I
The central theme of this special issue is the ancient notions of liberty, as articulated in the Ancient Near East, Classical and Hellenist Greece, Republican and Imperial Rome, Sasanian Empire, and the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. As in the contemporary world, in antiquity liberty meant different things to different people.1 Liberty as a status characterised by the absence of slavery, liberty as freedom from external as well as internal constraints to achieve one’s own chosen ends, and liberty as freedom to realise one’s own potential or capability, are just a few of the articulations of this ideal in the ancient historical contexts examined here.2
This special issue originates from two impulses: first, to broaden our understanding of the conceptual articulations of liberty in the ancient world, from beyond the Graeco-Roman world to other ancient societies to which this world was connected; and second, to investigate the potential offerings of these ancient societies to our contemporary intellectual world.
The colloquium, held in June 2015 at University College London, accordingly gathered historians of antiquity whose specialisms are geographically and temporally diverse, from the Middle Eastern societies of the second millennium BCE to the Byzantine Empire, together with political theorists and legal and political philosophers interested in conceptions of liberty. The general aim was to establish a dialogue that would shed light on rival understandings of liberty in antiquity, and on the role that these might play in current thinking about this concept. More specifically, the intent was to address and consolidate the position of the ancient world within wider scholarly debates on the notions of liberty and the connected issue of the power of the state, and to explore whether, alongside the well-known Republican conception of liberty, on whose revival in our contemporary politics much has been written, antiquity might provide us with further intellectual alternatives with which to read and analyse the world we currently inhabit.3 To address such questions, Kinch Hoekstra and Quentin Skinner were invited to comment on all the papers delivered at the colloquium, specifically with a view to considering their implications for normative contemporary conceptualisations of liberty. To reflect this commitment, this special issue ends with a revised version of their comments, delivered at the end of the colloquium during the final roundtable. These have been slightly modified to take into account the published versions of the essays; the conversational tone of the discussion has been retained, in order to preserve the open nature of a debate that is predicated upon the firm belief in the fruitful continuous dialogue between historical enquiry and political theoretical analysis.
A central concern of this special issue is, therefore, to reaffirm the importance of the ancient world in the wider field of the history of political thought. Despite some notable exceptions,4 the general trend in the scholarship on ideas about freedom in antiquity has been dominated by either decontextualised linear narratives, arranged chronologically from a putative beginning to a putative end, or by author-by-author studies of rather limited breadth.5 As a result, works concerned with modern notions of freedom have ignored the ancient articulations of this value, relegated them to a learned footnote, or, at best, used them selectively to grant ad hoc authority to the conception of this ideal being advocated. In the past twenty years or so, however, some philosophers and modern historians, most notably perhaps Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner, have turned their attention to the ancient world, and particularly to the Roman Republic, to explore and in some senses revive what they consider a distinctive trait of its ideological tradition – the notion of freedom as absence of domination or dependence upon the arbitrary will of someone else.
In relation to these scholarly trends, this investigation makes three main interventions: first, it broadens the geographical scope of the ancient history of liberty, moving away from a strictly classical, Graeco-Roman centric focus to include the Ancient Middle East by investigating ancient Syria, Israel, Iran, and Byzantium. Second, it considerably widens the chronological scope of the traditional historical investigation. Rather than focusing exclusively on classical Athens or Rome and their great thinkers, which clusters attention chronologically around the fifth to fourth centuries BCE in Greece and the first century BCE to the first century CE in Rome,6 this special issue covers a chronological range from the second millennium BCE down to the Byzantine empire. Third, and perhaps more importantly, this volume does not attempt to compose an overarching linear history of the ancient notion of liberty, reflecting the underlying conviction, following the Rortyian view of the centrality of contingency in the conceptualisation and adoption of political values,7 that such a history cannot be written. What can be written, however, is a history of ancient notions of liberty as adopted at specific times and places. Building on the foundations laid by Quentin Skinner, the work here is constructed upon a series of well-defined historical contexts, within which the notion of political liberty, broadly understood as the relation between the commonwealth and the civic members of the community,was conceptualised, re-elaborated, transmitted, or adopted in the struggle for power, or, more generally, in the administration of their mutual civic relations. The result is a study of the processes of contingent adaptation and/or constant reinterpretation to which the idea of liberty has been variously subjected in these different ancient societies.
