8 Paıdeía
the principles particular to the pólıs as a species of political community ex-
plains why a city so rarely imitated was so universally admired.^4
In her inception, Sparta stands in contrast to later republics such as the
fledging United States. The citizens of a tiny, warrior community living in a
warlike world needed a unity that an extended, bourgeois republic endowed
with a dynamic economy and located on a vast and nearly empty continent
could afford to dispense with. Pythagoras is said to have compared faction
[stásıs] in the city with disease in the body, ignorance in the soul, division
within the household, and a lack of proportion in general. “One must avoid
these things,” he reportedly observed, “with every means at one’s disposal, and
one must root them out with fire and sword and with every sort of contriv-
ance.” The philosopher from Samos was not at all peculiar in holding this
opinion. The testimony of Herodotus on the matter is, if anything, more force-
ful. The historian from Halicarnassus not only wrote that “stásıs within the
tribe is a greater evil than war waged by men thinking as one”; he added that
this was true “to the very degree that war itself is less desirable than peace.”^5
For the cities of Hellas, the presence of the enemy without required the sup-
pression of dissidence within.
For this reason, the well-known antidote for faction proposed in The Fed
eralist by James Madison could never have been applied within the Greek
pólıs. No one in antiquity would have countenanced economic differentiation
and a multiplication of religious sects. If the commonwealth was to survive, it
was vital for the citizens “to act in unison with each other.” As a consequence,
the ancient republic sought to solve the problem of stásıs not “by controlling
its effects” in the manner later suggested by the American statesman. It did so,
rather, “by removing its causes.” As Madison himself had occasion to observe,
the Greeks attempted this not by granting free rein to opinion and by encour-
aging a proliferation of petty special interests with an eye to balancing them
against one another, but rather “by giving to every citizen the same opinions,
the same passions, and the same interests.” Homónoıa—unanimity, solidarity,
or like-mindedness regarding the advantageous, the just, and the good: this
was the goal; and the market economy, though tolerated as a necessity, was
perceived as a threat. Where the Greeks distinguished the free and political
from the commercial agorá, where they excluded the merchant and the crafts-
man from political life, and where they simply held the tradesman in disdain,
the cause was not some bizarre and irrational prejudice against men of busi-