EURIPIDES: LIFE AND WORKS

For Greeks of the fifth century bce there is very little biographical information that can be relied upon. Much of the information about Euripides extant in later antiquity is based on plausible and (more often) implausible inferences from allusions in Old Comedy and from statements in the dramas themselves (according to the widespread, but false, assumption that various first-person statements may express the dramatist's own convictions). The doxographic tradition often constructed teacher-pupil relationships whenever a similarity was detected between two intellectuals. Anecdotes commonly transmitted stories based on traditional patterns of folktale and myth rather than on genuine biographical data.

Eur. was probably born some time in the decade of the 480s, and no later than about 475. The first reliably recorded date in his life (from the Marmor Parium) is that of his first production of plays at the Great Dionysia in 455, when he was presumably at least 20 years old and may have been as old as 31 or 32. Different ancient traditions place his birth in 480/79 (in some sources, more precisely, on the very day of the Battle of Salamis) or in 485/4 (a coincidence with the first victory of Aeschylus) or one of the two previous years.

His father's name was Mnesarchides (or Mnesarchos) of the deme Phlya (Kekropid tribe), and anecdotes and later cult connect him with Salamis (for his birth, and for the cave in which he is supposed to have isolated himself to compose).

Lyric vs dialogue and the registers of tragic utterance

The alternation of song and speech was basic to the genre of tragedy from its inception. The contrast between sung lyric metres and spoken metres (iambic trimeter, or occasionally trochaic tetrameter) parallels to a large extent the contrast between chorus and actor(s), but crossover does occur. The head-man of the chorus (koryphaios) speaks iambic trimeters, sometimes in a short dialogue with an actor (as Med. 811–19) and sometimes (esp. in couplets) as a pause or articulation after a long speech by an actor (as Med. 520–1, 576–8, 906–7, 1231–2). On a few occasions, other individual members of the chorus speak iambic lines to indicate indecision (as in Aesch. Ag. 1346–71, Eur. Hipp. 782–5). Actors sometimes sing either short exclamatory lyrics (as Medea in 96–167) or an extended aria (as Hippolytus in Hipp. 1347–88). A lyric exchange or lyric dialogue (amoibaion) may involve two actors or the actor(s) and chorus. Both participants in such an exchange may be lyric voices (esp. in a kommos, a quasi-ritual lament, as at the end of Aesch. Pers.), or one voice may be confined to iambic trimeter to provide a calmer counterpoint to the emotion expressed in the other voice's lyrics (as Soph. Ant. 1261–1346; Eur. IT 827–99, Helen 625–97). Sometimes the relative emotional levels of the two voices vary during the scene, as Aesch. Ag. 1072–1177 (where Cassandra's emotion infects the chorus), 1406–1576 (where Clytemnestra first responds in trimeters, then joins in the lyrics).

The Attic tragedians wrote in an artistic literary language which deliberately set itself apart in many ways from colloquial Attic and formal Attic prose, although the language used in the dialogue portions of tragedy is relatively closer to ordinary Attic than that of the lyric portions. When considering the language and style of Euripides, one must be aware of three main levels of differentiation from ‘normal’ (non-poetic) speech. First, in many respects the tragedians are continuing the traditions of high-style poetry and thus they inherit or share forms and constructions found in epic, choral lyric, and other archaic genres. Tragedy's debt to various lyric genres is especially heavy in the choral odes, while messenger speeches tend to feature more prominently certain epicisms. Second, there are distinctive elements of tragic style that seem to be common to all its practitioners, features that one might find in Aeschylus or Sophocles or other tragedians of the fifth century (or even later). Finally, there are the features and mannerisms specific to Euripides himself, some of which represent simply extensions or greater frequency of stylistic features already found in the tradition (such as various forms of verbal repetition), and some of which are more clearly innovative or idiosyncratic (such as the admission of more colloquialisms and the extension of tragic vocabulary through the allowance of additional word-shapes within the iambic trimeter and through greater openness to contemporary intellectual and technical vocabulary).

FRANÇOIS DE CALLIÈres (1645–1717), ambassador and spy during the reign of Louis XIV. His On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes (1716) was written for Philip, duke of Orleans, regent during the minority of Louis XV. Neither the first nor the last of innumerable handbooks of good diplomacy, it ably records the diplomatic ideals of a period in which imperial arrogance had been temporarily replaced by a concern for the principled conduct of foreign affairs.

