The Longue Durée of the Greek Polis

[Music] And just seeing this long continuity made me think that it might be fun to try to tell the story on a very very large canvas. [Music] [Music] Welcome to Lesky, a podcast on new ideas in ancient Greek studies. I'm your host Johanna Hanank and I'm a class assistant brown university. Every so often in this field a book comes along that you just know is going to be really important. That was the feeling some quarter century ago when Peregrine Horton and Nicholas Persell's The Corrupting Sea first appeared. Even though I was just an undergraduate I remember catching snippets of my professor's conversations about it in the department hallways at the University of Michigan. And now there is something of the same atmosphere of excitement around John Maas much anticipated and magisterial new tome, Polis, a new history of the ancient Greek city state from the early iron age to the end of antiquity, which was published by Princeton earlier this year. And this time I'm really excited to actually be part of the conversation. The Polis has a concept has been the subject of a great deal of scholarship in the last few decades, much of which was animated by Mergens Hermann Hansen's Copenhagen Polis Center. The center led to too many publications to list here, but I'll just note an inventory of archaic and classical polis compiled by Hansen himself along with Thomas Hainan-Yielsen and that's OUP 2004, and Hansen's Polis, an introduction to the Greek city state and that's OUP 2006. Now there's even a Polis inventory app and I'll be putting the link to where you can download it in the show notes. In his new book though, John Maa considers the ancient Greek polis in its much longer dure. From the early iron age to the end of antiquity, as it says on the tin, for Maa the 338 Battle of Kirona was hardly a death now for the polis. Rather, the Hellenistic world provided just the circumstances under which the polis most flourished. So what we think of as the classical polis, or the polis in the period of Greece's 100 Years War as Maa has it, was really better prelude and not a particularly uplifting one, to the centuries of highly functional, roughly democratic polis communities that, across the Eastern Mediterranean, held on to some degree of autonomy and stateness until the third century AD. When Maa's polis first came out, Peter Toniman wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, "Polis is a vast, generous, and deeply humane book, the work of an extraordinary scholar at the peak of his powers. It is history writing at its very best." So it is truly an honor and a pleasure to have his my guest for this episode, none other than that same extraordinary scholar at the peak of his powers, John Maa. John Maa was born in New York of Chinese parents. He grew up in Geneva, where he studied Greek and Latin at school and outside school. He went on to study classics, then ancient history, at Oxford. He is taught ancient history in classics departments at Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia. Maa is deeply interested in studying Greek history, especially in the Hellenistic period, using documentary and material sources. Just a quick note that, as ever, I've put a few references in the show notes. So now, I'd like to welcome into the Lesky John Maa. The next voice you'll be hearing is his. Happy holidays. I think I always wanted to write a book on the polis. And when I was a graduate student, I thought, you know, I'll write a dissertation on the polis. People say that's insane. You'll never, never mention that again. So of course, I kept thinking about it. And it's something I've been wanting to do for a long time. Specifically, of course, as I say in the preface, it comes from conversation with Josh Ober. When I noticed that, the things he was interested in, namely the push, oligarchical pushback in the, say, mid-fourth century BCE, looked very much like the things you see in Athens. It looked very much like the things you see in the late-second century BC Athens. I think that perhaps giving Maa's have a works on the tension between enormous economic wealth boom. The religious conservatism of certain circles were deeply implicated in this economic boom and democratic re-information. And just seeing this long continuity made me think that it might be fun to try to tell the story on a very, very large canvas and a very large timeframe. But that raises the question of why, why is it interesting to write history on these small scale polities which are very delimited, very bounded, and also which have these issues of mass and elite or the consequences of small scale democracy and autonomy in a very, very vivid way. Why that should be interesting to us. So what was the precise genesis of it? You started it, it came from a series of lectures. Yes. Not just one lecture, which was just very unsatisfactory. It was just basically trying to put together the narrative of the polis. And I realized that every part of this story was in motion. The Hellenistic period, of course, which I work on is changing and has been changing for a while. It was problems of autonomy and democracy. The early R&Age and archaic period is massively changing all the time because of the archaeology and because of these conceptual advances in how we study the archaic polis. I'm thinking of two very different scholars, Alan Duplouy and Julian Zuerbach. These very interesting ways of looking at it. The classical period was the work on associations, the work on slavery, the Hellenistic, the Roman, the Romanist, and the late antiquity. Every bit of the story was like infirmament. And I thought, you know, just to do the narrative, to try to do justice to all of these different stories and to try to connect them would be interesting. The problem is that by the time it finished one section, things had moved on, the scholarship had moved on already. You know, lately I was finishing, you know, the last part of the book, of course, working on the analytical chapters. And the study of the R&Age seems to have another round of renewal. It's just remarkable how, in a way, everything is infirmament and just pushing in different directions. Well, I wanted to ask where you began writing. It's such an enormous book in terms of intellectual rigor and the depth and the texture that you bring to the narrative. So did you start at the beginning? Yes, I'm afraid I did. I'm afraid I did. You know, the archaic acorn was just starting down and reading through Homer and reading through the Odyssey. You know, starting was