## 1. The Scope of Ancient Political Philosophy



We find the etymological origins of two key terms in the title of this
article, "political" and "philosophy", in
ancient Greek: the former originally pertaining to the *polis*
or city-state; the latter being the practice of a particular kind of
inquiry conceived literally as the "love of wisdom"
(*philosophia*). These ideas were transmitted beyond the
confines of the classical *polis* as the Greek city-states came
under the suzerainty of larger kingdoms after an initial Macedonian
conquest at the end of the fourth century B.C; those kingdoms in turn
were eventually conquered and significantly assimilated by the Roman
republic, later transmuted into an empire. Philosophers writing in
Latin engaged self-consciously with the earlier and continuing
traditions of writing about philosophy in Greek. Already from its
origins, Greek political philosophy put the question of the forms of
regimes or "constitutions" (*politeia*, singular)
at the center of its concerns. The classification of types of
constitutions already found in Herodotus, fleshed out by Plato, and
further adapted by Aristotle--in Aristotle's version,
there were three "good" regimes, namely, monarchy,
aristocracy, and a moderate form of democracy, as well as their three
"perversions," namely tyranny, oligarchy, and a bad form of
democracy--would continue to inform the discussion of politics
into the context of the "mixed regime" of the Roman
republic, held to combine elements of all three of the good regimes.
These discussions were indexed to the particular historical setting
under consideration while also offering general principles that remain
relevant in many ways, even as the questions and contexts for
political philosophy have changed.



Because the field of political philosophy so delineated has had a long
history since then, long past the time when the ancient models were
accepted as defining the field and determining the
"problems" to be considered, it is a mistake to approach
their thought with a modern menu of expectations of what the subject
will contain. At the same time, because the Greeks also developed
other genres widely recognized today--among them, history,
tragedy, comedy, and rhetoric--no understanding of their thought
about politics can restrict itself to the genre of political
philosophy alone. Some argue, for example, that Thucydides'
elaboration of the nature of the political through his
*History* of the fifth-century Peloponnesian War between
leagues led by Athens and Sparta is more important and instructive
than that issuing from Plato's philosophical dialogues (Geuss
2005). While that argument is contentious, it rests on an important
broader point. "Politics" and what is
"political" emerged as part of a widespread set of
sociolinguistic practices, most notably and best documented in Athens,
while "philosophy" was invented by a relatively small
number of self-professed "philosophical" thinkers. Thus
the invention of "political philosophy" as a genre can be
understood as a deliberate challenge to existing practices, and
conceptions, of "the political." The challenge was
directed in particular, though not exclusively, to democratic
practices in mid to late fifth century Athens, which was the
*polis* both intellectually dominant and in many ways
politically exemplary at the time, as well as bequeathing the
lion's share of our surviving evidence from ancient Greece
(Meier 1990, Ober 2008; on the surviving evidence for ancient Greek
philosophy in general, see the entry on
 doxography for ancient philosophy).



This article therefore begins by surveying political practices and the
reflective accounts to which they gave rise in the classical Greek
period of the independent *polis*. It then turns to the
thinkers who invented "political philosophy" par
excellence: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. It continues to Hellenistic
Greek thinkers before considering the main currents and roles of
political philosophy in the Roman republic. While offering a survey of
certain developments in the Roman empire, it leaves aside the
distinctive contributions made by Jewish and Christian thinkers in
that period, and in particular the great upheaval of thought effected
by Augustine, who was deeply engaged with classical authors such as
Plato and Cicero, who became in turn a crucial starting point for
 medieval political philosophy.
 The article concludes with some reflections on how the nature of
"ancient political philosophy" should, and should not, be
understood.


## 2. Politics and Philosophy in Ancient Greece


### 2.1 Politics and Justice



The distinctive understanding of "politics" forged in
Greece was marked by the historical emergence of the independent
 city-state[1]
 and the variety of regimes which it could harbor. Notwithstanding
fantasies of a pre-political "Age of Kronos", the
*polis* was widely understood as the acme of human civilization
and the principal domain in which human fulfillment could be sought.
The city was the domain of potential collaboration in leading the good
life, though it was by the same token the domain of potential
contestation should that pursuit come to be understood as pitting some
against others. Political theorizing began in arguments about what
politics was good for, who could participate in politics, and why,
arguments which were tools in civic battles for ideological and
material control as well as attempts to provide logical or
architectonic frameworks for those battles.



Such conflicts were addressed by the idea of justice, which was
fundamental to the city as it emerged from the archaic age into the
classical period. Justice was conceived by poets, lawgivers, and
philosophers alike as the structure of civic bonds which were
beneficial to all (rich and poor, powerful and weak alike) rather than
an exploitation of some by others. Hesiod's late eighth-century
epic poem *Works and Days*, for example, contrasts the brute
strength with which a hawk can dominate a nightingale ("You are
being held by one who is much stronger... I will make a meal of
you, if I want, or let you go," lines 206-208), with the
peace and plenty which flourishes wherever justice, such as rendering
fair verdicts to foreigners, is preserved (lines 225-230).



So understood, justice defined the basis of equal citizenship and was
said to be the requirement for human regimes to be acceptable to the
gods. The ideal was that, with justice as a foundation, political life
would enable its participants to flourish and to achieve the
overarching human end of happiness (*eudaimonia*), expressing a
civic form of virtue and pursuing happiness and success through the
competitive forums of the city. Whether justice applied to the
city's relation with other cities was a further and highly
contested point, memorably explored in Thucydides' recounting of
the "Melian Dialogue" in 416 BCE, in which emissaries of
the Athenians debated the meaning of justice with the leaders of the
island-city of Melos, a city they were threatening with death and
disaster should they fail to submit to Athenian imperial demands
(Thuc. V. 84-114).


### 2.2 Politics, Justice, and Equality



Justice, then, depended on treating equals equally, and distributing
citizenship and the privileges of officeholding accordingly. Yet how
should "the equal" be understood? This became the major
political faultline of the Greek fifth century BCE. Oligarchical
regimes might consider only the
 *kalokagathoi*[2]--the 
 elite and well-born, usually also wealthy landowners
--to be full equals; democratic regimes, by contrast, tended to
treat the "many" (or some large proportion of them) as
political equals of the elite "few," in the fullest
democracies enfranchising all free- and native-born
 men.[3]
 Sparta, a unique political entity, still exemplified the same broad
pattern in naming its citizens "the equals" or (more
literally) "the peers" (*hoi
 homoioi*).[4]
 The absence of slave status made one free but not necessarily a
citizen. Slavery for its part was little discussed as an explicit
political question, though Aristotle recognized that the question of
its justice or injustice had indeed been raised at least in
theoretical debate and needed to be addressed, which he did himself by
sketching out a kind of slavery that could in principle (so he
claimed) be just by nature (see 4.3 below; Garnsey 1996 on slavery in
Greek thought from Aristotle to Augustine). The exclusion of women
from active citizenship in Athens was more consciously felt, giving
rise to fantasies of female-dominated politics in Aristophanic comedy
(*Lysistrata*, *Assemblywomen*) and to tortured
reflection in many tragedies (consider the titles of *Medea*
and *Trojan Women*, both Athenian works setting explorations of
women's roles in the dramatic contexts of archaic foreign
polities).



Among equals, however defined, the space of the political was the
space of participation in decision-making concerning public affairs
and actions. That invention of the political (what Meier 1990 calls
*The Greek Discovery of Politics*) was the hallmark of the
classical Greek world. Citizens, whether the few (usually the rich) or
the many (including the poorer and perhaps the poorest free adult
men), gathered together to conduct public affairs, sharing either by
custom, by election, or by lot--the latter seen in Athens as the
most democratic, though it was never the sole mechanism used in any
Greek democracy--in holding, or holding accountable, the offices
for carrying them out. Rhetoric played an important role in shaping
those decisions, especially, though not only, in democracies, where
discursive norms shaped by the poor majority were hegemonic in public
even over the rich (Ober 1989).



At the same time, politics was shaped by the legacy of archaic poetry
and its heroic ethos and by the religious cults which included,
alongside pan-Hellenic and familial rites, important practices
distinct to each city-state. This was a polytheistic, rather than
monotheistic, setting, in which religion was at least in large part a
function of civic identity. It was a world innocent of modern
bureaucracy and of the modern move to intellectual abstraction in
defining the state: the entity we would call "Athens" in
the abstract was called in its own day by the collective noun for its
living and breathing citizens, "the Athenians." So if
ancient political philosophy left out much that modern political
philosophy would include (e.g., for the most part, the question of the
justness of slavery), it also included much that the latter would tend
to exclude. Not only the civic religious cult, but also the patterns
of child-rearing, cultural stories expressed in music, epic, and
drama, gender roles and sexual practices, military participation, and
so on, were features of the "way of life" which
constituted the *politeia* or "constitution" in its
broadest sense (Lane 2014a, 59-62). This broadest sense was
initially most evident to the Athenians when they looked at the
peculiar customs of Sparta, but Plato taught them to recognize that
democratic Athens was as distinctive a regime (Schofield 2006:
31-43), one embodying a particular set of ethical goals and
practices in its political arrangements.



Most of those generally recognized as "wise men"
(*sophoi*) and "students of nature"
(*physikoi*) who appeared in this milieu, thought within the
same broad terms as the poets and orators. Justice was widely, if not
universally, treated as a fundamental constituent of cosmic order.
Some of the *physikoi* influenced political life, notably a
number of the Pythagoreans in southern Italy. Others held themselves
aloof from political action while still identifying commonalities or
consonances between nature and politics, for example, Democritus of
Abdera, whose atomist philosophy comported with a defense of political
life, and so of the justice that it required individuals to enact, as
being necessary for individual flourishing (see e.g. Democritus'
fragment DK B252 = Taylor D116). However, these portraits of broad
consonance between nature and politics were challenged in the mid to
late fifth century BCE by some among a new breed of thinker and actor,
the professional teachers ("sophists"), who began to ask
whether the laws and customs (*nomos*, singular;
*nomoi*, plural) embodying political justice were truly a
reflection of justice in nature (*phusis*), or merely an
imposition of arbitrary human norms. Most of the sophists argued the
latter, though they did so along a spectrum of interpretation (for
which our evidence rests heavily on Plato, who portrays Socrates
arguing with a considerable number of sophists): for example, for
Protagoras (an itinerant teacher from Abdera who is depicted in
Plato's *Protagoras* and *Theaetetus*), the human
creation of political life was a cause of celebrating human virtues
and practical abilities; whereas for Thrasymachus (an ambassador to
Athens from Chalcedon, a city in Asia Minor near modern Istanbul, who
is depicted in Plato's *Republic*), it was a cause of
condemnation, the powerful in any city imposing laws to serve their
own advantage. In addition to the question of how laws fit into the
natural order, many sophists raised the question of whom the laws
benefited: were laws a socially and individually useful set of
restrictions on bad behavior, as some including Antiphon and an author
known today as the *Anonymous Iamblichi* seemed to think? Were
they the exploitative impositions of the strong on the week, as Plato
had his character Thrasymachus argue? Or were they the means by which
the many tamed and controlled the naturally powerful, preventing the
latter from using their strength for their own profit, as Plato had
his character Callicles argue? (See the entry on Callicles and
Thrasymachus.) These varied dimensions of the
*nomos*-*phusis* debate raised challenges for the
governing intellectual assumptions of the *polis*, even though
the sophists advertised themselves as teaching skills for success
within it, a number of them being employed as diplomats by cities
eager to exploit their rhetorical abilities. Socrates and Plato would
respond to this challenge in shaping a new genre of
"philosophy" which broke the mould of their predecessors
(on the genre of philosophy, see Nightingale 1993a). While it is
broadly true to say that Greek political thinkers generally
presupposed the importance of justice, in the fifth and fourth
centuries BCE many of them also increasingly problematized it.


