Athens by Livingstone Niall;

Author:Livingstone, Niall; [Livingstone, Niall;]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-08-15T04:30:00+00:00

Notes

1 ΦΑΙ. Σὺ δέ γε, ὦ θαυμάσιε, ἀτοπώτατός τις φαίνῃ. ἀτεχνῶς γάρ, ὃ λέγεις, ξεναγουμένῳ τινὶ καὶ οὐκ ἐπιχωρίῳ ἔοικας· οὕτως ἐκ τοῦ ἄστεος οὔτ’ εἰς τὴν ὑπερορίαν ἀποδημεῖς, οὔτ’ ἔξω τείχους ἔμοιγε δοκεῖς τὸ παράπαν ἐξιέναι. ΣΩ. Συγγίγνωσκέ μοι, ὦ ἄριστε. φιλομαθὴς γάρ εἰμι· τὰ μὲν οὖν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν μ’ ἐθέλει διδάσκειν, οἱ δ’ ἐν τῷ ἄστει ἄνθρωποι. Just as Socrates’ alleged wisdom consists in knowing that he does not know (Apology 21d), so here the ignorance of his surroundings which Phaedrus imputes to him is explained by his desire for knowledge (philomathia). In fact, of course, Plato’s Socrates is represented as noticing things about both people and places (here, the altar of Boreas a little further down the Ilissos, Phaedrus 229b) which those more ‘familiar’ with them, like Phaedrus, do not.

2 The Athenaiōn Politeia (Ath. Pol). Politeia (πολιτεία) is the abstract noun in Greek derived from the concrete noun polis (‘citizen community’, ‘city-state’, or ‘city’ for short). Thus a particular politeia is a ‘citiness’ – what makes a community what it is, its ‘workings’ or, to use the conventional translation, its constitution. (Politeia, Latinised as Res publica and rendered in English as Republic, i.e. ‘system of government’, is one of the transmitted titles of Plato’s famous dialogue, the other being peri dikaiosynēs ‘about justice’ or ‘about morality’; in the modern Greek language, politeia, the quality of being a citizen, has come to mean ‘culture’). The Ath. Pol. was probably composed over a period spanning the 330s–320s bc. There are two main reasons for calling it ‘Aristotelian’ as opposed to ‘Aristotle’s’. First, it is one of a huge collection (numbering perhaps around 150; ancient estimates go as high as 250; no others survive) of accounts of politeiai, forms of government, of Greek cities which we are told were produced by Aristotle’s philosophical school but which must surely in large part, if not entirely, have been farmed out to his pupils rather than composed by the maestro himself – though of course it is quite imaginable that Aristotle might have wished to take responsibility himself for the account of Athens. Second, and more importantly, there are features of style, expression and thought which do not fully cohere with Aristotle’s other surviving works, the Politics in particular. See the magisterial introduction and commentary of P.J. Rhodes (1993): 1 f. on ancient testimonia for the Aristotelian collection of politeiai, 51–7 on the date of Ath. Pol., and 58–63 on its authorship.

3 Ath. Pol. 25. On the (unsolved and enigmatic) murder of Ephialtes, now a subject for modern detective fiction, see Roller 1989.

4 My focus here is on the ‘legend’ of Solon, poised (and I suggest, rhetorically self-positioned) between myth and history. For a more ‘disenchanted’ reading of Solon’s rhetoric as class-struggle Realpolitik in defence of the aristocracy to which he belonged, see Rose 2012: 201–66; also 2012: 360, on ‘the precedent of Solon’: ‘they ask for land, let them eat politics.’

5 Cf. Olympian 1 115 f. εἴη σέ τε

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