At the end of his Nobel Lecture, 1974, Solzhenitsyn quoted a Russian proverb, and then made this slightly curious statement: “It is on such a seemingly fantastic violation of the law of conversation of mass and energy that my own activity is based, and my appeal to the writers of the world.”
The proverb?
One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.
Here, here!
And yet, there are eras in which another sort of word seems able to infect the whole world.
Shift the scene to 306 B.C. Antigonus, one of the four or so warlords competing for the mastery of Alexander’s empire, awaits news of a naval battle at Cyprus fought by his forces against the fleet of his greatest rival Ptolemy. His son Demetrius is his commander. Some thought this battle would decide nothing than less which warlord would rule all, although later events proved otherwise. In any case, recounting the scene four hundred years later, in his Life of Demetrius, Plutarch writes:
As his special messenger to carry word of the victory to his father, Demetrius sent Aristodemus of Miletus, the arch-flatterer among all his courtiers, and ready now, as it would seem, to crown the achievement with the grossest of his flatteries. For when he had crossed over from Cyprus, he would not suffer his vessel to come to land, but ordered the crew to cast anchor and remain quietly on board…he himself got into the ship's small boat, landed alone, and proceeded towards Antigonus…[Antigonus] sent servants and friends, one after the other, to learn from Aristodemus what had happened. Aristodemus, however, would make no answer to anybody, but step by step and with a solemn face drew near in perfect silence. Antigonus, therefore, thoroughly frightened, and no longer able to restrain himself, came to the door to meet Aristodemus, who was now escorted by a large throng which was hurrying to the palace. Accordingly, when he had come near, he stretched out his hand and cried with a loud voice: "Hail, King Antigonus, we have conquered Ptolemy in a sea-fight, and now hold Cyprus, with twelve thousand eight hundred soldiers as prisoners of war." To this Antigonus replied: "Hail to thee also, by Heaven! but for torturing us in this way, thou shalt undergo punishment; the reward for thy good tidings thou shalt be some time in getting." [17]1
We’re not told what punishment, if any, this Aristodemus underwent. But that’s because Plutarch goes straight to the most important fact of the story:
Upon this, the multitude for the first time saluted Antigonus and Demetrius as kings. Antigonus, accordingly, was immediately crowned by his friends, and Demetrius received a diadem from his father, with a letter in which he was addressed as King. The followers of Ptolemy in Egypt on their part also, when these things were reported to them, gave him the title of King, that they might not appear to lose spirit on account of their defeat. And thus their emulation carried the practice among the other successors of Alexander. For Lysimachus began to wear a diadem, and Seleucus also in his interviews with the Greeks; with the Barbarians he had before this dealt as king. Cassander, however, although the others gave him the royal title in their letters and addresses, wrote his letters in his own untitled name, as he had been wont to do.
Now, this practice did not mean the addition of a name or a change of fashion merely, but it stirred the spirits of the men, lifted their thoughts high, and introduced into their lives and dealings with others pomposity and ostentation, just as tragic actors adapt to their costumes their gait, voice, posture at table, and manner of addressing others. Consequently they became harsher in their judicial decisions also; they laid aside that dissemblance of power which formerly had often made them more lenient and gentle with their subjects. So great influence had a flatterer's single word, and with so great a change did it fill the whole world. [18]
The word was “king,” i.e., basileus. Alexander had set the precedent of accepting Persian and Egyptian royal titles from “barbarians,” that is, from non-Macedonians and non-Greeks, but it is surprising to learn that prior to this incident, the competitors for the empire had scrupulously refrained from accepting this Greek title.2 Now this bit from Plutarch is quoted, and without any of the caveats classicists are so prone to, by a leading historian of the Hellenistic era, F.W. Walbank. We know that even though Plutarch wrote so much later, he consulted scores of sources long-since lost to us. Apparently in Walbank’s judgment, this event did happen, and Plutarch was likely right that it served as a marker, both symbolic and effectual, of the Grecian world’s move into a post-republican era. We see in other of the lives (Philopoeman, Agis, & Cleomenes) of Plutarch’s grand work, that later efforts to revive freedom for the Greek cities, most notably in the 200s, produced only short-lived results before the coming of Roman rule. Polybius’s history—the work which likely suggested to Plutarch the power of a parallel approach to Greek and Roman affairs--makes this clearer yet.
