| |
Kingship was the dominant political institution in the ancient Mediterranean world and exercised a continuing fascination even for Greeks and Romans who lived in proudly non-monarchical regimes. We will begin by surveying kingship in the Archaic Mediterranean world, primarily through the lens of Homer’s poems and Herodotus’ History but with some reference to comparative Persian and Hebrew material. We turn then to central texts of the fourth-century BC: selected passages from Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Isocrates’ kingship orations offer different visions of the ideal ruler as well as competing definitions of philosophy and wisdom. After touching on Hellenistic monarchs and Roman views, we will spend several weeks on Lives of Plutarch and how they appropriate ‘classic’ themes of the education and virtues of the king/leader, the nature of wisdom and its relation to power, the use and abuse of law, rhetoric and myth, and differing relations of rulers and ruled. We will end by glancing at the adaption of classical themes in the late antique, Medieval and Renaissance periods when new ideals of Christian monarchy evolved.
|
PHILOSOPHY AND KINGSHIP IN ANTIQUITY
Semester 1
