Lynette G. Mitchell

Panhellenism and the barbarian in Archaic and classical Greece

This is the first book in English to provide a systematic treatment of Panhellenism. The author argues that in archaic and classical Greece Panhellenism was a body of narratives that expressed, defined and limited the community of the Hellenes and gave it political substance. Yet Panhellenic narratives also responded to other needs of the community, in particular serving to locate the Hellenes in time and space. Thus one of the chief Panhellenic narratives, the war against the barbarian, provided the conceptual framework in which Alexander the Great could imagine his Asian campaign.

THE WOMEN OF RULING FAMILIES IN ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL GREECE

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Thucydides and the Monarch in Democracy

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 Political Thought in Ancient History

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’.

“Every Inch a King”. Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds

The chapters in this book focus on legitimacy, propaganda and political ideology issues and reveal how they interrelate-so that kingship is shown to be a nexus of ideas and representations which connect earthly concerns of legitimacy and power with the larger concerns of mans place in the cosmos. The book emphasises the centrality of the Middle Eastern and Iranian perspective on kingship, which so often is ignored or incidental in comparative studies of this nature, as also stresses the continuities between the ancient and medieval worlds, generally treated separately. Kingship was concerned with constraint of the ruler, and the consent of the ruled. In the late medieval period this relationship between ruler and ruled had been imagined in various ways. The late sixteenth-century French political philosopher, Jean Bodin, developed the theory of the divine right of kings in order to justify the king’s absolute authority. Keywords:ancient world; kingship; medieval world

Every Inch a King

Drawing on studies of kings from Cyrus to Shah Abbas, this volume provides a rich variety of readings on royal authority and its limitations in medieval societies in both Europe and the Middle East, exemplified especially in the case of Alexander the Great, God and King, and the persistence of his legend in later eras.