It is no accident that Plutarch parallels the life of Demetrius with that of Mark Antony, and assuming the traditional ordering of the lives is correct, likewise no accident that he places this pairing at the penultimate spot in his book, just before the final one of Dion with Marcus Brutus. Some other time, perhaps, I’ll show why those two should be seen, respectively, as the failed Plato-guided tyranny-fighter on the stage of Greek Sicily, and the failed Plato-reading tyranny-fighter on the stage of the whole Roman empire; that is, why they together serve as a capstone that shows how classical political philosophy, both in the Greek world and in the Roman one, was ultimately unable to hold off a movement towards the destruction of city-state liberty.
Demetrius and Antony, in the place before that last pair, are thus best understood as the respective Greek and Latin playboy bringers of monarchy to once-republican peoples—this is the symbolic truth even though many other figures were involved in or more decisively consolidated the parallel “transitions” in question. Plutarch regrets that transition, although his work contains a handful of key passages which vindicate Leo Strauss’s argument that classical thinkers would quietly endorse “Caesarist” monarchy when republican peoples had been too corrupted to remain republican. In any case, as Shakespeare learned from Plutarch, Antony and Demetrius function as embodiments of a spirit simultaneously libertine, sophist-tic, and princely, which certainly was in operation at the passing of classical political liberty.
To return to our particular story, we need to ask ourselves why Aristodemus so carefully arranged to be the very first to deliver Antigonus the news of the battle. It was clearly a plan, either his own, or as I think more likely, Demetrius’, to set a scene of maximum dramatic impact in which the unprecedented use of the “king” title could seem most appropriate and be hardest for its recipient to reject. For Plutarch had already shown us why, in his account of Demetrius coming to Athens as a liberator a year earlier, why he might have approved of this maneuver of courtly rhetoric, or have orchestrated it himself. A certain military event had
…inspired father and son with a wonderful eagerness to give freedom to all Greece, which had been reduced to subjection by Cassander and Ptolemy. No nobler or juster war than this was waged by any one of the kings; for the vast wealth which they together had amassed by subduing the Barbarians [i.e. those of the Persian emprire and beyond], was now lavishly spent upon the Greeks, to win glory and honour. As soon as father and son had determined to sail against Athens, one of his friends said to Antigonus that they must keep that city, if they took it, in their own hands, since it was a gangway to Greece. But Antigonus would not hear of it; he said that the goodwill of a people was a noble gangway which no waves could shake, and that Athens, the beacon-tower of the whole world, would speedily flash the glory of their deeds to all mankind. [8, emphasis added]
In modern terms, Antigonus viewed Athens as the “media capital” of the Greco-Macedonian world—this was more important than the fact the Athens had often spearheaded Greek military resistance to Macedonian power during the 350s-320s.
