On the murder of Eratosthenes

Date

There is no internal or external evidence to enable us to date the speech precisely.

The case

Athenian law on adultery was both broader and more severe than in most modern societies; broader in that the term moicheia, which is usually translated ‘adultery’, was applied to unauthorized sex (excluding rape) with the free female dependants of another man; more severe in that the law allowed a man considerable powers against anyone he caught committing moicheia with a woman under his control and protection, including (in the case of wife, mother, sister, daughter, or free mistress) the right to kill. These differences reflect a significant difference between the Greek view of the offence and our own. For us adultery, though recognized as an impropriety under divorce law, is a private matter between the individuals involved. For the Greeks the offence threatened the family, since it created a risk that an adulterine bastard might be introduced into it, with the result that control of family property and cults might be passed outside the bloodline. Hence the application of the term moicheia beyond marital infidelity, and also the severity of Athenian law, which in this as in other areas recognized the importance of the family. The present speech was written for a certain Euphiletos, who exercised the extreme right against a young man named Eratosthenes.

LIFE

The ancient biographical tradition concerning Lysias is both clear and consistent. He was born in Athens in 459/8, the son of a resident alien of Syracusan origin named Kephalos. At fifteen he migrated (either with his two brothers or just his older brother, Polemarchos) to the colony of Thourior, where he stayed until ejected by the anti-Athenian faction there in the civil disturbance which followed the destruction of the Sicilian expedition, returning to Athens in 412/11. He died in his late seventies or early eighties.

However, many scholars have preferred a later date for Lysias' birth. The traditional date would place his period of artistic activity (403– c. 380) between the ages of 56 and 78; this is not impossible, but it would certainly be unusual. Moreover, at Dem. 59.21–2, Lysias is mentioned as having both a mistress and a mother who is still alive, at a date which is unlikely to be earlier than 390 and may be as late as 380. This would make Lysias almost seventy at least, and his mother at least in her mid-eighties. Since longevity and sexual potency, like literary activity, are variables we cannot rule out this possibility; but again a later date for the birth would be more plausible. But since the tradition that Isokrates, born in 436, was younger by a significant margin than Lysias goes back to a contemporary source, we cannot plausibly bring Lysias' birth down beyond the mid-440s.

FILMER, LOCKE AND HOBBES. ‘TWO TREATISES’ AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL WRITING

If Locke wrote his book as a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer, then he cannot have written it as a refutation of Thomas Hobbes. It is almost as mistaken to suppose that he was arguing deliberately against Leviathan as to believe that he wrote to rationalize the Revolution. There would have been no point whatsoever for the intellectual champion of the Whig exclusionists to produce one more criticism of Hobbes. Professor Skinner has demonstrated that Hobbes did have an intellectual context and a following: he did not spring from nowhere and exist without effect, excepton his opponents. But he was politically the least important of all the absolutist writers. Filmer, on the other hand, was the man of the moment, a formidable and growing force with those whose political opinions mattered, and representing in himself the ipsissima verba of the established order. Therefore Locke found himself impelled to write on this subject, and for that reason Filmer's thinking lies directly behind his political doctrines. Moreover, his controversy with patriarchalism has a fundamental significance in the history of political and social thinking, for the development of the structure of modern society.

Locke rejected Hobbesian absolutism along with Filmer's, of course: the word ‘Leviathan’ occurs in his Second Treatise, and there are phrases and whole arguments which recall the Hobbesian position, and must have been intended in some sense as comments upon them.

‘Property I have nowhere found more clearly explained, than in a book entitled, Two Treatises of Government.’ This remark was made by John Locke in 1703, not much more than a year before he died. It must be a rare thing for an author to recommend one of his own works as a guide to a young gentleman anxious to acquire ‘an insight into the constitution of the government, and real interest of his country’. It must be even rarer for a man who was prepared to do this, to range his own book alongside Aristotle's Politics and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, to write as if the work were written by somebody else, somebody whom he did not know. Perhaps it is unique in a private letter to a relative. What could possibly be the point of concealing this thing, from a man who probably knew it already?

Odd as it is, this statement of Locke anticipates the judgement of posterity. It was not long before it was universally recognized that Locke on Government did belong in the same class as Aristotle's Politics, and we still think of it as a book about property, in recent years especially. It has been printed over a hundred times since the 1st edition appeared with the date 1690 on the title-page. It has been translated into French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese and Hindi: probably into other languages too.

