Mitchell, L: Heroic Rulers of Archaic and Classical Greece

Introduction Chapter One: Basileia and tyrannis: exploding myth Chapter Two: Arete and the right to rule Chapter Three: Ruling Families Chapter Four: Rulers in the polis Chapter Five: Epilogue: Athens, ruling and arete Bibliography Index

Lynette Mitchell is Professor of Greek History and Politics at the University of Exeter, UK. Her books include Greeks Bearing Gifts (1997) and Panhellenism and the Barbarian in Archaic and Classical Greece (2007).

In this crisply written and pleasingly accessible study, Professor Lynette Mitchell has caught a rich haul of personal and charismatic rulers of Greek states and peoples from Archaic to Hellenistic times. She detects a common ideological basis for their diverse regimes in claims to heroic heritage and values, and argues persuasively that monarchical but not absolutist modes of rule remained central to Greek political experience from Homer's Agamemnon to Aristotle's Alexander and beyond. -- Paul Cartledge is the A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek culture, Cambridge University, UK In our fascination with the Greeks as inventors of republican and democratic government, we tend to forget that many Greek cities and states were ruled by monarchs for much of the time. Lynette Mitchell's brisk and confident survey shows that a wide variety of rulers from archaic tyrants to Macedonian and Molossian kings represents variations of a 'charismatic', family-based form of monarchical leadership that was characteristic of the archaic and classical Greek world and arose out of the same climate of 'competitive egalitarianism' that also gave rise to republics. This is a refreshing and important new perspective on Greek political history. -- Hans van Wees, Grote Professor of Ancient History, University College London, UK An impressive and groundbreaking treatment of the topic: Lynette Mitchell has undertaken a bold attempt to treat much-studied issues from a fresh perspective. -- Dr. Sian Lewis, University of St. Andrews, UK