many, ending with whatever it is in book 24. I did that in Athens, in fact. So I was also visiting museums, visiting the Kermaykos, you know, the National Museum, the Binaki Museum, looking at things and trying to think about the early R&Age and so on. But no, I just started at the beginning. So much more I wish I'd done in terms of traveling, for instance, just to see the early R&Age. So a lot of it is this imaginary seminar or imagining traveling seminar that just took place in my head. That's such a great way to put it. When you began writing from the beginning, what hunches did you have about the story that you would be telling or the unity of the Polish? And I'm curious about whether, to what extent, those ideas might have changed as the work progressed? That's a really, really essential question, I think, about that you wouldn't start on this thing like this unless you had a hunch that it was a unitary story. You know, the initial moment is this hunch that you can tell this as a single story. In spite of variation and that variation diversity is meaningful in relationship to a central model of the Polish, or that they represent different path or possibilities that gradually converge and once they converge, stay there. I think that was also one of the hunches is that there is a crucial moment around the 350 to 250 where things start to coalesce. Other things are still there, but gradually die out or turn into dead ends. And that one thing gets to that point, things accelerate, you know, the convergence accelerates in the early second century. And this form then proves very stable. And I think was the hunch I had. And I think it's possible to carry it out, but at a cost. The thing that I realized is that the existence of this unitary form, it itself a problem in that it covers very diverse things and the way in which this apparent unity is maybe used strategically by very diverse actors. For instance, in the Near East or the Roman Empire, which is pushing the simplest way. is something that gave me pause. So what are the characteristics then of the unity? If we talk about the Greek Paulus in its long d'array, what is holding that idea together over so many years? That's again something that gives me pause, but the most salient features are the institutional shell of a regularly consulted and theoretically sovereign people, playthos, mass, whatever you call it, which is theoretically inclusive of free-born males in the community. Of course, has all kinds of protocols for admission, institutions which share power and which circulate, including a bouleur, including a council, which though does grow more logarchical in the run period, is still an institution that's still a body of powerholders. So a human community organized on institutional lines, an urban center and a territory whose relationship to the center is symbiotic or coterminous. I suppose those would be the basic elements that you see, human population, institutional setup and the physical layout. As you tell that story in the book, one of the characters that keeps springing up is Aristotle, and you seem to be really thinking with Aristotle. Could you say a little bit about how his ideas about the Paulus and about political life shaped the arc of your book? Aristotle was also a companion from the conception of the book, which in fact, started writing or taking notes for at the time I was writing a book on honorific statues and the Hellenistic World, which is also a book about the Paulus. In a way, this is just this book writ large. This is really about the politics, even though the Nicaromachian ethics and so on have really interesting insights into civic ideology. But this Aristotelian simplification down to institutional power, which of course is something that's very problematic. That makes people ask, well, what about religion, what about gender, what about associations, what about informal power, and all these things, you know, as an issue I try to grapple with, are in my view, in an Aristotelian view, present, but shaped very deeply in a constitutive way by who has access to institutional power. I, to put it simply, elections matter and elections matter, who controls institutions, who controls the law, will matter. And that, you know, the very simple equation is, if the majority controls, it will actually tend to pass measures that favor the majority. That means redistribution to provide public goods, and that means sort of soft pedaling of the enforcement of economic rights, of contract rights, whereas if the few are in power, they tend to enforce contracts very strictly, and they tend to evade taxation, redistribution, they tend to favor certain types of display of wealth, and so on. And, you know, of course, we live in an Aristotelian world, in a way, right, where the control of judicial institutions, but also the control of, you know, who determines what happens with taxation. It's like absolutely central to our debates, and then a lot of obfuscation happens around this issue, you know, precisely, which precisely shows how important it is. So that's, I suppose, why Aristotle was at the center of the book. The insistence on institutional power be very important and constitutive. Well, it's also so interesting that he's someone who is living is thinking really toward the beginning of what you call the long classical period, or at the start of this period within that, or where there's, that's characterized by a phenomenon that you call the great convergence. Yep. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting about this book is the way that it challenges maybe some long-standing, problematic ideas of the periodization of Greek history. You introduce a slightly different vocabulary, at least it's different for me. So I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about, yeah, how you see the arc of the periodization about how you divide up the book just really on a structural level for you. What is the arcade period? What is the classical period? What are some of these terms, the great convergence, or the Hundred Years War, or the Indian Summer of the Bliss? These are all really interesting terms. I hope they have higher noience values, so they'll stick in people's mind. That was the assumption. They're also, of course, not. They're also very familiar to those who work in, say, the traditional Louis-Roubaix and Philippe Gaultier, you know, this feeling that, I know it was a frugus, you know, had a speaker of convergence had a feeling about this, that the world between 350 and 150, say, is a. It shows a strong unity