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Aristotle's Politics on Greeks and Non-Greeks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2021

Thornton Lockwood
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Abstract

Scholars of race in antiquity commonly claim that Aristotle holds protoracist views about barbaroi or non-Greeks. But a careful examination of Aristotle's remarks in his Politics about slavery, non-Greek political institutions, and Greek and non-Greek natural qualities calls into question such claims. No doubt, Aristotle held views at odds with modern liberalism, such as his views about gender subordination and the exploitation of slave and nonslave labor. But claims that Aristotle holds protoracist views are regularly but erroneously asserted without careful consideration of relevant textual evidence. I argue that Aristotle neither categorically distinguishes Greeks and non-Greeks nor does he endorse the claim that Greeks are categorically superior to non-Greeks. Indeed, Aristotle regularly draws upon non-Greek political institutions in his own formulation of the best constitution and he praises the non-Greek constitution of Carthage as superior to that of Greek constitutions such as Sparta and Crete.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 83 , Issue 4 , Fall 2021 , pp. 465 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of University of Notre Dame

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Footnotes

I am grateful to audiences at the Université de Montréal, the Institut d’études scientifiques de Cargèse, and the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy for feedback on earlier versions of this article. I am especially grateful for the constructive criticism of three anonymous referees from the Review of Politics and its editor, Ruth Abbey.

References

1 See, for instance, Rebecca LeMoine, Plato's Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill, “Kant and Race,” in Race and Racism, ed. B. Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 448–71; and Tunick, Mark, “Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill's Defense of British Rule in India,” Review of Politics 68, no. 4 (2006): 586–611CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Such a view already finds its proponents in antiquity: Plutarch, in On the Fortune of Alexander (1.6), reports that Aristotle counseled his student Alexander to rule Greeks in the fashion of a ruler (hēgemonikōs), but non-Greeks in the fashion of a master (despotikōs). The Greek term barbaros (and the cognate term barbarikos) is contested both in Aristotle's time and in our own; I will translate the term throughout my article as “non-Greek.” See further Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Erich S. Gruen, Rethinking the Other in Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and most recently Harrison, Thomas, “Reinventing the Barbarian,” Classical Philology 115, no. 2 (2020): 139–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Denise Eileen McCoskey, Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy (New York: Tauris, 2012), 24; Erik Jensen, Barbarians in the Greek and Roman World (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2018), 69. Non-Aristotle specialists echo the view. For instance, Jonathan Wolff, in his recent Introduction to Moral Philosophy (New York: Norton, 2018), claims that Aristotle believes that “non-Greeks have lower powers of deliberative rationality than Greeks, and they are more likely to be ruled by their bodily appetites. Non-Greeks are therefore not suited to the same level of freedom and should become slaves of Greeks” (228). Other scholars who claim that Aristotle categorically distinguishes Greeks and non-Greeks include Rosivach, Vincent, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57Google Scholar; Teisserenc, Fulcran, “La question barbare: Platon ou Aristote?,” Revue de philosophie ancienne 32, no. 1 (2014): 87–128Google Scholar; and Fritsche, Johannes, “Aristotle's Biological Justification of Slavery in Politics I,” Rhizomata 7, no. 1 (2019): 63–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 McCoskey, Race, 23–34, surveys the difficulties of ascribing a nonbiological concept of race to Greek and Roman authors. Although Fritsche ascribes to Aristotle a biological notion of race (“Biological Justification,” 73–75), the scholarly consensus is that such a claim is mistaken. See, for instance, Isaac, Invention of Racism, 70–73; Julia Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics: Aristotle and Race,” in Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays, ed. Julia Ward and Tommy Lott (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2007), 20–23; and Mariska Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5n6.

5 Isaac, Invention of Racism, 74. Although one may distinguish racialism, the doctrine that there are biologically distinct groups, and racism, the doctrine that biologically distinct groups can be evaluated as inferior and superior, I will use the terms “protoracist” and “protoracism” to include both claims (see further Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014], 271–75).