### 2.3 Politics and Philosophy



In giving birth to philosophy, the *polis* also gave birth to a
tension between what Aristotle would describe as two lives: the life
of politics and the life of philosophy. A faultline between ethics and
politics, so closely connected in an ancient culture preoccupied with
flourishing (*eudaimonia*) and virtue *(arete*),
opened here. Should philosophers *act* politically (and if so,
should they engage in ordinary politics in existing regimes, or work
to establish new ones), or should they abstain from politics in order
to live a life of pure contemplation? There was likewise a question as
to whether philosophers should *think* politically: were human
affairs worth thinking about in the broadest perspective opened by the
study of nature and of the gods? In engaging with questions of
rhetoric, virtue, knowledge, and justice, Socrates'
philosophical life was engaged with the political even before his
death (his trial and execution at the hands of the Athenian democratic
regime) embattled him with it. But for his student Plato and
Plato's student Aristotle, the practice and even the study of
human affairs such as politics were less divine, and so less
admirable, than the broader study of truth about the natural and the
divine realms. Philosophy might have to address the political but its
highest calling soared above it. If Socrates' political fate was
part of the stimulus for Plato to invent a new metaphysics and
epistemology in order to articulate an alternative realm of political
possibility, Plato's dialogues show Socrates simultaneously
asserting an independence for those disciplines from the bonds of the
political
 alone.[5]



This distinctive Greek--and particularly Platonic - outlook
must condition any historical understanding of the development of
ancient political philosophy. While one influential approach to the
history of political thought takes its bearings from what a thinker
was trying to do in and by what he or she said or wrote, it is
important to recognize that the founders of ancient political
philosophy were in part trying to define a new space of doing as
philosophizing, independent of ordinary political action. This is not
to say that they did not also have ordinary political intentions, but
rather to stress that the invention of political philosophy was also
intended as a mode of reflection upon the value of ordinary political
life.


## 3. Socrates and Plato



According to Cicero, Socrates (469-399 BCE) was the first to
bring philosophy down from heaven, locating it in cities and even in
people's kitchens (*Tusc.*V.10). A humbly born man who
refused the lucrative mantle of the sophistic professional teacher,
yet attracted many of the most ambitious and aristocratic youth of
Athens to accompany him in his questioning of them and their elders as
to the nature of the virtues they claimed to possess or understand, he
left no philosophical writings. We know him only through the surviving
testimony of others, first the lampoons in Aristophanes' comic
plays, and above all the "Socratic" dialogues written by
his student Plato and his associate Xenophon (dialogues by others are
known only by titles or fragments), and the remarks of Plato's
student Aristotle, as well as other sources from after or even long
after his death (for a collection, see Giannantoni 1990, and see the
entry on
 Socrates).


### 3.1 Socratic Ethics and Politics



Socrates seems to have been the first philosopher to treat
ethics--as opposed to cosmology and physics--as a distinct
area of inquiry. Asserting in Plato's *Apology* (38a)
that "the unexamined life is not worth living," he pressed
for definitions of the virtues or excellences which were widely
recognized and claimed by his fellows, but which they found difficult
to explain. As depicted by Plato, the search for such definitions led
invariably to a concern with knowledge of how best to live, as not
only one of the conventional virtues (in the form of wisdom) but also
as underpinning, even constituting, them all. That elevation of
knowledge in turn led Socrates to militate against the practices of
rhetoric and judgment which animated political institutions of Athens
such as the law-courts, Assembly and Council. Instead he posited the
existence, or at least the possibility, of political expertise,
claiming (in Plato's *Gorgias*) to be the one person in
Athens who at least tried to pursue such a true *politike
techne*, a complex notion that can be understood as meaning
politics as a kind of professional expertise (*Grg*. 521d). The
notion of political knowledge limited to one or a few experts, as
opposed to the embedded and networked knowledge produced and exercised
by the whole *demos* of Athens in their judgments and
political roles (Ober 2008), struck at the central premises of
Athenian democracy and those of Greek politics more generally (in
oligarchies, wealth rather than knowledge was the relevant criterion
for rule; in tyrannies, sheer power). Thus the nature of
Socrates' concern with ethics led him directly into a form of
political philosophizing. The relation between politics and knowledge,
the meaning of justice as a virtue, the value of the military courage
which all Greek cities prized in their citizens, all seem to have been
central topics of Socratic conversation.


### 3.2 Socrates' Trial: The Political Philosophy of Citizenship



That engagement with political philosophy was dramatically intensified
when Socrates was, at the age of seventy, arraigned, tried, and
sentenced to death by an Athenian popular jury. In a prosecution
brought by a group of his fellow citizens who claimed to be
shouldering that burden for the sake of the city (the usual way in
which prosecutions were brought in Athens), the charges laid were
against him were three-fold: not acknowledging the city's gods;
introducing new gods; and corrupting the young (*Apol.* 24b).
Each of these had a political dimension, given the civic control of
central religious cults mentioned earlier, and the broad political
importance of educating the young to take their place in the civic
order. Timed a few years after the overthrow of a short-lived
oligarchic regime (known as that of "The Thirty") which
had been led by several of Socrates' sometime associates Critias
and Charmides (their oligarchic regime having been imposed after the
ignominious Athenian defeat in the war with Sparta which had earlier
seen another associate of Socrates (Alcibiades) turn traitor to
Athens), the trial must be suspected of having served as a substitute
for the prohibited political trials of the oligarchic partisans (such
trials having been generally barred by an amnesty passed in 403 BCE by
the restored democracy; see Cartledge 2009, Ch.7, Carawan 2013, Shear
2011).



Socrates' speeches in the court trial--literary versions of
which were produced by Plato, Xenophon, and a number of other
followers--forced him to confront directly the question of his
role in an Athens defined by its democratic institutions and norms.
Socrates had played his part as an ordinary citizen, allowing his name
to go forward for selection by lot to serve on the Council, and
serving in the army when required. But he had not engaged actively in
"public affairs" (*ta pragmata*, *Apol.*
32e): he had not spoken in the Assembly (31c), nor, so far as we know,
brought any prosecutions in the law-courts. In Plato's account,
after countering the religious accusations, Socrates acknowledged this
abstention from public affairs but claimed to have had a more
significant mission laid on him by the god Apollo when his oracle at
Delphi declared that no man was wiser than Socrates: his mission was
to stir up the city like a gadfly (30e), discussing virtue and related
matters (38a), and benefiting each person by "trying to persuade
him" to care for virtue rather than wealth for himself and for
the city (36c-d). He went so far as to claim that as a civic
benefactor, he deserved not death but the lifelong publicly provided
meals commonly awarded to an Olympic champion (36e-37a).
Socrates here depicts himself as a new kind of citizen,
conceptualizing the public good in a new way and so serving it best
through unprecedented actions, in contrast to the conventionally
defined paths of political contest and success (Villa 2001).



While depicting himself in his defense speeches in Plato's
*Apology* as a new kind of virtuous citizen, Socrates makes
three remarks which have in modern times been seized upon as
indications of the principled limits which he might have put on the
requirement to obey the law. The first two recalled political
incidents: while serving on the Council, he had voted against an
illegal proposal (32b-c); and under the brief oligarchical
domination of "The Thirty", he had disobeyed an order of
the ruling body to arrest a democratic partisan for execution
(32c-d). The third is a hypothetical remark. If, he imagines,
the jurors were to say to him, "we acquit you, but only on
condition that you spend no more time on this investigation and do not
practice philosophy, and if you are caught doing so you will
die," his reply would be: "I will obey the god rather than
you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to
practice philosophy" (both quotations excerpted from longer
sentences, 29c-d). Particularly in twentieth-century Anglophone
scholarship, these remarks have engendered a view of Socrates as
endorsing civil disobedience in certain circumstances, and so have
framed the question of civil disobedience and the grounds for
political obligation as arising in Plato. A significant debate on
these matters took shape in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s
at the time of widespread civil disobedience relating to civil rights
and the Vietnam War: see for example Konvitz 1964, Woozley 1972.



That debate has had to confront the fact that Socrates did not
actually disobey his own death sentence with which his trial
concluded: when the time came, he drank the poisonous hemlock as
prescribed by the jury. Before that moment, Plato imagines Socrates
being visited in prison by his friend Crito (in a dialogue which bears
the latter's name), and urged to escape for the sake of his
friends and family, a practice which was frequently tolerated in
Athens so long as the escapee fled into exile. Socrates is not
persuaded by Crito's arguments. He begins his examination of
them by recalling principles to which he and Crito had in the past
agreed, including the principle that it is better to suffer injustice
than to commit it (*Cri*. 47a-50a). He then goes on to
ventriloquize a series of speeches against escape, which he ascribes
to the "Laws of
 Athens".[6]
 These speeches articulate a set of special connections between
Socrates and the Laws of Athens which, depending on one's
reading, either flesh out the principle that it is better to suffer
injustice than to do it (by dramatizing reasons for which it would
unjust for Socrates to escape), or else stand in tension with it by
invoking absolutist grounds with implications more extensive than such
a principle would authorize (Harte 1999). On any reading, it is
important to bear in mind that Socrates is choosing to obey a jury
verdict that has commanded him to suffer what is arguably an
injustice, but not to commit one, so that one of his fundamental
ethical principles here as elsewhere in Plato (that it is better to
suffer an injustice than to commit one) is at least compatible with
his acceptance of the jury's sentence.



The "Laws of Athens" appeal to a kind of social contract
made between themselves and Socrates. The contract is unequal: the
"Laws" compare themselves to parents and slaveowners, and
Socrates to child and slave. Obedience to them is owed, they claim,
because the "Laws" have provided the whole basis for
Socrates' education and life in the city, a city in which he has
notably chosen to remain, never traveling abroad except on military
service. But the "Laws" also speak of the opportunity they
afford to Socrates to "persuade or obey" them (51b;
51e-52a). The meaning of this clause and its relevance to civil
disobedience is again much debated (Kraut 1984 remains a landmark).
Nevertheless, the image of Socrates tried, convicted, and made to die
(by his own hand) at the city's command has come to be a vivid
and powerful symbol of tension in the relationship between political
philosophy and political authority.


### 3.3 The Defense of Justice in the *Republic*



The *Crito* depends upon a notion of justice and injustice
which it never defines. In the *Republic*, by contrast, a
dialogue in which Socrates is also the main character (and
first-person narrator) but in which the views he advances go beyond
the tight-knit pattern of debates in the dialogues discussed in
section 3.1, Plato (424/3-348/7
 BCE)[7]
 offers an account of justice linking the political to the
psychological and justice to a higher understanding of true goodness.
(See the entry on
 Plato.)
 The *Republic* is, with the *Laws*, an order of
magnitude longer than any other Platonic dialogue. Readers today are
likely to think of the *Republic* as the home par excellence of
political philosophy. But that view has also been challenged by
scholars who see it as primarily an ethical dialogue, driven by the
question of why the individual should be just (Annas 1999). This
section argues that the ethical and political concerns, and purposes,
of the dialogue are inextricably intertwined.



Near the beginning of the dialogue, a challenge is launched by the
character Thrasymachus, mentioned above, asserting that all actual
cities define justice so as to serve the advantage of the rulers. He
takes this to mean that the laws which their subjects are bound to
obey and the associated ethical virtue of justice which they are
enjoined to cultivate (traditionally seen as the necessary bond among
citizens and the justification for political rule), in fact amount to
a distorted sham. (See the entry on
 Callicles and Thrasymachus.)
 The question which Thrasymachus poses and which Plato's
brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus reformulate--why should the
individual be just if he or she can get away with not being just, when
elevated above the demands of ordinary justice either by special power
or good fortune?--thus already has a political valence from the
outset.



Socrates then launches a speculation as to the origins of cities: the
city is held to have an existence independently of ethical concerns,
coming into being for economic reasons and immediately needing to
defend itself in war (and also to be able to make offensive war for
economic gain). However, this origin already gives rise to a
proto-ethical dimension, first insofar as the members of the primitive
city each do their own work (the structure of what will emerge as the
virtue of justice), which is fleshed out when political rulers are
established who are able to use their wisdom to help their subjects
maintain a psychological balance in their souls that approximates, if
it does not fully embody, the virtues of moderation and justice and so
enables them to enjoy a unified rather than a divided soul. The
question of why the individual should be just, figured at the outset
by the contrast with the putatively happy tyrant, is resolved
eventually by demonstrating that the tyrant will necessarily, in
virtue of the disorder of his soul, be at once maximally unjust and
maximally unhappy.



That resolution rests on the division of the soul into three parts by
which the *Republic* places moral psychology at the heart of
political philosophy. Both soul and city are posited by Socrates in
arguments in Books II-IV and VIII-IX, in particular, to
have a tripartite structure when the soul is embodied in a living
person. In the soul and city respectively, the rational part or class
should rule; the spirited part or class should act to support the rule
of that rational part; and the appetitive part of the soul and
producing class in the city should accept being governed by it. Both
soul and city are therefore in need of, and capable of exhibiting,
four virtues (427e-444a). Two of these pertain to individual
parts: the rational part being capable of wisdom, the spirited part of
courage. Two however are defined by relations between the parts:
moderation as the agreement of all three parts that reason should
rule, justice as each part doing its own (this echoes, in a radically
new context, a conservative Athenian suspicion of excessive democratic
*polupragmosune* or busybody interference).



The result is that justice is defined as primarily a condition of
one's soul or city as a whole, not as any specific just action;
yet if the soul or city is so ordered, the individual will have no
cause to engage in the paradigmatically unjust action of
*pleonexia* or grasping for more than one's fair share. A
just soul will indeed reliably issue in traditionally just actions,
such as refraining from theft, murder, and sacrilege (contra Sachs
1963, who argues that Plato has simply abandoned the usual domain of
justice). But what makes its 'justice' count as such goes
beyond these particular actions and omissions, lying in the health and
orderliness of such a soul contrasted with the chaotic or even
tyrannical character of an unjust soul (Burnyeat 2013). To be a truly
effective, because wholly unified, agent, one must be just, moderate,
courageous and wise. The just person enjoys psychic health, which is
advantageous no matter how he is treated (fairly or unfairly) by gods
and men; correspondingly, the just society enjoys civic unity, which
is advantageous in being the fundamental way to avoid the assumed
supreme evil of civil war. In contrast, all other cities are
characterized as riven by civil war between the rich and the poor;
none of them counts as a single, unified city at all (see Rep.
422e-423a, and more generally, Book VIII of that dialogue).



By treating these ethical and political questions as interrelated, and
then going on to depict both an ideal political regime ("a
kallipolis", the fine or beautiful city) in which they could be
solved, and the imperfect regimes into which such an ideal regime will
decay, the *Republic* lays out a novel and ambitious template
for political philosophy: not only to interrogate the meaning of
virtue and citizenship, but also to develop an ideal regime and an
account of how and why such regimes may fail. That template will be
followed by Aristotle's *Politics*, by Cicero's
*De re publica*, and by Thomas More's *Utopia*,
among other successors. In Plato's hands, however, this template
included some specific political prescriptions to maintain the unity
of the ideal city which most of his successors abhorred. In
particular, Book V of the *Republic* suggests that a
sufficiently unified regime can be achieved only by depriving its
guardian-rulers of private property and of private families, instead
making them live in austere communal conditions in which they are
financially supported by their money-making subjects and allowed to
procreate only when and with whom will best serve the city. In Book II
of his *Politics*, Aristotle would read this prescription as
applying to all the citizens in the city envisaged in the
*Republic*, and both he and, later on, Cicero would deplore
what they construed as this abolition of private property. Even those
following and radicalizing Plato precisely by advocating the abolition
of property for all the citizens, rather than only deprivation of it
for the rulers, as would the sixteenth-century Sir Thomas More, were
generally opposed to if not also scandalized by the suggestion of
procreative communism.



The *Republic* initiates a further tradition in political
philosophy by laying out a template for the integration of ethics and
political philosophy into a comprehensive account of epistemology and
metaphysics. By making the claim of the philosophers to rule depend on
their knowledge of the good and of the other Platonic Forms (in
conjunction with their moral character and tested practical
experience), the dialogue vindicates the Socratic and Platonic thought
that ruling well--what we might call "rule" proper
- requires a rare form of expertise rather than lay judgment,
rhetorical advice, or common knowledge. In the *Republic*, the
knowledge required for rule is not specialized, but comprehensive: the
knowledge of the good and the Forms is somehow to translate into an
ability to make laws as well as the everyday decisions of rule. The
rulers are philosophers who take turns over their lifetime in
exercising political authority. They define their vocation as that of
philosophizing, engaging in rule out of some sort of compulsion or
necessity (see the entry on
 Plato's ethics and politics in the *Republic*).
 To that extent the *Republic* presents a paradox: if it is
widely considered the first major work of political
 philosophy,[8]
 it envisages a constitution in which philosophers rule but do so
separately from their role of philosophizing. 


### 3.4 The Definition of Political Knowledge in the *Statesman*



In the *Statesman*, Plato turns his attention to precisely the
topics identified at the end of the last section above. In a
discussion led by an unnamed person, a philosopher visiting Athens
from Elea, political expertise (harking back to the *politike
techne* met above with Socrates, sect. 3.1) is identified by
separating it progressively by a set of distinctions from other forms
of expertise. The discussion is interrupted but ultimately enriched by
a story or myth in which politics is shown to be a matter of humans
ruling other humans in place of living under divine guidance
(O'Meara 2020). That human expertise of statecraft is ultimately
distinguished by its knowledge of the correct timing (*kairos*)
as to when its closest rivals should be exercised: these are three
forms of expertise that in fact corresponded to key political roles,
some of them formal offices, in Greek cities at the time, namely,
rhetoric, generalship, and judging (Lane 1998, Lane 2013c). The
statesman is wholly defined by the possession of that knowledge of
when it is best to exercise these and the other subordinate forms of
expertise, and by the role of exercising that knowledge in binding or
weaving the different groups of citizens together, a knowledge which
depends on a broader philosophical grasp but which is peculiarly
political (El Murr 2014). Here, political philosophy operates not just
to assimilate politics to a broader metaphysical horizon but also to
identify its specificity.



The *Statesman* also raises an important question about the
nature and value of rule by law, as opposed to rule by such expert
knowledge as embodied in a rare and likely singular individual. For
its part, the *Republic* had taken law in its stride as the
standard formulation to be utilized in the construction of the city in
speech by the dialogue's principal interlocutors from Book II
onward, who constitute themselves as the ideal constitution's
'founders' (Annas 2017, Lane 2013a). By contrast, the
*Statesman* analyzes law as in principle a stubborn and
imperfect substitute for the flexible deployment of expertise
(293e-303c). However, the principal interlocutors of the latter
dialogue go on to agree that if the choice is between an ignorant
imitator of the true political expert who changes the laws on the
basis of whim, and a law-bound polity, the latter would be preferable,
so bringing law back into the picture as an alternative to the ideal
after all.


### 3.5 The "Second-Best" Regime of the *Laws*



The *Laws*, a work reported to have been still on wax tablets,
and so possibly left unfinished when Plato died (Diogenes Laertius
III. 37), treats the specificity of politics as a matter not of
distinct vocational expertise but of the requirements of a
"second-best" (739a) city, one in which private property
is allowed, as opposed to an ideal or implicitly first-best regime in
which private property would be prohibited to all (thus going beyond
even the ideal regime of the *Republic*). In this section, as
in most scholarly discussions, I will assume that the second-best city
for which laws are laid out in the later books is the projected Cretan
colony of Magnesia, of which the Cretan (Cleinias) among the
dialogue's three interlocutors has announced himself to be one
of the intended founders. (For an alternative argument, that the
second-best city is not meant to be Magnesia, see Bartels 2017.) In
this second-best city, the legislation for which is sketched out in
speech by the three interlocutors of the dialogue, politics still aims
at virtue, and at the virtue of all the citizens, but those citizens
all play a part in holding civic offices; the ordinary activities of
politics are shared, in what is described as a mixture of monarchy and
democracy. That description gives rise to an idea of the "mixed
regime" or "mixed constitution" which later became
influential in its own right, as we shall see below (section 6).



Another influential aspect of the *Laws* is its positive
evaluation of the nature of law itself as a topic proper to political
philosophy. While the *Laws* shares with the *Statesman*
the notion of law in an isolated and singular sense as being brutish
and stubborn compared to expert knowledge, it recommends a
"double" notion of law, in which each such command is
prefaced with a persuasive account of its rationale, addressed to the
citizens, who are expected to read and understand it (719b-723d,
and *passim*). Some scholars have found that to be a
distinctively democratic and liberal account of law (Bobonich 2002;
see also the entry on
 Plato on utopia).
 That arguably goes too far in a proceduralist direction, given that
the value of law remains its embodiment of reason or understanding
(*nous*), so that while adding persuasive preludes is a better
way to exercise the coercive force of law, no agreement on the basis
of persuasion could justify laws which departed from the standard of
*nous* (Laks 2005). Nevertheless, the emphasis on law as an
embodiment of reason, and as articulating the political ideals of the
city in a form that its citizens are to study and internalize
(Nightingale 1993b, 1999), is distinctive to this dialogue.



Also notable is that the *Laws*' emphasis on all citizens
as eligible, and so presumptively capable, to hold offices, differs
significantly from the rule reserved for philosophers in the
 *Republic*.[9]
 The outlook in the *Laws* may have somewhat more affinity with
the closing passages of the *Statesman*, which refer to the
offices or quasi-offices of rhetor, general and judge which at least
certain citizens will hold, those with the relevant expertise to play
each role. The *Statesman* however reserves a special
extraordinary role (presented as falling outside the structure of
ordinary civic offices) for the statesman whenever he is present in
the city (Lane 2013b). The role of the *Statesman*'s
eponymous figure must therefore be distinguished from that of the
"Nocturnal Council" in the *Laws* (which is
actually to meet just before dawn), a body of citizens who are
selected for wisdom and judiciousness and whose role is to review the
laws and suggest potential changes to a body empowered to change them,
rather than (as in the *Statesman*, at least theoretically) to
override them when it is better to do so (Reid 2021).



Much literature on Plato's political philosophy has debated
whether the turn in the *Laws* to the "second-best"
reflects a new form of realism on Plato's part about politics
more generally, invoking other remarks by the Visitor from Athens, one
of the three interlocutors, along with Cleinias and the Spartan
Megillus, which suggest that no one could ever be uniformly and
reliably virtuous and immune to corruption, though this is not
unequivocally stated (e.g. 874e-875d). Has Plato in the
*Laws* given up on his earlier idealism which rested on the
possibility of the philosopher-king, or on the idea of the perfectly
knowledgeable statesman? If so, should that be interpreted as
disillusionment or pessimism on his part, or as a more democratic or
liberal turn? Or are there more fundamental continuities that connect
and underlie even these seeming shifts? These questions structure the
broad debate about the meaning and trajectory of Platonic political
philosophy (for an overview, compare Klosko 2006 to Schofield
2006).


## 4. Aristotle



The two Platonic themes of superior political knowledge and, expressed
particularly in his *Laws*, political participation, also
structure the political thought of Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who
studied in Plato's Academy as a youth and researched there for
many years thereafter. Living much of his life as a resident alien in
Athens, with close familial ties to the extra-*polis*
Macedonian court which would, near the end of his life, bring Athens
under its sway, Aristotle at once thematized the fundamental
perspective of the Greek citizenship of equals and at the same time
acknowledged the claim to rule of anyone of truly superior political
knowledge. While building on Plato's project of demarcating
political expertise and depicting ideal as well as imperfect cities,
the advances and new directions that Aristotle pioneered in political
philosophy reflect certain disagreements with Plato in their wider
philosophies, though also with some deep commonalities.


