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Greg Anderson, Matthew Simonton. Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1713–1714, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy214
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Extract
Elite-controlled forms of politeia (“way of life”) were hardly uncommon in Greek experience during the classical era (480–320 b.c.). Some prevailed for many years in major poleis like Corinth and Thebes. Yet Matthew Simonton’s Classical Greek Oligarchy is just the third monograph-length study of oligarchia (“rule by the few”) to appear in English since the 1890s. Why might this be? All attempts to produce modern accounts of Greek oligarchia must overcome two formidable problems.
First, there is a complex problem of definition. As Simonton acknowledges, there was no precise equivalent in Greek of our word “oligarch” (3 n. 8). Moreover, since the term oligarchia retained a strongly pejorative coloring, “no Greek oligarchy ever advertises itself publicly as such” (59). The preferred self-descriptions were rather terms like eunomia (“good order”) and even aristokratia (“rule of the best”). In Greek experience, in other words, oligarchia was not a single, self-evident, mind-independent phenomenon. It existed ultimately in the eye of beholder. As a result, the category could be applied to almost any form of politeia that lay somewhere on the very broad spectrum between fully inclusive Athenian-style demokratia and one-man tyrannis. At one end of this spectrum were politeiai, like that of Corinth, which reserved certain rule-making functions for the “wealthy” minority (however defined) while still expecting the “poor” majority to make at least a modest contribution to the management of the polis. At the other were those that vested an almost unfettered authority in very small bodies of men, who ruled poleis largely for themselves, like the notoriously violent Spartan-backed regime of “the Thirty,” which controlled Athens for a brief period (404–403 b.c.) after the Peloponnesian War. Second, even if one’s working definition of oligarchia were somehow to encompass the term’s essential elasticity and multiplicity, one must still confront a problem of evidence. Alongside the vast array of testimony that survives for classical Athenian demokratia, the direct evidence we possess for elite-controlled politeiai is relatively slim. How then does Simonton attempt to resolve these two serious issues in his “political history” of “classical Greek oligarchy”?
