Dominique Lenfant’s collection of essays covers several important aspects related to the reception of Ps.-Xenophon’s Athenaion Politeia (AP).
The issue of its authorship and the date of its composition are marginal to the main aim of the book (except in Ferrucci’s chapter), though the editor, introducing the subject matter to give an overall view of each contribution, supports the idea that the AP was written in the fifth century BC (for a date in the early 390s, however, see E. Occhipinti, ‘(Ps)Xenophon’s AP: Genre, Audience, and Fourth-Century Themes of Debate’, in Politica antica 9 (2019), 11–42, with previous bibliography on the matter).
While one chapter (that of Caire) is devoted to the ancient reception of the AP, the rest of the book deals with post-classical reception, following a diachronic scheme. Contributions to the latter aspect feature several topics, such as modern and contemporary political reflections and thought: politicians, scholars, ideologists, intellectuals projected onto the ancient past contemporary concerns and feelings, while using the AP to support their own views and policies (see Quattrocelli, Lenfant, Rhodes, Payen, Müller, Ferrucci, Sancho Rocher). The story of the AP’s manuscript tradition is explored by Luana Quattrocelli’s paper, which is particularly valuable for the reason that it refines the dates of the four manuscripts of the AP (A Vaticanus 1950, B, Vaticanus graecus 1335, CMutinensis α.V.7.17, MMarcianus graecus 511), and also offers an impressive collection of bibliographical references to it (unfortunately, the author does not include any images of these manuscripts). Other chapters (Pontier, Payen) show the process which led to the questioning of Xenophon’s authorship by nineteenth-century scholars.
Another set of topics pertains to the AP’s aim, its main themes and its textual features. Cinzia Bearzot discusses Émile Belot (publishing in 1880), for whom the AP belonged to the epistolary genre: Xenophon sent a letter to Agesilaus on Athenian government in 378, in order to discourage him from attacking Athens. Christian Wendt turns to Ernst Kalinka, whose main edition of the AP (1913; his editio minor was issued in 1898), considered the work an exercise in prose style, written by an admirer of Athenian democracy as a tribute to the political view of his audience, members of the elite classes. In Hans Kopp’s chapter, we encounter Hartvig Frisch, whose 1941 commentary considered the AP to be a treatise expounding a theory of maritime power. Frisch was an anti-fascist Danish scholar who was compelled to retreat from his political activities by the German occupation of Denmark; his maritime theories and laws about sea power were applied to contemporary England.
Emmanuèle Caire deals with the reception of the AP by fourth-century BC authors, as well as later ones. She discusses passages from Isocrates, Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus which show similarities with the AP in regard to festivals, social organization and the link between democracy and thalassocracy (Isocrates); criticism of democratic exousia (‘licence’) and the conduct of Athenian demagogues (Plato); and the opposition between democracy and oligarchy, combined with a negative portrayal of democracy as the power of less morally endowed people to obtain political advantages thanks to their high numbers (Aristotle, Theophrastus).
Lenfant’s own chapter considers eighteenth-century France, in which the AP was much appreciated by both monarchists and republicans who, condemning the French Revolution, considered the pamphlet a kind of manifesto against democratic and extremist parties and, broadly speaking, against the power of the masses. The first French translations of the AP were published by the republican Jean-Baptiste Gail in 1793–1795, and anonymously by the monarchist César Henri de La Luzerne in 1793.
A mutual influence was exerted by French and English intellectuals and politicians from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, as Peter Rhodes’ and Pascal Payen’s chapters well show. In Britain, César Henri de La Luzerne’s translation provided material for those who wanted to attack democracy, such as William Mitford in The History of Greece (London 1784–1810). English monarchists, unfriendly to the French Revolution and its supporters, exalted monarchy and its good organization, and judged popular sovereignty a form of anarchy. On the contrary, George Grote (History of Greece, 1846–1856), who felt admiration for Athenian democracy, believed that the overthrow of elite power by the people was a good thing and that the pamphlet portrayed realities in a tendentious way. Rhodes explains that it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the AP was placed in its proper context thanks to the work of professional classicists, in Britain as well as in Germany. As Payen’s contribution shows, Grote’s liberal-democratic leaning influenced Victor Duruy’s and Gustave Glotz’s readings of Athenian democracy, which resulted in open criticism of the pamphlet’s content and prose style.
As we learn from Laura Sancho Rocher’s chapter, scholars from Spain and Italy contributed by offering an ‘ideologized’ reading of the AP, but they came to this debate later, from the second half of the twentieth century, when times had changed and new political trends entailed different concerns and responses. The first Spanish translation of the AP came out in 1951, under the Francoist regime. Its authors, Manuel Cardenal Iracheta and Manuel Fernández-Galiano, seemed to allude through their text to the authoritarian character of the Spanish regime. Yannick Müller explores Marxist readings of the AP given between 1976 and 1982 by Claudine Leduc, Luciano Canfora and Enrico Flores: the modern class struggle was compared to the AP’s antagonism between oligarchs and democrats; and its description of democracy was likened to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Finally, as Stefano Ferrucci shows in his survey of Italian scholarship in the 50 years up to 2018, Italian scholars’ interest in the AP developed after the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946 and during the political crises of the 1970s and 1990s.
The strength of this collection of essays is to show the close connection between classical scholars, or sympathizers with classical literature (politicians, intellectuals, etc.), and the political climate of their own times: modern concerns entail a non-neutral reading of the ancient past, today as yesterday.