From On the Manner of Negotiating with Princes

The usefulness of negotiation

To understand the permanent use of diplomacy and the necessity for continual negotiations, we must think of the states of which Europe is composed as being joined together by all kinds of necessary commerce, in such a way that they may be regarded as members of one Republic and that no considerable change can take place in any one of them without affecting the condition, or disturbing the peace, of all the others. The blunder of the smallest of sovereigns may indeed cast an apple of discord among all the greatest Powers, because there is no state so great which does not find it useful to have relations with the lesser states and to seek friends among the different parties of which even the smallest state is composed. History teems with the results of these conflicts which often have their beginnings in small events, easy to control or suppress at their birth, but which when grown in magnitude became the causes of long and bloody wars which have ravaged the principal states of Christendom.

FRIEDRICH LIST (1789–1846), German political economist. A liberal nationalist, List was forced to flee Germany in the 1820s and during his exile in the United States he became acquainted with American ideas on political economy and the protection of “infant industries.” Returning to Germany, he became an advocate of a customs union of the various German states, with a high external tariff. In the following extract from his masterwork, The National System of Political Economy (1841), he explains how free trade is a policy of the strong which works to the advantage of the more advanced economy, using arguments which have been repeated frequently in the last century and a half by opponents of liberal economic theory.

From The National System of Political Economy

Political and cosmopolitical economy

Before Quesnay and the French economists there existed only a practice of political economy which was exercised by the State officials, administrators, and authors who wrote about matters of administration, occupied themselves exclusively with the agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation of those countries to which they belonged, without analysing the causes of wealth, or taking at all into consideration the interests of the whole human race.

Quesnay (from whom the idea of universal free trade originated) was the first who extended his investigations to the whole human race, without taking into consideration the idea of the nation.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1757–1804), American statesman and first secretary of the treasury in the federal government established by the constitution of 1789. With James Madison and John Jay, Hamilton authored the series of articles, collectively known as The Federalist (1787–8), exploring and defending the republican principles underlying this constitution. When war broke out between Britain and France after the revolution in France in 1789, Hamilton argued that the new American nation should remain neutral. In Letters of Pacificus (1793), he disputes the popular view that the United States should side with France, arguing that the national interest must come before sympathy with the French as fellow revolutionaries against monarchical rule.

From Letters of Pacificus

France, at the time of issuing the proclamation, was engaged in war with a considerable part of Europe, and likely to be embroiled with almost all the rest, without a single ally in that quarter of the globe.

In such a situation, it is evident, that however she may be able to defend herself at home, of which her factions and internal agitations furnish the only serious doubt, she cannot make external efforts in any degree proportioned to those which can be made against her.

This state of things alone discharges the United States from an obligation to embark in her quarrel.

It is known, that we are wholly destitute of naval force. France, with all the great maritime powers united against her, is unable to supply this deficiency.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (1466–1536), Dutch humanist, theologian, and religious reformer. Like other Christian humanists, Erasmus aspired to recapture the spirit of early Christianity by placing the teachings of scripture and of the early church fathers above those of Aquinas and the medieval scholastic tradition. Unlike Luther, however, Erasmus sought to preserve the unity of Christianity by reconciling Protestant ideas with those of the Roman church. His essay on the adage dulce bellum inexpertis, “war is sweet to those who have not tried it,” may be read as a defense of pacifism against the Thomistic doctrine of just war.

From “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis”

Among the choicest proverbs, and widely used in literature, is the adage ‘war is sweet to those who have not tried it.’ Vegetius uses it thus, in his book on the Art of War, III, chapter XIV, ‘Do not be too confident, if a new recruit hankers after war, for it is to the inexperienced that fighting is sweet.’ There is a quotation from Pindar: ‘War is sweet to those who have not tried it, but anyone who knows what it is is horrified beyond measure if he should meet it.’

There are some things in the affairs of men, fraught with dangers and evils of which one can have no idea until one has put them to the test.

JOHN of Paris (c. 1250–1306), an independent-minded theologian, philosopher, and priest in the Dominican order. John's promising career as a teacher of philosophy at the University of Paris was derailed when he was denounced to the authorities for defending the then unorthodox views of Thomas Aquinas. Restored to his position in 1300, he was again embroiled in controversy when he defended the claims the French crown in its conflict with the papacy over the king's right to regulate the church in France. Arguing that royal authority is not derived from that of the church, John concluded that the king was superior to the pope in temporal matters within the realm. His arguments for monarchical authority against the claims of the church strengthened the position of all monarchs against both pope and emperor.

From On Royal and Papal Power

What royal government is and whence it had its origins

In the first place, it is to be understood that a kingdom can be defined thus: a kingdom is the perfected government of a multitude by one person for the sake of the common good.