in spite of the undoubted rupture represented by the end of the Akimid Empire and the rise of the Hellenistic Kingdoms. But that. it's a question of scale. If you look at the cities, then the thing that fall into place, you know, in the late classical period, are very, very durable. And Aristotle was a witness to that. He was, you know, there at the creation of that particular form of the police. Even though he himself has his prejudices and obsessions of a well-born, rich elite man of the four century, you know, all these conservatives, you know, is virtue teachable or that sort of crap. You know, it's actually stuff he's really, really worried about. But he is there at the creation of the police, at the great convergence, with all of its compromises and choices and simplifications. So that. that period dilation is familiar to a certain school, I think, of Hellenistic history. You know, once you accept that, then, you know, you have a very short classical period before that. There's a weird fifth century, you know, what I call the Hundred Years War, which is, of course, the classical period we like most, and which produce a great literature and everything, where the long classical period is, in fact, Orson Welles' "Cookoo Clock", you know, they actually have stable institutions, democratic compromise, and the work of art they produce mostly is thousands of honorific decrees that are test to, you know, the social contract actually working, whereas the, you know, short classical period has things in play, you know, very much in play across the board in very many places from Syracuse to Asian Minor, you know, like tyranny or principalities. It's actually something that's valuable in this period, a lot of people are trying it, and they pop up over the place. In a way that period just works out the contradictions of the archaic period, especially the sixth century BC, when, you know, the Polish Hattacolaest and we now see what the issues are, you know, for instance, the issue of law, for instance, the issue of what is citizenship versus a single rule, and so on. So, I have a, you know, kickoff period in the sixth century, a classical period which works these things out, and a long classical, which then has a prolongation into the Roman period, because it's such a durable, durable form. The seventh century, I think, is a crucial period, which is one that we don't see very well, because you have what I call the leap to the state that occurs in this period, and it's still very, very mysterious. I think the seventh century is a crucial period that needs, needs, needs elimination. Say, the difference between late geometric Athens and Athens by 600 is very great, and the understanding, the phenomenon of consolidation and institutionalization, I think, is really, really important challenge. Well, for the archaic period, could you say a little bit about what you see as characterizing the Polish in the archaic period? What are some of the tensions in your chapter on it? You return to this mass and elite question, which is unavoidable, of course. Could you say just a little bit about your take on what we see in the archaic period in terms of the consolidation of the Polish structure? It's a period I think everyone likes to teach in a way the archaic period. I think Vastonais Zoule, you said everyone likes to teach it because it's science fiction. There's just so little evidence in a way that you can try to fit all the pieces together. It's not true, of course. The extraordinary thing about the archaic period is how much really interesting archaeology there is and making sense of that, I think, is important. And it also a lot of epigraphy and a lot of great literature. What do you see in the archaic period? What is my archaic period? You talk a lot about integration under this rubric of the, I guess you could say, mass and elite. Would you say a little bit about that? What do you mean by integration when we're talking about the emergence of stateness? Yeah, I think it's once you accept that elites, rich and powerful people who have unequal access to resources are in some way bound to people who don't have the same access to leisure and to resources. Then what is the relationship between them going to be? Do the fat to speak your holy peches have greater claim to anything? because they're more muscular and more athletic or born of gods, all these claims or in the contrary, are they bound in relation to solidarity to the rest of the community? The interesting thing, what I try to argue, that goes back to Teri Brissard, brilliant thesis, it also is a prefigures, Joshua Obers analysis of Athens, if that community is where you have all kinds of deferring elitist claims, are not necessarily dominated by that elite, but in fact, are full of competing elites who have to find ways of expressing this because the community is open and has no entrenched power or hereditary elite, with communities which can be very, very austere and egalitarian, and there will be small power groups which are enforcing solidarity in that way, or create or sponsor, of course, are the examples of this. Well, speaking of science fiction and what people like, I think that this also maybe that thesis could account for why people love archaic poetry so much, including myself, is because there's so much missing, or you can project so much onto it. But I was really interested by your use of archaic, the lyric poetry as evidence for this period, because it is such an interdisciplinary study, but it was so nice to see that alongside the inscriptions and the archaeological evidence. What do you think that the poetry that does survive, or that we think survives from this period, adds to the material understanding that we have? Yeah, I mean, archaic, lyric, you know, in all of its shapes. I mean, you know, I did a lot of readings of small bits of hiponax and archaic, archaic, archaic, is complaining about people not paying their team on to the feast, and that you can see the seven-century communities with isomorphic associations, which, you know, probably about the emergence of the tribes and the constituent parts of the polis, which have this ideology of participation and equality. I think you can see that in Archaeolicus, and you probably can see this in hiponax, for instance, as well. But doesn't account for the fact that archaic poetry is not just about the politics of the egalitarian community, but have all kinds of differing claims to distinction and so on. And so you have to find a model to read that in the polis. My difficulty, in fact, is not so