ABSTRACT
TURNING eastwards again to a world of which Lucretius knew little, we resume contact with Hellenistic political thought; and that, now more than ever, means the study of the nature, powers and duties of a king. The Cyropdedia of Xenophon, so barren of thought and lacking in coherence, has proved to be curiously prophetic of the fact that kingship, half Greek and half Oriental, dominated the eastern Mediterranean for the next three centuries after Alexander. As we saw in Chapter XII, this was a world in which political philosophers, if they wished to make their influence felt, had to seek access to a king or. write fictitious letters, addressed to famous kings of the past, Philip or Alexander, but intended to be read by kings of their own day. One of these we noted above (p. 2 54), the letter prefixed to the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum of Anaximenes. The writer had urged the importance of the king's A6yos-, of his pronouncements as to what is right and lawful. And, since men everywhere were in fact obliged to take most of their law from kings, it became a matter of supreme importance to know what a real king ought to be. If he is to be the source of law, he must be a man with highly exceptional qualities. It ought not to be possible, though it did in fact happen, that a very ordinary person be made king merely by appointment. This was the same dilemma as confronted Aristotle, who thought that, as the 1r6Ats was something 'in nature', so the 7TOALTTJS" must be something as it were biologically classifiable (supra, p. 21 6). What now is a king? How can he be defined
and classified? The Stoics had argued that only he is king who has the virtue, goodness, ability of a king. So the search for the perfect prince ( cp. Chap. IX) goes on, the search for the 'king by nature'. Many more treatises on monarchy were written than have survived.