6 Malcolm Heath, “Aristotle on Natural Slavery,” Phronesis 53, no. 3 (2008): 245n6 and Leunissen, From Natural Character, 53–54.

7 Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics”; Jill Frank, A Democracy of Distinction: Aristotle on the Work of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 26–32; Dietz, Mary G., “Between Polis and Empire: Aristotle's Politics,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 2 (2012): 283–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Ambler, Wayne, “Aristotle on Nature and Politics: The Case of Slavery,” Political Theory 15, no. 3 (1987): 390–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 30–31; Dietz, “Between Polis and Empire,” 284–85; Cherry, Kevin M., “Does Aristotle Believe Greeks Should Rule Barbarians?,” History of Political Thought 35, no. 4 (2014): 632–55Google Scholar; and Nah, D., “Aristotle as Realist Critic of Slavery,” History of Political Thought 39, no. 3 (2018): 399–421Google Scholar. Cherry, “Does Aristotle Believe,” 632–33, catalogs the views of the previous generation of Aristotle scholars on this question.

9 Exceptions to this claim include Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics,” 20–23; Leunissen, From Natural Character, 45–48; D. Lefebvre, “La puissance du thumos en Politiques VII, 7,” in Politique d'Aristote: Famille, régimes, éducation, ed. Emmanuel Bermon, Valéry Laurand, and Jean Terrel (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2011), 105–38; and Monteils-Laeng, Laetitia, “Aristote croit-il au déterminisme environnemental ? Les Grecs, les esclaves et les barbares (Pol.. VII, 7),” Polis 36, no. 1 (2019): 40–56Google Scholar. P.-A. Rodriguez, “L'impérialisme institutionnel et la question de la race chez Aristote,” European Review of History, no. 23 (2016): 761, takes this point to be fatal to Isaac's interpretation of Aristotle as “protoracist.”

10 I am quite grateful to an anonymous referee for the Review of Politics for helping me articulate these patterns in scholarship on Aristotle's Politics.

11 Aristotle also recognizes non-Greek intellectual achievements, such as the Egyptian invention of mathematics (Metaphysics 1.1.981b13–25) and Babylonian achievements in astronomy (De caelo 2.12.292a7–9; cf. 1.3.270b6–10), that undermine the claim that he views non-Greeks as uniformly primitive. In several places Aristotle recommends “periegetic literature,” namely, that of travelers who can attest to non-Greek customs (e.g., Rhetoric 1.4.1360a30–8; Pol. 2.3.1262a18–21). The Vita Menagiana reports that Aristotle authored a single volume on nomima barbarika (Rose 18/Gigon 26). See further Mor Segev, “Aristotle on the Intellectual Achievements of Foreign Civilizations” (unpublished).

12 Although I arrive at conclusions similar to Cherry, “Does Aristotle Believe,” and Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics,” my article goes beyond their more localized claims. Cherry focuses primarily on Aristotle's treatment of Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis and Ward is ultimately concerned with Aristotle's contrast between the terms ethnos and polis. Neither article examines in detail all of Aristotle's references to non-Greeks in the Politics nor his discussion of non-Greek political institutions.

13 M. Schofield, “Ideology and Philosophy in Aristotle's Theory of Slavery,” in Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms (New York: Routledge, 1999), 101–24, and M. Deslauriers, “The Argument of Aristotle's Politics 1,” Phoenix 60, no. 1/2 (2006): 48–69, decisively show that Politics 1.1–7 is devoted to refuting the Socratic claim (found in Plato's Statesman [258e–261a] and Xenophon's Memorabilia [3.4.12, 3.6.14]) that rule is not qualitatively differentiated, namely, that ruling a polis is qualitatively the same as ruling a slave (Pol. 1.1.1252a7–18, 1.3.1253b18–19, 1.7.1255b16–20).

14 Translations are my own, based on William D. Ross, Aristotelis Politica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), but informed by C. D. C. Reeve, Aristotle Politics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998).