much with archaic, archaic poetry is with archaic law. Basically, the question is that, you know, can you use archaic poetry to try to reconstruct a generalized ethos of, you know, community, individual, group, household, whatever state, society in the archaic period? I think you can. Can you use the emergence of written law and regulation, you know, a little bit in seven-century, a lot in the six-century, to reconstruct the institutional setup across police. Let's see, we're back to this. The fact that you have many archaic polis. You have the police of archaeology, burial tombs, dedications. You have the archaic police of the, of Lyric, song, small bounded groups, warfare. And then you have the police of institutional setup, of law, of the fiscality of public goods. And they all seem to overlap at the same time. And as you know, people tend to emphasize different things. The Aristotelian, me, tends to argue that once you've gotten to the horizon of the state, it will actually constitute and determine other things. But that's a gambit because of the many places where we don't have law. We don't have law for the killer Jesus chaos, for instance, or for Iguina. I guina is producing temples, war ships, coins. But we don't have very many, we have one or two, I think, archaic written regulations. So how do we imagine the polis of Iguina, the archaic polis of Iguina? We have bits of pindar towards the end, right? But that's, I think, the, and we're back to this problem of how do we construct unity out of these very disparate materials? For the story of that construction, it then seems that moving forward, what you call the Hundred Years War, is really important, locus for, you know, the sifting through a lot of these problems. And then when it comes out the other end, it seems like that, you know, there is, well, this is when you get into your, the great convergence. So could you just say a little bit about why you think it's useful to look at this period of, I think, standardly, in the textbooks, in the historiography is presented as a period of competition between hegemonies. So why, why did you see it as productive to look at it at that as, there was successions of hegemonies synoptically as the Hundred Years War? I think that's a really interesting way of presenting it. Well, it, it simplifies our teaching, doesn't it, for the period. Basically, we don't actually have to worry too much about the First Peloponnesian War and, or, you know, whatever is going on, 375 BC. It, of course, is, you know, is also dangerous because it flattens out a lot of things. But yeah, I think, I think what you say is right, that the possibility of hegemonia and that scale, which is an Athenian story, but not just, and a repercussion that has everywhere, like, you know, it's impossible to understand what's going on the Peloponnes in the early fifth century without realising the shadow of Athens. Athens doesn't have to be directly involved. You know, it's not, whatever, thermositeclyse in Argos, was actually, like, encouraging ferment, but just the presence of hegemonia is actually doing things in the Peloponnes and surely elsewhere. You know, so this is a case of atoms realigning, whatever, that creates this obsession with hegemonia. And then this particular tone of the, you know, the fifth and fourth centuries, because extreme, extreme violence. So the story starts in, you know, whatever, 464 or 462, with Athens and Sparta falling out. And it ends in 362, shall we say, when Xenophon says, "Taraché everywhere, you know, there's just troubles." So, you know, this period, this long period of trouble, I think, was, you know, the narrative history seemed to impose it. Yeah, I kept finding myself thinking about the very end of the Hellenica when Xenophon presents the battle of Maintainer as just really there is in a way no outcome. His reading of it, which, you know, other scholars, both ancient and modern, challenge and see bias in his account. But I think it is very interesting that he ends with this sort of aporrhea just saying that, you know, it wasn't clear who emerged victorious. And there's even more confusion and disorders you're saying, in Greece than there ever was before. So I think it's really interesting then that at the beginning, or at the end of the 100 years war period and then the beginning of the great convergence, that are really important figure for the convergence in a way is sort of maybe paradoxically or ironically Philip of Macedon. So could you say a little bit about how the story of Philip and Alexander and how they manage the Greek world then goes on to influence this, this story of the great convergence. I found myself thinking of Demetri Ab's book on the slogan of Greek freedom in this period and how important it is the way that. Philip when he's setting up his league manages, you know, he includes the buzzwords talks about autonomy really presents a commitment to those those values that had emerged as important. So how does that then set the stage for the Hellenistic pull and the convergence that you discuss? No, it's a very good point. I mean, I think I downplayed and downplayed the two and it was another sort of a annoyance factor, you know, moments in the in the book. But I think it's a very good point that Philip, of course, represents, doesn't he a sort of, you know, extreme end of the of the four century or the four century politics and that you have the League of Corinth and it's a federalism porn. You know, having all of the like, you know, the like, the like, the Indian is trying to be important, but in the in that it's federal important. Or the all institution that the delegates and the the contingents, which are proportional. Or this combined with, of course, it has very particular dynamism of this conquest state, you know, of the of the 360s or whatever the 350s. And also, you know, extremely hard knows politics of supporting factions and supporting tyrants and oligarchies. So you have that slightly contradictory mix, which is very, very, you know, 100 years, war very, very four century. The real politic, the harshness combined with the desire and tendency towards institutional solutions. Alexander, of course, it grows out of this, but there is like a particular accident that Alexander and his successors go the demitry of path of choosing local freedom as a slogan for strategic reasons or for cultural reasons. reasons, and it could have gone other ways, it could have gone the Philip solution of you know, cynicism and oligarchy's and tyrants, but they actually painted themselves into