another in form and substance. The Hippocratic physicians described Scythian customs,
and Herodotus wrote about medicine.
The tragic poets addressed questions of politics,
and their plays conveyed conceptual understandings of political dynamics of the kind that
are found in contemporary works of social science. Thucydides, whom I have described
elsewhere as the last of the great tragedians, adopted his plot line from tragedy and made
use of its discoveries and reversals that Aristotle would consider the basis of Katharsis.
He applied tragedy’s spare plot line to history to craft an abstract, stylized narrative that
directs our attention to the deeper meanings of events. Plato trashed Homer and the
tragic poets in his Republic, but devised dialogue as an art form and used it to convey
wisdom that could not be captured by concepts.
In the pages that follow, I elaborate some of epistemological and substantive
conceptions that shape the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the histories
of Herodotus and Thucydides and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. As my purpose
is to build a foundation for my own theory, I gloss over many of the differences among
these figures, highlighting only those relevant to my goal. The principal themes I treat are
human motives, the nature of order, levels of analysis and actors. These Greek
conceptions have modern counterparts with which I will contrast them. I do so to
demonstrate the utility of the Greek formulations or interrogate and supplement modern
understandings. The second section of the chapter builds on this treatment to present the
outline of my theory. It is elaborated in more detail by the chapters that follow. I
conclude with a brief reprise and overview of these chapters.
FOUNDATIONAL ASSUMPTIONS
9
Convention