On the Use of Greek History for Life: Josiah Ober's Athens and Paul Rahe's Sparta

Among contemporary scholars who write about classical Greece, Josiah Ober and Paul Rahe are especially adept at navigating the territory shared by history and political theory and illuminating the relevance of Greek history for our time. The historical approach each takes in the works under review d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Review of politics 2019-04, Vol.81 (2), p.305-321
Main Author: Collins, Susan D.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antiquity
Citizenship
Debates
Deities
Democracy
Essays
History
Inheritance
Inheritance and succession
Injunctions
Intellectuals
Justice
Meditation
Plutarch (46?-120?)
Political philosophy
Political theory
Politics
Review Essay
Selfknowledge
Social order
Studies
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Summary:Among contemporary scholars who write about classical Greece, Josiah Ober and Paul Rahe are especially adept at navigating the territory shared by history and political theory and illuminating the relevance of Greek history for our time. The historical approach each takes in the works under review does not easily fall into the categories—monumental, antiquarian, and critical history— delineated by Nietzsche in the essay to which my subtitle alludes. Yet, in treating these works together, I am guided by a question that Nietzsche raises at the conclusion of his “untimely meditation” in recalling the Delphic injunction Gnōthi seauton, “Know thyself.” The Greeks’ cultural inheritance, he argues, was a chaos of foreign ideas—Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian—and gods, and it was only when the Greeks began to organize this chaos in accordance with the Delphic injunction that they were prevented from being swamped by their own history and became the model for all civilized peoples. The works under review are extraordinarily rich, and I will not do justice to their many arguments. Rather, I organize my consideration of them by focusing on this question: What is the relation between the study of Greek history and the search for self-knowledge at the core of Greek political philosophy?
ISSN:0034-6705
1748-6858
DOI:10.1017/S0034670519000019