this corner, which is a contingent factor, I think, and I try to say this, that they could have gone many other ways, but the result of Alexander plus the successors choosing to go not like Leisemachus, you know, let's have oligarchy's Republican, oligarch republics, but let's have actual democracies on the Ionian model, ASEAN Ionian, actually is a very important fork in the road. So I think that is how I would look at that crucial period between 3.5 and 9.5 and say 281. And that's one of the one of the contingent factors of the Great Convergence. Yeah, it's just so fascinating that it would be the emergence of the Hellenistic Kingdoms that then really gives space for the democratic pull-ists to breathe and flourish. Yes, the Kuku clock time. Yes, I think that's I think that's it. Yes, there is a paradox and there is arguing that if you're interested in the pull-ists and you should you should actually be very involved in the Hellenistic period, very interesting in the Hellenistic period, which doesn't have, of course, parfum Aristotle, if we want to claim them, but doesn't have, you know, the playtos and the Cicillides, we have to deal with, I'm afraid, Polybius is book five, for instance, you know, this is very, very interesting stuff, but it's very different sort of material. And then the the politics of the of the Onerific Decree, which you know, Ben Gray has studied. Well, you mentioned the year 281, which brings me to a question, I think that the inscription that you begin with about Heraclaya is from 280, if I'm not. I don't think we know when it's from. Was it, I can remember the date that was given. 250's, 260's. Oh, it's about 270, I guess, is the goats of Heraclaya. So we're in that neighborhood, temporally. And I thought that that was such an interesting inscription on for so many reasons. You position it programmatically at the start of the book, but I think that unlike a lot of books that begin with this, this kind of eye catching vignette, it's something that you do return to throughout the book. So could you maybe just, for the listener, give a brief account of that really fascinating inscription and why you see it as something paradigmatic or good to think with as you're thinking about the long array of the Paulus. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a inscription that a lot of people have talked about, you know, I mean, Louis Reber, of course, the great Louis Reber, the epigraphists in his story, another Hellenistic period, wrote about it. It's a sin inscription, it's a block of stone, it's now on the island of Amor Goss, but it seems almost certainly to come from this very small place, 17 square kilometers island in the small cyclades, Raclaya, Heraclaya, which I must confess, I've not traveled to, even though I've wanted to go there ever since I've read about this inscription. Now thanks to the truth and boom in Greece, I think it actually has like, you know, gastropubs and Airbnb and everything. So it's not like traveling there in, I don't know, in 1949, or you know, it actually used to be a difficult place to get to and and it says, you know, the citizens get together and swear not to keep goats and this actually what have to do with the Soteri are the protection of the coin on and that if someone brings in goats, you can stop them and if you get killed during the Afrey, the community will intervene and help sue the the the the miscreant. It's not that we are sureing in terms of enforcement of the law, but it isn't an extraordinary and then this is actually described as being for the good of the Heraclaya or Tide citizens, but also all of those who inhabit the city. The way you have the whole package of the of the polis, you know, I've argued, I mean, the others have not, in Christi, Constantinople, Poulou, Pierre Fruilich, about doubts about this, but I think institutional setup seems to be like a polis. So, why are the citizens coming together to swear an oath not to keep goats is extraordinary, I think, and why do they say this is actually a vital matter of the Soteri, how do the community of citizens relate to the broader community, you can see the whole poetics of Tocoynon and of polis are actually in there. So, yeah, it's a very very famous text, a lot of people have talked about it. The thing that really was arresting for me and that decided me to start the book with this is the discovery in the the Ganadios Library in Athens of this enormous 800-page book on Racklaya by a local historian, I think, called Gavallas. And I missed all the stuff, it's actually fascinating stuff about recipes, schools, the name of the captain who like, you led the boat to Amorgos, is just a graarian history which is hinted at earlier, namely that Racklaya was when the travelers discovered it actually under the thumb of the monastery on Amorgos and people by tenets who paid 50%. So, the alternative is not you know, the community of men or the community of goats because it's island turned into a goat island in the early one period, but the island of Cyclops, the Pollis, or a feudal world, a land-lord-dominated world. And I thought that alternative was very arresting, that the Pollis is neither of state of nature nor this state of domination, but it lives in that space in between. And I think that's why I returned to this, especially towards the end of the book, I'm obsessed by the possibility that in fact we, someone is getting screwed in this story, it's just we can't quite tell it's something that obsesses me as well. After you discuss the great conversions and the Hellenistic history and democracy in chapters nine, in chapter nine, you move into talking about the kind of general qualities of the Pollis that we see in this period. Talk about the political culture that emerged from the great conversions and you write that this political culture shows great unity, stability, and coherence. Could you discuss a little bit the qualities of the Pollis, as you see them, so for instance, you single out festivals. This is one example of something that is an important part of maintaining these equilibria within the Pollis societies. So what are the qualities of the Pollis that then have emerged after this great convergence? I'm always afraid of sounding romantic or story-eyed. So the belief, of course, is that they manage stable forms of local democracy on a small scale, and that the Eworkotism reflects the outcome of bargains between the elite, the wealthy elite, in a way that doesn't allow it to transform into a political elite. So what I call the tragedy of the elites, you know, that