Whilst he was waiting at Rotterdam for a ship to take him home after the Revolution, Locke received the following letter from The Hague:

The writer was Lady Mordaunt, wife of his friend who was to become Earl of Monmouth and Earl of Peterborough and who was already in England with William III. The Convention she mentions was the Convention Parliament, then working out the constitutional future of England after James II had sputtered out. By 11 February Locke was in London: on the 12th the Declaration of Right was completed: on the 13th William and Mary were offered the crown.

This letter, except perhaps for its last phrase, aptly expresses the traditional view of the reasons why Locke sat down to write Two Treatises of Government. What was wanted was an argument, along with a scheme of government, an argument deep in its analysis and theoretical, even philosophical, in its premises, but cogent and convincing in its expression.

The dating of the composition of Two Treatises and the question of whether the Second was composed before the First

Professor Richard Ashcraft in his recent book, Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 1987, has decisively rejected the version of the composition and dating of Locke's book set out in this Introduction. In his view the First was written in 1680–1 and the Second in 1681–2, neither as early as 1679, in whole or in part.

Neither in this book, nor in his extremely detailed analysis of Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government, 1986, does Professor Ashcraft produce any new references in materials previously unknown to underwrite his new interpretation. I had hoped that in the exhaustive analysis, interesting and valuable as it is in so many ways, which he has undertaken on the books and papers of the radicals who surrounded Shaftesbury in the 1680s, who plotted against James II after Shaftesbury's death and who involved themselves in Monmouth's attempt to overthrow him, some allusion to the text of Two Treatises might appear. It was perhaps unlikely, considering Locke's cautious habits and his attitude to what he had written, that any such allusion would be in plain language. But one or other of those who associated with Locke might well have known and written about the manuscript de Morbo Gallico (see above, pp. 62–5).

This is a somewhat reduced version of the scholarly edition originally published in 1960 with a second edition in 1967, latest printing 1988. Much of the scholarly apparatus has been dropped here: the lists of books Locke had in his possession at times relevant to the composition of Two Treatises, the List of Printings, the Collation, the successive Forewords to successive printings. All these have been retained in the 1988 printing of the scholarly edition, to which those to whom final detail is important are referred.

Advantage has been taken of the appearance of the book in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series to make some alterations not yet present in the scholarly edition. The extremely small number of errors in Locke's own text have been amended, though none of them alters the sense in any respect. The Introduction, its footnotes and the footnotes to Locke's text have been quite extensively corrected, but mainly so as to take account of work done after the second edition of 1971 until the later 1970s. As far as possible, moreover, all contributions made since then which touch on the facts about the writing and publication of Locke's political work have been taken into account. The book cannot, however, claim to cover the whole body of extant scholarship on Locke's Two Treatises, and for that reason a list of suggested reading has been added before the Bibliography.

THE TEXT

General. The attempt here is to present Locke's ‘text for posterity’ (see above, pp. 9–11) from the Christ's corrected copy. It has been set up in type from a photograph of that document. The compositors have in fact worked from printer's copy prepared for the press between 1698 and 1704 by Locke himself and by Coste. Locke's hand appears only occasionally after the first few pages, and Coste seems to have been copying rather than taking his dictation: it seems possible that he may have been copying from another, very similar exemplar, the hypothetical second master-copy which is discussed below.

The decision to reproduce the Christ's copy, modified only in such particulars as were absolutely necessary, was the simplest, most consistent solution to an intricate editorial problem. The reader has before him the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death, or something as close to that version as the editor can make it. He has also a record, complete in all essentials, but not absolutely exhaustive, of all the variants from that final version which were seen by Locke, and then rejected by him at one correcting stage or other.

Documents used. In order to appreciate why the editor has ventured to alter the Christ's copy in any way whatsoever, it is necessary to record the documents from which he has worked.

LOCKE AND OXFORD

John Locke lived from 1632 to 1704, from the seventh year of the reign of Charles I to the third year of the reign of Queen Anne: 1632 was the year of the birth of Sir Christopher Wren in England, of Pufendorf and Spinoza on the continent. In the course of his seventy-two years Locke saw the worlds in which he spent his life, the intellectual and scientific world, the political and economic world, change farther and faster than any of his forefathers had done, and in England more markedly than anywhere else. He was as much of a mere Englishman as a universal genius could be, though he spent two critical periods of his life abroad, in France from 1675 to 1679 and in Holland from 1683 to 1689. He was as private and ordinary a man as could be expected of an individual who was to help to change the philosophical and political assumptions of Europe, but for two other periods he was a directive political influence in his own right and something of a public personality. This was between about 1667 and 1675 and again in 1679–82 when he was associated with that overpowering political leader, the first earl of Shaftesbury, and between 1694 and 1700 as the confidant of Lord Somers, the chief figure of the government. He died a famous man and he has remained one of the great English names ever since.