Perhaps more than any other dialogue, Plato's Laws demands a reading that is at once historical and philosophical. This text's conception of the ‘rule of law’ is best understood in its contemporary socio-political context; its philosophical discussion of this topic, in fact, can be firmly located in the political ideologies and institutions of fourth-century Greece. In this paper, I want to focus on the written lawcode created in the Laws in the context of the Athenian conception and practice of rule (...) by written law. How are the Athenian laws authorized, disseminated, and implemented, and how does Plato's lawcode reflect and/or depart from this model? What is the status of the ‘text’ of each lawcode? How—and how well—do the citizens know the law? When and by whom can the lawcode be altered? Recent work on literacy and on rule by written law in fourth-century Athens invites a serious reconsideration of Plato's lawcode and the polity it is designed for. Certainly Plato's Laws is grounded in a serious meditation on Athenian legislative practices. But Plato adds a novel ingredient to his legislation—the ‘Egyptian’ practice of ‘doing things by the book’ exemplified by the institution of laws which compel doctors to treat patients in strict accordance with venerable and, indeed, sacred medical texts. As I will argue, the ‘Egyptian’ medical and textual practices offer a model for the rule of law quite different from that found in Athens. (shrink)

Some business schools have come under considerable criticism for what observers see as their complicit involvement in the corporate scandals and financial crises of the last 15 years. Much of the discussion about changes that schools might undertake has been focused on curriculum issues. However, revisiting the curriculum does not get at the root cause of the problem. Instead, it might create a new challenge: the risk of decoupling the discussion of the curriculum from broader issues of institutional purpose. In (...) this article, we argue that the most pressing need facing business schools is not to teach new courses to be responsive to social demands and stay relevant. Instead, it is to revisit their basic mission—the principles and beliefs on which they were founded—and then to re-evaluate their curriculum design choices in this light. We contrast the Spartan and Athenian educational paradigms as a way of shedding light on the nature of a coherent response. (shrink)

According to several fourth-century Athenian sources, the Spartans were a boorish and uneducated people, who were either hostile toward the written word or simply illiterate. Building upon such Athenian claims of Spartan illiteracy, modern scholars have repeatedly portrayed Sparta as a backward state whose supposedly secretive and reactionary oligarchic political system led to an extremely low level of literacy on the part of the common Spartiate. This article reassesses both ancient and modern constructions of Spartan illiteracy and examines the ideological (...) underpinnings of Athenian attacks on the ostensibly unlettered Lacedaemonians. Beginning with a close analysis of the available archaeological and literary evidence on Spartan public applications of literacy, it argues that the written word played a central role in the operation of the Spartan state, which utilized a variety of documents and required routine acts of literacy on the part of Spartiate commanders and ocials. Both the broad eligibility for the ephorate and the Lacedaemonians' chronic oliganthropia demonstrate that not all of the important public functionaries whose duties customarily involved reading and writing were members of the Spartan elite. The fact that Spartan office-holders acquired their literacy skills from a compulsory and comprehensive system of public education, which promoted the creation of a collective identity, further argues in favor of a literacy that was more broadly based than previous scholars have concluded. The article then accounts for these representations of Spartan illiteracy by locating them in the context of the changing relationship between orality and literacy in fifth- and fourth-century Athens. It argues that as the written word played an increasingly important role in Athenian democratic practice and ideology, it began to performtwo interconnected functions: as a signicant component in Athenian self-denition and as a key indicator of cultural and political dierence between Athens and its Peloponnesian enemies. (shrink)

The neologism ‘sexist’ has gained entry to an Oxford Dictionary, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, third edition , where it is defined as ‘derisive of the female sex and expressive of masculine superiority’. Thus ‘sexpot’ and ‘sex kitten’, which are still defined in exclusively feminine terms in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary , have finally met their lexicographical match. This point about current English usage has of course a serious, and general, application. For language reflects, (...) when it does not direct, prevailing social conceptions. Thus it is not accidental that there is no masculine counterpart to the word ‘feminism’. ‘Male chauvinism’, the nearest we have come to coining one, is more emotive than descriptive and so involves ambiguity; while ‘sexism’, even when it is given an exclusively masculine connotation, is still, formally, sexually neutral. ‘Feminism’, by contrast, unequivocally denotes the striving to raise women to an equality of rights and status with men. It has been suggested, it is true, that there were inchoate feminist movements or tendencies in the ancient Greek world, for example in the Classical Athens of Aristophanes and Plato . But feminism in the modern sense did not really emerge before the eighteenth century; and in Britain, for instance, it was only with the passage in 1975 of the Employment Protection, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that women raised themselves on to an all but equal footing with their male fellows — at any rate in the technical, juridical sense. (shrink)

The neologism ‘sexist’ has gained entry to an Oxford Dictionary, The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, third edition, where it is defined as ‘derisive of the female sex and expressive of masculine superiority’. Thus ‘sexpot’ and ‘sex kitten’, which are still defined in exclusively feminine terms in the fifth edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary, have finally met their lexicographical match. This point about current English usage has of course a serious, and general, application. For language reflects, when it (...) does not direct, prevailing social conceptions. Thus it is not accidental that there is no masculine counterpart to the word ‘feminism’. ‘Male chauvinism’, the nearest we have come to coining one, is more emotive than descriptive and so involves ambiguity; while ‘sexism’, even when it is given an exclusively masculine connotation, is still, formally, sexually neutral. ‘Feminism’, by contrast, unequivocally denotes the striving to raise women to an equality of rights and status with men. It has been suggested, it is true, that there were inchoate feminist movements or tendencies in the ancient Greek world, for example in the Classical Athens of Aristophanes and Plato. But feminism in the modern sense did not really emerge before the eighteenth century; and in Britain, for instance, it was only with the passage in 1975 of the Employment Protection, Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts that women raised themselves on to an all but equal footing with their male fellows — at any rate in the technical, juridical sense. (shrink)