Carol Atack
Fellow, praelector, associate tutor and director of studies in Classics, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
Associate editor, Polis: the Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought.
Editor, Bloomsbury Ancient Politics Series, Bloomsbury Academic.
Syndic, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Currently working on two short books - Xenophon for the Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics series, Plato for a trade publisher - as well a monograph 'Temporality in Plato's Dialogues'. In press with Oxford World's Classics: Memories of Socrates: Memorabilia and Apology, a new translation by Martin Hammond with notes and introduction by Carol Atack.
2019-20: Fellow, Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC.
2016-19: Post-doctoral research assistant, 'Anachronism and Antiquity' project, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, and non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow, St Hugh's College. Lectured on Sexuality and Gender in Greece and Rome.
2015-16, University of Warwick: Senior Teaching Fellow in Greek Cultural History; I lectured on Sexuality and Gender in Antiquity, focusing on the Greek world, and also taught Greek literature and language.
2014-15: Stipendiary lecturer and acting tutor in Classics, St Hugh's College, University of Oxford. Lectured on Thucydides and the West.
Current research is focused on fourth-century BCE Greek political thought, especially temporality and change in Greek political thought. I am preparing a monograph on the temporality of Plato's dialogues. I'm also interested in Xenophon's ethical thought, and in new approaches to the history of democracy.
My first monograph, The Discourse of Kingship in Greek Political thought, develops work begun in my PhD thesis, 'Debating kingship: models of monarchy in 5th and 4th century BCE Greek political thought'. It investigates the continuing interest in the idea of monarchy in Greek political thought during the classical period in democratic Athens. I explore the use of monarchy across different literary genres, and for different argumentative and rhetorical purposes, and track changing responses to the idea of monarchy in changing political and historical contexts. Monarchy provides a privileged lens for viewing the relationship between individual and polis, and ways of calculating the balance between parts and whole of the city. Ancient critiques of monarchy as a form of rule help to show that democracy is not the only form of constitution that receives a negative evaluation from early theorists.
This builds on work begun in my 2010 MPhil dissertation, ‘Ancestral constitutions in fourth-century BCE Athenian political argument: genre and re-invention’, which examined the role of ‘ancestral constitution’ arguments in fourth century BCE Athenian responses to democracy.
My broader interests lie in ancient political philosophy, the history of political thought (particularly the reception of ancient political thought within 20th century and contemporary political thought), the history of democracy, historiography and the philosophy of history.
Supervisors: Paul Cartledge and Malcolm Schofield
Address: Newnham College
Cambridge
CB3 9DF
Associate editor, Polis: the Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought.
Editor, Bloomsbury Ancient Politics Series, Bloomsbury Academic.
Syndic, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Currently working on two short books - Xenophon for the Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics series, Plato for a trade publisher - as well a monograph 'Temporality in Plato's Dialogues'. In press with Oxford World's Classics: Memories of Socrates: Memorabilia and Apology, a new translation by Martin Hammond with notes and introduction by Carol Atack.
2019-20: Fellow, Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC.
2016-19: Post-doctoral research assistant, 'Anachronism and Antiquity' project, Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, and non-stipendiary Junior Research Fellow, St Hugh's College. Lectured on Sexuality and Gender in Greece and Rome.
2015-16, University of Warwick: Senior Teaching Fellow in Greek Cultural History; I lectured on Sexuality and Gender in Antiquity, focusing on the Greek world, and also taught Greek literature and language.
2014-15: Stipendiary lecturer and acting tutor in Classics, St Hugh's College, University of Oxford. Lectured on Thucydides and the West.
Current research is focused on fourth-century BCE Greek political thought, especially temporality and change in Greek political thought. I am preparing a monograph on the temporality of Plato's dialogues. I'm also interested in Xenophon's ethical thought, and in new approaches to the history of democracy.
My first monograph, The Discourse of Kingship in Greek Political thought, develops work begun in my PhD thesis, 'Debating kingship: models of monarchy in 5th and 4th century BCE Greek political thought'. It investigates the continuing interest in the idea of monarchy in Greek political thought during the classical period in democratic Athens. I explore the use of monarchy across different literary genres, and for different argumentative and rhetorical purposes, and track changing responses to the idea of monarchy in changing political and historical contexts. Monarchy provides a privileged lens for viewing the relationship between individual and polis, and ways of calculating the balance between parts and whole of the city. Ancient critiques of monarchy as a form of rule help to show that democracy is not the only form of constitution that receives a negative evaluation from early theorists.
This builds on work begun in my 2010 MPhil dissertation, ‘Ancestral constitutions in fourth-century BCE Athenian political argument: genre and re-invention’, which examined the role of ‘ancestral constitution’ arguments in fourth century BCE Athenian responses to democracy.
