In a landmark essay, Stephen Greenblatt discussed a telling comment attributed to Elizabeth I in 1601.1 The queen learned that the steward of the Earl of Essex commissioned Shakespeare’s own theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to perform Richard II. Given the earl’s well-known seditious intentions, the queen responded, “I am Richard II. Know ye not that?” As Francis Bacon explained in his treatise indicting the Earl of Essex for treason, the earl’s steward supported the production “to satisfy his eyes with the sight of that Tragedy, which he thought soon his Lord should bring from the Stage to the State.”2 Greenblatt argues that the earl’s steward, and apparently the queen herself, recognized that the story had “the power to wrest legitimation from the established ruler and confer it on another.” In short, “the queen understood the performance as a threat,” and the steward understood its galvanizing potential. The earl commenced his ultimately unsuccessful rebellion against the queen the day after the performance.

Chapter 2 surveys phrases with the verb boulomai that describe the ability to do “whatever one wishes” or to live “however one wishes” as freedom in order to demonstrate that democratic freedom was understood as the ability to bring one’s will to fruition. These phrases are found in a wide range of genres, including history, philosophy, oratory, drama, and epigraphy. By defining themselves as free in contrast to slaves, Athenians perceived their actions and decisions as emanating from themselves rather than a master. Freedom was thus defined as not simply a prerequisite status for citizenship, in contrast to birth or wealth, but a personal capacity for action. This positive freedom was a central aspect of citizen identity, rendering scholarly accounts focused on negative freedom incomplete. The distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action; as a citizen, one did what one wished. Positive freedom gave rise to procedural components in Athenian administration and law, notably voluntarism and accountability, as well as served as a distinctive core marker of identity in contrast with other states, such as Sparta and Persia.

The sparse material remains of Jews from the Sasanian Empire include around twenty personal seals, which were used to validate legal, business, and personal documents.1 These objects typically bore the owner’s name and an accompanying image. The identity of the owner is ascertainable from both the names and type of script; Jewish owners likely used square or Hebrew script, Christians used Syriac, and Middle Persian was used by all groups, including Jews and Christians.2 The images on Jewish and Christian seals are often easily recognizable communal symbols. For example, some Jewish seals depict ritual objects, such as the shofar, palm fronds, and citron (Figure 5).3 These were common features of Jewish visual culture, present on coins minted by the Judean rebel Bar Kokhba in the first half of Figure 6. the second century and in late antique synagogue mosaics.4 Not surprisingly, many Christian seals feature crosses.

The nature of this boast is puzzling: What does the king of the Sasanian Empire, in this case Shapur I (r. 240–270 CE), have to do with rabbinic biblical interpretation? An anonymous interpolation explains that “King Shapur” in Rabbah’s boast is simply a nickname for Shmuel, an earlier prominent rabbi. According to the interpolation, Rabbah is therefore making a run-of-the-mill brag about besting his eminent rabbinic colleague, Shmuel. Even so, the fact that Shmuel’s high rank is conveyed through analogy to the Sasanian king is noteworthy. Such a comparison assumes that the rabbinic movement is a kind of microcosm of the Sasanian Empire, headed by prominent rabbis and kings respectively.

A lengthy talmudic story tells of a man from the city of Nehardea who entered a butcher’s shop in the city of Pumbedita and demanded some meat.1 When the man was told that he must wait until the attendant of Rav Yehuda b. Ezekiel is served, he rages, “who is Yehuda b. Shewiskel to receive before me!” – omitting Yehuda’s title “Rav” and employing a derisive portmanteau of Rav Yehuda’s patronymic “Ezekiel,” and the word for a type of roasted meat, shewisqa.2 When informed of the slight against him, Rav Yehuda excommunicates the man, while the rabbi’s students further advise him that this man regularly insults others by calling them slaves. Rav Yehuda cites a dictum, which he attributes to Shmuel, to the effect that anyone who calls others a slave is himself the descendent of slaves. This man then sues Rav Yehuda for defamation, and they appear before a judge. The man insists that, far from being a slave, he is in fact a descendant of the priestly and royal Hasmonean line. Rav Yehuda counters by conveniently furnishing another statement which he once again attributes to Shmuel: “Whoever says ‘I am descended from the house of the Hasmoneans’ is a slave.”

An early medieval Middle Persian Zoroastrian source known as The Provincial Capitals of Ērānšahr describes the provinces and major cities of the Sasanian Empire and supplies several of them with short foundation myths. In describing the establishment of the cities of Susa and Šuštar in Khuzistan, The Provincial Capitals reports that they “were built by Šīšīnduxt, the wife of Yazdgird, the son of Šābuhr, since she was the daughter of the Exilarch (rēš-galūdag), the king of the Jews (jahūdagān šāh), and was also the mother of Wahrām Gōr.”

Chapter 3 analyzes freedom as doing “whatever one wishes” in fourth-century oratory. As several scholars have noted, doing “whatever one wishes” appears ambivalent in forensic speeches. They argue that, since Athens was not an anarchic state, extreme freedom could be glossed as a threat to sociopolitical stability. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, however, I argue that the most dominant principle, even in these texts, is the preservation of positive freedom as justification for the litigant’s position. While acting “however one wishes” may be presented as objectionable, the rhetoric of that assessment emphasizes who is doing “whatever they wish” and whom they affect by doing so. Bad characters, whether a criminals, oligarchs, or metics, can be rebuked as undeserving of positive freedom and abusing the power that attends it. The limitation of another citizen’s ability to do what he wishes can also condemn the action. Doing “what one wishes” is not a byword for antidemocratic action, but can have such a connotation because of the particular actors or victims of the actions. It is the misuse of the natural qualities of a citizen that leads to censure.

In the concluding Chapter 6, I suggest other inquiries unfold when we take seriously the notion of the citizen as free and empowered. The approach to freedom and power developed throughout these chapters provides another way to interpret and understand Athenian political thought from the ground up. Recognizing democratic freedom as autonomy calls for a reassessment of ancient critiques of that freedom, such as Plato’s criticisms in the Republic. Likewise, expanding our view of power beyond power over others in order to allow multiple, simultaneous agents with the power to act uncovers often overlooked individuals with power, such as women and metics. In terms of modernity, democratic freedom offers a form of liberty before liberalism separate from republican or neo-Roman conceptions that is still able to protect a multiplicity of individual values.

In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

Following attacks by Syriac Orthodox Christians around 792, a group of Maronite monks in northern Syria appealed to Timothy I, the Catholicos of the Church of the East, to intervene on their behalf with the Caliph, with whom the Catholicos was believed to have a close relationship. In his response, Timothy encouraged the Maronites to join his own church, noting that its many martyrs established its theological purity: