Lecture One: Office and Anarchy

This lecture introduces the importance of political office in the grammar of Greek constitutional thought, by exploring historical moments suggesting that the Athenians at least had an implicitly normative conception of political office. The most important of these episodes is in the aftermath of the rule of the Thirty in 404/03, when some texts record the archon under the Thirty whose name would normally be used to date the festival year as Pythodorus, but others record this as a year of anarchia, in which no (valid) archon had served.

The Carlyle Lectures are a lecture series co-sponsored by the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Faculty of History.