Roman history

Abstract

made positive claims to certainty for so many points which are not certain. Barry S. Strauss has written a study of *Athens after the Peloponnesian War. He begins with an examination of the nature of Athenian politics and society after the Peloponnesian War, and then proceeds to apply the results to the history of the period down to the Peace of Antalcidas. Faction, as defined by certain social anthropologists, is Strauss's preferred term for a political group, but his approach is a sensitive one, allowing that politicians might be led to cooperate with one another by various considerations, including even agreement on a question of policy. He finds less unity in Athens in the early fourth century than has often been found: opposition between rich and poor, and between oligarchs and democrats, did exist; but the Peloponnesian War had reduced both the numbers and the importance of the poor (Strauss argues that casualties fell disproportionately on the thetes) and prevented them from taking revenge on rich oligarchs, and all classes wanted to see a revival of the Athenian empire. Last and most substantial, Martin Ostwald's ** From Popular Sovereignty to the Rule of Law is a sequel to his Nomos and the Beginnings of the Athenian Democracy. It is a work of immense but not oppressive learning, which studies the development of both political institutions and political attitudes in fifth-century Athens. Ostwald argues a thesis (though the reader may lose sight of this in the course of some of the longer discussions): that during the century the claims of nomos (enacted law) were extended, challenged, and finally upheld, so that by the beginning of the fourth century what mattered most to the Athenians was not the sovereignty of the demos but the rule of law. On the institutional side there are detailed discussions of Ephialtes' reform of the Areopagus and of the oligarchic revolutions at the end of the fifth century; on the intellectual side Ostwald studies the advance of state control into the field of religion towards the middle of the century, and detects in the second half of the century an 'establishment mentality', excessively reluctant to change the nomoi, among the democrats, while the sophists championing the cause of physis (nature) were encouraging attacks on the nomoi. Events at the end of the century showed what could happen if men's physis was not restrained by nomoi, and the Athenians entered the fourth century with a new code of nomoi. P. J. RHODES