they are elites are embedded in such a way that they can only claim distinction or elite status in ways which are controlled by the people and which forces them into accepting economic burdens, which you know, the whole paradox, the then paradox. If the elites are in charge, why are they paying for everything very, very heavily and competing for the privileges? And the answer is both an ideology that has painted them into that corner and they accept as the term that are eliteness and institutional setup in the assembly and in the courts, especially the courts, which basically forces them in that direction. So it is an extension, I suppose, of Obers model of mass and elite and what happens when you have economic inequality and political equality that express to institutions as well as ideology. And then you have to have all kinds of cultural phenomena that reflect this, like the honor of a fixed statue, like the festival, like certain types of public space, but also certain type of physical setups like the house, like the built environment, like art, for instance, like visual art and probably even though we don't have enough of this, the literary production of this period, you know, Hannah Gola Benira doing this book on the forgotten literature of the Hellenistic period, which is the literature of the festival, the literature of the gennesium, the literature of the civic of the civic library. So that I suppose are the are these forms of the of the great convergence. You know, and to come back to say the book is also very anxious about this. I read a book about early modern Geneva in which the the magistrates at the beginning of every yearly assembly stand up and doff their hats to the assembled people to show who is sovereign. But this author Raphael Barasho that the reality is that the elites have sewn it all up, that every election is basically, you know, a sham and that they control law, so that you actually had very severe civil disturbances in Geneva by the late 17th and early 18th century, with very recognizable stasis. I disgruntled aristocrats taking the lead of popular members of popular uprising and being executed and so on. So my worry is that we don't have that we don't see elite power. What we assure me allows me to sleep at night that we don't have stasis anymore, well, stasis gradually dies out as a period. But that might be another reason to be worried, it's like when The bombs don't go off, you know, the mafia actually is in charge. So those are some of the anxieties that shadow my portrayal, or my unpacking of the quality of the police. Well, I think it's very interesting because you have this extremely sensitive attunement to performance and the politics of performance talking about, when you're writing about especially the era of the tyrannies. And it is interesting to think about as you do how the notion of performance or specific performance doesn't die with tyranny. I mean, it is still a part of democracy. And so one wonders then to what extent. These are some of these things that look very noble are performative fictions as well. Yes. Isn't that where we get to the whole theoretical problem of the performative, which we were taught rigorously using speech act theory to believe that it actually could shape social relations. But at the same time, we're confronted with the popular use of performative, which is something that you do cynically and that allows people to live unacceptable realities because they've seen like gestures, token gestures, that mask relations of power. So that is really-- I mean, as classists, we're at a disadvantage because we tend to believe what our texts tell us because we always got a pat on the head for unpacking things. And therefore, when we unpack festivals, social spaces, social discourse in a way that is complex and coherent, we may be just in fact doing the work of power for power. The problem, of course, is where do we find correctives to this? Like social archaeology, unfortunately, has to impose meaning on material remains, which are mute. And therefore, it's theoretically perilous. And it's perilous because often the meanings are imported on just yesterday's textbooks. I'm not going to name names, but I think this is a problem we face. The law, of course, we don't know how if it actually had any bite. So we have a problem of various types of evidence, which are all unsatisfactory, to answer these problems. This notion of doing the work of power by attending so much to power's rhetoric is a really fascinating one. I mean, one of the things I talk about a lot with my students is the way that arguably classical Athens continues to exert soft power today. And I know that this book is not primarily a story about Athens in any way, but I am wondering-- and this is personally on the basis of my conversation with Christie and with Leah Lazar and with Leah's new book about her wonderful book about Athens and power in the fifth century. To what extent do you think that the Poles that have crystallized or the political system that's crystallized after the great convergence? Is there an Athenian influence upon the way that some of these baseline polis structures then work? So one thing that we were talking about with Christie and Leah is the adoption of not only the epigraphic habit, but of the practice of-- and this is obviously your-- an area-- one of your many areas of expertise, but with the granting of honor of the conscriptions, how that works, the language of honor. To what extent does the archaic have some-- the way that the Athenians did things, the way that they perform their politics, have a lasting influence or does it? Yeah, I know that's an amazingly important question. I have to read Leah Lazar's book. I think this is a horrible thought, a sort of a paradoxical thought, that the spread of the Athenian-- of Hellenistic democracy might actually just map the extent of the Athenian empire either the islands and Asia Minor might have picked up these democratic turns because they were actually directly ruled by an imperial power. And that the slowness of Peloponese and of Thessaly's on Western Greece to join the great convergence just because they weren't directly ruled by Athens. So omnitz, eggs, and all of that. But yes, to a certain extent, in a way that poses other problems, yes, Athens does-- does exert an influence and things like Leiturgia and competition are such that you can find them everywhere and that then you get to the point when you can actually understand them. Thanks to Athens, because we know more about Athens. We actually