So Demetrius [aka Demetrius I of Macedon] sailed, with five thousand talents of money and a fleet of two hundred and fifty ships, against Athens, where Demetrius the Phalerean [do note, not the same Demetrius!] was administering the affairs of the city for Cassander and a garrison was set in Munychia [a fortress right up against Piraeus]. By virtue of forethought combined with good fortune, he appeared off Piraeus...but…everybody thought that the ships belonged to Ptolemy and prepared to receive them. At last, however, the generals discovered their mistake and came to the rescue, and there was confusion, as is natural when men are compelled to defend themselves against enemies who are making an unexpected landing. For Demetrius, finding the entrances to the harbours open and sailing through them, was presently inside and in view of all, and signaled from his ship a demand for quiet and silence. When this was secured, he proclaimed by voice of herald at his side that he had been sent by his father on what he prayed might be a happy errand, to set Athens free, and to expel her garrison, and to restore to the people their laws and their ancient form of government.[8]
Some background. Athens had submitted to Macedonian rule—a garrison was lodged in Munchyia--from 322 onwards, after its total defeat in the Lamian war of revolt. Historians have typically marked the end of the classical Greek era right there. But the rule Athens had submitted to was not direct--operation of its institutions had been reserved to an oligarchy, and it apparently retained a good deal of the apparatus of the democracy, including the assembly. It reserved citizen rights to 9,000, thus disenfranchising some 12,000 (says Plutarch) to 22,000 (says Diodorus Siculus). There was also a brief interlude of radical—yet somewhat Potemkin—democracy early in the 322-307 period, in which Phocion (who had wisely counseled against the Lamian war) was infamously executed. Most of the period, however, was characterized for Athens, as we see in the passage above, by Cassander’s overt “subjection,” which operated in Athens by means of the other Demetrius, the Phalarean one.
On hearing this proclamation, most of the people at once threw their shields down in front of them, and with clapping of hands and loud cries urged Demetrius to land, hailing him as their saviour and benefactor. The party of Demetrius the Phalerean also thought they must by all means receive the conqueror, even though he should confirm none of his promises, but nevertheless sent ambassadors to supplicate his mercy. These Demetrius met in a friendly spirit, and…sent him and his friends under safe conduct to Thebes, as he desired. As for himself, he declared that, although he desired to see the city, he would not do so before he had completed his liberation by ridding it of its garrison; meanwhile, after running a trench and a palisade round Munychia, he sailed against Megara [a distinct city-state; Athens’ closest neighbor], where a garrison had been stationed by Cassander…
…Megara, however, was captured, and the soldiers would have plundered it had not the Athenians made strong intercession for its citizens; Demetrius also expelled its garrison and gave the city its freedom. While he was still engaged in this, he bethought himself of Stilpo the philosopher, who was famous for his election of a life of tranquility. Accordingly, Demetrius summoned him and asked him whether any one had robbed him of anything. "No one," said Stilpo, "for I saw nobody carrying away knowledge." But nearly all the servants in the city were stolen away, and when Demetrius once more tried to deal kindly with the philosopher, and finally, on going away, said: "Your city, Stilpo, I leave in freedom," "Thou sayest truly," replied Stilpo, "for thou hast not left a single one of our slaves."[9]
Do you notice how good Demetrius is trying to be, according to Greco-Athenian standards? And how a liberation effected by another is often an illusory one? And by the way, one does not have to be a believer in the “no extensive slavery, no direct democracy” thesis (cf. Rousseau, The Social Contract, III, xv, 9-11) to see how diminished was the “freedom” Demetrius had left Megara. There are interesting scholarly disputes about to what degree democracy or mixed-regime republicanism continued on, or was revived for a time, in corners of the Hellenistic world; the disputes are fueled by our lack of good sources, but we can note that the unlike the names of Miletus, Erythrae, Rhodes, and Megalopolis, the name of Megara does not come up in these disputes. That is, there is no evidence that its “liberation” recounted here lasted. As for Athens, whatever freedoms and powers Demetrius would grant it, by 300 BC it was under a new overt tyranny.3 But back to Demetrius in 307:
