in historiography or poetry (especially fifth-century Athenian tragedy) where it is extremely elusive, as is clearly demonstrated by Aristophanes or by Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War; or it has disappeared, as in the case of the writings of Protagoras; or it is very late and falsely attributed to earlier times, as with the works of Pythagoreans under the Roman emperors.

Plato and Aristotle in the next generation were the first systematic political theorists in the proper sense of the term, though immediately before them at least two men, the Sophist Protagoras and Socrates, had taken steps towards a science or philosophy of political behaviour, which became full-fledged with Plato. That Plato and Aristotle had only a fragmented tradition behind them is suggested by the way in which Plato changed his mind drastically on fundamental questions between the Republic of his 'middle period' and the later Statesman and Laws, and by Aristotle's failure to complete his Politics or even to convert it into a fully coherent work. After   Aristotle the development came to an abrupt end. It appears that Greek political thought was coterminous with the small autonomous city-state, the polis (from the words 'politics' and 'political' were derived): thinking about politics began with the emergent city-state and ended with its death. Thus Zeno, the founder of the Stoic philosophical school, who was born thirteen years before the death of Aristotle, also wrote a Republic, but, its tide apart, it had nothing in common with Plato's book. What little is known of this 'republic' reveals that it had neither social nor economic nor political institutions, reflecting the way in which the Greeks after Alexander the Great turned their moral and political concerns away from the polls and politics to the inner psyche of the individual. The real world had become increasingly monarchical, and what passed for political writing was soon concentrated on superficial analysis of the 'good king', symbolized by the four orations entitled On Kingship of Dio Chrysostom (who died after AD 112).

It is hardly surprising that there was no interest in antiquity in Aristotle's Politics, with its basic premise [1253a2-3] that 'man is by nature a being designed to live in a polls'. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics had closed by looking ahead to the Politics. 'As then the question of legislation has been left uninvestigated by previous thinkers, it will perhaps be well if we consider it for ourselves, together with the whole question of the constitution of the state' [1181bl2-14]. There follows in a few lines a rough table of contents of the Politics (except for Book 1), closing with the sentence, 'Let us then begin our discussion.' Whether Aristotle himself or a later ancient editor wrote this conclusion, the points it makes are first that the study of politics is a branch of ethics, and second that it can be examined only within the framework of the city-state. Hence the discus­sion of the good citizen becomes closely enmeshed with the account of the good man. The demise of the polis after Alexander inevitably entailed the end of both aspects of the fundamental premise. And the pivotal problem, the nature of justice, was replaced, in so far as one may speak of any replacement, by the qualitatively different question of the nature of the good ruler.

A major stimulus to the lively though unsystematic political discussion that began in the sixth century BC was the institutional variety that emerged among the numerous more-or-less independent city-states of the Greek world. Some idea of this variety may be deduced from the fact that Aristotle and his school produced 158 booklets, each called 'The Constitution of X', of which only the one on Athens survives, thanks to its rediscovery in the late nineteenth century on an Egyptian papyrus first published in 1891. Presumably it is typical of all of them with its mixture of historical and contemporary descriptive data and, at some fifty pages, it was probably the longest.

Once politics became a subject of speculation and debate, this extraordinary variety invited comparative value-judgments. Which was better or best, and why? These questions were already being asked by poets such as Solon and Theognis in the first half of the sixth century BC and they were subject of public discussion in Athenian tragedy in the next century. But the answers were brief, almost gnomic, as moralists asserted their conflicting views. In the exchange between King Theseus of Athens and a Theban herald the former declares: 'no one man rules this city’. The demos reigns, taking turns annually. They do not give supremacy to the rich; the poor man has an equal share in it.' 'That's mob rule,' replies the herald. 'The demos is not the right judge of arguments; then how can it give right guidance to the city?' (Euripides, Suppliant Women, lines 399-419). This is assertion and counter-assertion, argument without a rational pro­gression. For the latter to emerge, a whole series of more systematic discussions was required, of the nature of truth and of justice, of the virtues and their limits, of human nature and the possibilities of changing or controlling it. In that context the famous dichotomy between nature (physis) and convention (nomos) became prominent in political analysis for several decades.

