Epicureans on kingship

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Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.

In the tradition of Schmitt and Agamben’s “political theology”, anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins have traced the concept of political power and sovereignty to an initially religious impulse - an attempt to channel the raw violent potential of humans and, as importantly, nature into a ceremonial vehicle. They differentiate between two models of ancient sovereignty - divine kings (whose divine power is absolute and unrestrained) and sacred kings (who embody power in order to contain it). In these terms - insofar as the sovereign is conceptualized as the one who imposes the state of exception, rather than the sacrifice on whom it is imposed - political thought in the Western tradition embedded in the tradition of divine kingship. Robert Graves, following James Frazer, proposed an alternate lineage of sacred kingship at the earliest origins of the Western tradition in the myth of a dying and resurrecting king, ultimately subordinate to the true source of divine power, the Goddess of life, who is slain and replaced by his double. This sacrificial ritual, unlike current binary models of sovereignty, is mediated by a third term which operationalizes a second binary, splitting that in which the "sovereign" always arises as the dominant term against itself. Though its historicity has been challenged, I argue that this model taken as a formal hypothetical presents a useful paradigm for demonstrating the contingency of the form of the paradox of sovereignty asserted by Schmitt, Agamben, etc., and reading it in relation to the structure of binary contradiction and dialectic - manifest distinctly in the structure of double kingship and in the opposition of sovereign and homo sacer - as well as the absent term of mediation.

Ancient Tyranny, 2006

A Critical Companion to the 'Mirrors for Princes' Literature, 2022

Lenz development, or in place, as still found in Persia and other inimical Near Eastern states. A king is now a tyrant and slave-master. Most influential for later, post-Classical, writings in praise of princes are Greek works of the fourth century B.C. The first explicit works of advice addressed to kings, subsequent to the early poets who had always retained a central role in education, appear then. A surprise turnaround in the attitude to kingship occurs in politically minded philosophical writers associated with Athens. Athens is still governed by a democracy. Xenophon, Isocrates, Plato, and, somewhat differently, Aristotle all praise kingship and even state that kingship is the best form of government. At times we can see an ad hoc reason for this in their desire to flatter their own (if not always Athens') foreign royal friends or allies, especially in Xenophon and Isocrates who make Eastern kings into ideal models, and arguably but less so in Plato and Aristotle. But the more general trend has not been given enough scholarly attention. They share a theoretical monarchic reaction on the part of intellectual and perhaps wealthy Athenians to the excesses of democracy. Indeed some of the first talk of " political science" occurs in followers or close successors of Socrates (died 399 B.C.)-we will discuss five-who use the term to refer to an ideal ruler's knowledge of how to rule, and their own expertise in advising him. It is not enough to call these thinkers conservative. While today seeming theoretical and abstract, they claimed a power to educate true statesmen. Their kings are able to unify a state, end the chaos of democracy, and put an end to the endemic bloody fighting between rich and poor, or oligarchs and democrats, that plagued historical Greek cities. These authors depict ideal kings as virtuous, self-controlled, and benevolent leaders of a harmonious state. With Alexander the Great of Macedon (336-323 B.C) and earlier his father Philip II, kingship returned to the Greek world. Greece, the Near East and most of the former Persian Empire came to be ruled by Greek kingdoms. Naturally some writers flattered them; intellectuals are often attracted to power. Hellenistic-era (323-30 B.C.) practices exerted a significant influence on Roman political forms and ideology, when in the first century B.C. Rome moved from a republic to a monarchy. Greeks now found themselves the subjects of an external ruling power. When authors of the 1st century B.C. to the 2nd century A.D. wished to flatter or improve their Roman lords, they were able to draw upon models of exemplary rulers found in Homer, histories of Alexander, and Greek philosophy. The wishful thinking is apparent, but this tradition did reach a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who himself wrote a work of advice for rulers and others. We will consider these four thematic periods in chronological order.

Vol. 42, 2, 2019

The aristotelian theory of regimes Artigos / Articles

Every Inch a King. Comparative studies on kings and kingship in the ancient and medieval worlds, ed. Lynette Mitchell & Charles Melville, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 1-21

1 Shadows of the Empire...

in Nunzio Bianchi and Mircea Duluș (eds.), Legacies and Entanglements: Religious Identity, Cultural Tradition and Political Order in the Byzantine Sphere (= Études byzantines et post-byzantines 5), Heidelberg, 2023, 119–148.

This article explores Eugenios of Palermo’s theory of kingship as enclosed in his Poem XXI (ed. M. Gigante). Eugenios presents a theoretical framework which refrains from speaking of the king’s divine rights or his ministry through the will of God. Instead, he proposes a theory of elective kingship in which he suggests that the earthly rulers are “appointed from among ourselves to rule with our consent.” The analysis argues that this theory is unlikely to have been propagated during the reign of William I (r. 1154–1166) or William II (r. 1166–1189) as hitherto presumed in scholarship. Instead, it suggests that the poem was a propaganda tract meant to establish the legitimacy of Tancred of Lecce’s claims to the Norman throne (r. 1190–1194). It may have been prepared for Tancred’s coronation or his heirs, Roger III (r. 1192–1193) or William III (r. 1194).

Phronesis 42 (1997): 324–334, 1997

Epicurus is one of the first social contract theorists, holding that justice is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed. He also says that living justly is necessary and sufficient for living pleasantly, which is the Epicurean goal. Some say that there are two accounts of justice in Epicurus—one as a personal virtue, the other as a virtue of institutions. I argue that the personal virtue derives from compliance with just social institutions, and so we need to attribute only one account of justice to Epicurus. I show how this interpretation makes sense of claims about justice by Epicurus and his followers, including Hermarchus, Lucretius, and Diogenes of Oinoanda.