My broader interests lie in ancient political philosophy, the history of political thought (particularly the reception of ancient political thought within 20th century and contemporary political thought), the history of democracy, historiography and the philosophy of history.
Supervisors: Paul Cartledge and Malcolm Schofield
Address: Newnham College
Cambridge
CB3 9DF
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Books by Carol Atack
'Who would you say knows himself?'
In 399 BCE Socrates was tried in Athens on charges of irreligion and corruption of the young, convicted, and sentenced to death. Like Plato, an almost exact contemporary, in his youth Xenophon (c. 430-c. 354 BCE) was one of the circle of mainly upper-class young Athenians attracted to Socrates' teaching. His Memorabilia is both a passionate defence of Socrates against those charges, and a kaleidoscopic picture of the man he knew, painted in a series of mini-dialogues and shorter vignettes, with a varied and deftly characterized cast—entitled and ambitious young men, atheists and hedonists, artists and artisans, Socrates' own stroppy teenage son Lamprocles, the glamorous courtesan Theodote. Topics given Socrates' characteristic questioning treatment include education, law, justice, government, political and military leadership, democracy and tyranny, friendship, care of the body and the soul, and concepts of the divine. Xenophon sees Socrates as above all a supreme moral educator, coaxing and challenging his associates to make themselves better people, not least by the example of how he lived his own life. Self-knowledge, leading to a reasoned self-control, was for Socrates the essential first step on the path to virtue, and some found it uncomfortable. The Apology is a moving account of Socrates' behaviour and bearing in his last days, immediately before, during, and after his trial.
but could still be found in the participatory structures of local social institutions. This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of ancient societies throughout Antiquity. It examines the experiences of those living in democratic communities and considers how ancient practices of democracy differ from our own. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the
principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the Polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in Antiquity add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College and Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge.
Carol Atack is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
Cultural History of Democracy editor: Eugenio Biagini
This central hypothesis is tested by an examination of attitudes to temporal errors in ancient literary texts and chronological writings and by analysing notions of anachronistic survival and multitemporality. Rather than seeing a sense of anachronism as something that separates modernity from antiquity, the book suggests that in both ancient writings and their modern receptions chronological rupture can be used as a way of creating a dialogue between past and present. With a selection of case-studies and theoretical discussions presented in a manner suitable for scholars and students both of classical antiquity and of modern history, anthropology, and visual culture, the book's ambition is to offer a new conceptual map of antiquity through the notion of anachronism.
It explores the notion of kingship offered by historians such as Herodotus, as well as dramatists writing for the Athenian stage, paying particular attention to dramatic depictions of the unique capabilities of Theseus in uniting the city in the figure of the ‘democratic king’. It also discusses kingship in Greek philosophy: the Socratics’ identification of an ‘art of kingship’, and Xenophon and Isocrates’ model of ‘virtue monarchy’. In turn, these allow a rereading of explorations of kingship and excellence in Plato’s later political thought, seen as a critique of these models, and also in Aristotle’s account of total kingship or pambasileia, treated here as a counterfactual device developed to explore the epistemic benefits of democracy.
This book offers a fascinating insight into the institution of monarchy in classical Greek thought and society, both for those working on Greek philosophy and politics, and also for students of the history of political thought.
Papers by Carol Atack
The analogy between the divine order of the kosmos and the human order of the polis was well established in Greek thought, and the basis of a persistent but evolving political cosmology that attempted to link human and divine. The analogy is well attested in literary evidence, although the use of kosmos-derived terms in archaic political structures from several Greek cities in some cases pre-dates the repurposing of kosmos language by early philosophers. These developments in the scope of kosmos language meant that this analogy underwent substantial change in the classical period, as philosophical ideas of nature and the divine challenged traditional formulations of one side of the analogy, and the development of the polis, and particularly radical Athenian democracy, challenged the other. Although the analogy is one that is fundamental to Greek thought, as Geoffrey Lloyd has shown, its origins lie much more firmly in the human end of the analogy, in the arrangement of forces by military leaders and in the anthropomorphism by which Greek gods were seen in terms of human leadership. One established view of the polis-kosmos analogy in Presocratic thought is that its use of the language of human justice, with the forces of the kosmos conceptualised in terms of retribution and repayment, and with an emphasis on equality between such forces, imbued it with a democratic tinge. For example, Anaximander (DK 12 A9-11) in early testimony for this new usage of kosmos language, describes the heavens and the world(s) within them as subject to such forces. 5 But perhaps some caution should be exercised in assimilating Presocratic cosmology to the politics of democratic Athens, rather than to broader models of political change operating in a world with multiple possibilities for types of rule, and multiple models of justice. A broader examination of the use of kosmos language in political contexts, both in literary texts and in documentary sources, shows that the analogy could be applied in many differing forms and in different political contexts, but had a strong association with archaic and aristocratic world-views. This chapter will therefore show that the kosmos-polis analogy was contested, with a more democratic version briefly visible in the fifth-century BCE eventually losing out to a less democratic version, more evident in both fourth-century texts and in political nomenclature that persisted into the Hellenistic era. I will argue that, as the polis became less aristocratic, alternative formulations of the analogy, such as those found in Aristophanes' comedies, repositioned it in a democratic context. But the relationship of the comedic, democratic version to philosophical investigations into cosmology and cosmogony is not straightforward.
his account of kingship to his thought on citizenship and distributive justice
within the polis.
achieve the good life through imitating virtuous monarchs.
