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Xenophon's Cyrus and the Democratization of Virtue
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20575 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
5,777 Words |
| Author
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Waller R. Newell
Waller R. Newell is associate professor of political science
at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He is currently
completing a book on tyranny and statesmanship in Plato's
political philosophy. |
It is a commonplace regarding ancient political philosophy that it has no relevance for us today because the Greeks had no experience of large societies and governments. According to this view, because the ancient Geeks lived in small city-states, they idealized this particular kind of government as the best one in principle for all places and times.
A passing familiarity with ancient Greek philosophy and history dispels this assumption. In the first place, even the smaller of the Greek city-states were too large to match the prescriptions for the best regime elaborated by Plato or Aristotle-to say nothing of their political, economic, and religious practices. Plato's and Aristotle's contemporaries in Athens generally thought pretty well of their city's military glories and cultural achievements, but it is far from clear that the philosophers shared this view.
Even more significant, however, is the fact that the ancient Greeks were familiar with alternatives to the polis. In book 3 of the Politics, for example, Aristotle mentions commercial leagues that had been formed by various peoples for the purpose of promoting and regulating trade. Aristotle's rejection of such large-scale authorities is based on principle, not because he was unaware of the possibility. Trade, he argues, is one of the concerns of the household (oikos)--the private sphere of life including family relations and the production of material goods (hence our term "economics"). However valuable and necessary, the concerns of the household must be circumscribed by, and subordinate to, the nobler and more important concerns of the political community. For Aristotle, a commercial league or trading alliance is not a political authority, even if it is physically far larger than any actual city-state, because its justice is merely contractual.
But the Greeks were also aware of a far more imposing and successful example of large-scale political authority, one that was no mere trade association but which had apparently worked out complex institutional arrangements for every aspect of human association. This was the Persian Empire, an enormous regime embracing millions of people from dozens of different nationalities. The Greeks had fought off the Persian kings' attempts to add them to the empire, and this victory began the Greeks' own rise to the greatness of the classical era. But the thoughtful among them were far from despising the Persians. On the contrary, they had frequent occasion to rue the comparison between their own fractious, tiny, and unstable regimes with what struck them as the awesome power and efficiency of the great multinational monarchy to
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