In connection with this definition, ‘government’ is taken to be the genus, while ‘multitude’ is added in order to differentiate it from government in which each person governs himself, whether by natural instinct (in the manner of brute animals) or by one's own reason (in the case of those who lead a solitary life).

THUCYDIDES, who simply refers to himself as “an Athenian,” was born around the fifties of the fifth century bce. He was possibly of royal Thracian descent – he also had political influence in Thrace and business interests there – and was certainly an aristocrat. We know little about his life with any certainty, save what he himself tells us in his History. He served as an Athenian military commander in 424 (and may have done so earlier) but was defeated by the great Spartan general Brasidas, and was sent into exile for a period as a result. The latter half of his life is largely unknown to us, although it is likely he died around the end of the century or possibly (according to some recent research) a little into the 390s. By his own account he began writing his History when the war between the Athenians and the Spartans began, convinced that it would be a unique event and that thus his record of it would be, as he suggests, “a possession for all times.”

From History of the Peloponnesian War

Introduction

However, I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology.

ARISTOTLE was born in Stagira, in northern Greece, in 384 bce. His father, Nichomachus, was court physician to Amyntas III, king of Macedon, and thus Aristotle was brought up mainly in Macedonia. At seventeen, however, Aristotle was sent to Athens, the cultural centre of the Greek world, to pursue his education. Very quickly he became primarily associated with Plato's Academy, where he remained for more than twenty years. Plato himself was nearly sixty when Aristotle joined the Academy yet he clearly recognized the young man's precocity and very soon Aristotle became a favored pupil – and leading disciple. However, on Plato's death in 347 bce Aristotle left Athens. It is often supposed he left Athens because Plato's nephew, Speusippus, was appointed Scholarch – head of the Academy – when he thought the position should have gone to him. However, as a metic – a non-Athenian-born resident of Athens – Aristotle could not own property in Athens and since the buildings and possessions of the Academy were transferred to Speusippus as well as the headship, it is unlikely that Aristotle had any expectations in that regard. By all accounts, he also got on well with Speussipus, at least personally. In any event, there were more personal reasons for leaving Athens. This was the time when Philip II of Macedon was gradually bringing all of Greece under the Macedonian sphere of influence and anyone with a strong Macedonian connection was likely to be suspect, especially in Athens.

MOSES MAIMONIDES – or to give him his Jewish name, Moshe ben Maimon – was born in Cordoba in Spain in 1135 ce. His father, himself a Jewish scholar of considerable repute, educated him to begin with, though he also studied philosophy and the natural sciences with local Muslim scholars. After having to flee Cordoba in 1148, the family settled in Fez in 1160 where Maimonides continued his studies. However, persecution forced them to flee again in 1165. Eventually settling in Old Cairo, Maimonides embarked upon a career as a physician, while continuing to write in various fields, finally serving as court physician to the great Muslim leader Saladin. He was also, however, a leading member of the Jewish community and much of his time was taken up in responding to questions from the wider Jewish Diaspora. Maimonides published in many areas of thought, although perhaps his most celebrated text is the Guide to the Perplexed, an attempt to address the challenge posed by Greek thought to Jewish faith. He also wrote a small treatise on Logic (excerpted here) which gives a clear statement of how he saw the character of the political and international realms. He died in Cairo in 1204.

From Logic

Political science

Political science falls into four parts: first, the individual man's governance of himself; second, the governance of the household; third, the governance of the city; and fourth, the governance of the large nation or of the nations.

The classical distinction between civilization and barbarism is replaced in medieval Europe by a religious dichotomy dividing Christians from non-Christians. The distinctions are cultural, but where the cultures they privilege are spatially bounded these distinctions can be interpreted geographically. The earliest Christians were scattered and oppressed, their faith divorced from the temporal world and therefore from its rulers and their territories. But as Christians grew more numerous and rulers were converted, Christianity came to be understood not only as a faith but as a realm of Christians and their lands. The church itself was organized into territorially defined bishoprics and Christian kingdoms distinguished collectively from the outer wilderness of paganism. With the expansion of Islam in the seventh, eight, and ninth centuries, Christian communities in Asia Minor, Persia, and Africa were destroyed or (as in the case of the Ethiopian church) cut off from European Christianity. The threat posed by Islam to Christian communities everywhere probably reinforced the developing sense of Christian unity (Hay, 1968: 24). By the high middle ages there had emerged the idea of a concrete Christian society: the spiritually defined, ecclesiastically organized, and geographically delimited Christendom.

One concern of medieval Christian thinkers is to articulate the laws governing this society, a problem made difficult by the diversity of kinds of law recognized within it. In treating what we have come to call international relations, these thinkers articulate principles to guide Christian princes in their relations with one another and, occasionally, with non-Christians.

