To speak of ‘government’ in the context of classical Greece is an anachronism, since ‘government’ is not a Greek word (though it has some relationship in derivation to the Greek kybernetes, the helmsman). Nevertheless, in the fifth and fourth centuries the Greeks themselves did talk about ‘constitution’ (politeia), ‘rule’ (arche), ‘to rule’ ( kratein) and ‘sovereignty’ ( to kyrion), and were concerned with questions of who ruled and how they did it. One of the major movements in the archaic period which had radically affected ideas of statehood and which was probably the most significant phenomenon for the development of the polis is what Morris (1996) has called the ‘strong principle of equality’. As a result, many states across the Greek world had moved towards systems of political administration in which ‘rule’ was conducted by magistrates (archai) from the citizen body, however that was defined. Although these magistrates ‘ruled’ in one sense, in Greek political thought they were answerable to a higher rule, and that was the ‘rule of law’ (nomoi), that body of custom which was enshrined as traditional and unwritten law (indeed Aristotle thought that unwritten law had more authority than written law: Politics 1287b4-8), which gave freedom and equality for all before the law ( isonomia). To stand outside the law was to be a tyrant.
The present chapter will have three sections. In the first section we will look at ideas of sovereignty as they developed in fifth - and fourth-century political thought. This overview will provide the background for the second section, which will work through the chief magistracies of the constitutional forms which acted under the rule of law. In the final section, we will turn to those constitutions which were deemed not to exist under the rule of law, the models the Greeks (and particularly the Athenians) used to understand them, and how this understanding then affected perceptions of real-life politics in the city-states.
World History