Perhaps the most ambitious aim unifying the contributions to this special issue, then, is to investigate whether, alongside the Republican way of thinking about liberty highlighted by theorists advocating a contemporary revival of Republicanism, the ancient world can offer us other ways of conceptualising this ideal. It thereby seeks to broaden and further enrich the existing dialogue between the study of ancient history and contemporary political theory, in the hope that expanding our knowledge of the ancient world as a reservoir of potential intellectual resources could help clarify our thinking about the political world.8 The guiding assumption of such an enterprise is that history, and more specifically here the history of the ancient world, when analysed through the heuristic lenses of analytical political philosophy may have something to offer us that goes beyond the clarification or even the comprehension of historical questions concerning the ancient societies under scrutiny: it may help us address the most pressing evaluative issues of our days; in other words, it may help us understand how best to build our civic community and conduct our lives.
What follows here are, first, some reflections about the relation between ancient history and contemporary political theory and, second, an attempt at extrapolating some theoretical understandings of liberty from the historical specificities of the contexts analysed in the following contributions.
II
The understanding of the relation between the study of history and contemporary political theory highlighted above, not very new per se, is far from uncontroversial. The relationship between history and political philosophy has, of course, been fiercely debated by political philosophers as well as historians.9 For some of the former, history is needed to address the two important issues of universalism and realism. According to one recent statement of this point of view, history can assist in the attempt to strike a balance between ‘understanding political principles as timeless prescriptions, applicable and determinate in all times and all places, and understanding them instead as theoretical distillations of whatever moral culture it is that we happen to find ourselves a part of.’ It can also help mediate the utopian and the achievable, since by drawing on ‘the history of political practice, political philosophers are required to work out just how ambitious political philosophy ought to be in its prescriptions.’10
Unlike many of their early-modern and modern colleagues, however, ancient historians have not reflected at length upon the relationship of their subject to political philosophy, and the topic is indeed conspicuously absent in the most recent works on the methodology of ancient history.11 Although the reasons for this are not immediately evident, what I believe lies behind a scholarly trend, at times apparently disinclined towards methodological self-reflection, is to be found in the historical development of the discipline as a whole.
Although recent work has shown the innovative nature of studies of the ancient world in the eighteen century, highlighting the novelty of the Enlightenment contribution to the study of ancient history, it remains true that the most significant formative developments in the discipline were initiated in scholarship in Germany in the second half of the nineteen century.12
Here, within the institutional context of the universities (in contrast, for example, to the world of amateur scholarship in eighteenth-century Britain) which also provided a framework for robust and sustained scholarly self-advertisement, a new research methodology was developed that would be of paramount importance: Quellenforschung, a specific technique of philological scholarship that had risen to prominence in Germany, and spread to other parts of Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 As a form of source criticism, Quellenforschung deconstructs transmitted ancient texts and establishes a relation of dependence between them by focusing on inconsistencies and errors, and by seeking out non-preserved sources through painstaking comparative work aims to reconstruct lost texts.
The dominance of this distinctive philological methodology in ancient history has had significant effects on the discipline in its modern form. Questioning how texts have come into being led to an emphasis on questions of origins rather than of identity, which in turn generated a preoccupation with the issue of the historical reliability of the information provided by these texts. Philological source criticism of this kind thereby played an essential role not only in the (somehow, at times, arbitrary) construction of the past, but also in establishing a particular relation between past and present, now characterised by a profound hiatus. Ancient texts were no longer taken at face value. Nor, when they were seen to be too imaginative to be historically reliable, was their validity assessed according to general criteria of plausibility or to the reader’s own values.14 Instead, the process of reconstruction set in motion a process of objectification, which subtly, at times unconsciously, and always pervasively, fostered an experience of estrangement. Once the past had been objectified in this way, the categories of time or of historicity, as Hartog calls them, came to give order and meaning.15
This new method of ‘scientific’ scholarship moved beyond the traditional grand narratives, which in previous generations had been firmly rooted in the idea of historia magistra vitae and on the assumption of a shared set of values across time, providing thereby also arguments for contemporary political debates. In tandem with the development of prosopography, it came to represent the transition from Romantic to Positivist history. The reaction to Hegel’s philosophical history of the liberty of the human spirit, which incidentally also produced the school of C. O. Müller and August Böckh, gave rise to the work of later positivist historians, whose vision of the ancient world contributed to the forging...
