Polıteía 37
mean what they say and say what they mean, it is surely the case that their
rhetoric is designed to secure the support of their listeners, and the need to
retain that support thereafter inevitably places limits on the speakers’ subse-
quent freedom of action.^2
This objection should be noted and assimilated, then safely put aside, for
much of what Namier had to say nonetheless remains apt, and his strictures
against anachronistic reconstructions apply not just to public affairs in Brit-
ain’s Augustan age, but—with even greater force—to politics within the an-
cient cities of the Hellenes. To be sure, it would hardly be proper to speak of
classical Greek politics as a non-Euclidean system. In fact, there may well be
something to the view that the “new science of politics”—pioneered by Thomas
Hobbes, James Harrington, and John Locke and further developed by the
baron de Montesquieu, David Hume, and the American Founding Fathers—is
a creation which bears a striking resemblance to a system of geometry “built
up by taking a curve for basis instead of the straight line.”^3 But, though true,
this begs the point to be made here—for, revolutionary though it once was,
their application of this “new science of politics” has decisively shaped subse-
quent history and thereby our own experience, expectations, and presump-
tions; and this fact may be the greatest obstacle to our comprehension of ear-
lier times. It really is difficult for our minds to think in unwonted terms, and
the attempt to understand the character of ancient political life does, in fact,
require of us a fundamental readjustment of ideas and of mental habits as well.
One might even say that one has to steep oneself in the political language of a
period before one can safely describe or be sure of understanding its political
structure.
It would, for example, be an error to apply to the Greek pólıs the modern
distinction between state and society. The ancient Hellenes knew neither these
words nor the two things they denote. In antiquity, there was no Greek state.^4
The ancient Hellenic republic was, as James Madison would later observe, “a
pure democracy,... a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who
assemble and administer the government in person.” The pólıs really was, as the
Greeks often remarked, the men. In one poem, Alcaeus of Mytilene contended
that “warlike men are a city’s tower of defense.” In another, which survives
only as paraphrased by later authors, he played variations on the same theme:
Neither stone blocks
Nor ships’ timbers