Coming back again to Munychia…he drove out the garrison…at last, on the urgent invitation of the Athenians, he made his entry into the upper city, where he assembled the people and gave them back their ancient form of government. He also promised that they should receive from his father a hundred and fifty thousand bushels of grain, and enough ship timber to build a hundred triremes. It was fourteen years since the Athenians had lost their democratic form of government, and during the period which followed the Lamian war…their government had been administered, nominally as an oligarchy, but really as a monarchy, owing to the great influence of the Phalerean. And now that Demetrius had shown himself great and splendid in his benefactions, the Athenians rendered him odious and obnoxious by the extravagance of the honours which they voted him. For instance, they were the first people in the world to give Demetrius and Antigonus the title of King, although both had up to that time shrunk from using the word, and although this was the only royal prerogative still left to the descendants of Philip and Alexander which it was thought that others could not assume or share; moreover, the Athenians were the only people to give them the appellation of Saviour-gods…and the spot where Demetrius first alighted from his chariot they consecrated and covered with an altar, which they styled the altar of Demetrius Alighter; they also created two new tribes, Demetrias and Antigonis… [10, emphasis added]
But the most monstrous thing that came into the head of Stratocles (he it was who invented these elegant and clever bits of obsequiousness) was his motion that envoys sent by public decree and at public expense to Antigonus and Demetrius should be called sacred deputies, instead of ambassadors, like those who conducted to Delphi and Olympia the ancient sacrifices in behalf of the cities at the great Hellenic festivals. In all other ways also Stratocles was an audacious fellow; he lived an abandoned life, and was thought to imitate the scurrility and buffoonery of the ancient Cleon in his familiarities with the people. …one day when [his mistress] had brought in the market-place for his supper some brains and neck-bones, "Aha!" he cried, "thou hast bought just such delicacies for me as we statesmen used to play ball with." [11]
Or, as Plato had the rhetoric teacher Gorgias saying in the dialogue named after him:
…[The power of rhetoric] is being able to persuade by speeches judges in the law court, councilors in the council, assemblymen in the assembly, and in every other gathering whatsoever, when there is a political gathering. And indeed with this power you will have the doctor as your slave, and the trainer as your slave; and that moneymaker of yours will be plainly revealed to be making money for another and not for himself, but for you who can speak and persuade multitudes.
But to return to Plutarch:
…some one else, outdoing Stratocles in servility, proposed that whenever Demetrius visited the city he should be received with the hospitable honours paid to Demeter and Dionysus, and that to the citizen who surpassed all others in the splendour and costliness of his reception, a sum of money should be granted from the public treasury for a dedicatory offering. And finally, they changed the name of the month Mounychion to Demetrion, …and to the festival called Dionysia they gave the name of Demetria… [12]
…But there was one honour proposed for Demetrius which was more strange and monstrous than any other. Dromocleides the Sphettian moved, when the dedication of certain shields at Delphi was in question, that the Athenians should get an oracle from Demetrius. And I will transcribe his very words from the decree… “Decreed by the people that the people elect one man from the Athenians, who shall go to the Saviour-god, and, after a sacrifice with good omens, shall enquire of the Saviour-god in what most speedy, decorous, and reverent manner the people may accomplish the restoration to their places of the dedicatory offerings; and that whatever answer he shall give, the people shall act according thereunto." With such mockery of adulation they finally perverted the man's mind, which even before was not wholly sound. [13]
Plutarch had earlier mentioned that Demetrius had a sounder character than most of those raised in the Macedonian families with claim to royal lineage. So this passage shows he believes it was the professional flattery of certain Athenian speakers—to my mind Gorgias-like, but significantly, also Critias-like and Acts 17:36-like in its freewheeling invention of myths and play with religion--which caused his soul’s general surrender to tyrannical inclinations.
There is a long tradition of speaking of “Asiastic Despotism” and its contrast with the Greek freedom. In a recent excellent post here, Pavlos showed us some of the earliest material for that tradition, key passages in Herodotus, as Greeks began to compare their way of life with those of other peoples. Later on, at the height of classical Greek culture, both Plato and Xenophon meditate upon how ambitious young Greeks might envy the example of Cyrus the Great.