ABU NASR MUHAMMAD AL-FARABI was born in Transoxania around the year 870 ce. Although we do not know much for certain about his life, we do know that as a young man he studied in Khorsan and Baghdad, two major centers of learning in the Islamic world and it was in the latter city that he established his reputation as a writer. Although based there for much of his life, he traveled widely to other major centers of Islamic civilization, for example, Aleppo and Damascus in Syria and also Egypt. He was versatile in many areas of study and although the claim that he could speak seventy languages is hardly likely there is no reason to doubt the breadth and range of his learning. His most famous political works are usually called The Political Regime and The Virtuous City, though he also wrote many influential commentaries on ancient texts such as Plato's Laws. He was the first major Islamic thinker to found a “school” and was a major source of the manner in which Islamic civilization absorbed and adapted Greek thought. He died, at the age of eighty, in Damascus, loaded with honors.

From The Political Regime

Man belongs to the species that cannot accomplish their necessary affairs or achieve their best state, except through the association of many groups of them in a single dwelling-place. Some human societies are large, others are of a medium size, still others are small.

CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON DE LA BREDE ET DE MONTESQUIEU, was born in 1689. His life and career were fairly normal for a French aristocrat of his time, save that he was, and remained, a staunch enthusiast for freedom and an equally staunch opponent of despotism. After a good education locally, Montesquieu went to the University of Bordeaux to study law, graduating after three years and then moving to Paris to continue his studies. In 1713, on his father's death, Montesquieu returned to Bordeaux to take up his duties on his estates and in 1716 he became, on his uncle's death, President of the Parlement of Bordeaux. He was thus a local nobleman of considerable consequence with wide commercial and landowning interests, including a special interest in his vineyards and the international trade in wine. His intellectual interests remained, however. On his return to Bordeaux, he had been elected to the Academy at Bordeaux and remained active in it for the rest of his life. His first major work, Persian Letters, was published anonymously in 1721 and was a biting satire on the political and ecclesiastical conditions in Europe in general and France in particular. It was a great success and afterwards Montesquieu began to move in French and European literary circles, becoming a regular in the salon of Madame Lambert and attending the Club de l'entresol, which featured detailed discussion of political and international affairs and amongst whose members was the Abbé de Saint-Pierre.

Although a society of states has been in the making in Europe since at least the fifteenth century, the idea of a distinct body of law springing from and regulating this society remained hazy throughout the early modern period. The term “international law” (and cognate expressions in other languages) did not come into general use until the nineteenth century. Even then, the rules governing international relations were sometimes referred to as the “public law of Europe.” But most writers clung to the antiquated and equivocal term “law of nations” (ius gentium, droit des gens, Völkerrecht, etc.), struggling to describe new modes of diplomacy using a conceptual vocabulary inherited from ancient Rome and medieval Christendom.

The modern debate over whether a law-governed order is possible in a world of sovereign states reflects the growing importance of individualism. Theorists who base civil law on individual interests argue that the sole purpose of government is to protect the lives and property of its subjects. For some, this argument points toward constitutional government and the protection of individual rights. To others it suggests an instrumental conception of government in which laws are tools of rather than constraints on policy. Such a conception threatens individual rights by undermining the laws that define and protect them.

In its most extreme versions, individualism regards human beings as appetitive creatures, driven, in the absence of a superior earthly power, to be their own law in matters affecting their survival.

FRIEDRICH VON GENTZ (1764–1832), Prussian diplomat and advocate for international cooperation to resist the French revolution and the Napoleonic expansion that followed it. Working closely with the Austrian chancellor, Metternich, Gentz played a prominent role in the Congress of Vienna, which brought the Napoleonic wars to an end. In his essay on the European balance of power (1806), Gentz anticipated the post-war system in which the balance operates to maintain the equal rights of states as members of an international society. By enforcing international law, the balance of power functions in international society in a way analogous to the judicial and executive power within a state.

From “The True Concept of a Balance of Power”

What is usually termed a balance of power is that constitution which exists among neighbouring states more or less connected with each other, by virtue of which none of them can violate the independence or the essential rights of another without effective resistance from some quarter and consequent danger to itself.

Many misconceptions have arisen as a result of the similarity with physical objects upon which the term was based. It has been supposed that those who saw in the balance of power the basis of an association of states were aiming at the most complete equality, or equalization, of power possible, and were demanding that the various states of an area which is politically united should be most precisely measured, weighed and rounded off, one against the other, in respect of size, population, wealth, resources, etc.