Melissa Lane

The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought

This book, first published in 2000, is a general and comprehensive treatment of the political thought of ancient Greece and Rome. It begins with Homer and ends in late antiquity with Christian and pagan reflections on divine and human order. In between come studies of Plato, Aristotle and a host of other major and minor thinkers - poets, historians, philosophers - whose individuality is brought out by extensive quotation. The international team of distinguished scholars assembled by the editors includes historians of law, politics, culture and religion, and also philosophers. Some chapters focus mostly on the ancient context of the ideas they are examining, while others explore these ideas as systems of thought which resonate with modern or perennial concerns. This clearly written volume will long remain an accessible and authoritative guide to Greek and Roman thinking about government and community.

The ethics of scientific communication under uncertainty

Communication by scientists with policy makers and attentive publics raises ethical issues. Scientists need to decide how to communicate knowledge effectively in a way that nonscientists can understand and use, while remaining honest scientists and presenting estimates of the uncertainty of their inferences. They need to understand their own ethical choices in using scientific information to communicate to audiences. These issues were salient in the Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with respect to possible sea level rise from disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Due to uncertainty, the reported values of projected sea level rise were incomplete, potentially leading some relevant audiences to underestimate future risk. Such judgments should be made in a principled rather than an ad hoc manner. Five principles for scientific communication under such conditions are important: honesty, precision, audience relevance, process transparency, and specification of uncertainty about conclusions. Some of these principles are of intrinsic importance while others are merely instrumental and subject to trade-offs among them. Scientists engaged in assessments under uncertainty should understand these principles and which trade-offs are acceptable.

Greek political thought: the historical context

Terminology Much of our political terminology is Greek in etymology: aristocracy, democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, plutocracy, tyranny, to take just the most obvious examples, besides politics itself and its derivatives. Most of the remainder – citizen, constitution, dictatorship, people, republic and state – have an alternative ancient derivation, from the Latin. It is the ancient Greeks, though, who more typically function as ‘our’ ancestors in the political sphere, ideologically, mythologically and symbolically. It is they, above all, who are soberly credited with having ‘discovered’ or ‘invented’ not only city-republican forms but also politics in the strong sense: that is, communal decision-making effected in public after substantive discussion by or before voters deemed relevantly equal, and on issues of principle as well as purely technical, operational matters. Yet whether it was in fact the Greeks – rather than the Phoenicians, say, or Etruscans – who first discovered or invented politics in this sense, it is unarguable that their politics and ours differ sharply from each other, both theoretically and practically. This is partly, but not only nor primarily, because they mainly operated within the framework of the polis, with a radically different conception of the nature of the citizen, and on a very much smaller and more intimately personal scale (the average polis of the Classical period is thought to have numbered no more than 500 to 2,000 adult male citizens; fifth-century Athens’ figure of 40,000 or more was hugely exceptional). The chief source of difference, however, is that for both practical and theoretical reasons they enriched or supplemented politics with practical ethics (as we might put it).

Approaching the Republic

Introduction Plato’s shortish dialogue Charmides ends with the following sequence, initiated by a response on the part of Charmides to the question whether he thinks he needs the Socratic ‘charm’ which will cure the soul (176b–d): I am sure, Socrates, that I do need the charm, and as far as I am concerned, there is no obstacle to my being charmed by you daily, until you say that it is enough. Very good, Charmides, said Critias. If you do this / shall take this as a proof of your moderation - that is, if you allow yourself to be charmed by Socrates, and never desert him in things great or small. You may depend on my following and never deserting him, he said. If you who are my guardian command me, I should do very wrong not to obey you. And I do command you, he said. Then I will do as you command, and begin this very day. You there, I said, what are you two making plans about? We are not making plans, said Charmides. We’ve made them. Then you are about to use force, I said, without giving me the chance of a scrutiny? Yes, I shall use force, he said, since he orders me. In the face of this you had better plan what you will do. No plan is left open to me, I said. When you put your hand to action of any sort and are using force, there is no human being who can oppose you. Don’t, then, he said; don’t oppose me, not even you. I won’t oppose you, then, I said.

Political Philosophy: The View from Cambridge

This article reports on a conversation convened by Quentin Skinner at the invitation of the Editors of The Journal of Political Philosophy and held in Cambridge on 13 February 2001.

Herodotus, Thucydides and the sophists

The sophists Let us begin by considering three Athenian texts of the fifth and fourth centuries bc . The first, short enough to quote in full, is a fragment of what was probably a satyr (i.e. serio-comic) play. Controversy continues as to whether the author of these forty-odd lines of verse was the tragedian Euripides (c. 485–c. 406), or Critias, uncle of Plato, versifier, political pamphleteer, and leading member of the oligarchic junta that overthrew Athenian democracy in 404 following Athens’ defeat by Sparta, who was killed in the course of its suppression the following year. The speaker is Sisyphus, archetype of villainy and cunning – whose never-ending punishment was and remains legendary: There was a time when human life had no order, but like that of animals was ruled by force; when there was no reward for the good, nor any punishment for the wicked. And then, I think, men enacted laws ( nomoi ) for punishment, so that justice ( dike ) would be ruler ( turannos )… and hubris its slave, and whoever did wrong would be punished. Next, since the laws prevented people only from resorting to violence openly, but they continued to do so in secret, then I think for the first time some shrewd and clever ( sophos ) individual invented fear of the gods for mortals, so that the wicked would have something to fear even if their deeds or words or thoughts were secret. In this way, therefore, he introduced the idea of the divine, saying that there is a divinity, strong with eternal life, who in his mind hears, sees, thinks and attends to everything with his divine nature ( phusis ). He will hear everything mortals say and can see everything they do; and if you silently plot evil, this is not hidden from the gods, for our thoughts are known to them. With such stories as these he introduced the most pleasant of lessons, concealing the truth with a false account. And he claimed that the gods dwelt in that place which would particularly terrify men; for he knew that from there mortals have fears and also benefits for their wretched lives - from the revolving sky above, where he saw there was lightning, the fearful din of thunder and the starry radiance of heaven, the fine embroidery of Time, the skilful ( sophos ) craftsman. Thence too comes the bright mass of a star, and damp showers are sent down to earth. With fears like these he surrounded men, and using them in his story he settled the divinity in a fitting place, and quenched lawlessness ( anomia ) by means of laws ( nomoi )… Thus, I think, someone first persuaded mortals to believe ( nomizein ) there was a race of gods.

Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy

Introduction Verity Harte and Melissa Lane Part I. The Vocabulary of Politics: 1. The political art in Platos Republic Alexander Long 2. Putting history in its place: Plato, Thucydides, and the Athenian politeia Cynthia Farrar 3. Platonizing the Spartan politeia in Plutarchs Lycurgus Melissa Lane 4. The body politic: Aetius on Alcmaeon on isonomia and monarchia Jaap Mansfeld 5. Latin philosophy and Roman law Miriam Griffin Part II. The Practice of Politics: 6. The Platonic manufacture of ideology, or how to assemble awkward truth and wholesome falsehood Robert Wardy 7. Platos politics of ignorance Verity Harte 8. The political skill of Protagoras Nicholas Denyer 9. Proclus and politics Jonathan Barnes Part III. The Politics of Value: 10. Relativism in Platos Protagoras Catherine Rowett 11. Justice writ large and small in Republic IV Myles Burnyeat 12. An aesthetic reading of Aristotles Ethics Richard Kraut 13. The Stoic sage in the original position Mary Margaret McCabe Part IV. Politics Extended: Animals, Gods, Cosmology: 14. Aristotle on the natural sociability, skills and intelligence of animals Geoffrey Lloyd 15. Gods and men in Xenophanes James Warren 16. Socrates and his gods: from the Euthyphro to the Eudemian Ethics Christopher Rowe 17. The atheist underground David Sedley Malcolm Schofield bibliography, 1970-2012.

Reconsidering Socratic Irony

introduction On his way to court, as a defendant against the charges – of not worshipping the city’s gods; introducing new gods; and corrupting the youth – which will lead to his conviction and execution, Socrates meets his officious Athenian compatriot Euthyphro. Euthyphro is bringing a prosecution of his own father for murder, an action that most Athenians would regard with horror as violating the divine obligation of filial piety. To Euthyphro’s boast that he has knowledge of the divine, and of piety and impiety, Socrates replies: “It is indeed most important, my admirable Euthyphro, that I should become your pupil, and as regards this indictment challenge Meletus [one of the three citizen-prosecutors of Socrates] … and say to him … that … I have become your pupil.” ( Euphr . 5a-b) You may find it hard to believe that Socrates is sincere in his admiring desire to become Euthyphro’s pupil. This is a prime instance of the Socratic speeches in Plato’s dialogues which many readers have found it necessary, or desirable, to interpret as spoken ironically: in this case, implying that the smug Euthyphro actually has nothing to teach Socrates. For ‘irony’ is, in a representative definition, “saying something with the intent that the message is understood as conveying the opposite or an otherwise different meaning” – although we must immediately ask, understood by whom? Sometimes, by an addressee who is expected to understand the irony, in which case irony can be a graceful and playful way of conveying meaning.

Socrates and Plato: an introduction

Approaches to Platonic interpretation To introduce Socrates and Plato is to introduce the problem of the relation between them. Although other contemporaries left portraits of Socrates as well, it is Plato’s writings – primarily a body of dialogues in which Plato himself never appears – which stamped the figure of his teacher indelibly on the history of Western philosophy. Because Socrates is best known to us as a character in Plato’s writings, there arises what has been called the ‘Socratic problem’. Can a real or ‘historical’ Socrates, with distinctive beliefs, be identified on the basis of the testimony roughly contemporaneous with his life which survives from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and (a generation later) Aristotle? Or is, perhaps, the Socrates we value largely the portrayal Plato makes of him? The ‘Socratic problem’ is complicated by the fact that Plato’s ‘Socrates’ seems to argue for contradictory positions in different dialogues. For example, in Protagoras (352–8) Socrates argues that because no one does wrong willingly, vice results simply from ignorance, an argument which assumes that only rational beliefs determine action. But in Republic IV he explains vice as due to the two irrational, or less than rational, parts of a tripartite soul when not stably governed, as they should be, by the third and rational part. This apparent contradiction has often been resolved by assuming that the Protagoras is one of a group of dialogues written early in Plato’s career (the ‘early’ dialogues), in which the character ‘Socrates’ is meant by Plato to represent the historical Socrates’ views, whereas the Republic is one of the ‘middle period’ dialogues in which Plato is using Socrates simply as a mouthpiece for his own theory.

The Origins of the Statesman–Demagogue Distinction in and after Ancient Athens

This article argues against the assumption that Athenian political practice involved an evaluative distinction between terms signifying the good “statesman” and the bad “demagogue.” Terms now translated “demagogue” are used by Aristophanes, Thucydides, and other Athenian orators and historians in a neutral, or even positive, sense. Instead, the evaluative distinction is built by Plutarch out of Platonic analysis, Aristotelian vocabulary, and the Thucydidean classification of Athenian politicians. The article concludes with reflections on the context of Moses Finley’s classic analysis of Athenian demagogues, and on the implications of the argument for political practice and thinking today.