Polus admires orators for their tyrannical power. However, Socrates argues that orators and tyrants lack power worth having: the ability to satisfy one’s wishes or wants (boulêseis). He distinguishes wanting from thinking best, and grants that orators and tyrants do what they think best while denying that they do what they want. His account is often thought to involve two conflicting requirements: wants must be attributable to the wanter from their own perspective (to count as their desires), but wants must also be directed at objects that are genuinely good (in order for failure to satisfy them to matter). We offer an account of wanting as reflective, coherent desire, which allows Socrates to satisfy both desiderata. We then explain why he thinks that orators and tyrants want to act justly, though they do greater injustices than anyone else and so frustrate their own wants more than anyone else.

For many anti-Calvinists, including the Cambridge Platonists, the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination entailed unacceptable conclusions about the character of God. Inspired by the fractious political climate, seventeenth-century English anti-Calvinists frequently accused the Calvinists of making God into an ‘arbitrary tyrant’, one who imposed his arbitrary will upon a hapless creation, unbound by any principles of justice or goodness. After considering the political and theological background from which this anti-tyrannical discourse emerges, this chapter examines the ways in which, in their attacks on the doctrine of double predestination, Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and John Smith all appeal to an explicitly Platonic notion of God’s unwavering intention to communicate his goodness to creatures as far as they are able to receive it.

In the concluding Chapter 6, I suggest other inquiries unfold when we take seriously the notion of the citizen as free and empowered. The approach to freedom and power developed throughout these chapters provides another way to interpret and understand Athenian political thought from the ground up. Recognizing democratic freedom as autonomy calls for a reassessment of ancient critiques of that freedom, such as Plato’s criticisms in the Republic. Likewise, expanding our view of power beyond power over others in order to allow multiple, simultaneous agents with the power to act uncovers often overlooked individuals with power, such as women and metics. In terms of modernity, democratic freedom offers a form of liberty before liberalism separate from republican or neo-Roman conceptions that is still able to protect a multiplicity of individual values.

Evocations of Classical Greece and Rome pervade Robert Lowell’s entire oeuvre. His fascination with Latin literature in particular shaped his own poetry. The density and involved syntax of Virgil and Propertius are echoed in the crabbed and tortured involutions of Lowell’s earlier poetry. His confessional verse is in part a response to Catullan frankness. His view of America as declining from republic into empire was colored by the historiography of Suetonius and Tacitus, in whose portraits of imperial tyrants Lowell found a frame for depicting the darker elements of his own character. He essayed many (usually very free) translations or versions of Greek and Roman poems, often with autobiographical inflections. A number of “original” poems can be shown to have originated as translations from Catullus, Virgil, Propertius, or Horace. In contrast with his almost obsessive engagement with Roman literature, Lowell’s engagement with Greek was less extensive, often mediated through later European literature, and (notably in his versions of Aeschylus) less vivid.

Since modern tyrannies tend to be ideological in character, they rely heavily on rhetoric or propaganda. This chapter consists of eight speeches that illustrate different ways that rhetoric has been used to foster tyrannical or immoral and violent policies in modern politics. The speakers include Maximilien Robespierre, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Deng Xiaoping.

This chapter explores the contrast between two types of ultimate authority (the tyrant and the sovereign) and the material limits on both through a study of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. It begins with an examination of the shared terrain between the two terms, and then moves to a study of the discursive development of tyrannos in ancient Greece. Two insights result: first, notions of sovereignty depend on some idea of limits or boundaries, whether recognized or not, to differentiate it from illegitimate tyranny. Second, the legitimacy problem is always political, depending on power and contestation; claims to either sort of ultimate authority will never find secure or self-evident foundations. Oedipus – a benevolent tyrant who has faith in his power because he escaped his fate and has bested the Sphnix – ends up unwittingly demonstrating the limits of both types of claims to ultimate authority. Attempting to find freedom beyond democratic knowledge and the constraints of time and inheritance, Oedipus’s refusal to remain bounded by the material limits of human existence results in his tragic downfall.

Chapter 3 describes how the Constitution created a system for control of factions. But when those factions more and more polarized around the issue of slavery, the Northern and Western national majority was unable to rule and eventually had suppress the Southern minority in the Civil War. In recent decades, much Black migration out of the South and some White migration into the Republican Party have again polarized voter sentiment into red and blue states, or two tribes. This gridlock in the national government has again created a national majority which cannot rule (see the Senate cloture procedure), in which case a new political crisis plagues the country.

This chapter deploys the modes of relating to the classical past established in the previous chapter to survey the contemporary resonances of the full range of declamation scenarios, paying particular attention to the realm of the imaginary. The interpersonal conflicts (murder, rape, disownment, etc.) of the genre are very close to the gossip about and probably some of the reality of many star declaimers' lives. Similarly, declamations on war tapped into a major Greek imperial discourse as well as the civil wars and foreign incursions about which most of our sources keep a diplomatic silence. Declamations on tyranny tapped into another common discourse and offered space for reflection on illegitimate power. The survey continues with civil strife and misconduct in public life and and moves on to consider honours, embassies, religion, migration, both collective and personal, and construction projects. In these areas, too, declamation speaks both to contemporary realities and to contemporary discourses.

Abstract: The material for this chapter is drawn in part from a class I taught on American pragmatism at a local correctional institution. It raises the question: Since a habit is something we take for granted, how could we even begin to recognize our own habits as supporting tyrannical relationships? A response to this question and to the role that formal education could play in promoting this recognition is the topic for the remaining chapters in the book.

