study, bringing diVerent interpretative strategies to bear, where appropriate.
This means that they treat the poetry of Homer diVerently from the tragedies
of Sophocles and these diVerently from the narrative of Thucydides and the
dialogues of Plato. Attention to these diVerences in genre in their larger
context, namely, a primarily oral culture, does not produce series of discon-
nected and particularistic interpretations, however. Committed to probing
thematic continuities in the writings of a single author, among, say, Herod-
otus’ ethnographies or Isocrates’ speeches, or across the works of multiple
authors, among, say, Homeric poetry, Sophoclean tragedy, and Platonic
dialogue, these scholars are able to oVer context-sensitive insights that,
taken together, bring out shared theoretical concerns on the part of the
speciWc author or set of authors they study. For these political theorists,
attending to genre also means taking seriously that the classical authors do
not always speak in clear authorial voices or announce declarative truths and
that, at times, they use tropes like irony, myth, and metaphor to invite the
truth of their compositions to be called into question. Focusing on these
practices, their venues, and the genres that disclose and produce them, the
political theorists under discussion seek to illuminate the attitudes of the
classical authors to such things as authorship and authority, truth and cred-
ibility, judgment and imagination, all key issues for politics.
III. A third commitment shared by this group of political theorists is to take
seriously the sometimes declared, sometimes implicit claim made by most of
the classical authors that they wrote for present and future audiences and
understood their work as, in Thucydides’ words, ‘‘a possession for all time.’’
From the perspective of this commitment, the classical authors’ reXections on
human action and character, political practices, and institutions and their
modes of expressing these reXections are examined for the light they shed on
the worlds these authors inhabited and on the attitudes these authors took to
their worlds, and also for their relevance to our own contemporary world.
These political theorists thus reject the view that there is an unbridgeable
chasm between premodernity and modernity. They also, however, reject
the view that the best way to understand the classical Greeks is as part
of a particular and unfolding historical narrative, whether progressivist
or declinist. Seeking to demonstrate neither essential otherness nor causal
continuity, or to explain why certain singular events occurred, or why par-
ticularWgures acted in speciWc ways, or how given institutions arose, they
explore instead the ways in which these events, actions, and institutions,
the political theory of classical greece 179