Welcome to Classical Politics Online, the website dedicated to a simple, panoptic exposition of the political theory of the ancient Greeks and Romans which, from the founding of Sparta by Lycurgus to the constitution of Rome in the time of Cicero, has been the groundwork of all political theory, finding echoes everywhere from the Constitution of the United States, which was based on that of Rome; to Marx, whose Communist Manifesto is an exposition of that statement of Plato's in Republic:
Every polis is really two: a city of the rich, and a city of the poor - and anyone who can promise the one to the other will never lack for allies.
Does this not precisely describe the eternal war between the proletariat and the bourgoisie,
upon which the Communist Manifesto is predicated? Is the Communist Manifesto not, in fact, a promise to deliver the bourgois to the proletariat, that is, the rich to the poor
?
I feel it is important to have a condensed and learnable exposition of the political theory of the ancients, as it is an elegant, reasonable and complete framework for the discussion of politics - modern as well as ancient.
There are great advantages in being able to discern the classes that are necessay to society, and to enumerate the kinds of constitution that might be adopted by a State, and what kinds of people adopt what kinds of Constitution: not only to the statesman, to whom the advantages of such knowledge are obvious, but to the common man as well. This is most especially true in modern democracies such as the United States of America, where political sophistication on the part of the populace is an absolute necessity.
However, the most important thing for the political rhetorician — the politician as such — to know, are the kinds of constitutions a state can have, the class of men each constitution tends to favor, and he particular modes of happiness sought by those men. For the highest kind of political rhetoric consists of allegories drawn from the various kinds of constitutions. For instance, it is evidentally of great advantage to the political speaker in a democracy to be able to accuse a measure of being oligarchic or tyrannical, but to describe his own measures as "increasing liberty" or tending to ease the persuit of pleasure, Liberty and Pleasure being the defining kind of happiness persued by partizans of Democracy.