However, I shall argue that the tragedians manipulate Athenian foundation myths to present the city’s mythical monarchs, Theseus and Erechtheus, as the focus and origin of political power, and to question the democracy’s claim to political legitimacy. The mythical king is reconfigured to query the legitimacy of the Athenian constitution and the construction of Athenian ideology.
The role of the good king in the Athenian political imaginary seems to be to represent and embody the political unity of Athens, and the city’s orderly relationship with the gods and cosmic order. Their narratives show the difficulties in maintaining this order, specifically in handling crises such as supplication by outsiders whose religious or political status is problematic; good kingship is demonstrated by making the correct responses to military, political and religious challenges to the order and unity of the city, such as the arrival of Oedipus, the Heracleidae, and the Argives. Should Euripides’ and Sophocles’ manipulations of myths be read as authorising the transfer to democracy, or undermining its claims to power?
Tragedy clearly rejects the ‘bad’ form of single-person rule, tyranny; the audience at the City Dionysia could assess potentially tyrannical rulers (such as Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone and other Theban plays) against the recognised (though contested) category of tyrant.
In contrast, the tragedians create the category of good kingship through linking monarchy to Athenian democratic political values, a sophisticated manipulation of the political imaginary. As the fifth century BCE reaches a close, and Athenian democracy falters, the values exhibited by the good king begin to match those idealised by the struggling city (for example in the public funeral speeches) as democracy’s opponents gain ascendance in Athenian political debate.
'Who would you say knows himself?'
In 399 BCE Socrates was tried in Athens on charges of irreligion and corruption of the young, convicted, and sentenced to death. Like Plato, an almost exact contemporary, in his youth Xenophon (c. 430-c. 354 BCE) was one of the circle of mainly upper-class young Athenians attracted to Socrates' teaching. His Memorabilia is both a passionate defence of Socrates against those charges, and a kaleidoscopic picture of the man he knew, painted in a series of mini-dialogues and shorter vignettes, with a varied and deftly characterized cast—entitled and ambitious young men, atheists and hedonists, artists and artisans, Socrates' own stroppy teenage son Lamprocles, the glamorous courtesan Theodote. Topics given Socrates' characteristic questioning treatment include education, law, justice, government, political and military leadership, democracy and tyranny, friendship, care of the body and the soul, and concepts of the divine. Xenophon sees Socrates as above all a supreme moral educator, coaxing and challenging his associates to make themselves better people, not least by the example of how he lived his own life. Self-knowledge, leading to a reasoned self-control, was for Socrates the essential first step on the path to virtue, and some found it uncomfortable. The Apology is a moving account of Socrates' behaviour and bearing in his last days, immediately before, during, and after his trial.
but could still be found in the participatory structures of local social institutions. This volume surveys democracy broadly as a cultural phenomenon operating in different ways across a very wide range of ancient societies throughout Antiquity. It examines the experiences of those living in democratic communities and considers how ancient practices of democracy differ from our own. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: sovereignty; liberty and the rule of law; the “common good”; economic and social democracy; religion and the
principles of political obligation; citizenship and gender; ethnicity, race, and nationalism; democratic crises, revolutions and civil resistance; international relations; and beyond the Polis. These ten different approaches to democracy in Antiquity add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College and Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture, University of Cambridge.
Carol Atack is a Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
Cultural History of Democracy editor: Eugenio Biagini
This central hypothesis is tested by an examination of attitudes to temporal errors in ancient literary texts and chronological writings and by analysing notions of anachronistic survival and multitemporality. Rather than seeing a sense of anachronism as something that separates modernity from antiquity, the book suggests that in both ancient writings and their modern receptions chronological rupture can be used as a way of creating a dialogue between past and present. With a selection of case-studies and theoretical discussions presented in a manner suitable for scholars and students both of classical antiquity and of modern history, anthropology, and visual culture, the book's ambition is to offer a new conceptual map of antiquity through the notion of anachronism.
It explores the notion of kingship offered by historians such as Herodotus, as well as dramatists writing for the Athenian stage, paying particular attention to dramatic depictions of the unique capabilities of Theseus in uniting the city in the figure of the ‘democratic king’. It also discusses kingship in Greek philosophy: the Socratics’ identification of an ‘art of kingship’, and Xenophon and Isocrates’ model of ‘virtue monarchy’. In turn, these allow a rereading of explorations of kingship and excellence in Plato’s later political thought, seen as a critique of these models, and also in Aristotle’s account of total kingship or pambasileia, treated here as a counterfactual device developed to explore the epistemic benefits of democracy.
