Civic Obligation and Individual Liberty in Ancient Athens (Oxford Classical Monographs)

Peter Liddel offers a fresh approach to the old problem of the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens. He draws extensively on oratorical and epigraphical evidence from the late fourth century BC to analyse the ways in which ideas about liberty were reconciled with ideas about obligation, and examines how this reconciliation was negotiated, performed, and presented in the Athenian law-courts, assembly, and through the inscriptional mode of publication. Using modern political theory as a springboard, Liddel argues that the ancient Athenians held liberty to consist of the substantial obligations (political, financial, and military) of citizenship. By developing a notion of civic obligation, this book attempts to re-interpret the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens. Its primary concern is to elucidate how the considerable obligations of the citizen to the city-state (polis) and community (known here as civic obligations) were reconciled with ideas about individual liberty, and how this reconciliation was negotiated, performed, and presented in the oratory of the Athenian law-courts, assembly, and through the publication of inscriptions. This work assesses the extent to which Rawls' model of liberty, consisting of his advocacy of renewed conventional modes of justice and liberty, might be used to elucidate the kind of liberty that existed in the ancient Greek city. The historical context is late fourth-century Athens, during which period it is possible to observe a growing concern, expressed in the oratorical and epigraphical sources, for the performance by citizens of obligations, epitomized in the notion of good citizenship which emerges in Lycurgus' speech Against Leocrates. The core of the work analyses the ways in which the civic obligations were negotiated in oratorical and epigraphical modes of expression, examines comprehensively the substance of those obligations, and the ways in which their virtuous performance was recorded and used as a tool of self-promotion. The final chapter measures the survey of Athens with that gleaned from the theory of Rawls: notwithstanding certain historical peculiarities, it is suggested that the model may be a useful one for thinking about city-states and other organizations beyond fourth-century Athens "Peter Liddel gives a new angle to the question of the nature of individual liberty in ancient Athens by examining the obligations of the citizen. His primary concern is to elucidate how the considerable obligations of the citizen to the city and to the society that surrounded him (known here as civic obligations) were reconciled with ideas about individual liberty, and how this reconciliation was negotiated, performed, and presented in the Athenian law-courts, assembly, and through the inscriptional mode of publication. Liddel assesses the extent to which the Rawlsian model of liberty might be used to elucidate the kind of liberty that existed in the ancient Greek city."--BOOK JACKET.