The idea of a republic has been very tied up from the beginning with the idea of loss, even when linked with the hope for a new beginning. The first great political text of republican political theory may be the Funeral Oration of Pericles as reported (invented?) by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War, where the defence of the Athenian form of self-government as tolerant and cultured, as well as heroic in war, is articulated in a speech of mourning. It is the loss of the lives of the citizen soldiers of Athens that provides an opportunity for putting foward the general greatness of Athens. So a rather immediate sense of loss is the moment for an imformal pit of republican theory. The speech itself is a model for later commentary on republics and democracy, including Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, which echoes some phrases from Thucydides and is again a celebration of a republic driven in its rhetoric of passion but the immediacy of loss.
The model that Pericles, Thucydides, and other writers of Classical Greece, have for courage in war as a civic virtue, does not come from a republic though. It comes from the Homeric epics of the Mycenaean monarchs at war, kings and heroes from societies where those who rule states and command armies are close to the gods, and those commanded are from some lower order of life. Nevertheless Homer permeates the culture of classical Greece. Pottery surviving from Athens of that era suggests a fascination with the martial courage of Achilles, Ajax, and Odysseus, though many of Odysseus' fights are wit mythical dangers rather than war in the most organised and politically defined sense. The broader nature of Odysseus' struggles maybe give us an idea of a culture in which war seems to be part of a constant struggle with divine and natural dangers including fate and chance, along with the inevitability of death.
Aristotle's accounts of courage as a virtue are focused on martial courage drawing both on Homeric models and the wars of the Greek republics in his own time. As Aristotle criticises the excess of recklessness, that is of suicidal courage in battle with serves no purpose in the defeat of the enemy, he may be distancing himself to some degree from the Achilles type of Homeric hero who welcomes an early death as the price of glory as a warrior. That fits in with a general spirit of rationalising the Homeric aspects of Greek culture, which we can also see in Plato. We might wander how Aristotle would define the courage of the Spartan three hundred, or the recklessness of his own student Alexander in battles, always leading from the front against the greatest odds in the most hazardous situations, in a deliberate imitation of Achilles. Self-sacrificial Homeric excess was still a part of classical Greek martial culture.
Moving from the virtue of courage to the supreme virtue of justice, the idea of a republic becomes further overshadowed by an ideal remote from lived reality, but with some Homeric basis. Justice is only necessary according to Aristotle, because friendship is not pure enough in the city. Where there is true friendship, there is no need for general rules or external judges to regulate activity. The ideal city is a community of friends, where rulers are the friends of citizens, not a city of laws. The highest friendship is one of mutual admiration of virtuous character. The examples of that take us back to Homer, since the great friendship of Greek culture is that between Achilles and Hector, during the Trojan War. No doubt Aristotle also has philosophical friendships developed in the pursuit of truth in mind, but he was not claiming that was an adequate basis for the city.
Moving onto Roman political thought, Cicero's Republic features Scipio Africanus the Younger, so a direct connection with the most heroic moment in all Roman history, the defeat of Carthage, though Scipio's contribution in the Third Punic War was one of Homeric extremism, the physical destruction of the city and the butchery of the entire population. Older moments in the Roman past appear in the Republic, as they do in the ethical discussions of On Ends. The republic is defined by a military structure, which has its greatest moments in the past with regard to establishing the constitution and vanquishing existential threats to the republic. By Cicero's time, victory over Carthage has left Rome itself its most dangerous enemy as generals compete for dominance of a state that has grown to much after the Punic Wars to be regulated according to old republican virtue.
In imperial times, republicanism is even more tied up with nostalgia as can be seen in the fascination Tacitus has for the Germans and Britons, shadows of simple liberty and courage uncorrupted by wealth and luxury. Tacitus claims to see the epitome of Roman virtue in his father-in-law Agricola's career, but the general feeling is that the barbarians are the moral victors in Tacitus, recalling a Rome of virtuous customs and heroic farmer warriors, who put liberty before comfort, comfort Tacitus himself did not abandon.
In the republicanism of the Renaissance, and republican thought since, the ancient republics are the model. The Enlightenment produced some critical understanding of the harshness of antique or barbarian republican virtue, but nevertheless tried to incorporate it in various ways. Humboldt preferred commercial modern societies to ancient republics as basis for liberty, but nevertheless regretted the loss of the antique spirit of heroic independence and struggle with fate, in war as well as other spheres. Montesquieu leans towards monarchies based on commercial life and social honour, over the austerity of republican virtue, but still sees the liberties of the French monarchy as rooted in the barbarian republicanism of the ancient Germans passed on through the Frankish conquerors of Roman Gaul. The modern spirit of 'sweet commerce' has precedents in the commercial spirit of ancient Athenian and Carthaginian republics as Montesquieu notes.
The American Republic and the first French Republic took inspiration from the ancient republics as can be still be seen in the iconography of state symbols. Even the most apparently moderate republicans, those who distinguish themselves from 'civic humanism' and 'Athenian' or 'Spartan' republicanism are concerned with the models of Rome and late medieval to Renaissance northern Italy. The nostalgia, the mourning for something lost, was always there. There is an element of this in communitarian theory as well, but that has a living ethical community aspect, which tends to counteract the idea of a time when citizens were friends, liberty was worthy of sacrifice, and commerce supported a city of equals not a grandiose aristocratic- monarchical state. As the ambiguity of Enlightenment thinkers suggest, this may be simply the condition of political thought most aware of historical existence and of politics as a part of life, not just a theory of power or ideal rules. Anti-politics itself, the apparent antithesis of republicanism, often refers to what looks very much like a sanitised version of barbarian republicanism as 'natural' liberty.
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