sacriWced by her father, Agamemnon to propitiate the gods so that the Greeks
can continue their expedition against Troy. Is this less barbaric than treating
women as slaves? Iphigeneia is a living instrument used for the sake of an
action’’ (Davis 1996 , 17 ). The passage, read in its embedded context, as an
incorporated reference to the words of a poet, may, thus, be seen to call into
question the very distinction it is often claimed to establish. Taking seriously
Aristotle’s inconsistencies in his account of natural slavery, such scholars
conclude not that his account is incoherent but that he uses these inconsist-
encies to underscore the diYculty, if not impossibility, of determining con-
clusively who, if anyone, may be a slave by nature.
Bringing popular, persuasive, and conXicting opinions between the many
and the wise into conversation with one another and orienting them in a way
that draws on both sets of opinions but endorses neither, Aristotle’s endoxic
method is explicitly dialectical. He applies this method to the prevailing
opinions and ideas of his time and also, as is evident in his account of the
mean, to the ethical practice of virtue and to the political institution of a
middle class. In all these ways, Aristotle, like the earlier theorists, brings into
dialogue ideas and practices that, in his culture as well as in our own, are
more usually opposed.
The dialectical quality of Aristotle’s theorizing is evident not only in his
dialogues with other classical authors and in his endoxic method, but in the
ways these inform his substantive teachings about the building blocks of
politics. In book I of the Politics, for example, Aristotle describes the
polity both as emerging out of and preceding such smaller units as individual
human beings, households, and villages. These claims seem contradictory.
They may be taken, however, not as a sign of shoddy thinking, but as evidence
of Aristotle applying his dialectical approach to the polity itself. These
claims underscore his methodological commitment to thinking about polit-
ics both from the top down (from whole to parts) and from the bottom
up (from parts to whole) and his substantial commitment to understanding
the polity as an organic and preexisting whole with its own characteristic
features and functions and also as composed of individuated and diVeren-
tiated parts.
An exploration of the ways Aristotle’s dialogic practices inform his treat-
ments of individual human beings and collectivities and the constituent parts
of each of these unities—including soul and virtue, education, property,
justice, and law—shows Aristotle to be a fertile resource for current theory
and practice, although not in a particularly straightforward way. Attention to
184 jill frank