Thus far, I have used the metaphor of the body to explore increasingly expansive understandings of what we mean by the political. But to understand ancient politics, one must also pay attention to what is perhaps its most enduring and distinctive contribution: its self-conscious commitment to critical inquiry about the ideals and purposes of community life (see part V, ‘‘The Athens of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle,’’ this volume). Socrates’ politics of the agora is a form of political inquiry that places itself in the noisy swirl of contending political ideas, beliefs, and systems and takes on all comers, seeking both to make an argument about and to impart a particular ethical orientation on the community. Ancient politics, in short, gave reflectivity to the political self by seeking to cultivate the virtues of citizenship and to guide one in the practice of the good life.
This reflection on the ends of political life is the basis both of ancient texts and of our thinking about those texts. At its worst, ancient politics reemerges as a romanticizing gesture that cannot help but disappoint. At its most practical, it may provide, as Livy and Thucydides hoped, lessons and warnings (Neustadt and May 1986; Chaplin 2000; Matthes 2000). But our engagement with ancient political thought stimulates a broader inquiry into how we see ourselves as political beings. It may invite us to think about politics as something more than the instrument of interest (Arendt 1958 and Zuckert, this volume, chapter 34), or about the possibilities and limits of participatory and deliberative forms of democracy (see Further Reading below). An inquiry into ancient politics may point to traditions that form a part of who we are (Pocock 1975; MacIntyre 1984; Millar 2002a; Connolly 2007) or the ambivalent legacy on which those traditions have been constructed (Richlin 1992; Saxonhouse 1992; Roberts 1994). It may alert us to the ‘‘political and ideological mystifications’’ of our own age (Habinek 1998: 5) or truths that are hidden or lost (L. Strauss 1953, 1964). It may provide a model of political inquiry (Kraut 1984; Vlastos 1991, 1994a). Or it may prompt a deeper reflection on oneself as an ethical being (Nussbaum 1986, 1990b, 1994; Hadot 1992; Foucault 1997; Balot 2006).
Politics is not one thing. Whether we enter the jail with Socrates, cast a glance back to the earth in Scipio’s dream, or roam the recesses of the inner self with Seneca, politics comes into relief by the types of questions we ask, and the stance we assume. I have sought to show how our own inquiry into ancient politics necessarily occurs in a conceptual context that reveals as much as it conceals. The legacy of ancient politics, and the feature of this volume, is to encounter these other stances so that our own thoughts do not simply become reflexes costumed as political argument, but critical and self-conscious reflections on the possibilities of political life.
World History
