M. Faraguna, Lykourgan Athens?, in Clisthène et Lycurgue d’Athènes. Autour du politique dans la cité classique (edd. V. Azoulay-P. Ismard), Paris 2011, pp. 67-86 (original) (raw)
Related papers
'Before “Lycurgan Athens”: the origins of change’, in V. Azoulay and P. Ismard (eds), Clisthène et Lycurgue d’Athènes. Autour du politique dans la cité classique, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011, 119-31
Greek Political Thought in Ancient History
Polis, 2016
Greek historians of the fifth and fourth centuries bce also intended their works to be political commentaries. This paper concentrates on the work of Thucydides, and his interest in fifth-century ideas of constitutionalism. Honing in on the political ‘opposites’, democracy and oligarchy, this paper argues that Thucydides collapses these categories, to show not only that they are unstable, but that, built upon the same political vocabulary, they naturally lead towards his new idea of the measured blending of the few and the many in a mixed constitution, which creates political stability and a positive political experience for the community. In this sense, Thucydides’ text, which uses historical narrative as a vehicle for political commentary, needs to be understood within the framework of historical contextualism, but also as a ‘possession for all time’.
The treatise of Ioannes Lydos On the Magistracies of the Roman State contains an argument against the legitimacy of the Roman emperors and in favour of the political freedom of the Republic. This argument targets Justinian in particular, whom Lydos compares to tyrants such as the early kings of Rome and the dynasts of the Republic. While most of the essay examines the details of Lydos' text, some consideration is given to its historical context and the range and nature of political dissidence in early Byzantium. This essay proposes that Ioannes Lydos, official of the praetorian prefecture and professor of Latin in Justinian's Constantinople, argued in his treatise On the Magistracies of the Roman State that the Roman emperors were tyrants rather than legitimate rulers. This conclusion emerges when we compare his precise definitions of various kinds of monarchies to his accounts of the emperors, especially Caesar, Augustus, and Justinian. Since Lydos associates the word 'freedom' only with the period of the Republic and locates the origin of imperial rule in the violence and tyranny of the late Republic, it is reasonable to conclude that his politics were 'republican.' Though he allows for the possibility of 'lawful' kingship, he carefully defines the origin, nature, and behaviour of the emperors in such a way as to exclude them from that category.