Yet one might wonder how, if at all, these two modes of analysis - which might be called ‘‘particular’’ and ‘‘general,’’ or sometimes ‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘philosophical’’ - work together. At first glance, the historical emphasis on particularity appears to conflict with any effort to elicit generalized teachings from classical political thought. Is it realistic to think that the gap between particular and general can be bridged by imaginative reflection? Can we avoid mistaking ‘‘is’’ for ‘‘ought’’ in making the transition from history to theory? Is it responsible for scholars and thinkers to put classical political thought to use in the vastly different conditions of late modernity?
To each question, our answer is a resounding yes. Despite the apparent tensions between particular and general, it will emerge that these approaches can cooperate successfully and so produce illuminating results. Study of the ancient city implies neither nostalgia for classical antiquity nor envy of the political lives of ancient citizens. Instead, the ubiquitously rich and deeply alien world of classical antiquity can be recovered as a repository of imaginative and theoretical resources. Recovering the deep history of political thought will remind us of forgotten dimensions of political experience and challenge us knowingly to resist the tyranny of our modern preconceptions. In undertaking such a project of recovery, the difficulty is to avoid either ham-fistedly wrenching classical ideas from their roots in their own native soil or gazing worshipfully on ancient ideas as the wondrous products of a definitively superior era. The appropriate metaphor is rather that of transplanting a healthy tree, with its roots intact, to an alien environment, where it can flower for us to enjoy or perhaps even bear fruit.
To understand why a two-tiered framework of analysis is helpful, consider the fruitlessness, if not impossibility, of writing the history of political thought without employing both analytical modes. On the one hand, purely general and abstract discussions of ancient texts, unanchored in historical understanding, run the risk of anachronism. We can easily distort the ancients’ own political vocabulary and outlook. Such distortions inevitably blunt the force of any theoretical challenges or provocations offered by the ancients. This happens all too frequently, as when scholars have anachronistically imported the modern language of sovereignty or social contract theory into study of ancient political ideas or ideology. More specifically, politically central ancient concepts such as hubris (arrogance), aidos (shame), or pietas (duty) cannot be simply or easily ‘‘translated’’ into the modern political vocabulary. They cannot be communicated to modern audiences apart from historical investigation of the particular communities of meaning in which those concepts played a decisive role.
On the other hand, purely contextual analyses, uninformed by larger questions about political life as such, often result in either meaningless dead ends or reverential ‘‘appreciation.’’ Either form of antiquarianism runs the moral and political risk of promoting doctrinaire claims to cultural authority that ignore the elements of selfcriticism in Greek and Roman political thought. Such risks can be accentuated if antiquarian history is reinforced by the naive idea that classical antiquity provides uncontaminated moments of origin for later political developments. One and all, the present contributors heed Nietzsche’s warnings against simplistic notions of uncorrupted or innocent ‘‘starting-points’’ (On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1967); cf. Foucault 1977).
Instead of segregating historical and philosophical, or particular and general, approaches, it is most productive to synthesize these modes of analysis. If we envision them as mutually supportive and dialectical, then each approach might teach the other. Neither will have to remain ancillary. In the first instance, our understanding of the history of ancient Greek and Roman political thought can be immeasurably improved if we learn to ask the right questions - questions motivated by broad awareness of political thought and practice in other geographic regions and chronological periods, including European modernity. Modern students of comparative politics have repeatedly illustrated the epistemological value of studying both like and unlike cases, in all their diversity, and they have shed light on how to examine historical comparanda with methodological sophistication and self-consciousness (e. g., Katznelson 1997; Lich-bach 1997; Landman 2000: 27-32; for an application in ancient history, Pritchard 2007: 349-52). I discern three ways in which our understanding of classical political thought, specifically, can be improved through conducting comparative studies of political thought and political life in other regions and periods.
First, doing comparisons between different periods and regions helps to render visible certain frequently unacknowledged features of the classical political experience. Consider, for example, our understanding of the relationship between Greco-Roman polytheism and classical political life. Despite their theological beliefs and symbols (Osborne, chapter 8), the Greeks regarded their political practices and ideals as human constructs dependent on human effort. In particular, by contrast with political life in other ancient Mediterranean regions, the Greeks and Romans did not, in general, view the political world as a divinely controlled world, nor did they invest their political leaders with transcendent religious authority (see Raaflaub, chapter 3; cf. Lincoln 2007). Authority in Greek and Roman politics derived from the communal power of citizens.