But in this post I am seeking to provide the other bookend to the story, to contrast the depressing late-classical-Greek evidence from Plutarch against the inspiring early-classical-Greek kind from Herodotus. I am exploring the possibility that the Greek acceptance of the end of their polis liberty and democracy had less to do with emulation of Persian monarchy, and more to do with certain evil patterns of political life and ambition they had themselves fostered, and especially within Athens. As a convinced Manentian, I of course also think that the greater relevance to their lives (by the late 300s) of the “political form” empire, and the sheer power imbalances that came with it explains much of the story—the Greek cities proved unable to ally or confederate enough to defend themselves from either the Madeconian empires, or later on, the Roman one. But I am also a convinced Platonist, and especially on the question of how dangerous “Sophist-i-cation” really is. It is natural to sing of Athens the city of poetry, history, artwork, and speeches, yes, and of philosophy most of all, but it looks to me as if the bad seeds of irresponsible poetry and rhetoric, whatever their degree of blame for earlier Athenian hubrises and reverses, revealed their ultimate fruit at the coming of Demetrius. Having seen that even the Athenians—actually, especially the Athenians!—would bow down before a poetic cult of monarchy, I believe he ordered Aristodemus to set things in motion with his father, and thus, spread the Athenian poisons across the Hellenistic world
Incidentally, for those wanting an account of Demetrius’s life that supplements, while largely depending upon, the one available in Plutarch, the popular-audience classicist James Romm has just published one:
I don’t know that second book and have only peeked into Romm’s. But back to Plutarch, whom you should definitely turn to first, for the culminating bits about Demetrius in Athens:
Furthermore, while he lingered in Athens at this time, Demetrius took to wife Eurydicé, a widow. She was a descendant of the ancient Miltiades…The Athenians, accordingly, took this marriage as a graceful compliment to their city; but in general Demetrius made a rather light matter of marriages, and had many wives at the same time, of whom Phila enjoyed the greatest esteem and honour, both because of her father, Antipater, and because she had been the wife of Craterus, the one of all the successors of Alexander who left behind him the most goodwill among the Macedonians. …However, so slight was the respect which Demetrius paid to Phila and to the rest of his wives, that he consorted freely with many courtesans, as well as with many women of free birth, and as regards this indulgence he had the worst reputation of all the kings of his time.
Here is the other reason Plutarch pairs him with Antony. Due to later military exploits, including a spectacular yet failed siege of Rhodes, Demetrius acquired the title of “The Besieger.” But his sexual exploits, which unlike Antony’s, never seem to have netted him in the complicating/elevating tangles of lasting eros for any one beloved, make Demetrius the Rapist, or Demetrius the Desecrator, the more fitting title. Plutarch shows us Demetrius going out of his way to bed illustrious women wherever he goes, and it seems that during this second residence in Athens, he really let himself go. Two aspects of this are particularly noteworthy: he made the Acropolis, especially its most sacred places, his sex-party headquarters, with the Athenians apparently making no resistance to this; and, he became infatuated with a beautiful boy named Democles, who killed himself rather than submit to Demetrius’ lust.
And now [i.e., after the battle off Cyprus and the adoption of kingly titles] the Athenians called upon Demetrius because Cassander was besieging their city. So Demetrius sailed to their help with three hundred and thirty ships…and…drove Cassander out of Attica... …he gave their freedom to the Greeks on this side of Thermopylae, made the Boeotians his allies… [And the Athenians] although before this they had used up and exhausted all the honours that could be bestowed upon him, nevertheless devised a way to show themselves then also the authors of new and fresh flatteries. For instance, they assigned him the rear chamber of the Parthenon for his quarters; and there he lived, and there it was said that Athena received and entertained him… he filled the acropolis with such wanton treatment of free-born youth and native Athenian women that the place was then thought to be particularly pure when he shared his dissolute life there with Chrysis and Lamia and Demo and Anticyra, the well-known prostitutes.[23]
Now, to give all the particulars plainly would disgrace the fair fame of the city, but I may not pass over the modesty and virtue of Democles. He was still a young boy, and it did not escape the notice of Demetrius that he had a surname which indicated his comeliness… But he yielded to none of the many who sought to win him by prayers or gifts or threats, and finally, shunning the palaestras and the gymnasium, used to go for his bath to a private bathing-room. Here Demetrius, who had watched his opportunity, came upon him when he was alone. And the boy, when he saw that he was quite alone and in dire straits, took off the lid of the cauldron and jumped into the boiling water, thus destroying himself, and suffering a fate that was unworthy of him, but showing a spirit that was worthy of his country and of his beauty.[24]
Writer after writer remembers Lucretia, whose suicide in the name of chastity helped initiate Rome’s republican era; but Democles, whose similar suicide did nothing to stave off the end of Greece’s, is largely forgotten.