have forensic rhetoric. We have these issues worked out and argued about in ways which onerific degrees say will not tell you. Problems with this. I first did, of course, that Moons Hansen, for instance, said, well, you know, Athens does not give us keys as exceptional. When here we're saying, no, in fact, we have a broad culture, which is kind of unitary and kind of Athens flavored. And the extreme specificity of Hansen's approach then is cast into doubt. The other one is like for me, like if this is a case, then why are we going to study Leiturgia at Carthaya in 280 BC rather than just read the Mustannese? Have I just not saw in the branch I'm sitting on? That if Athens is everywhere, then we might as well just go back to studying classical Athens rather than studying all of these pale copies, which spread out the world. Well, that is part of the story, but not the main story. So my hope, periodization, just basically become problematic. And you might as well, in terms of studying, in terms of what the classics are, return and place Athens at its beating heart. I don't know. Well, is there a particular, maybe, a smaller polis that you have a special affection for? I was wondering as you emerged from this. But one of the first history seminars I took in graduate school was on the polis, actually, with Emily Mackel. And our final project was we had to each pick a polis and do kind of a Copenhagen polis project style entry for it. And people came up with all sorts of really interesting examples. Is there-- Wow. --if you were going to do a little side project on one particular, maybe lesser known one? What jumps to mind? When I taught the polis, I did only once at Columbia. I asked my students to write about a polis. I was stupidly forgot to tell them not Athens. So everyone just wrote the final project on Athens. Much to my despair, to my complete despair is such a failure to interest them in anything else. I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know how to answer that. I'm right now working on a place called Iry in Ionia, New Tales, which we only know about because of a synochism. And it was Tales. I think it's Iry. And Mustafa Adak thinks it's Iry. And there's one inscription, maybe two from Iry. One is probably-- Peter Tonerman points out a piece of the curses of Tales, which is really interesting. But the other one is a 350's decree, which you can see. People of Iry are actually receiving exiles. They're debating whether to pay them a pension. And they seem to have a full range of institutions. And that's one inscription. And you have the whole package is there, politics, institutions, finance. And then if you look at the synochism with Tales, you get a sense of the economy, namely that they derive their income from enslaved workers in the forest and from textiles. And just to try to imagine how the institutions and the social history map over each other, I think is very, very interesting. And I wish you could do that for every policy. I don't think we've actually done it very well for any policy. I don't think we even do it for Athens. Like the full social history of Athens, paradoxically, is still-- still has to be written. I think I know-- I know, Fergus Miller used to say that just to annoy people who do Greek history. But I think it's kind of true, right? Like we have all of these elements that would allow us to write a full history of it. But I don't think it's still there yet. Maybe the inference of Athens is just so massive. The object is so intimidating. Yeah, I think it's so complicated. It's like out this hall of mirrors, the way that the influence works. Well, you said earlier in the conversation that you worry about sounding too romantic sometimes about this material. So I would like to point out that you have a chapter on the concept of the worst palace where perhaps some of the scales fall from the eyes. And could you say a little bit about what you're arguing in that chapter, where you specifically consider forms of injustice that might have been engendered or perpetuated by the palace structure? Yeah, yeah. Yes, indeed. I mean, other people say this much, much better than I. And I think I'm just a knight, too. And I think I'm just playing catch up here. But the fact that citizenship is an idea that's so empowering, that we're in a community and that we have a say, and that public goods will come back to us, and those will handle them. We'll be accountable. And that we have formed the writing that prevent informal power, external institutional power, that we have institutions to try to protect us, is very, very empowering and enobling. of Hannah Arendtway, but what about those who don't have access? Yeah, that's a very obvious point. But what if it's not those who don't have access, but that the definition of the in-group is predicated on the exclusion of others, on the work of others. And that's not a new thing to say, fine. But to think about then what it is to be an enslaved textile worker or to be a freed woman who is a certain age and who's caring for, say, a woman in Delphi or in one of these folk in cities, I don't know, Ambri Sauce. And whose life will be that? If we talk about fulfillment and human flourishing, then the thought of all those lies which are cut short and who never realized, I think is a very, very harsh thing or difficult thing. I talk about the story of that 12-year-old boy in slave who tried to kill his master in slavery and is almost certainly was executed. And that just gave me real poor. I thought it very, very difficult to think about that. You know, also, if I'm reading Orlando Patterson, and the description of what it is like, based on anthropological documents, to grow up as a slave child next to the children of two three children in the same family, that is very painful. It's a very painful thing to think. You know, and the question is whether it's coterminous with a polis or if it's just a historical contingency because everyone is doing it, the polis did it very well because it does most things very well. Yeah, the institutional framework seems to be important than part of that story. Well, so in terms of your story, the story that you tell in this book, where does it end and how did you pick an end point for it? Yes, I have an index card to myself called the never-ending polis because, you know, of course, you know, the book starts by this impulse, which is very common in people who work on the epigraphy of the Hellency period. The polis doesn't end in whatever, three, three, eight, or three, two, three, B.C. But it