Despite their diplomatic function, the Residents in office between 1798 and 1818 often preferred intimidation to accommodation. To some extent, their interventionist attitude reflected wider assumptions about the prevalence of ‘tyranny’, ‘inhumanity’, and misgovernment in India. These moral imperatives, combined with the supposed ineffectiveness and untrustworthiness of Indian allies, led Residents to argue for the necessity of unequal alliances backed by force. These convictions shaped the Residents’ relationships to the military, leading them to try and assert control over subsidiary forces in the region, and to panic when forces were disordered or insufficient. Subsidiary forces might have posed problems for the Resident, not least in the form of open mutiny, but they were also seen as essential to his control. Residents explicitly equated military and political power, and were determined to make a show of strength, contrary to the governor-general-in-council’s emphasis on conciliatory conduct. These differences of opinion become most apparent in the controversies that occasionally erupted around the Resident’s acts of judicial violence. Whereas superiors in London and Calcutta worried about undermining the Company’s claims to civilizational superiority through brutal acts of corporal punishment, in the Residents’ view civilization was instead a hindrance to be cast aside.

This chapter investigates Thucydides’ views about morality and justice and the role that these concepts play in his work. It argues that Thucydides’ own ideas about justice were conventional, but that his understanding of the role of justice in shaping human affairs was more novel. The chapter explores the methodological problem of reconstructing Thucydides’ views about justice and morality, given that most statements on these themes are made by characters rather than the author. It then analyses the text’s representation of key ideas about justice, morality and other virtues; it explores how these are manifested in Thucydides’ characterization of individuals in the work; and it surveys the differences between Thucydides’ representation of Spartan and Athenian approaches to justice and morality.

The history and nature of the Athenian Empire (arche) is not the primary subject of Thucydides’ History, but his text is nevertheless a critical piece of evidence for it. After briefly surveying the key features of the Athenian Empire and its development, this chapter explores Thucydides’ picture of Athenian imperialism, focusing on three areas in particular. First: how can imperial power be justified? Second – a related but different question – why do states seek imperial power (is it, indeed, something over which states have a choice or is it an inevitable feature of interstate politics)? Finally, how and why do empires fail?

This chapter argues that Thucydides’ History provides for its readers an opportunity to assess the limits and opportunities of diverse political regimes, particularly democracy, oligarchy and monarchy. In doing so, he offers insights not only into the specific characteristics of the cities that employ those regimes (Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes), but also into what is distinctive about those regime types, understood in categorical terms. The chapter focuses on Thucydides’ presentation of democracy in Athens and in Syracuse, arguing that Thucydides, although alert to the weaknesses of democracy, was also an admirer of the attainments and ambitions of this form of governance.

We will turn now to two symbolic images: The allegory of Injustice in the Arena Chapel (Padua) by Giotto di Bondone (1303–1305) and the allegory of War in the Palazzo Pubblico (Siena) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338–1339). They are major milestones in the visualization of rape in European art, condemnatory representations intended for a public audience. Despite the extensive secondary literature on these sites, the representations of sexual violence have never been examined or compared to each other, even in specialist studies. They can potentially reconfigure our views of wartime rape before modernity.

This chapter addresses the question of why prominent nobles were so interested in being church advocates by examining the legitimate financial benefits that came with the position. Using sources from the period 1050 to 1250, it argues that advocates typically received one-third of the fines when they held court on ecclesiastical estates, and also received food and lodging in return for fulfilling their role as judge. It also demonstrates that many advocates received separate income for their responsibilities in providing protection. While all of these payments were initially in kind, by the thirteenth century it was increasingly common for advocates to receive a single lump-sum money payment for fulfilling all their advocatial responsibilities, which is evidence of the increasing commodification of local positions of authority in this period. This chapter also investigates the numismatic evidence for church advocates as additional source material for the economic dimensions of the role.

This chapter serves as a counterpoint to the previous chapter and frames the book’s arguments up to this point in very broad terms, looking back to corruption in the ancient Roman Empire and forward to the Sicilian mafia and other modern, nonstate actors. It argues that advocates’ corrupt practices of protection and justice ought to be understood as encompassing two main strategies: either extracting as much income as possible from regions that were peripheral to their own territorial interests or – in contrast – attempting to win the hearts and minds of churches’ dependents in order to convince them to abandon their allegiance to their landlords. Both of these strategies are commonplace ones across human history and highlight more general challenges tied to protection and justice. This chapter also contends that, precisely because these corrupt practices were so common, scholars’ arguments about the decline of advocatial abuses from the thirteenth century onward are misleading.

The central theme of Chapter 2 is anti-monarchism. The chapter shows that during the free state monarchy was widely thought to be the worst form of government. Monarchy entailed tyranny and the concomitant slavery of the people. However, an even more powerful anti-monarchical argument rose to prominence during the free state. Based largely on 1 Samuel 8, numerous advocates of the free state maintained that monarchy was against God and thus both idolatrous and sinful. Already in early December 1648, a radical pamphlet, Light shining in Buckingham-shire, equated kingship with the devil. But the argument that monarchy was a sin and idolatry became particularly vociferous during the Engagement controversy. It was argued repeatedly that monarchy, as a form of government, was against God’s express will. Such an argument led to the conclusion that monarchy was finished in England and would soon be so elsewhere in Europe as well.