Demetrius himself would be fairly forgettable, merely the best general of his time who with better luck might have emerged as the greatest of the Macedonian kings, were it not for the significance highlighted by Plutarch, again, one both symbolic and effectual, of his interactions with Athenian rhetoric. He copulated with countless women up there in the Parthenon, but the real half-Athenian “child” he bestowed on the world, was the progeny of his tyrannic ways and the tricks of the rhetors. This child was the Hellenistic cult of kingship, and at least as presented here, it was quite divorced from the theoretical thought present in sections of Xenophon and Aristotle (later echoed in Cicero and Virgil) which explored how monarchy might function non-tyrannically; rather, Plutarch shows us it was from the outset cringingly flattering, overtly blasphemous, and serially Harvey-Weinstein-like.
Not so long ago, Athens had rewarded its outstanding citizens with little crowns of honor—there was even a set reward for the magistrate or rhetor "of the year,” that is, in the latter case for the citizen who had made the most beneficial speech in the assembly.4 Plutarch was a great admirer of Pericles and his use of rhetoric,5 and also had praise for the top speakers of the last days of Athenian democracy, Demosthenes and Phocion, regardless of their often opposing one another on the correct policy to take towards Macedon. It would be an elementary mistake to regard Plutarch as the opponent of rhetoric simply, or of Athenian learning simply. He was capacious enough both to be the admirer and collector of the Laconic sayings of Sparta, and the author of a treatise about how to study poetry, especially Homer and Euripides. And of Athens generally he said:
But true it is, what is said of that city, that the good men she breeds are most excellent, and the bad the most notorious; as their country also produced the most delicious honey, and the most deadly hemlock. [Life of Dion, near the end]
The Life of Demetrius shows us Athens at its worst, where it is most mixing the honey of its rhetoric/poetry with the poison of licentious tyranny-encouragement. The spirits of Pheidippides, Alcibiades at his worst, Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Critias have finally triumphed, and Plato’s literary attack upon Sophist-i-cation has finally lost.
Much of this might be explained by sheer military necessity. The disaster of the Lamian War, and the resultant fourteen years of the Cassander-backed defacto tyranny, had taught the Athenians the futility of opposing the might of the Macedon in the name of democracy. Better to use her charms to flatter its monarchs.
Perhaps the creepiest phrase in the Life of Demetrius was uttered in this spirit. It is additionally chilling because one so readily sees its application in our day. An Athenian defending one of Stracocles’ unprecedented proposals for official Demetrius-flattery, and from the charge that it showed that Stratocles had gone insane said this: “He would indeed be mad not to be mad.” Certain stark imbalances of power, coupled with evident mass corruptions of character, make it incumbent upon those who would survive and thrive to attain mastery of the madness peculiar to their era, and destined to “succeed” within it. So they must attain fluency in a new language, one so divorced from truth as to be insane.