The men who initiated those first more systematic theoretical discussions of ethics and society in the second half of the fifth century BC were professional itinerant teachers known as Sophists. They were in no sense a school of thinkers; on the contrary, they often disagreed sharply among themselves, most obviously in their political allegiance. The illusion that they were in some ways a group with essential coherence is a tenacious but false image created by Plato and it has remained dominant to this day. It was Plato, too, who has made it virtually taboo to accept the contemporary view that counted Socrates among the Sophists, though, as Kerferd has phrased it, 'in function he was correctly so regarded' (p. 57). That Socrates took no pay from his pupils is essentially an irrelevance, though it is customarily adduced as central in distinguishing the activity of Socrates from that of the other Sophists. The place of neither in the history of political thought is influenced, let alone determined, by anything so marginal to their thinking about politics.

Much as the Sophists (and others) disagreed among themselves on matters as fundamental as the nature of justice or the relative superiority of democracy or oligarchy, there was more or less universal agreement on the inequality of men and almost as much unanimity, in conse­quence, on the necessity for social and political hierarchy in a well-functioning community. Not even the Utopian thought of the classical Greek period was egalitarian. Nor, to move from Utopia to existing Greek society, was such a figure as the Sophist Protagoras of Abdera an egalitarian, though, as Kerferd has pointed out, he 'produced for the first time in history a theoretical basis for participatory democracy' (p. 144). Protagoras held that all men-or, more correctly, all free adult males - were endowed with the capacity to share in the process of political decision-making, but not in equal measure. Hence the need for educators, for Sophists like himself and, at least by impli­cation, for a political leadership. There is reason to think that some such view was widely shared in democratic circles: that is the implication of the acceptance in practice of elite leadership, even in Athens. In the final century of Athenian democracy the paradoxical situation then arose in which democracy was virtually unchallenged as a working political institution at the same time that the small articulate intelligentsia were anti-democratic, while the spokesmen for democracy, such as Demosthenes, were content to repeat familiar slogans without any attempt to elaborate and deepen the Protagorean doctrine or any other.

It was also universally believed and had written by Plato and Aristotle along with nearly everyone that the essential condition for a true polis, and therefore for the good life, was 'rule by laws, not by men'. Of the frequent statements of that position it is enough to quote one, again from Euripides' Suppliant Women (lines 312-13): 'The power that keeps cities and men together, is noble preservation of the laws.' To be sure, that kind of ideological slogan is easily shown to be incapable of withstanding rigorous analysis, lit it was eminently practical. It meant in practice the stability of the city-state, its freedom from civil strife. Without fixed, publicly known laws that were regularly enforced as he basis of all social behaviour, stability could not have been achieved. The formulation and publication of the laws was the work, in the archaic period, of shadowy figures known by the Greek as lawgivers (nomothetai), often taking action in direct or indirect consequence of civil strife. Thereafter, rule by laws remained, unchallenged in Greek history, by and large for practical rather than theoretical reasons, even when absolute monarchs became increasingly the norm.

This lack of theoretical justification or sanction for whatever law was held to rule is striking. Neither legitimacy nor political obligation was a serious concern among Greek writers on politics. Modem scholars have managed, after a desperate search, to produce a few examples among the Sophists of rudimentary social contract notion, and t is the extraordinary and unique passage in Plato's Crito in which Socrates insists on his moral obligation to accept the death penalty that ten imposed on him by an Athenian court. However, that all adds up to a negligible harvest when compared with the long line in modem political thought stretching back to William of Ockham and Jean Bodin. Rule by law, in short, was upheld because the alternative was chaos, not because the content of the law, whatever it was, could be justified on theoretical grounds.

Especially striking was the lack of religious sanction for the law. Justice came from Zeus, to be sure, aid there were punishable offences of tiny and sacrilege, but both the content of the law and the procedure had become secularized by the early classical period. All ideas, all proposals, had to be defended, argued, and or challenged by human reason. On that score, at any rate, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were not rebels but representatives of a fundamental strain in Greek thought.