### 4.1 Aristotle's Philosophical Method and Ethics



Whereas Plato's philosophy continually sought a single or small
set of unifying truths behind the veil of appearance,
Aristotle's wide-ranging researches into what would now be
considered the natural sciences, as well as in logic and other areas
of inquiry, manifested respect for the opinions of "the many and
the wise" as a starting-point for philosophical understanding.
His approach likewise manifested appreciation of the multiplicity of
forms of knowledge, in particular the cleavage between theoretical
understanding of the world as it necessarily is, and practical
knowledge of how to deliberate about acting in relation to whatever
"could be otherwise." Uniting his accounts of phenomena as
different as plants, animals, ethics and politics, was a teleological
structure of explanation. Biological creatures work to fulfill the
realization of their end or *telos*, a specific way of living a
complete life characteristic of the plants or animals of their own
kind, which is the distinctive purpose that defines their fundamental
nature--just as human artifacts are designed and used for
specific ends. While every human being, in acting, posits a particular
*telos* as the purpose making that action intelligible, this
should ideally reflect the overall natural *telos* of humans as
such.



Here, however, arises a problem unique to humans. Whereas other
animals have a single *telos* defining their nature (living the
full life of a frog, including reproduction, being the sole
*telos* of each frog, in the example used by Lear 1998), humans
both have a distinctive human nature--arising from the unique
capacity to use language to deliberate about how to act--and
also share in the divine nature in their ability to use reason to
understand the eternal and intelligible order of the world. Practical
reason is the domain of ethics and politics, the uniquely human
domain. Yet the political life is not necessarily the best life,
compared with that devoted to the divinely shared human capacity for
theoretical reason and philosophical thinking (compare *Nicomachean
Ethics* I with X.7-9). Whether it is the life of
contemplative reason or the life of practical reason that is best for
humans, the good life will require the development of the various
human moral and intellectual virtues, which include (without being
limited to) courage, moderation, justice, prudence, understanding, and
wisdom. 


### 4.2 Ethics and Politics by Way of Law



In considering practical reason to be the domain of both ethics and
politics, Aristotle follows Plato in drawing no sharp line between
those two domains (see on this point for ancient testimonies and
modern arguments respectively, Bodeus 1993: 22-24
and 59-63, and Vander Waerdt 1991, though for a contrary
argument, see Duvall and Dotson 1998). In fact he closes his
*Nicomachean Ethics* by remarking that for most people, the
practice of ethics can only be ensured by their being governed by law,
which combines necessity (compulsion) with reason and habituates
people toward virtuous action (*Nicomachean Ethics*
1179b32-1180a5) (Duke 2020). Because, for most people, the ethical
life presupposes government by law, the student of ethics must become
a student of political science, studying the science of legislation in
light of the collection of constitutions assembled by Aristotle and
his school in the Lyceum. All but part of one of the over one hundred
items in this collection reported in antiquity have been lost: a
considerable part of the analysis of the "Constitution of
Athens" was recovered from a papyrus discovered in the
nineteenth century. Aristotle's theoretical claims about the
nature of politics in the *Politics* must be understood against
this backdrop. The legislator (whose standpoint is adopted in the
*Politics*, see the entry on
 Aristotle's political theory)
 needs to have a grasp of the nature of politics as such (pursued
especially in Books I and III); an understanding of the major
faultlines in the interpretation and practice of politics (pursued
especially in Books II and IV-VI); and a grip on the structure
and characteristics of the specific city for which he aims to
legislate (pursued also in Book II for existing constitutions and
constitutional models; Books IV-VI for types of flawed
constitutions; and Books VII-VIII for the "best
constitution" (1323a14).



At the beginning of Book IV (1288b1-39), Aristotle offers a
fourfold account of what the expertise regarding constitutions must
encompass. As glossed by Eugene Garver (2011: 107), and drawing on
standard Aristotelian terminology distinguishing formal from material
causes, these include: "The first, 'that which is best in
the abstract'...orients politics around the end of politics, the
best life. The second, the best relative to circumstances, starts with
the material cause and organizes political inquiry around the best
that can be made out of given material. The third, the best on a
hypothesis, starts not from the true end of politics, but any posited
end, and so looks for means and devices that will preserve any given
constitution. The final inquiry, the search for 'the form of
constitution which is best suited to states in general,'
articulates a formal cause that can organize almost any material, any
kind of people." These four elements of expertise regarding
constitution are not tidily segregated in different parts of the text;
they are pursued variously, sometimes in combination, and draw on
wider discussions of the nature of politics and the human good that
are threaded throughout.


### 4.3 Claims to Rule



The *Politics* begins by setting the stage for the first kind
of understanding of constitutions identified above, by offering an
analysis of the teleological ends of life and the human capacity for
speech which together support its two most famous contentions: that
"it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that
man is by nature a political animal" (I.2, 1253a2-3). (Hu
2020 discusses the naturalness of the *polis*.) While for some
modern readers this sentence asserts that political participation is
necessary for virtuous human flourishing (as for Irwin 1990), others
contend that "the argument that man is a political animal does
not imply that man must participate in politics to become virtuous,
only that he must literally be a part of a *polis* and live
under its laws." (Mulgan 1990:
 205)[10]
 In either case, as Hannah Arendt (1958) emphasizes, Aristotle's
understanding of civic unity insists on respect for human plurality as
the condition of political action; in Book II, he criticizes
Plato's *kallipolis* (the beautiful city for which a
constitution is sketched in the *Republic*) for interpreting
the requirement of civic unity in so extreme a fashion as to have
obliterated the properly political domain altogether (Nussbaum 1980).
Nevertheless, civic unity is still an aim of Aristotle's ideal
virtuous regime, and a limited Platonic spirit survives in the common
meals that this regime would offer to all citizens: VII.10. 



If "man is by nature a political animal," how can it be
just to exclude some human beings from a full share, and in some cases
from any share, in political life? Aristotle recognizes that this
question must be confronted, and he acknowledges some unnamed thinkers
who had answered that it is indeed unjust. For these unnamed figures,
slavery is not merely a conventional arrangement (rather than a
natural one); it is a conventional arrangement which is contrary to
what is natural, and this is why it should be counted as unjust. As
Aristotle describes their view: "Others affirm that the rule of
a master over slaves is contrary to nature [literally: 'against
nature' (*para phusin*)], and that the distinction
between slave and freeman exists by convention [*nomo*,
dative] only, and not by nature [*phusei*]; and being an
interference with nature is therefore unjust [not *dikaion*]:
for it is force [*biaion*]" (I.4,
1253b20-23). Aristotle blocks the inference that any
relationship of slavery is contrary to nature and therefore unjust, by
arguing that there are or could be grounds for a kind of slavery that
is indeed consonant with nature: namely, he claims, enslavement of
those whose practical reason is incapable of fully ruling their own
actions. He contends that the person who is by nature a slave
"has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is
without authority, and the child has, but it is immature" (I.13,
1260a12-14) (on interpretation of this passage in light of
Aristotle's biological works, Karbowski 2012; for an argument
that Aristotelian natures are made through habituation, Frank 2005).
This does not imply that any or all actually enslaved persons are
natural slaves, though Aristotle in the same chapter and elsewhere
remarks on "barbarians," especially peoples who live in
certain climates, as fitted for slavery (Kraut 2002:
290-95). Some of the pernicious afterlives of this view and of
the Aristotelian account of natural slavery more generally in later
defenses of slavery are recounted in Huxley 1980 and Monoson 2011. On
many interpretations, the view also leads to some tension in
specifying the function of slavery as an institution, since that
institution presupposes that the slave can understand and follow the
master's commands, which would seem to require some degree of
deliberative capacity even on Aristotle's own terms. The
exclusion of some human beings from a share in political life and
their subjection to the domination and exploitation of a relationship
of enslavement shadows Aristotle's exploration of the value of
the life of politics for realizing human nature.



Elsewhere in the *Politics*, the Greek dictum of citizenship
among equals--that "a citizen is one who shares in
governing and being governed" (III.13, 1283b42-1284a1,
also translatable as "ruling and being ruled in
turn")--is presented as an analytical truth, leaving open
how such equality is to be conceived in practice (and again,
consistent in the logic of the argument with the potential exclusion
of some from the domain of equality altogether). The citizen
"shares in the administration of justice, and in offices"
(III.1, 1275a23-24). In defective regimes, the good citizen and
the good man may come apart. The good citizen of a defective regime
is one whose character suits the particular regime in question
(whether oligarchic, or democratic, say) and equips him to support it
loyally; hence he may be deformed or stunted by a role of holding (or
a role of holding accountable) offices defined on incorrect terms. In
"the best state," however, the citizen is "one who
is able and chooses to be governed and to govern with a view to the
life of excellence" (III.13, 1284a1-3). In such a state,
"the citizens must not lead the life of artisans or tradesmen,
for such a life is ignoble and inimical to excellence" (VII.9,
1328b39-41), nor that of farmers, as political participation
requires leisure. Here the limitations and exclusions among actual
humans licensed by the principled formulation of the
possibility--requiring actual realization--of human virtue
become apparent.



Aristotle recognizes that there are other possible claims, or as it
were titles, to political rule: "There is also a doubt as to
what is to be the supreme power in the state:--Is it the
multitude? Or the wealthy? Or the good? Or the one best man? Or a
tyrant?" (III.10, 1281a11-13). He develops in particular
detail the arguments that might be made on behalf of the many and the
knowledgeable one respectively. The many can judge, as they did in
Athenian dramatic audiences, juries, and the Assembly (where they
"judged", by voting on, the merits of something advanced
for their consideration, whether a play, an indictment, or a
speaker's proposed resolution). Aristotle uses the image of a
collectively provided feast to illustrate the potential superiority of
such collective judgement; how to interpret this image (whether as a
potluck, Waldron 1995, Wilson 2011, Ober 2013, or in a more
aggregative way, Bouchard 2011, Cammack 2013, Lane 2013a, Hatzistavrou
2021) and other images that he uses is a matter of some renewed
controversy (for a review, see Bobonich 2015). But the lesson
Aristotle draws from the various images is clearly limited to
vindicating a role of the many in electing and holding accountable
incumbents of the highest offices rather than in holding such offices
themselves (III.11, 1281b31; Lane 2013a). The many can contribute to
virtuous decision-making in their collective capacity of
judgment--presumably in assemblies and juries--but not as
individual high officials (Lane 2013a, 2014b, Poddighe 2014).



In the contrasting case of the one supremely excellent person,
Aristotle argues that such a person has, strictly speaking, no equals,
and so cannot be made justly to take a turn in rule, holding office
for a time, as one citizen among others. Instead it is right that such
a person should rule without the term limits that political office
would ordinarily require:



> 
> If, however, there be some one person, or more than one, although not
> enough to make up the full complement of a state, whose excellence is
> so pre-eminent that the excellence or the political capacity of all
> the rest admit of no comparison with his or theirs, he or they can be
> no longer regarded as part of a state; for justice will not be done to
> the superior, if he is reckoned only as the equal of those who are so
> far inferior to him in excellence and in political capacity. Such a
> man may truly be deemed a god among men ....men like him should
> be kings in their state for life. (III.13,
> 1284a3-11...1284b32-34; cf. III.17, 1288a24-29)
> 



On one reading, this implies that virtuous monarchy does indeed count
as a political regime, albeit one in which only one or a few of the
citizens are eligible to hold the highest offices (Riesbeck 2014). Yet
this argument is left at the hypothetical level. In the absence of
such a superlatively virtuous, even godlike individual, the
formulation of political rule as involving some kind of turn-taking by
a large body of sufficiently virtuous citizens remains preeminent
(though even this should not be read to imply that all should in fact
alternate in office, or even that all should necessarily be eligible
for all offices).



As Aristotle turn to consideration of the best constitutions relative
to particular (and imperfect) circumstances, the major issue is
conflict between rival factions over the basis for defining equality
and so justice. In the *Nicomachean Ethics*, Book V, Aristotle
had identified two types of equality: geometrical, or proportional to
merit; and arithmetical, or proportional to mere numerical counting.
In *Politics* III.9 he picks up this distinction and aligns it
with the conflict between oligarchical and democratic justice. As he
later puts it, "Democrats say that justice is that to which the
majority agree, oligarchs that to which the wealthier class
agree..." (VI.3, 1318a18-20), while truly
aristocratic justice would enfranchise only those equal in virtue.
This attention to the actual political contentions of rival Greek
groups leads into a discussion of the relative goodness and badness of
imperfect regimes, modeled in part on Plato's
*Statesman*. Whereas that Platonic text had distinguished
monarchy from tyranny, aristocracy from oligarchy, and good from bad
democracy on the basis of obedience to law (all these regimes being
conceived as lacking the genuine political knowledge of the true
statesman), Aristotle instead makes the dividing line the question of
ruling for the common advantage as opposed to ruling for the advantage
of a single faction. The "bad" democracy, for example,
rules for the faction of the many as opposed to the faction of the
few, whereas the "good" democracy--which Aristotle
baptizes "polity", using the general word for
"constitution" (*politeia*)--rules for the
advantage of all citizens. Aristotle augments this analysis with
appeals to historical narrative, overlapping with the narrative of
Athenian political history offered in the *Constitution of
Athens* compiled by him or, more likely, by members of his school.
On his telling in the *Politics*, Athenian democracy had
degenerated from an aboriginal democracy of non-meddling farmers
(VI.4), through various intermediate forms, to a democracy (seemingly
that of contemporary fourth-century Athens) in which men rule, not
laws. Yet this trajectory does not prevent him from asserting that in
general democracy is "most tolerable" of the three
perversions (IV.2, 1289b4-5) and noting that it at least
involves the characteristic political liberty of ruling and being
ruled in turn (VI.2).



A further major turn in the analysis comes when the question of some
single "best" regime is replaced by a question about not
what is "best" in the "ideal" sense, but the
good constitution "that is easily attainable by all"
(IV.1, 1288a37-39) and in practice best for most cities (IV.11).
This Aristotle calls the middling regime: a political, because
sociological, mean between oligarchy and democracy, in which the
middle classes hold the preponderance of both wealth distribution and
political power. Thus it is attainable through reform of either an
oligarchy or a democracy, the most prevalent constitutions among the
Greeks. Strikingly, his example of such a regime is Sparta: presented
as a case of a characteristically democratic distribution of education
(among citizens only, of course) coupled with the characteristically
aristocratic principle of election to offices rather than selection by
lot (IV.9) (though to be sure, democracies such as Athens made use of
election for certain of the highest offices as well).


### 4.4 Aristotle in Political Philosophy



"All modern discussions of citizenship as a noninstrumental
good-in-itself are indebted, if only indirectly, to him [sc.
Aristotle]" (Ober 1998: 290). The *Politics* emphasizes
that "a state is not a mere society, having a common place,
established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of
exchange" but is rather "a community of families and
aggregations of families [sc. united] in well-being, for the sake of a
perfect and self-sufficing life" (III.9, 1280b30-34, with
square brackets added). It has been suggested in this article that the
final clause of that sentence is important: Aristotelian citizenship
counts as a noninstrumental good-in-itself only so long as it does
indeed aim at the *telos* of a perfect life. That is, while
Aristotle indeed valued the possibility of political participation in
officeholding and the control of officeholding as part of the best
constitution, he saw its value as most fully realized only insofar as
it was an expression of virtue, as it would be in that best
constitution (whether governed by a collectivity of virtuous citizens
as in the regime described in Books VII and VIII, or in the rare and
perhaps purely hypothetical case of a superlatively virtuous
monarch).



Nevertheless, Ober's observation rings true more broadly for the
historical significance of Aristotle's political thought. The
medieval rediscovery in the West of the full Greek texts of
Aristotle's *Ethics* and *Politics* and their
translation into Latin in the thirteenth century served as a basis for
reconceiving civic life as valuable on the basis of reason independent
of revelation. Thus 1260 - the date of William of
Moerbeke's complete Latin translation of the
*Politics*--symbolizes a fundamental turning point in
political philosophy, one in which Aristotelian philosophy would be
widely deployed within certain strands of thought of the Catholic
Church, while also inspiring a wide range of philosophical movements
and later becoming the target of others. Indeed, modern debates over
the meaning of Aristotle find him a precursor of or inspiration for a
range of intellectual and political positions: Aristotle as a
communitarian (MacIntyre 1984) vs. Aristotle as an exponent of class
conflict (Yack 1993); Aristotle as a democrat, or at least as
providing the basis for democracy (Frank 2005), vs. Aristotle in
opposition to Athenian democracy in his day (Ober 1998). One
interesting development has been the use of Aristotle to articulate an
ethics of capability (Nussbaum 1993). In evaluating Aristotle's
political thought, it is important to distinguish between modern
democratic assumptions and his own starting points, many of which were
in tension with the democracies of his own time.


## 5. Hellenistic Philosophies and Politics



Important developments in political thinking and practice took place
under the Hellenistic kingdoms that supplanted Macedon in its
suzerainty over the formerly independent Greek city-states. These
included, for example, a genre of rhetorical letters addressed to
rulers, and the important analysis of Greek and Roman constitutional
change by the second-century Greek historian Polybius (Hahm 2000). As
kingships flourished among the Hellenistic kingdoms until they in turn
came under Roman rule, not only the value of political participation,
but also the proper domains of politics, were widely debated.
Different authors would orient themselves respectively to
still-surviving polis communities and the various leagues which united
many of them in the Hellenistic period; to the kingdoms mentioned
above; to the Roman constitution, and eventually to the special forms
of imperial power which eventually arose therein; and in more
philosophical terms, to the cosmos as a whole and all rational beings
within it.


### 5.1 Persisting and New Schools



In addition to the major movements of Epicureanism and Stoicism
treated separately below, other schools also persisted and arose in
this period. Those persisting included the Platonic Academy
(transformed in a skeptical direction) and the Aristotelian Lyceum
(the Peripatetic School). Newcomers, albeit tracing themselves to
their own understanding of the figure of Socrates, included the Cynics
and the Pyrrhonist skeptics, and we focus on these latter two
here.



The Cynics took their name from the Greek for "dog,"
referring to the animal-like life indifferent to social conventions
which they pursued, carrying out all their bodily functions in full
public view. While this generally led them to advocate what might be
considered more an anti-politics than a politics, a provocative
statement by their founder Diogenes of Sinope (c.404-323 BCE)
- answering a query about his birthplace by asserting himself to
be a "citizen of the world" (Diogenes Laertius, VI. 63)
- would resonate with later Stoics and others developing a
political philosophy that has become known as cosmopolitanism (see the
entry on
 cosmopolitanism).
 Diogenes' indifference to political power was also reflected in
his reported reply to the visiting world-conqueror Alexander the
Great, asking him to request a boon: all the Cynic wanted was for the
emperor to step out of his light (Diogenes Laertius, VI. 38). In a
lineage stretching from Diogenes to his follower Crates, who became
the teacher of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, we can see the
Cynic-Stoic kinship especially in the early Stoics' rejection of
many conventional political and moral opinions. Yet the Cynics also
manifested some parallels with the Epicureans and even with the
skeptics.



One branch of ancient skepticism had its roots in Plato's
Academy, which from the time of Arcesilaus' headship in the
mid-260s BCE turned in a skeptical direction, arguing that there was
no clear criterion of truth and so philosophers can only suspend
judgment. While that was an "Academic" position within
philosophical debate, a possible forebear (Pyrrho) had in the fourth
century BCE putatively demonstrated the tranquility of mind which such
a position could bring, by living a life seemingly without any
investment in the truth of his beliefs (though the question of how,
and how far, Pyrrho was guided by appearances would perplex later
followers). (See the entry on
 Pyrrho.)
 From the first century BCE, a radical movement of
"Pyrrhonist" skepticism was developed outside the Academy
by Aenesidemus, followed about a century later by Agrippa, in a
movement summed up for posterity in the second-century CE work of
Sextus Empiricius (*Outlines of Pyrrhonism*) which would have a
considerable influence on early modern philosophy. Meanwhile the
milder "Academic" skepticism, allowing the inquirer to
incline to one side or another though not to invest in full belief,
had significant influence on first-century BCE figures such as Cicero.
(See the entry on
 ancient skepticism.)


### 5.2 Epicureanism



Founded by Epicurus in his "Garden" in Athens in the early
third century BCE, and elaborated by, among others, the remarkable
Latin poet Lucretius in the mid first century BCE, the various members
of the Epicurean school did not see politics as a straightforward part
of the good life or a fulfillment of the flourishing of human nature,
though their views of its origins, nature, and largely instrumental
value were complex (for an overview, see Robitzsch 2017). For his
part, Epicurus himself (see the entry on
 Epicurus)
 is reported in his "Key Doctrines" to have held a
contractarian view of justice for mutual protection from harm
(reminiscent of Glaucon's initial proposal about justice in
*Republic* Book II, which itself seems to echo the
*nomos-phusis* debate among the 5th c. BCE sophists). Justice
serves utility (Alberti 1995): as Epicurus wrote, "If someone
makes a law and it does not happen to accord with the utility of
social relationships, it no longer has the nature of justice"
(*KD* 36, LS 22B) (on Epicurean justice, Aoiz and Boeri 2022).
The greatest utility is that of tranquility or security, which is the
naturally desired end or goal. While, as Annas 1993: 298 argues, the
individual Epicurean agent will be disposed to justice as part of the
path to tranquility properly understood ("The just <life>
is most free from disturbance...", *KD* 36, LS 22B),
nevertheless laws will be necessary to enforce obedience to the
contract by most people, and indeed one should obey the laws in order
to attain peace of mind (*KD* 34-35, LS
22A4-5).



For Epicureans, the city serves a legitimate and necessary function in
ensuring security. But this does not mean that an active public life
is also normally the most rational path to security. On the contrary,
while many people will be attracted to the possible fortune and glory
of such a life, and while cities need such people, the Epicurean sage
will on the whole refrain from active political participation (for
discussion of texts, including some exceptions, both in Lucretius and
other evidence, see Fowler 2007). Instead the insecurities of life are
best met by the formation of a community of friends living together
and sharing their lives. Friendships both secure us against risks and
anxieties (more reliably than the hazards of a political career) and
also provide pleasures and indeed joy: to quote Epicurus once again,
"The man of noble character is chiefly concerned with wisdom and
friendship. Of these the former is a mortal good, but the latter is
immortal" (*Vatican Sayings* 78, LS 22F (7)).



A potential sticking point for Epicurean ethics and politics is the
justification for a still further dimension of communal life: the
willingness to sacrifice oneself for a friend, or to risk breaking the
law for the greater good of one's fellow citizens (Sharples
1996: 122). It would seem difficult to construct a compelling
theoretical justification for such actions from Epicurean premises,
which privilege obedience to law in order to avoid civic strife (as
seen for example in key moments in Lucretius' poem *De Rerum
Natura*, V.925-1157; see Campbell 2003, especially on lines
1011-1027), though Cicero has Torquatus report in *De
Finibus* (I.69) that at least some Epicureans believed that
friendly relationships could mature into love of a friend for their
own sake. Whatever the theoretical conundrum, it did not prevent a
number of Epicureans from undertaking such risky public service, among
them more than one of the assassins of Julius Caesar (Sedley 1997;
Fowler 1989 discusses a wide range of Roman Epicurean attitudes). A
more modest but still striking example of Epicurean public service is
the huge portico inscribed with Epicurean sayings and exegesis in
second-century Oenoanda (in modern-day Turkey) by one Diogenes of that
city (Smith 1992, 2003). Whether or not his fellow citizens
appreciated the instruction, modern archaeologists and philosophers
are grateful for this unparalleled source of knowledge of Epicurean
philosophy.


