Introduction xiii
time that he died, if not well before, the concept had become fundamental to
political science.^5
In the fifth century, Herodotus traveled about the eastern Mediterranean
and the Black Sea; investigated the nómoı—the customs, habits, and laws—of
the Hellenes and of the various barbarian peoples within or on the borders of
the Persian empire; and attempted to make sense of the nómoı of each nation
with an eye to the polity and way of life within which those customs, habits,
and laws found their place.^6 At the end of that century, Thucydides depicted
the great war between the Athenians and the Spartans as an epic contest be-
tween two different polıteíaı and used his history to analyze the strengths and
weaknesses of each.^7 In the decades that followed, Xenophon employed the
same approach in interpreting the Persian monarchy; and in a book he enti-
tled the Polıteía, which we now know as The Republic, Plato pioneered the
study of political psychology with regard to the rise and the decay of the dif-
ferent regimes. Soon thereafter, in his universal history of the Greeks and the
barbarians from the time of the Return of the Heraclids to the 340s, Ephorus
studied the rise and fall of hegemonic powers with an eye to the virtues nour-
ished by particular regimes and the vices associated with their decay.^8 Then,
Aristotle brought regime analysis to full maturity, applied it to an assortment
of the polities in existence in his time, and left it as a legacy to Theophrastus,
Dicaearchus, Sphaerus, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
Cicero, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Ammianus Marcellinus,
and the other great writers responsible for recording so much of the little that
we know concerning the ancient world and for making sense of the changes
that took place.^9
Regime analysis was comprehensive. One acute, if anonymous, ancient
observer nicely captured what was at stake for these authors when he defined
polıteía broadly as “the one way of life of a whole pólıs,” and Isocrates did the
same when he dubbed it “the city’s soul.”^10 Though much may separate Thucy-
dides, Xenophon, Ephorus, Plato, and Aristotle from one another, on this fun-
damental point they and those who subsequently followed their lead were
agreed: that to come to understand a polity, one must be willing to entertain
two propositions. First, one must presume that the form of government, the
constitution, the rules defining membership in the políteuma or ruling order
(in short, the political regime as such), rather than economic or environmen-
tal conditions, is the chief determinant of a political community’s character.
Second, one must assume that paıdeía, which is to say, education and moral