Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 146-149 [Access article in PDF] Ryan K. Balot. Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xii + 291 pp. Cloth, $39.50. This study, which originated as a Princeton doctoral dissertation, explores how greed and injustice figure in selected texts from Homer to Aristotle and how these two concepts are woven into Athenian history, especially in the oligarchic episodes of the late fifth century B.C. Balot breaks new ground in exploring how a range of authors employs the concepts of greed and injustice to analyze relations within the polis and between city-states. The result is a stimulating account of the centrality and malleability of these ideas in Hellenic and, more particularly, Athenian thinking. While this study passes over many Athenian texts that might illuminate its topic and contributes more to intellectual history than to political or social history, it provides insights into the texts on which it focuses.In his introductory chapter, Balot states that "Greed is central to ancient Athenian history, ideology, and political thought. It motivated political action and occupied the attention of contemporary analysts of civic conflict and imperialism" (1). His goal, he says, is "to explain how the social practices of greed gave rise to a sophisticated discourse and how, in turn, that discourse shaped and stimulated cultural practices, self-representations, and political behavior in a particularly important period of Athenian history" (5)—i.e., the oligarchic revolutions of 411 and 404 B.C. Balot observes that in a Hellenic context, "greed" (which is sometimes, but not always, designated by the term pleonexia) is a concept normally used to criticize others either from a societal perspective, because a greedy agent violates canons of fair distribution, or from an ethical perspective, because the greedy individual has an "impoverished conception of what it means to live as a human being" (1); in this study, he is interested primarily in the societal perspective. He emphasizes that we should be attuned to greed as "one of the most powerful evaluative tools in the arsenal of Athenian rhetoric" (7), and that behind the archaic and classical discourse on greed lies social conflict over what constitutes fair distribution within society. Having sketched out some of the features of "greed" in a Hellenic setting, Balot surveys perspectives on greed from Rome to the Middle Ages and modern America. While this provides a broader context for his study, the brevity of the treatment does not allow much depth of analysis.Balot begins his discussion of ancient texts in chapter 2, "Greed in Aristotle's Political Thought." His rationale for starting with Aristotle, who comes at the end [End Page 146] of the tradition with which he is concerned, is that "Aristotle's analysis provides a powerful theoretical model that can then be tested and played off against earlier discussions of and cultural practices deriving from greed" (22-23). Balot discusses in detail Aristotle's psychological and social analyses of greed in his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, with special attention to his difficulties in reconciling these different perspectives on greed. There is perhaps too much joy in Aristotle for Aristotle's sake here (Balot acknowledges in his introduction that this chapter contains the most technical discussion in the book), and what emerges is not so much a theoretical model as a series of questions and problems raised by Aristotle's analyses. Given the difficulty of the material and the specifically Aristotelian context in which it must be set, it might have been better to treat it at the end of the book as a retrospect on the earlier tradition.In chapter 3, "Solonian Athens and the Archaic Roots of Greed," Balot first discusses how Homer and Hesiod explore individual acquisitiveness and the threat that it poses to distributive justice within a community. He nicely takes Homer's portrayal of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles in the Iliad as paradigmatic for later discussions of greed, both in its treatment of individual greed as a social problem and in Achilles' use of the "rhetoric of greed" against...