### 5.3 Stoicism



While Epicurus held that the sage would not engage in politics except
in "some special circumstance," Zeno, the founder of the
Stoic school (see the entry on
 Stoicism),
 held rather that a true sage "will engage in politics unless
something prevents it" (Seneca, *De Otio* 3.2, as
translated and quoted in Sharples 1996: 124; *SVF* 1.271). As
we shall see, a Stoic commitment to politics generally took it to be
part of nature's rational plan for human happiness, though this
was not incompatible with a Cynic tincture of questioning whether
existing laws are truly in accordance with the natural law (Vogt
2008). The question however of the nature of the polity in which
politics was to be exercised remains contested as a matter of the
interpretation of various Stoic figures, who across the lifetime of
the school encompassed both the early generation of the school's
leaders (Zeno and his successor Chrysippus) and later figures thriving
in the Roman period who wrote variously in Greek and in Latin (for an
overview, see Laurand 2005). To be sure, the polity in question was
invariably figured as a city, according to the account given in Dio
Chrysostom (36.20: " They [the Stoics] say that a city is a
group of people living in the same place and administered by
law" (*SVF* 3.329, as translated in LS 67J). But which
people? Whether the members of this city were to be all humans
together with the gods, or only human sages and the gods, and whether
the city is to be envisaged as a distinct foundation or as identical
with the cosmos, has much exercised both Stoic thinkers and subsequent
interpreters. And which law? How does or should the law of a
particular city relate to the natural law? These questions are
canvassed further as this section unfolds.



Both Zeno and Chrysippus wrote works in the Platonic genre entitled
*Republic*, neither of which survives in full. (So too,
reportedly, had Diogenes the Cynic.) Zeno's was written as a
young man, allegedly under Cynic influence, rejecting the use of money
in the characteristic Cynic vein. His portrait of the republic
combines the Stoic idea of a natural law by which human conduct is
harmonized with cosmic order, with a classical vision of politics in
which a Platonic ideal of friendship through communist and sexual
bonding (more erotic than familial for Zeno) persists (following
Schofield 1991: 22-56). He seems to have adopted Plato's
prescription for the community of women and children, and at least
some aspects of his insistence on the potential civic equality of men
and women and political irrelevance of their anatomical differences.
Humans share many characteristics and tendencies with other animals,
and their initial impulse to form into society is a social rather than
strictly political one: they are animated by a tendency to associate
with those akin to themselves (the Stoic notion of
*oikeiosis*).



Such a social tendency is, according to what is reported of the
opening of Chrysippus' lost treatise *On Law*,
transformed into a political relationship by means of law: "Law
is king of all things human and divine. Law must preside over what is
honourable and base, as ruler and as guide, and thus be the standard
of right and wrong, prescribing to animals whose nature is political
what they should do, and prohibiting them from what they should not
do" (*SVF* 3.314, as translated in LS 67R). Yet, in
keeping with some tendencies in Platonism and Cynicism, such law might
have to be radically different from existing laws if it is to be in
full conformity with nature and reason. For Chrysippus, even certain
forms of incest are said to have been "discredited without
reason" (*SVF* 3.753, as translated in LS 67F): a
comparison with animals would license them.



Plutarch's characterization of Zeno's *Republic* as
prescribing that "we should regard all men as our
fellow-citizens and local residents" (*SVF* 1.262, as
translated in LS 67A), composed around the end of the first century of
the Common Era, has often been read as prescribing a kind of
cosmopolitanism that builds on Diogenes' paradoxical Cynic
version of that stance. However, the reliability of this text as an
account of Zeno has been questioned, and just how this fellowship of
all humans relates to the fellowship of rationally perfect sages and
to the sharing of humans and gods in the cosmos has been debated (for
a defense and interpretation of Plutarch's claim as applying to
all humans, see Vogt 2008: 86-90, contra the views of Schofield
1991 and Vander Waerdt
 1991).[11]
 Arguably, as in the case of Aristotle, the underlying kinship by
nature establishes a potential for a full civic membership which is to
be based solely on virtue, itself potentially available to all
rational beings but realized in practice by few or perhaps even none.
This is one interpretation of the report that Zeno presented
"only virtuous people in the *Republic* as citizens,
friends, relations and free" (as translated in LS 67B; this is
preserved in Diogenes Laertius 7.32-7.33, found in *SVF*
1.226 and 1.222 respectively).



Especially for the early Stoics, existing cities remained an accepted
arena both for political action in practice--Stoic sages and
scholars advising kings and serving in offices (*SVF* 3.686;
translated in LS 67W)--insofar as the notion of a distinctive
individual city remained the principal framework for defining the
nature of politics in terms of justice. Yet the role of natural law
already in the early Stoics, and certainly in later ones, came to
support an alternative horizon for politics on the scale of the cosmos
as a whole (Laurand 2005). Malcolm Schofield (1991: 103) has argued
that this development "mediates the transition from
republicanism to natural law theory," so bequeathing a crucial
resource to early modern thinkers who sought to construct new versions
of the latter. Meanwhile, in the years of the Roman republic, certain
affinities between Stoic and republican ideas proved significant, as
we shall now see.


### 5.4 Hellenistic Philosophies and Roman Republican Politics



Roman fascination with Greek philosophy was catalyzed by the Athenian
embassy of three leading philosophers sent to Rome to plead the legal
case of their city in 156/155
 BCE;[12]
 it continued as late as the early sixth century CE, as seen
especially in the life of the eminent philosophical polymath and Roman
senator under barbarian rule, Boethius. Roman aristocrats were
especially attracted to the Stoic willingness to countenance the
kingly and political lives alongside the scholarly one as equally
preferable (*SVF* 3.686, translated in LS 67W). They began to
study the Stoa seriously from the late second century BCE. The
affinity between Stoicism and Roman republicanism was enhanced by the
second-century Stoic teacher Panaetius, who seems to have argued that
the Roman *mos maiorum* or ancient ways and customs were the
best form of government, so burnishing philosophical principle with
the ancestral piety dear to the Romans. To be sure, in the later
throes of civil war, many Stoics would have difficulty in justifying
assassination of tyrants, insofar as civil war would be worse than
even a monarchy flouting the law, as one Roman adherent to the school
would say in rebuffing Junius Brutus' attempt to recruit him to
the conspiracy to murder Caesar (Plut. *Brut*. 12. 3-4).
Other Romans were strongly attracted to Epicureanism or to Cynicism,
and some of these, however paradoxically, likewise played significant
roles in political life. Thus the distinctive lineaments of the Roman
republic, now to be described, were debated and interpreted by the
philosophically minded in terms of Greek political theory; conversely,
it has been argued that Hellenistic philosophies were significant in
shaping the ways in which Roman jurists conceived of law (Brouwer
2021).


## 6. The Roman Republic and Cicero



While the founders of the city of Rome were said to be the legendary
twins Romulus and Remus, Romans would come to identify the origins of
their distinctive liberty in the killing of a tyrannical king,
generally dated in 509 BCE, by the ancestor of the Junius Brutus who
would eventually kill Julius Caesar. The position of king was replaced
by two annually elected consuls, the royal council became the Senate,
and popular assemblies were established to elect magistrates and pass
the laws they proposed. By Cicero's time, this
regime--self-identified as the S.P.Q.R., the "Senatus
populusque Romanus" or "Senate and people of
 Rome"[13]-
 had become interpreted as a version of the "mixed
constitution" which had had a long if complicated and until then
relatively minor history as an idea in the works of Thucydides, Plato,
and Aristotle (Hahm 2009). An influential account of Rome as such a
mixed constitution, in this case combining the three classical regime
forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, had already been given
by the Greek historian Polybius, who referred to the distinction
between the characteristic powers in each kind of regime and their
mutual checking and balancing (*Histories* 6.11-18; see
von Fritz 1954). Whereas in Polybius the achievement of balance
between the different powers was portrayed as resulting from mutual
rivalrous self-assertion, Cicero would refer to it in more harmonious
language, a form of balancing (*compensatio*, *De rep*.
II. 57) with the ideas of mixing and tempering paramount, as observed
by E.M. Atkins (2000: 491). (For a useful overview of Roman political
thought, see J.W. Atkins 2018.)



According to Polybius, each element of the constitution exercised a
distinctive form of power. The elected consuls wielded
*imperium*, a form of executive command; the Senate enjoyed the
power to deliberate and consent to specific policies; and the popular
assemblies served as the source of authoritative law, also electing
the magistrates, including the popular tribunes who in turn exercised
veto powers over the Senate. An originally republican formula relating
the consuls to the people as the source of authoritative law survives
in a complete prescript of the Augustan period: "Titus Quinctius
Crispinus [consul] lawfully asked the people, and the people lawfully
resolved," as translated in Lintott 1999: 3. Moreover, the
tumultuous personal quest for office and influence led many
aristocrats and politically ambitious men to seek support among the
people, sometimes with radical measures of land reform which Cicero,
among others, would resolutely oppose. The theorizing of the proper
role of aristocratic leadership and Senatorial independence, together
with Platonic analogies for the requisite concord and harmony in the
city, would become central themes of Cicero's political
philosophy, as he wrote: "What the musicians call harmony with
respect to song is concord in the state, the tightest and best bond of
safety in every republic; and that concord can never exist without
justice" (*De rep.* II.69.)


### 6.1 Cicero: Life



Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) was the most famous
"homo novus" or new man of Roman politics, hailing from a
minor provincial landowning family rather than the great clans of
hereditary nobility. He rose to the office of consul and the lifetime
Senatorial membership it subsequently conferred by his audacious wit
as a lawyer and orator in public prosecutions. His greatest moment as
consul in 63 BCE came in exposing a conspiracy by Catiline; the brutal
suppression of the conspiracy by executing Roman citizens without
trial, however, would tar his political legacy. He became an enemy of
Julius Caesar (though accepting a pardon from him at the end of a
stretch of civil wars in 47 BCE), seeing the assertion of power first
by Caesar and then Marc Antony as fatal to the republic. Having
defended in his *De officiis* the kind of tyrannicide that he
took the killing of Caesar in 44 BCE to have constituted, and attacked
Antony mercilessly in his series of fourteen *Philippics* the
following year, Cicero was murdered in response by partisans of the
then-ruling Triumvirate to which Antony belonged.



The writings of Cicero were virtually canonized subsequent to his
death as classic models of rhetoric and philosophy; as Richard Tuck
(1990: 43) has remarked, "For fifteen hundred years, from the
fourth century to the nineteenth, schoolchildren in Europe were
exposed daily to two books. One was the Bible, and the other was the
works of Cicero." His many speeches and letters are themselves
of considerable political and often philosophical interest, reworking
the evaluative vocabulary of Roman law and politics in ways which
suited his overarching (and changing) political purposes (for a
critical assessment, see Gildenhard 2011, which concludes that
"In his rhetoric Cicero...consistently refused to recognize the
positions of his adversaries as genuine political positions and
challenged their identities as senatorial peers, Roman citizens, or
even human beings "(Gildenhard 2011: 390). While his
philosophical writings--composed for the most part as a student
of philosophy in Rome and Athens, and then in a brief period
(46-44 BCE) when political developments led him to retreat from
active public life--cover a wide range of topics, including for
example, among those especially relevant to politics are two works on
the political role of the orator and the nature of oratory or
rhetoric, celebrating the moral purposes of the orator as essential to
the success of republican government.



While Cicero adhered to a moderate skepticism in general philosophical
matters, he would draw on a number of Stoic ideas in formulating his
own ethical and political teachings: these were shaped by the lectures
he had attended by the Stoic Posidonius in Rhodes, the writings of
Posidonius' teacher Panaetius and other earlier and contemporary
Stoic texts, as well as (we may speculate) conversation with the Stoic
Diodotus whom he accommodated in his household in Rome for many years.
In particular, Cicero emphasized the Stoic themes of the natural
affinity for society and the existence of natural law. At the same
time, Platonic themes and models were also important in his political
writings (for overall interpretations, Atkins 2020, Schofield 2021).
The discussion below is limited to the two dialogues which are
explicitly modeled on Plato's *Republic* and
*Laws*, titled by Cicero in Latin *De re publica* and
*De legibus* ( *On the Commonwealth* and *On the
Laws*), together with his most important work on political ethics,
the *De officiis* (*On Duties*), which exercised
particular influence on subsequent Western moral and political
thought.


