Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Timeline
- CHAPTERS AND NARRATIVES
- 1 Meaning in context: how to write a history of Greek political thought
- 2 The Greek invention of the polis, of politics and of the political
- Narrative I The prehistoric and protohistoric Greek world, c. 1300–750 BCE
- Narrative II The archaic Greek world, c. 750–500 BCE
- Narrative III The classical Greek world I, c. 500–400 BCE
- Narrative IV The classical Greek world II, c. 400–300 BCE
- Narrative V The Hellenistic Greek world, c. 300–30 BCE
- Narrative VI ‘Graecia capta’ (‘Greece conquered’), c. 146 BCE – CE 120
- APPENDIX I Selected texts and documents
- APPENDIX II The ‘Old Oligarch’: a close reading
- Bibliographical essay
- References
- Index
APPENDIX II - The ‘Old Oligarch’: a close reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Timeline
- CHAPTERS AND NARRATIVES
- 1 Meaning in context: how to write a history of Greek political thought
- 2 The Greek invention of the polis, of politics and of the political
- Narrative I The prehistoric and protohistoric Greek world, c. 1300–750 BCE
- Narrative II The archaic Greek world, c. 750–500 BCE
- Narrative III The classical Greek world I, c. 500–400 BCE
- Narrative IV The classical Greek world II, c. 400–300 BCE
- Narrative V The Hellenistic Greek world, c. 300–30 BCE
- Narrative VI ‘Graecia capta’ (‘Greece conquered’), c. 146 BCE – CE 120
- APPENDIX I Selected texts and documents
- APPENDIX II The ‘Old Oligarch’: a close reading
- Bibliographical essay
- References
- Index
Summary
Ah, how the cold sea, friendless of old, stretches all round us!
That mildew democracy has filled our city now,
Rots its green shoots, tough root-stock. Oh, I have found it
More hateful and sore to me than to raw hill-side the plough!
(from Naomi Mitchison, ‘The exiled oligarchs are driven out of the city’, in Black Sparta [1928])Like the work itself, its conventional English title – due to Gilbert Murray – is distinctly odd. It has been handed down wrongly attached to Xenophon's completely extant corpus, but, though certainly Attic (Athenian) in dialect, it is not Xenophontic in style. Possibly already in antiquity, it was given the same title as other works on Athens' constitution (politeia), but this can be very misleading, because it is very different in both approach and content from the Aristotelian Athenaiôn Politeia of the 330s. So different is it, in fact, that it has been seen as a work of epideixis, a purely rhetorical display piece, glorying in both the discovery and the incipient codification of rhetoric by mid-fifth-century bce Sicilian rhetoric masters, and in the clever-clever proto-philosophical sophistical reasoning that takes its name precisely from the movement associated with the rhetoricians (and other skills-mongers) labelled collectively – and pejoratively – Sophists, with a capital ‘S’, who also began to make their presence felt at Athens and elsewhere in the Greek world from the mid-fifth century on (see chapter 6).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice , pp. 140 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009