15 For instance, Fritsche, “Aristotle's Biological Justification,” 64, argues that Aristotle's account of the non-Greek household contains “in a nutshell” the theory of natural slave articulated in Politics 1.4–6, even though Politics 1.4–6 makes very limited reference to non-Greeks. Teisserenc, “La question barbare,” 122–24, also suggests that Politics 1.2 assimilates non-Greeks and the slave by nature, although he recognizes that the claim cannot be exhaustive for all non-Greeks.

16 Kamtekar, Rachana, “Studying Ancient Political Thought through Ancient Philosophers: The Case of Aristotle and Natural Slavery,” Polis 33, no. 1 (2016): 150–71Google Scholar, notes that the dialectical context of Aristotle's account of natural slavery is twofold, namely, it engages both the question of the unity of rule and the question whether slavery is conventional or natural (158). Arguably, Politics 1.2 speaks to the first question and Politics 1.4–6 speaks to the second one.

17 Pol. 1.4.1254a9–11, 13–17. Nonetheless, Pol. 1.5 does characterize the natural slave in terms of “sharing in reason to the extent of perceiving it” but not having it (1.5.1254b22–23; cf. 1.13.1260a12–14). Heath, “Natural Slavery,” persuasively argues that the natural slave's incapacity consists in an impairment of practical deliberation about global matters that detaches “an individual's conception of intrinsic value from executive control of his behavior” (253).

18 Karbowski, Joseph, “Aristotle's Scientific Inquiry into Natural Slavery,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 3 (2013): 331–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, implicitly makes my explicit point: the most detailed recent analysis of the argument for natural slavery in Politics 1.4–6 makes almost no mention of non-Greeks (except for Pol. 1.6.1255a28–30, which I discuss next).

19 See, for instance, Aristotle's discussion of barter, which he reports many non-Greeks still use (Pol. 1.9.1257a22–27); cf. Ward “Ethnos in the Politics,” 19–20.

20 I am in agreement with a number of other scholars who claim that careful examination of Aristotle's quotation calls into question whether he (or Euripides) agreed with the words put into Iphigenia's mouth (see IA 1400–1401). See further Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 30–31, Dietz, “Between Polis and Empire,” 284–85, Nah, “Aristotle as Realist Critic,” 418–19, and most recently (and exhaustively) Cherry, “Does Aristotle Believe.” Fritsche, “Aristotle's Biological Justification,” 73, claims that Aristotle concurs with the poets.

21 Pol. 1.7.1255b36–38, 1.8.1256b23–26, 7.2.1324b37–39, 7.14.1333b38–1334a1.

22 See, for instance, Fritsche, “Aristotle's Biological Justification,” 85–88.

23 Millett, Paul, “Aristotle and Slavery in Athens,” Greece & Rome 54, no. 2 (2007): 178–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar, notes that based on the evidence of social history, Athenian slaves were overwhelmingly non-Greek. If so, Aristotle's rejection of conventional slavery is a direct attack on the social practices of his adopted polis.

24 Ambler, “Aristotle on Nature and Politics”; Peter L. P. Simpson, A Philosophical Commentary on the “Politics” of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 42; Dietz, “Between Polis and Empire,” 284; and Nah, “Aristotle as Realist Critic,” 413–19, offer variants of the claim that Aristotle is undermining rather than endorsing the position of “conventional slavery,” i.e., slavery justified by defeat in inter-poleis warfare (Pol. 1.6.1255a4–6, 23–32). Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi,’” argues that by conventional slavery Aristotle means instead the fourth-century Macedonian practice of enslaving Greeks (e.g., as in the case of the destruction of Thebes in 335 BCE), which Aristotle allegedly objected to on the grounds that Greeks (or at least Macedonians) were enslaving Greeks (144–45). The key problem for Rosivach's argument is Aristotle's claim that the proponents of conventional slavery think it applies only to non-Greeks, a view that Aristotle rejects as false (Pol. 1.6.1255a28–29). Were Rosivach right, Aristotle should be criticizing the very practice of enslaving Greeks, which he never does.

