论文部分内容阅读
In the formative stages of their culture, from the eighth into the sixth century BCE, the Greeks interacted intensely with cultures descended from the great Near Eastern civilizations (from Anatolia to Egypt) and absorbed an immense amount of outside impulses in all spheres of culture, including the intellectual.Strangely, with few partial exceptions, nobody has seriously investigated whether such influences affected the emergence of Greek political thought as well.There is no a priori reason to think that this was not the case, and my larger project aims to find out whether, to what extent, and how it was.This paper will focus specifically on reflections on politics and government.It will briefly summarize the early Greek evidence for such reflections in Homers and Hesiods epics and the political conceptions underlying early laws as well as the reforms enacted in the late seventh and early sixth century in Sparta and Athens.The paper will then offer some explanations for the emergence of such reflections in their Greek context and suggest some answers to the question of whether there exists evidence for comparable ancient Near Eastern thought that might have influenced Greek thought.In a final and very tentative section, the paper will address the potential for comparison with the emergence of political thinking in early China.