The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Athenian Thought

Atack, C. (2014), ‘The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Athenian Thought’, Histos, 8, 329-62.

Ancestral constitutions in fourth-century BCE Athenian political argument: genre and re-invention

This dissertation explores the use of 'ancestral constitution' arguments in Athenian political theory of the fourth century BCE. It shows how the 'patrios politeia' is invoked by authors such as Isocrates and Xenophon as a means of expressing opposition to current democratic practice, and also how the use of such arguments is explored, parodied and rejected by Plato in dialogues such as the Menexenus, Timaeus/Critias, and Laws. Submitted for the MPhil in Classics, University of Cambridge, June 2010 and awarded the Members' Classical Essay Prize

Sexuality and Gender in the Ancient Greek World

Course booklet for the Sexuality and Gender course I taught at the University of Warwick in 2015-16

“Cyrus appeared both great and good”: Xenophon and the Performativity of Kingship

n this chapter, Atack argues that Xenophon’s depiction of the performance of kingship by Cyrus (Cyropaedia), Agesilaus (Hellenica, Agesilaus), and other kings contains an evaluative model that explores alternative techniques a ruler can use to persuade others to be ruled. By deploying frameworks of performativity and spectacle derived from Judith Butler and Guy Debord respectively, this chapter analyses these narratives of kingship and connects them to other Greek political and ethical concerns about the role of the outstanding individual within society, linking Xenophon more closely to both Plato and Aristotle as a political and ethical theorist. Yet Xenophon’s orientation toward performativity also pulls him in the direction of analysts of status and structure. In its performative aspects Xenophon’s kingship begins to look like gender, equally established through performance and with a troubled relationship to essence

Models of Inclusion and Exclusion in Democracy Ancient and Modern: A Response to Paul Cartledge’s Democracy: A Life

This article forms part of a symposium on Paul Cartledge's 'Democracy: a life' (2016). It argues in support of new approaches to Athenian democracy focused on the experience of those who were not active participants in the political institutions of the democracy but excluded because of their status (women, metics, slaves). It further argues that it is important to embrace the democracy of Hellenistic Greek cities, as denying them the status of democracy on grounds of lack of political self-sufficiency leads to similar misconceptions about sovereignty and participation in supra-national politics as those that marred recent UK debates on sovereignty and Brexit

The shepherd king and his flock: paradoxes of leadership and care in classical Greek philosophy

Chapter in Paradox and Power in Caring Leadership: Critical and Philosophical Reflections (2020), edited by Leah Tomkins, published by Edward Elgar, pp. 75-85. When Xenophon, the fourth-century BCE Athenian soldier and writer, and once one of Socrates’ students, tried to explain the nature of leadership, in his extended case study and biography of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia in the sixth century BCE and founder of its empire, his Cyropaedia, he turned to a familiar image, that of the king or leader as shepherd. For Xenophon, Cyrus provided a model of how to lead and inspire troops, and how, after the campaign was over, to set up a stable government in the conquered territory. Xenophon explores what qualities enabled Cyrus to rule more successfully than others. But when he invokes the image of the king as shepherd, Xenophon opens a set of questions about the consequences of the unequal and asymmetric relationship between leaders and those they lead, as well as emphasising the centrality of care to ideas of what constituted good leadership. Like other thinkers of his time, the image of the ruler as shepherd enables a debate on the paradoxes of leadership and care (Brock 2013: 43-52)

Imagined Superpowers: Isocrates’ Opposition of Athens and Sparta

Isocrates has been comparatively neglected as a source for political and cultural history and theory. However, the many works of his long career show a continuing engagement with Athenian political culture and the education of its political class, and his assessment of Sparta is significant for both of these. He imagines and explores the struggle for hegemony between Athens, Sparta and other Greek poleis, before the rise of Macedon reshaped the Greek political landscape, and does so through a series of works that aim to create and modify Athenian political identities, and to examine claims to lead any Panhellenic project, through his novel use of literary discourse. This paper explores some of the difficulties in making use of Isocrates’ texts to understand the political culture of Athens and in particular Athenian assessments of the power of Sparta. It shows how Isocrates’ literary style lends itself to the creation of artificial or exaggerated oppositions, and that the opposition between Athens and Sparta as political exemplars is one that Isocrates himself identifies from the political discourse of Athens

Precarity and Protest: The politics of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

Reading and performing Aristophanes' Lysistrata through the work of Judith Butler on performativity and precarity. This paper explores both Aristophanes' play and the experience of performing and studying it

The History of Athenian Democracy, Now

Review article from History of Political Thought covering books on the history of Athenian democracy and its relevance to politics now (as of publication date in 2017

Ancient Utopias: imaginary cities in Greek political thought

These are the slides from a talk given at the JACT Summer School, Bryanston, on 1/8/2018. How did ancient Greek writers and poets use imaginary cities to think about how to live well, what kind of community to develop, and how to maintain relationships between individual, community and cosmos? From Homer to Aristotle, the imaginary city provides an opportunity to think about the kind of society that would deliver a stable community, and a means of critiquing existing political organisations