Lynette Mitchell

The Greek polis has been arousing interest as a subject for study for a long time, but recent approaches have shown that it is a subject on which there are still important questions to be asked and worthwhile issues to be explored. This book contains a selection of essays which embody the results of the latest research. Beyond the historical development of the Greek polis , the contributors ask questions about the civic institutions of ancient Greece as a whole and their relationships to each other. Questions of power or the significance of a written code of law are discussed as well as the nature of Greek overseas settlements. Development of the Greek Polis presents up-to-date research and asks up-to-date questions on various aspects of an important topic.

Democratic Athens seems to have been the first place in the Greek world where there developed systematically a positive theorising of kingship. Initially this might seem surprising, since the Athenians had a strong tradition of rejecting one-man-rule. The study of kingship among the political thinkers of the fifth and fourth century has not received much scholarly attention until recent years, and particularly not the striking fact that it was democratic Athens, or at least writers directing themselves to an Athenian democratic audience, that produced a positive theorising of kingship. The aim of this essay, then, is not only to show how the political language around kingship became a way of forming definitions of what democracy was and was not, but also, among some fourth-century intellectuals, of shaping new ideas about what it could be.

Athenian democracy depended upon political ‘champions’ in order to operate effectively, although the champions themselves were often heavily criticised. At the same time, critics of democracy looked for alternatives in the ‘best men’, or ‘best man’ to rule the state. Thucydides engages with both these issues, and informed by wider political debates and other representations of the ‘democratic monarch’ (especially that of Theseus), analyses and draws a character sketch of Pericles and Alcibiades, in their role as either ‘good king’ or ‘bad tyrant’, in order to present a critique of democratic stability.

Greek historians of the fifth and fourth centuries bce also intended their works to be political commentaries. This paper concentrates on the work of Thucydides, and his interest in fifth-century ideas of constitutionalism. Honing in on the political ‘opposites’, democracy and oligarchy, this paper argues that Thucydides collapses these categories, to show not only that they are unstable, but that, built upon the same political vocabulary, they naturally lead towards his new idea of the measured blending of the few and the many in a mixed constitution, which creates political stability and a positive political experience for the community. In this sense, Thucydides’ text, which uses historical narrative as a vehicle for political commentary, needs to be understood within the framework of historical contextualism, but also as a ‘possession for all time’.