25 E. Holberg raised the question whether Aristotle may hold inconsistent racist views, not unlike contemporaries who view a category of individuals as inferior, but exempt members of that category because of personal acquaintance (i.e., “I do not hold racist views because I am friends with Smith, who is a member of a different race”). I do not see that evidence from the Politics supports such an interpretation for his views on non-Greeks. For instance, Aristotle does not qualify his remarks about Macedonia (e.g, that it is a long-lasting kingship based in territorial expansion [5.10.1310b39–40, 5.11.1313a24, 7.2.1324b15] or that Philip II was assassinated owing to his arrogance [5.11.1311b2]) in terms of race, even though many Greeks viewed Macedonia as a non-Greek kingdom.

26 Aristotle's account of absolute kingship (pambasileia) also appears to be a superlative constitution for both Greeks and non-Greeks, although its interpretation is contested (Pol. 3.13.1284a3–17, 1284b25–34; 3.15.1285b29–33; 3.16.1287a10–b35; 3.17.1288a14–17). But if it is best for at least some Greeks to be ruled by an absolute king, then there is no categorical distinction between Greek and non-Greek kingship.

27 What polis with a “good reputation” might Aristotle have in mind? At the conclusion of his analysis of Carthage, Aristotle claims that Sparta, Crete, and Carthage “are justly held in high esteem” (Pol. 2.11.1273b26; cf. 2.1.1260b32), but his criticisms of Sparta and Crete are merciless and he commences his analysis of the best constitutions by pointing out that “the currently available constitutions are not in a good condition” (Pol. 2.1.1260b34–35).

28 Aristotle refers to the Greeks as both a genos and as organized into ta ethnē (Pol. 7.7.1327b29, 33–34). Translators have expressed genos as “race,” “family,” and “stock”; and ethnos as “tribe,” “people,” and “nation.” Somewhat unusually, Fritsche, “Aristotle's Biological Justification,” 73–75, argues that Aristotle believed that Europeans, Asians, and Greeks represented three different genē that practiced race purity (eschewing intermarriage). I render genos here as “kind” in the way that one might identify a “kind” of plant (but without implying a rigid scheme of genera and species).

29 See, for instance, Isaac, Invention of Racism, 70–73; Heath, “Natural Slavery,” 253–58; Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics,” 20–23; Lefebvre, “La puissance du thumos,” 105–38; and Monteils-Laeng, “Aristote croit-il au déterminisme environnemental?,” 47–50. By contrast, Fritsche, “Aristotle's Biological Justification,” 75n10, rejects the model of climatic causation and argues for a biological cause of race. Leunissen, From Natural Character, 45–48, provides an account of the material causation underlying Aristotle's blend based in large part on Aristotle's analysis of the qualities of nonhuman animals in the Historia Animalium.

30 Thus, although Frank, Democracy of Distinction, 31, is correct to claim that there is no “immutable feature about the Asian soul,” Aristotle's climatic model of causation seems to imply that any human being raised in “Asian” heat will develop persistent “Asian” qualities.

31 Aristotle contrasts Asians and Europeans with respect to “craft knowledge,” but fails to ascribe it explicitly to Greeks (who are said to possess “both” [1328b30]). Presumably technē is incorporated into intelligence.

32 Although Politics 7.7 clearly privileges spirit and intelligence, Aristotle says very little about intelligence and instead uses the remainder of the text to discuss spirit (through a critique of Plato's characterization of spirited guardians in the Republic). Within Aristotle's psychological taxonomy, spiritedness is one of three forms of desire and appears to be especially connected to anger or the response one has to being slighted. See further Lefebvre, “La puissance du thumos,” 128–34.

33 Nicomachean Ethics 3.8.1116b30–32 ; Pol. 7.7.1328a6–7, 1327b40–41. See further Heath, “Natural Slavery,” 255–58; Leunissen, From Natural Character, 48–51.