### 6.2 *De re publica*



*De re publica* was composed by Cicero between 54 and 51 BCE, a
turbulent period of strife in Roman politics. Its dramatic setting is
in 129 BCE during the crisis caused by Tiberius Gracchus, a consul who
had championed a property redistribution law for the people and whom
members of the Senate had violently suppressed as a putative threat to
Roman civil order. All of it except the "Dream of Scipio"
(Book VI) was lost from the Middle Ages onward; it has been
reconstructed from references and excerpts in later authors,
supplemented by a palimpsest of much of Books I-III discovered
in 1819. Framed as a dialogue between Scipio Aemilianus, a hero of the
resistance against Tiberius Gracchus and his like-minded brother, and
several others of his actual contemporaries, the dialogue has a
discernible structure identified by E.M. Atkins (2000: 490): Books
I-II treat "the best condition of the *res
publica*"; Books III-IV treat "justice and human
nature", topics common to the best city and the best citizen;
and Books V-VI treat the "best citizen' in
discussing the statesman and in the Dream of Scipio.



While justice was for Cicero, as for the Greeks, the fundamental bond
of the commonwealth, he offered distinctive and influential linked
definitions of the *res publica* ("commonwealth",
or more literally the "public thing") as the *res
populi*, the "property/thing of the people", and of a
*populus* or "people" in turn as "an
assemblage associated with one another by agreement on
"law" [*iuris consensu*] and community of interest
[*utilitatis communione*]" (both, I.39). This could be
interpreted either as a strong normative claim--the people agree
on "law" [*ius*], also translatable as right or
justice, and share a common interest--or alternatively in a
weaker deflationary manner, the people nominally accepting a common
law and sharing a common conception of their self-interest which may
or may not be in accord with
 justice.[14]
 Such ambiguity would be famously exploited by Augustine, who used
Cicero's definition to argue that lacking justice, conflicted
and divided republican Rome had been no commonwealth, before offering
his own even weaker definition of a "people" as those
united in (any) common love (*City of God*, II.21). In
Cicero's own hands, the definitions were used to stress that the
commonwealth was the property of the people, who entrusted it to the
magistrates to be used for the common good (I.51-2), and that
the "welfare of the people is the supreme law"
("salus populi suprema lex", *De leg.* III.8; this
was a reference to a maxim in the ancient "Twelve Tables"
compendium of Roman law). It followed too that just as Plato denied
the title of a (single unified) regime to the imperfect regimes torn
by civil discord, so Cicero inferred that a corrupt regime was not
strictly speaking a *res publica* at all (III.43-48). The
role of the statesman (*rector rei publicae*) is to aim at the
happiness of the citizens, defined in a laxer way than most Greek
philosophers would allow, as wealth, true glory, and virtue all
combined.



The character Scipio adheres to Greek philosophical principles in
declaring that "the commonwealth cannot possibly function
without justice" (II.70), adhering to the standard abstract
definition in an Aristotelian vein of justice as "giving each
their due" (*ius suum cuique tribuere*). In Book III, two
other dialogue participants present respectively the famous arguments
given on one day for justice, and on the next day against justice, by
the skeptical Greek philosopher and ambassador to Rome Carneades
during the embassy in 156/155 BCE mentioned above. Cicero's
presentation reverses the order, no doubt to give justice the last
word.



In Cicero's hands, Carneades' case against justice avails
itself of the *nomos/phusis* contrast and of the kind of
ambition for power expressed by Plato's character Callicles in
the *Gorgias*. Justice is not natural, as it differs radically
among different peoples; it conflicts with wisdom, which tells us
"to rule over as many people as possible, to enjoy pleasures, to
be powerful, to rule, to be a lord" (III.24b), and it is fatal
for states and empires, which can't survive without injustice.
In reply, the speech for justice avails itself of Stoic themes:
"true law is right reason, consonant with nature"; there
is "one eternal and unchangeable law" [i.e. what has come
to be known as "natural law"] (III.33). This includes rule
of the best over the weakest for the benefit of the latter (III.36):
as in Plato's *Republic*, the justice of rulership is not
exploitation but paternalistic benefit. And as in Plato's
*Republic* Book X, where the myth of Er supplies a revisionary
religious justification for justice (it will help you to choose your
next reincarnation well), so Cicero's *Republic*
concludes with a dream recounted by Scipio Aemilianus about his even
more eminent Roman ancestor, Scipio Africanus. The dream describes the
divine order which not only rewards humans for just service to their
city (VI.13), but also puts human affairs in a cosmic perspective
designed to embolden them to care more for justice than for petty
human advantage:



you must always look at these heavenly bodies and scorn what is human.
What fame can you achieve in what men say, or what glory can you
achieve that is worth seeking?" (VI.20)



In a dramatic rejection even of the traditional Roman motives of honor
and glory as conventional motivations to virtue, the imagined elder
statesman asks: "...and even the people who talk about
us--how long will they do that?" (VI.21). As Jed W. Atkins
has observed (2013:76), glory is in the Dream "first devalued,
and then revalued", in a Platonically inspired image of
"the glory of the heavenly realm to which good statesmen will
return" (2013: 77-78).


### 6.3 *De legibus*



*De legibus*, or *On the Laws*, is also written as a
dialogue, but one set in Cicero's own day with himself, his
brother, and closest friend as the interlocutors, gathered at his
country estate of Arpinum. Probably begun after *De re
publica*, it was likewise written in the years immediately before
51 BCE, and similarly survives only in piecemeal and fragmentary form.
Books I-II treat natural law or *ius naturae*, with
"Marcus" (Cicero himself) declaring that "law is the
highest reason, rooted in nature" (I.18), and that men, bound to
the gods by reason, are "born for justice"
(I.28-32). However, "the corruption of bad
habits...extinguishes...the sparks given by nature"
(I.33) and can result in the formation of bad laws. Such iniquitous
laws as those passed by tyrants are not just (I.42); nor is the title
of law to be conferred upon "what bandits have agreed among
themselves" (II.13).



In Books II-III, the speakers prescribe an ideal law code, based
on but modifying Roman law; notably, for example, the institution of
the tribunate is defended (III.16-17). As these prescriptions,
and the circumstances of their writing (a temporary retreat from
active politics), suggest, Cicero had a complex attitude to the Greek
dilemma posing the lives of philosophy and of politics as opposed
alternatives. He saw philosophy as a source of insight and perspective
relevant to politics, but after his early studies, devoted himself to
it primarily when temporarily debarred from more active pursuits. One
might say that philosophy became, beyond its intrinsic value, a form
of alternative public service when the forum was too dangerous for him
to enter (here following the reflection along these lines offered by
Baraz 2012).


### 6.4 *De Officiis*



"The *De officiis*, not the *De re publica*, is
Cicero's *Republic*" (Long 1995: 240). This dictum
of A. A. Long holds true not only in the sense that for Cicero, as for
Plato and Aristotle, ethics was inseparable from politics. It is true
also and more profoundly insofar as the *De officiis* takes up
the same subject as Plato's *Republic*, namely the
apparent conflict between justice and individual advantage, and
proposes broadly the same resolution, namely that the conflict is only
ever apparent: violating one's *officia* or duties can
never serve one's advantage so long as both are properly
understood. Book I treats what is virtuous, or *honestas*; Book
II treats what is advantageous, or *utilitas*; and Book III
considers cases to show that any apparent conflict is illusory.



The most difficult case to resolve according to the overall argument
of the book is that of advantage when understood as political
ambition, driven by greatness of spirit. As Cicero acknowledges, and
as was especially true in the highest echelons of Roman society,
"Men are led most of all to being overwhelmed by forgetfulness
of justice when they slip into desiring positions of command or honour
or glory" (I.26). The solution is to aim only at true glory,
such as can be gained only through the fulfillment of one's
*officia*. Similar casuistry enables Cicero to resolve in
accordance with his thesis a range of common cases where advantage
might be sought at the expense of justice (in administering the estate
of an orphan, for example, a common duty of eminent Romans). Yet such
casuistry is always advanced within a context of celebration of
justice and natural law: it is not simply that in fact justice never
conflicts with advantage, but that justice properly understood is
always to one's advantage as a human being.



As in Plato, a redefinition of the virtues plays a crucial role in the
overall argument for the benefits of justice. For Cicero, the virtues
are Romanized as *officia*, understood not only as duties in
the abstract but rather as obligations of role or relationship, each
attaching to someone in virtue of a distinct *persona* (whether
as father, consul, neighbor, and so on, or simply as a human being).
Some virtues are rooted in one's *persona* as a human
being subject to natural law, others in the specific roles and customs
of one's city. Four principal virtues are identified: wisdom;
justice, resting on *fides* (good faith and credit) and respect
for property; greatness of spirit; and decorum. Respect for property
is a keystone of Cicero's political thought, here very far from
the current in Platonism which subordinated property to civic
harmony.



Strikingly, whereas tyrannicide might appear to be a difficult case
for such an ethical code to confront, Cicero presents it--writing 
later in the year that Caesar was assassinated--as the
straightforwardly ethically correct choice. Cicero couches his case in
Stoic terms of naturalness and fellowship (Dyck 1996, *ad loc.*
to *Off*.III.29-32). His pivotal move is to deny that
tyrants are party to the otherwise universal nature of human
fellowship. Thus he asserts that "there can be no fellowship
between us and tyrants...just as some limbs are amputated if they
are...harming other parts of the body, similarly if the wildness
and monstrousness of a beast appears in human form, it must be removed
from the common humanity...of the body"
(*Off*.III.32: ostensibly about the tyrant Phalaris).


## 7. Political Philosophy in the Roman Empire



Although Rome ruled over an empire long before Cicero died, and the
republican constitution that he had served would remain formally
intact in many respects long after that date as well, the imperial era
of Roman government is standardly associated with the elevation of
Octavian by the Senate in 27 BCE by according him the title of
"Augustus" (among other novel titles and combinations of
offices that he was then and later accorded). Octavian and a number of
his successors were also referred to as the *princeps*,
literally the first man, implicitly the first among nominal equals,
sometimes translated by the English derivation 'prince',
and so giving rise to the description of the period from 27
BCE-284 CE as the Principate (to be followed in turn by the
Dominate). In this period, Stoicism continued to exercise an important
hold, drawing in part on the Hellenistic genre of advice to kings;
Platonism too, and forms of Pythagoreanism, regained much sway.
Moreover, a number of Stoic-minded writers and orators played their
parts in Roman political life, some fashioning the life of a
philosopher itself into a distinctive form of what might be called
non-political politics (Trapp 2007). In this article, I cannot explore
the full ramifications of these philosophical developments under the
Empire, in writers in Greek as well as in Latin, and influencing not
only pagan but also Jewish and Christian thinkers. The article also
leaves aside the many and varied important contributions to political
thought in Rome and its possessions made not by philosophers but by
historians, including Livy, Sallust, Diodorus Siculus, Tacitus, and
Suetonius. (Again, for an overview that seeks to integrate political
and historical developments with political theorizing, see J.W. Atkins
2018.)


### 7.1 Later Stoicism



If Cicero as a new man made senator had to contend with the
competitive pressures of republican politics, Seneca (c. 3
BCE-65 CE), as a new man (from Spain) made senator a century
later, had to contend with the problem of advising, and surviving, the
poisonous politics of intimacy with the *princeps*. For Seneca,
Stoic philosophy (of which he was an avowed exponent, though other
philosophical influences can also be found in his ideas), can be best
squared with politics if the ruler is supremely virtuous: in that
case, the Stoic wise man is the king or prince.



Like Cicero, Seneca wrote essays in natural as well as political
philosophy, including for example a significant analysis of the give
and take of benefits or reciprocal gifts and favors in political life
(*De beneficiis*, recently translated afresh by Griffin and
Inwood, 2011), and even a *De officiis* (which is lost). Like
Cicero, he wrote important collections of letters (and where Cicero
wrote poetry, Seneca also wrote plays). The letters include his
distinctive "consolations" which would inaugurate a new
philosophical and literary genre (see the entry on
 Seneca).



In this large corpus, arguably his most important surviving work for
political philosophy is his *De clementia* ("On
Mercy"), addressed to the emperor Nero whom he served as tutor
(in rhetoric, not in philosophy) and later in the capacity of
officially designated *amicus* or friend (Veyne 2003, vii, 19).
Presented as a "mirror" in which Nero could see himself
and the consequences of his virtue (1.1.1), this text would become a
fountainhead of the "mirror for princes" genre in
subsequent centuries. The challenge was how to reconcile the virtue of
justice with that of *clementia*, clemency or mercy, a
distinctively Roman virtue (not corresponding exactly to any Greek
word: Braund 2009, 33) that had been incorporated into public life as
a virtue of the Roman people (*clementia populi Romani*) and
attributed specifically in cultic form to Caesar Augustus (previously
Octavian) as *clementia Caesaris* (included as one of
"the four virtues attributed to Augustus on an honorific
shield," as observed by Griffin 2000: 540; see more generally
Flamerie de Lachapelle 2011). Appealing to the related Stoic virtue of
*philanthropia* in Greek, *humanitas* in Latin, or
love of humankind, Seneca claimed that, by taking into account all the
circumstances of the affair, clemency can claim to embody, as it were,
a more perfect justice (*iustissimum*), than would the
observance of the strict letter of the law (2.7.3, as discussed by
Braund 2009, 66-70).



Seneca manages to defend clemency's claim to the rank of virtue
by distinguishing it both from its opposite, *crudelitas* or
cruelty, and from a related disposition, *misericordia*, pity
or compassion, which for the Stoics counted as a vice (2.4.4). The
Stoic sage will exercise clemency by attending to the circumstances
and causes of the criminal's act, but also by seeking in various
ways to improve the latter's character (1.14.1-3,
1.16.1-3), an approach that goes back at least to Plato
(*Prt.* 324a-c, *Grg.*469a-b), doing so with
parsimony and discernment between those who are curable and those who
are not (again with Plato, *Grg.*525a-526b). Indeed,
Seneca asserts that those who are curable will generally strive
subsequently to become worthy of the clemency shown to them by the
prince (2.2.1), a principle illustrated by the story of
Augustus' clemency toward the conspirator Cnaeus Cornelius
Cinna, who would become his lifelong friend (1.9). In good Stoic
fashion, Seneca finally shows that the virtue of clemency is both
valuable in itself and also beneficial. It sustains the rule of a
prince by inspiring love in his subjects (1.19.6), whereas cruelty
augments the number of his enemies (1.8.7). And conversely, whereas
*misericordia* wallows in a wrongful and inefficient emotional
pity for the treatment that justice would prescribe of the criminal
(2.6.1), clemency improves the criminal more efficiently than cruelty
would do (1.22.1), and for this and other reasons better aims at the
good of mankind. It is worth noting finally that, while Seneca
specifies that clemency should also extend to slaves, his
cosmopolitanism stopped short of advocating their manumission or the
abolition of slavery (Griffin 1992:
 256-85).[15]



Seneca did not limit himself to the political function of advising
rulers. Instead, he conceived the role of philosophy as benefiting
people generally, in the widest sense of a cosmopolitan ethics and
even politics. His *De otio* ("On Leisure")
contrasts the single commonwealth embracing gods and men in a cosmic
citizenship, with the ordinary multiple commonwealths to which the
accidents of birth assign us (though these also rightly command
allegiance) (4.1). Should such an ordinary regime turn lethal, the
philosopher remains a citizen of the cosmic commonwealth, and so his
serenity can and should remain intact. That fate befell Seneca himself
in 65 CE, when Nero accused him of conspiring in a planned
assassination of the emperor and ordered him to commit suicide. To be
sure, however, Seneca's suicide reflected not only political
obedience, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the belief,
previously expressed in his writings (in particular *De
providentia* and *De ira*, as well as his letters) that
suicide is a supreme mark of freedom. No tyranny can so enslave us as
to take away this freedom: a freedom to act based on the inner
liberation of realizing that death and other worldly losses are in
fact indifferent and irrelevant to happiness (Inwood 2005:
307-9).



Seneca was far from the only Stoic politically active in his day or in
successive generations. Others like Thrasea Paetus and Barea Soranus
under Nero, Helvidius Priscus under Vespasian, and Paconius Agrippinus
under Tiberius, chose to defy those whom they saw as tyrannical
rulers, becoming known as the so-called 'Stoic martyrs'.
(On the varieties of Stoicism under the principate, see the classic
study of Brunt 2013, originally published in 1975.) Some Stoics spoke
out against a wider range of customs that they took to be cruel or
unfounded or otherwise irrational, most notably Musonius Rufus against
such practices as the Athenians' holding of gladiatorial games
in the same theatre of Dionysus where they celebrated religious
festivals (assuming that it is indeed he who is described in Dio
Chrysostom's *Orationes* XXXI, 122), and against the
social convention of excluding women from philosophizing (for his
fragments, see King 2011). Yet these later Stoics made rather few
detailed contributions to political philosophy, even if their
fundamental analysis of living according to nature and reason, as
further developed by figures ranging from the once-enslaved Epictetus
to the emperor Marcus Aurelius, remained an important touchstone for
thinking about politics.


### 7.2 Platonisms and Other Philosophies in the Empire



While the men of affairs in the Roman Senate and imperial court turned
often (though not exclusively) to Stoicism, in the Greek centers of
philosophy and among provincial Greek men of affairs Platonism
remained an important framework for thinking about both ethics and
politics, as did a related if somewhat shadowy form of
 Pythagoreanism
 which can be seen as a continuation of the genre of Hellenistic
kingship treatises (Centrone 2000). The most important contributions
made to political thought by the Platonist philosopher of the
second-century AD, Plutarch (c.46-c.120 CE), are his paired
biographical lives of Greek and Roman statesmen, each with a
comparison drawing political morals. Together with the histories of
Thucydides, Livy and Sallust, these *Lives* instructed
generations of students in the principles and perils of political
ethics, and instituted the distinction between statesman and demagogue
as we have come to know it today: with figures like the fifth-century
BCE Athenian "Aristides the Just" embodying the ideal
statesmen, in contrast to the Platonic view of all past and present
statesmen as fatally flawed. Plutarch also made important
contributions to political philosophy in the many essays collected in
his volumes of *Moralia*.



Plutarch was a committed but in some ways revisionist Platonist. His
attitude to public life was more Roman than Platonic (befitting the
role in public affairs that he played in his own city): the political
life was for him unproblematically noble, not inferior to the life of
philosophy. Similarly, he revised the strict Platonic dictum that
philosophers must rule by allowing that philosophers might rule merely
in the sense of advising rulers, not of being rulers themselves. (In
fact, this move had some Platonic pedigree in the
*Statesman*'s insistence that the science of statecraft
is the same whether known and exercised by an advisor or by an actual
ruler (259a).) And he considered philosophy to be more of a
character-building study than a source of knowledge of exact or
politically relevant knowledge. Where statesmen were educated in
philosophy, as for example in the *Lives* of Pericles, Cicero,
Brutus, and Cato Minor, he treats this as valuable mainly because of
the virtue--in particular, moderation and
self-restraint--which it imparts to them (Van Raalte 2005). The
study of philosophy serves as a sort of inoculation against greed and
immoderate ambition. But it need not impart any particular substantive
knowledge to the statesman (so competing philosophies could all be
useful in shaping virtue: Anaxagaorean influence on Pericles, an
eclectic mixture of Stoicism, Academic skepticism, and Platonism on
Cicero; Stoicism on the younger Cato). Indeed, excessively rigid
adherence to a philosophy could be deleterious, making a statesman
rigid and inflexible. The younger Cato was defeated when he stood for
the consulship because, Plutarch says, he experienced the same thing
that happens to fruits that appear "out of season"
(*Phoc*. 3.1). Like such fruits, he was admired, but "the
weight and grandeur" of his virtue was "out of all
proportion to the immediate times" (*asummetron tois
kathestosi kairois*, *Phoc*. 3.2-3).



Plutarch's political sympathies lay with monarchy. He treated
the exemplary Greek or Roman statesman as inherently and ideally a
kind of monarchical figure, even when functioning within a democratic
or republican environment. "Aristocratic and kingly" was
his praise for Pericles' type of true statesmanship (literally,
his "politics" or "policy",
*politeia*), once he has given up his initial recourse to
demagogic methods (*Per*.14.2). Thus for all his admiration for
Greek statesmen of the classical age, and his profound later influence
on republican sentiments in Europe, Plutarch preferred monarchy as the
best constitution and believed that he was following his master Plato
in so doing. As John Dillon puts it, he held "that the
accomplished statesman, like a first-rate musician, will be able to
make the best of any of the three basic constitutions [monarchy,
aristocracy, or democracy] that he is given to work on" (Dillon
1997). To quote Plutarch himself on this point from his fragmentary
writing "On Monarchy, Democracy, and Oligarchy":



> 
> ...if he [the statesman] is given the choice among governments,
> like so many tools, he would follow Plato's advice and choose no
> other than monarchy, the only one which is able to sustain that top
> note of virtue, high in the highest sense, and never let it be tuned
> down under compulsion or expediency. For the other forms of government
> in a certain sense, although controlled by the statesman, control him,
> and although carried along by him, carry him along, since he has no
> firmly established strength to oppose those from whom his strength is
> derived.... (*Peri mon.* 827bc)
> 



Plato's collective virtuous aristocracy in the *Republic*
(his philosopher-kings and -queens, in the plural), was transmuted by
Plutarch, perhaps under the influence of the singular kingly political
expert in the *Statesman*, into a monarchical
 ideal.[16]



Later Platonic philosophers, known as Neoplatonists (see the entry on
 Plotinus),
 also focused primarily on ethics in the context of cosmology and
theology, stressing the ascent of the soul to a disembodied pure
understanding of the One. Yet they made room for the political virtues
of the embodied soul as a first step in this process of divinization
or "becoming like God" (O'Meara 2003). In working
out the political implications of such views, Plato's
*Laws* became an important model for theocratic political
reform, especially as Neoplatonism became influential for a certain
strand of Christian thinkers, in particular those able to absorb the
translation of Greek texts into Arabic.


## 8. Conclusion



On a continuum of political rule stretching from the sheer domination
of some over others on one extreme, to a vision of collaborative
deliberation among equals for the sake of the good life on the other,
many ancient Greek and Roman political philosophers clearly staked out
the latter ground. The very idea of the city and the civic bond as
rooted in justice was common ground across much of the spectrum of
ancient political philosophy. Even the Epicureans saw society as
rooted in justice, although understanding justice in turn as rooted in
 utility.[17]
 Philosophers adhering to this approach were not however ignorant of
possible objections to it. The diagnosis of politics as domination has
never been more powerfully advanced than by Plato's character
Thrasymachus, nor has the attack on justice as a good life for the
individual ever been as powerfully made as by Plato's character
Callicles or the skeptic Carneades. The nostalgic view of ancient
political philosophy as predicated on widely shared conceptions of
human nature and the human good, before the splintering and fracturing
of modernity, is an oversimplification.



It is true that those ancient visions of politics which rooted
themselves in a commitment to ethical cultivation and the common good
did not have to contend with the absolutist claims of rival versions
of monotheistic religions. But the ancients did have to answer various
forms of relativism, immoralism, and skepticism, contending with rival
philosophical schools which disagreed profoundly with one another. If
some of them chose to see politics as a domain of common benefit and a
space for the cultivation of virtue, this was not because it had not
occurred to them that it could be thought of otherwise, but in part
because they had developed powerful philosophical systems to support
this view. The experience and practices of the Greek *poleis*
(the plural of *polis*) and the Roman *res publica*
played important roles in shaping these approaches.



Plato and Aristotle can in many ways be seen as defending some
fundamental tenets of Greek ethics (such as the value of justice), but
doing so by means of advancing revisionist philosophical doctrines and
distancing themselves from the ways in which those tenets were
interpreted by the democratic institutions of their day. The range of
ethical and political views which they, along with their Hellenistic
successors, laid out, continue to define many of the fundamental
choices for modern philosophy, despite the many important innovations
in institutional form and intellectual approach which have been made
since. Many of those innovations, indeed, came in response to a
revival of the ancient skeptical and relativist challenges: challenges
already known from their evolution within ancient political philosophy
itself.