By contrast with politics in early modern Europe, moreover, Greek and Roman citizens were not subject to politically independent and frequently coercive clerical authority. Greeks and Romans had no need of the great modern theorists of toleration, such as Locke; they had no need to be liberated from religious orthodoxy by a Spinozistic Theological-Political Treatise. To the contrary, as Robin Osborne (chapter 8) demonstrates, Greek and Roman religion was subject to the authority of politics. Greek and Roman polytheism had no systematic orthodoxy or dogma; Greek and Roman political life was free of the religious controversies that so beset early modern political life. To put the point most provocatively, Greek, and to a lesser extent Roman, religion did not obstruct political rationality.2 Many of these features of ancient religion, and generally of ancient political life, would be invisible without the points of reference provided by far-ranging scholarly ‘‘time travel.’’
Second, by using analytical vocabularies developed in modern social science, political theory, and philosophy, we can inform our understanding of the classical political experience with a more useful set of interpretative tools (cf. Morley 2004; Ober 2008). In this belief, for example, certain contributors have utilized the vocabularies of modern political science and modern feminism to excellent effect. Josiah Ober (chapter 5) and Craige Champion (chapter 6) use the social-scientific language of collective action theory and international relations theory to explore uncharted territory in the ancient political experience (for other recent examples, see Low 2007; Eckstein 2006; Ober 1998). These chapters successfully defamiliarize certain scholarly commonplaces and make the ancients’ political discourse available to us for the improvement of our own political understanding. In a similar vein, Giulia Sissa (chapter 7) uses the conceptual tools of modern feminism to shed light on the distinctive ways in which the classical political experience was ‘‘gendered.’’ Sissa (chapters 7 and 18) and Champion, in particular, provide frameworks within which we can understand and evaluate the relationship between Greco-Roman ‘‘manliness’’ and ancient bellicosity, against the background of ancient Mediterranean culture at large.
Third, we improve our historiographic self-consciousness through becoming increasingly aware of our own location within histories of political life and thought. To be sure, we risk anachronism if we allow our interpretative lenses to be clouded with inappropriate terminology (cf. Rhodes 2003a). Yet our modern reconstructions of past practices and discourses are inevitably, though often undetectably, shaped by our twenty-first century vantage-points. If we are not conscious of the impact of our own highly contingent positions as late-modern observers, then we will not be able to take a properly self-critical perspective on our own ways of writing the history of classical political thought (cf. Osborne 2006: 14-28; Herman 2006: 85-101).
If our study of specifically classical political ideas can be improved through awareness of the broader currents of modern political thought, and through comparative study of other chronological periods and geographic regions, then the converse is also true: the larger educational value of studying ancient Greek and Roman politics depends on our sensitivity to historical particularity. Our awareness of historical particularity enables the ancient texts to speak on their own terms to permanent problems of political life, as those problems were interpreted and experienced in classical antiquity. As the following essays demonstrate, classical political life and thought are foreign and thus potentially challenging for us. Yet the ancient Greeks and Romans, even now, are not incomprehensibly remote in such a way as to render stimulating ‘‘conversation’’ impossible.
Like us, for example, the ancient Greeks and Romans confronted the universal problems of human neediness and ignorance, of disputes over scarce resources, of conflicts between the individual and the community, and of the frequently destructive human passions and appetites. They confronted such problems by employing concepts and language that we immediately recognize - justice, equality, freedom, virtue, and governance by law. But the ancient Greeks and Romans managed these problems, and used this familiar language, in an unfamiliar way, and within a life-world that differed from our own in many obvious ways, such as the near-universal acceptance of polytheistic religion, the size of the state, the difference between direct participation and representative government, the exclusion of women from citizenship, the practice of slavery, etc. This combination of similarity with difference means that the ancients have something new to offer, especially to modern citizens who also think in the language of justice, equality, freedom, virtue, and governance by law. By understanding the ancient past in a properly historical way, as I have described it, we might go beyond simply ‘‘appreciating’’ classical authors and political forms in an antiquarian or monumentalizing spirit.
Instead, we begin to render classical ideas and ideologies meaningful in arguments that we should care about. Within this framework, the historian of political thought becomes a creative mediator or umpire who judges the usefulness of historical theories and redeploys them in current political controversies. Thus, if we have tried to heed Nietzsche’s strictures against naive historicism, then we also give due consideration to his view that history should be used for the sake of‘‘life.’’ Our goal is to arrive at the advantageous position of being able to make use of historical thinkers and practices, to ‘‘put them into play,’’ so to speak, as we strive to ask the recurrent questions of political life. It is in this way that contributors to the present volume have strived not only to formulate the outlook of a newly distinct subfield, but also to uncover the extraordinary resources offered by study of classical political thought.
World History