34 See, for instance, Pol. 5.10.1312b25–33, 5.11.1315a27–31.

35 Monteils-Laeng, “Aristote croit-il au déterminisme environnemental?,” claims, I think correctly, that “Aristotle's justification of ‘environmental determinism’ does not . . . entail the support of a form of environmental providentialism” (42). P. Pellegrin, L'Excellence menacée: Sur la philosophie politique d'Aristote (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2017), 151–52, and Lefebvre, “La puissance du thumos,” 120, by contrast, appear to embrace an element of providentialism in their accounts of Politics 7.7.

36 Lefebvre, “La puissance du thumos,” 111–12.

37 Ward, “Ethnos in the Politics,” 18.

38 Cherry, “Does Aristotle Believe,” 651–55, also argues that natural qualities are insufficiently important in the development of complete virtue.

39 By contrast, Leunissen, From Natural Character, claims that “environmental factors have quite dramatic impacts on the individual natural character of people and thereby on their political and moral lives. Living a happy or virtuous life constitutes the perfection of human nature, but, evidently, realizing this kind of perfection is easier for some than for others, and easiest for those—typically, Greek—men who are by nature already disposed to courage and intelligence” (53).

40 Josephine Quinn, “Phoenicians and Carthaginians in Greco-Roman Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean, ed. Carolina López-Ruiz and Brian Doak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 671–83, surveys textual evidence about the nature of Carthage during Aristotle's time. Isaac, Invention of Racism, 324–51, and Gruen, Rethinking the Other, 115–22, survey Greek stereotypes about Phoenicia and Carthage, although Isaac overstates the case that the most persistent stereotypes attached to Phoenicians and Carthaginians are those of “guile, unreliability, and treacherousness” (328). Gruen is a good corrective, reminding us that Herodotus depicts Phoenicia as loyal to its colonists at Carthage and Carthaginians as fair and honest traders (Hdt. 3.19, 4.196). Barceló, Pedro, “The Perception of Carthage in Classical Greek Historiography,” Acta Classica 37 (1994): 1–14Google Scholar, in general supports Gruen, showing that Greek historiography on Carthage was generally positive prior to Rome's engagement with Carthage. The Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, and Places unfortunately possesses a textual lacuna where its author discussed the conditions of the Egyptians and Libyans (AWP 13).

41 See Pol. 2.9.1271a26–36, 2.10.1272a13–22, 2.11.1272b33–34.

42 Aristotle judges the Spartan overseers as superior to the Cretan order keepers, and the Carthaginian Hundred and Four as superior to the overseers (Pol. 2.10.1272a27–35, 2.11.1272b34–36); he makes extended criticisms of the Spartan and Cretan senates, but his criticisms of Carthage's senate are minor and ultimately he praises it as aristocratic (Pol. 2.9.1270b36–71a8, 2.10.1272a35–39, 2.11.1273a13–18); and he judges the Carthaginian office of king better than that of the Spartan office (2.11.1272b37–1273a1).

43 See Pol. 2.9.1269b12–19, 2.10.1272b15–17, and 2.11.1273b18–23; cf. 6.5.1320b4–7.

44 The next three paragraphs draw upon material from my unpublished manuscript “Carthage: Aristotle's Best (Non-Greek) Constitution?”

45 See, for instance, Pol. 2.9.1271a41–b9, 7.2.1324b3–15, 7.14.1333b6–33.

46 Carthage was hardly immune from exercising dominion by force. The Poetics reports that the battle at Himera (between Carthage and the Sicilian army of Gelon) coincided with (and perhaps was coordinated with) the Persian defeat at Salamis in 480 BCE (1459a26). Aristotle appears to be alluding to a tradition, written by the historian Ephorus and preserved in Diodorus Siculus (11.1.4), which claimed that Xerxes sought to open a “second front” in his war on Greece and proposed to Carthage an alliance that would coordinate their attacks on both the Greek mainland and Greek western colonies.