World History

Unit 2: Civilizations of the Mediterranean World

Chapter 5: The Greek City-States

12. Thu, Oct 10, 2013

For today, let's dig a little deeper. Here are some things to think about before class, so that we can discuss them with some subtlety.

By way of background, I'd like you to consider Aristotle's theory of the evolution (or more properly, the cyclical pattern) of governments. Aristotle (writing in the Politics after the golden age of Athens, at the dawn of the Hellenistic period) looked back on the history of governments in the various Greek poleis (almost all of them now subjugated by Philip of Macedon), and thought he discerned a pattern. From social chaos and anarchy, he argued, a strong man would arise and assert his claim as king. This then would degenerate into a tyranny, from which a group of aristocrats would rescue it. Aristocratic rule in its turn would degenerate into an oppressive form of the same thing (which he called oligarchy, though the name merely means "rule by a few"). From that, democracies would arise. Far from viewing this as the end-point of the process, however, as many modern theorists seem to have done, he argues that this also will degenerate in time into mere mob rule more or less equivalent to the chaos with which his cycle started, and from there it begins again. There is a certain organic wholeness to the Aristotelian theory, depressing though some may find it: what do you think of it? Is it a reasonable model? Does the history of the sixth through fourth centuries B.C. support his thinking?

• The Greek city-states went through a number of stages before most of them arrived at a somewhat democratic condition; as you will see in the next chapter, those democracies did not last long. Is there an organic relationship among these kinds of government? Does one, as Aristotle suggests, lead to another?
• The foundations of the Greek city-state. What is the implication of direct democracy? What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages? How might modern technological upheavals be pushing us in the direction of more direct democracy ourselves? Would that be a good thing? Perhaps we can touch briefly on Aristotle's theories of the different forms of government and their relationship to one another; it's a topic that will continue to gather interest as we move in a few weeks to the discussion of Rome.
• Greece in the larger context of the ancient Mediterranean: how did it interact with the other civilizations we have looked at? The book almost seems to suggest that, except for the Persian Wars, these various civilizations grew up in a vacuum, having almost no contact with each other. It's not necessarily so.

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