continues. Okay, so you say it does actium mark the end of the poison. No, of course not. It keeps going. And the question is where does it end? Does it end with Christianity? Does it end with the third century crisis? Does it end with justinian? I don't know. You know, the book sort of peeters out in that way. It has, like the polis itself, it has many endings because when you think that's it, you know, the four century Constantinian state is it. Then you have like epigrams or bishops that talk about the, you know, the will of the people and the reputation. You know, really look like civic epigram from say the Hellenistic period or even the archaic period. So the polis continues as an idea and heritage for a while and for a very long while. But it does not re-emerge in the Byzantine Empire. There's no commune until the 15th century. I think I have to read Caldellis to find out if this is, in fact, completely wrong. But I think there is an end. It's just slow and diffracted until basically perhaps the 7th century B.C. But there are many ends, you know, the end of civic finance, the disappearance of magistracies, the end of assemblies and all these things, you know, gradually peeter out during the late fourth and fifth centuries. See, then you always get the like tiny slivers of perhaps urban living, you know, does it will push you in that direction? Yeah, it's interesting because you then you have the people who are coming at it from maybe the Greek Middle Ages working on the Eastern Roman Empire and then, I mean, not Caldellis in particular, but then you get the kind of reverse movement that actually late antiquity begins with Alexander. Yes, yes, no, that's a good point, isn't it? That's a good point. And that's not something that I'm very good at dealing with is, you know, it's a very square book, this book, and it's about men of substance, about good citizens who do their duty and vote. It's about jury men who swear the oath. And the coolness of a world, you know, which stretches, you know, into Central Asia and to the Indus Valley of, you know, movement, movement of ideas, connectivities, individuals, is something that the, you know, the question is, what relationship, what is the relationship with the world of the police, you know, between free agents and motion, you know, I mean, Prostel and Hauden actually downplays a state downplay institutions and downplay the city. And I think late antiquity, late antiquity model is much, much closer to that. And do these people surf from polis to polis, or do they represent, you know, world, which is much closer to the village and the court, paradoxically above the police and below it? Well, I think John, this is hardly a square book. I think you're underselling yourself quite a bit. There's really a lot of texture and I think edge to it. This leads me, I guess, to maybe my last big question, which is, you know, I remember it was like seven or eight years ago that Graham Allison got asked to the White House to present on the Thucydides' trap on his thesis about. Oh. So let's say that you were to be invited to give some presentation to the Mucky Mucks, you know, the people who actually do control things these days, that was based on your research. I mean, what kind of interventions do you think, I mean, can there be interventions made for modern politics on the basis of this material? In a way, it's a, you know, a foreordained or pre-determined story, because the book itself is, you know, just to play my card on the table, is it may not appear that way because there's so much epigraphy in it, but it's a present-tist book, you know, in that it argues for a form of social democracy, you know, getting to Denmark in the Fukuyama way. In the Fukuyama phrase, you know, that, like, I hope not to be controversial by saying, "All the gorky is not a good thing." The influence of the elites, of entrenched elites, is not a good thing. Taxation is a good thing. The production of public goods, is a good thing. Accountability is a good thing. And that, that is not perhaps unrelated to the last eight years of anxiety, you know, classics and the age of anxiety is obvious. So anything I say, you know, in a way, is already said by Piketty or Stiglitz or Krugman or so on. It's, you know, it's a very simple book in that way. But that, you know, goes back to the, I think, liberating potential of the book, which most determined this book, most inference, it was Joshua was mass and elite, that, you know, there is no inevitability of oligarchy and that democracy actually can work and actually is durable stable and brings, tries to bring public goods to the largest number, rather than be a system based on spoils, which are the alternatives, the violent alternative. I think is a message, is a message of the book. With all of the worries and anxieties that go with it, you know, that there's a price to pay, that there's violence that is embedded in this system, injustices at every corner, and that these things should not be, that we still have to stare in them, in the face, because they, the question is whether they're co-terminus or contingent again. - Well, thank you so much, John, for this conversation. I was hoping that we could end with a signature podcast, word association game. - All right. - If you yourself are a game. - That's of course. - So I will, wonderful, thank you. So I will just throw out a few words and just say whatever comes to mind. - Okay. - Okay, so let's try it. So first is Paulus. - People. - Aristotle. - Paulus. - Hundred years war. - Atrocity. - Archaic Greece. - Hoplites. - The Greek convergence. - Civic owners. - And the last is demos. - Demos, gosh. She said demos, of course. I'm very tempted to think of a Greek man of any age really, listening and willing to argue with you about politics. That would be my old man, demos, demos, puknites, as I would imagine. - Your Aristophanic version or? - Yeah. - Aristophanic version, but in a way, timeless, I think. - Well, thank you so much, John. - Thank you. - Really monumental book in many ways and congratulations. - Well, thank you, John, for having me on this. - No, no, the pleasure is definitely on mind. (gentle music) - Thank you for joining us for this episode of Leski Podcast. And special thanks for their support of the podcast to the Brown University Department of Classics and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And we'd be grateful if you take a moment to rate the podcast and leave a review. It will help other listeners to find us. We look forward to you joining us again soon, here in the Leski.