This book offers a fascinating insight into the institution of monarchy in classical Greek thought and society, both for those working on Greek philosophy and politics, and also for students of the history of political thought.
The analogy between the divine order of the kosmos and the human order of the polis was well established in Greek thought, and the basis of a persistent but evolving political cosmology that attempted to link human and divine. The analogy is well attested in literary evidence, although the use of kosmos-derived terms in archaic political structures from several Greek cities in some cases pre-dates the repurposing of kosmos language by early philosophers. These developments in the scope of kosmos language meant that this analogy underwent substantial change in the classical period, as philosophical ideas of nature and the divine challenged traditional formulations of one side of the analogy, and the development of the polis, and particularly radical Athenian democracy, challenged the other. Although the analogy is one that is fundamental to Greek thought, as Geoffrey Lloyd has shown, its origins lie much more firmly in the human end of the analogy, in the arrangement of forces by military leaders and in the anthropomorphism by which Greek gods were seen in terms of human leadership. One established view of the polis-kosmos analogy in Presocratic thought is that its use of the language of human justice, with the forces of the kosmos conceptualised in terms of retribution and repayment, and with an emphasis on equality between such forces, imbued it with a democratic tinge. For example, Anaximander (DK 12 A9-11) in early testimony for this new usage of kosmos language, describes the heavens and the world(s) within them as subject to such forces. 5 But perhaps some caution should be exercised in assimilating Presocratic cosmology to the politics of democratic Athens, rather than to broader models of political change operating in a world with multiple possibilities for types of rule, and multiple models of justice. A broader examination of the use of kosmos language in political contexts, both in literary texts and in documentary sources, shows that the analogy could be applied in many differing forms and in different political contexts, but had a strong association with archaic and aristocratic world-views. This chapter will therefore show that the kosmos-polis analogy was contested, with a more democratic version briefly visible in the fifth-century BCE eventually losing out to a less democratic version, more evident in both fourth-century texts and in political nomenclature that persisted into the Hellenistic era. I will argue that, as the polis became less aristocratic, alternative formulations of the analogy, such as those found in Aristophanes' comedies, repositioned it in a democratic context. But the relationship of the comedic, democratic version to philosophical investigations into cosmology and cosmogony is not straightforward.
his account of kingship to his thought on citizenship and distributive justice
within the polis.
achieve the good life through imitating virtuous monarchs.
However, I shall argue that the tragedians manipulate Athenian foundation myths to present the city’s mythical monarchs, Theseus and Erechtheus, as the focus and origin of political power, and to question the democracy’s claim to political legitimacy. The mythical king is reconfigured to query the legitimacy of the Athenian constitution and the construction of Athenian ideology.
The role of the good king in the Athenian political imaginary seems to be to represent and embody the political unity of Athens, and the city’s orderly relationship with the gods and cosmic order. Their narratives show the difficulties in maintaining this order, specifically in handling crises such as supplication by outsiders whose religious or political status is problematic; good kingship is demonstrated by making the correct responses to military, political and religious challenges to the order and unity of the city, such as the arrival of Oedipus, the Heracleidae, and the Argives. Should Euripides’ and Sophocles’ manipulations of myths be read as authorising the transfer to democracy, or undermining its claims to power?
Tragedy clearly rejects the ‘bad’ form of single-person rule, tyranny; the audience at the City Dionysia could assess potentially tyrannical rulers (such as Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone and other Theban plays) against the recognised (though contested) category of tyrant.
In contrast, the tragedians create the category of good kingship through linking monarchy to Athenian democratic political values, a sophisticated manipulation of the political imaginary. As the fifth century BCE reaches a close, and Athenian democracy falters, the values exhibited by the good king begin to match those idealised by the struggling city (for example in the public funeral speeches) as democracy’s opponents gain ascendance in Athenian political debate.
(Final manuscript available via hcommons.org - see link)
This opens up the problematic distinction between history and fiction, with these authorless texts where one can’t easily appeal to authorial intention, an important aspect of Hellenistic historiography. There’s also the complicated relationship between autobiography, where a first person narrator examines the past, and history. Is there a tension or a collapse between the letters’ claimed status as historical documents and as historical narratives? Does the historical argument within the letters complicate or play with this?
First I’d like to consider the relationship between historiography and letters, and air some methodological and theoretical worries. Then I shall look at three letters, Isocrates 1 To Dionysius, the letter of Speusippus to Philip and Plato's Seventh Letter, to consider how the construction of identity works as political argument, how historical argument is incorporated in the narrative, and how historiographical themes shape the narrative.