But against such a deterministic and self-preservationist mindset, one might pose the entire example of Phocion, as also related by Plutarch. He had been able, unlike Demosthenes, to calculate when the odds were too steep to lash back at Macedon, when it was necessary to deploy the patient arts of diplomacy. And while much about Phocian’s career remains in dispute, with many classicists questioning the largely complimentary portrait drawn by Plutarch, I suspect they are largely wrong, and what I believe I learn from Plutarch is that Phocian had shown a way in which a leader of democracy might deal with various representatives of Macedonian power that was dignified, and which strategically stewarded the remaining resources and options of the city. An Athens of Demosthenes and Phocion, or even the Athens of Phocion alone, was one that various Macedonian warlords sensed had an indefinable power of character and speech, akin to the power the (far more corrupt) Soviet tyrant-class detected in Solzhenitsyn. For it was a power that at times could override “the laws of mass and energy.” So I think Demetrius approached the “beacon-tower” of Athens’ learning and oratory with a certain amount of trepidation. Had he met the right man and men, perhaps he could have, as Pompey eventually was by Cicero, been won over to something of a respect for republican ways, to something of a repentance for having entertained tyrannical ambitions, despite his need for glory and his addiction to sex-ploits. Can one imagine a Phocion-like Athenian pulling off a persuasion of a tyrannical man like Demetrius, to turn more towards virtue, of the kind Xenophon portrays in the dialogue the Hiero? Maybe not, but one can at least imagine a Phocian convincing a Demetrius that Athens would prove harder to bend to his will than he had hoped, and that he must make compromises.
But instead, by 307, the Athenians Demetrius met were more of the cast of Stratocles. They paved the way, and quickly, for a situation in which the steely young witness of Democles to Athens’ storied tradition of freedom could do nothing, and indeed would have been completely forgotten were it not for Plutarch.
So as Plutarch would want, let us give a final nod to Plato. I don’t say “final word,” because his teaching on these matters cannot be summed up in one saying. It is dialogic. In any case, many of the credentialed scholars our day are apt to find his attacks on “half-education,” and of the sophistry that thrived within it, hyperbolic and too defensive of the honor of philosophy; as for his related attacks upon non-philosophic poetry, they usually find them entirely misguided. But old Plato knew how dangerous these three connected plagues could be, not only to philosophy, but to decent political life. Indeed, as the “tower-beacons” of New York, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, and alas, most spires of official “academia” also, seem determined to train the sons and daughters of democracy in a mad Stratoclean embrace of rule by god-like temple-desecrating technocrats, an embrace that of course involves murderous scorn for anyone like Phocian or Socrates, his arguments for an education, a rhetoric, and a poetic artistry that are guided by philosophy rather than posed against it, are stronger than ever.
This and the remaining passages are from the Loeb edition of the Bernadotte Perrin translation, which is available from the University of Chicago’s Penelope site, where you can also check the Greek; readers who use the widely-available Dryden translation might number its paragraphs themselves, and then add five-to-ten to arrive at the corresponding Loeb number.
Scholars are in disagreement about what Alexander’s long-term plans for these titles were, and in disagreement about the significance of his also demanding certain more ambivalent “divine” titles from the Greeks; given his unexpected death in 323, it is impossible to know.
Paul Cartledge, Democracy, A Life, Chap. 14.
Morgen Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, p. 314.
Any reader of Plato who has not reflected about how he seems to condemn Pericles as a leader and rhetor in one dialogue, the Gorgias, while seeming to praise him for the same in another, the Phaedrus, has not even begun to engage with Plato’s real thought.
I am teaching the life of Antony this semester, Carl- it's very helpful to know about the comparison life, thank you!
Demetrius sounds like an enlightened ruler, even if a pseudo-religious colonizer, compared to reading Plutarch's accounts of the rivalry between Roman careerists Sulla and Marius. Really the whole bad lot of them, grasping power-hungry sadists all. No wonder the Penguin edition I have is titled "The Fall of the Roman Republic," even though for some reason the scholars have separated Plutarch's books in their own way. It would be great to see an edition of Plutarch's original text as he intended it to be read. Any suggestions?