true not only of our ethical ideas but also of our political ideas, and not just of
our ethical and political ideas but also of our ways of thinking about those
ideas, and of relating thought to practice. In short, the classical authors, in all
their many genres, are fertile resources for contemporary scholars because
they inaugurated a reXective approach to the study of politics that is no less
reXective for being about the world of action, power, and institutions, and no
less political for being reXective.
Politics counts among its constituent parts individuals, families, complex
and plural social groups, classes, and cultures, the practices and institutions
that regulate the relations among these parts, and also the constitutions that
guide them. Studying politics thus involves studying all sorts of matters
having to do with human beings, both individually and collectively, includ-
ing, but not limited to, history, economics, sociology, psychology, philoso-
phy, education, anthropology, and ethics. Treating as equally political matters
relating to public and private, community and individual, institutions and
ethics, Aristotle, to name only the most explicit example, calls politics the
most authoritative,kurio ̄tate ̄s, or architectonic,arkhitechtonike ̄s,art(Nico-
machean EthicsI. 1 – 2 ). The disciplinary boundaries that today often restrict
the study of politics to political science departments would have made no
sense to the classical authors.
In the past two decades this reXective and pre- (or, for us, multi-) discip-
linary approach to the study of politics has been adopted by a host of scholars
of the classical world. The practitioners of this approachWnd their academic
homes in and out of political science departments, in North America, the
United Kingdom, and Europe. Some produce studies of single thinkers. 1
Others examine multiple thinkers across time. 2 Still others are guided by a
particular topic, such as punishment (Allen 2000 ), greed (Balot 2001 ), mem-
ory (Loraux 2002 ; Wolpert 2002 ), gender (Saxonhouse 1985 ; Thompson
2001 ), or law (Schwartzberg 2004 ). Some see signiWcant discontinuities
among the classical authors, locating in Plato’s Socrates, for example,
the development of a set of concepts (Williams 1993 ) or the onset of a
theoretical attitude (Cartledge 2000 ; Thompson 1996 ) or a mode of audience
1 See, e.g., Bode ́u ̈s( 1993 ), Connor ( 1984 ), Crane ( 1998 ), Frank ( 2005 ), Kraut ( 2002 ), Lane ( 2001 ),
Lear, J. ( 1988 ), Lear, G. ( 2004 ), Mara ( 1997 ), Mayhew ( 1997 ), Monoson ( 2000 ), Nichols ( 1992 ), Orwin
( 1994 ), Price ( 2001 ), RaaXaub ( 2000 ), Rood ( 1998 ), Salkever ( 1990 b), Sherman ( 1989 ), Smith T. ( 2001 ),
Tessitore ( 1996 ), Thompson ( 1996 ), Wallach ( 2001 ), and Yack ( 1993 ).
2 See, e.g., Deneen ( 2000 a), Euben ( 1990 , 1997 ), Farrar ( 1988 ), Goldhill ( 2000 ), Gray ( 2000 ),
Nussbaum ( 1986 ), Ober ( 1998 ), Saxonhouse ( 1992 , 1996 ), SchoWeld ( 1999 ), and Rocco ( 1997 ).
176 jill frank