Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The political culture of the classical Greek city-state, or polis, whether it was an aristocratic republic or a democracy, was ideologically opposed to monarchy. The Greeks of the fifth century bc knew absolute rulers mostly from what they saw on the tragic stage, and the depiction there was negative: men such as Creon in Antigone, whose absolute power led to overweening arrogance. And aside from Sparta with its double constitutional monarchy, what the Greeks saw of kingship in the real world was characteristic of half-barbarian places such as Macedon or Thrace – and of course the Persian empire, the realm of the Great King. The power of the Shah-an-Shah was, naturally, respected. But thinkers of the classical period were contemptuous of his subjects, seeing them as no better than slaves who endured a despotism that Greeks would find intolerable. They thought it natural that free men such as themselves, despite being hugely outnumbered, had beaten such creatures at Marathon in 490 and during the great Persian invasion of Greece in 480–479. The absolutism of the Great King was in fact a Greek fantasy, for the Shah often confronted a powerful aristocracy and his conduct was hedged about with custom. Nevertheless, this was the ideology.King Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, and then the Successors of Alexander, forced the Greeks into a new political world in which ... log in or subscribe to read full text