ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the context of Gillies’s remarks and to explain how, in Britain in the 1790s, a conversation about representation in the constitutions of the Greek poleis could be, at the same time, a conversation about the viability of revolutionary democracy in modern Europe. That a claim about the former could signify an opinion respecting the latter — and vice versa — illustrates how, during the later eighteenth century, answers were urgently sought to contemporary questions in ancient antecedents. Virtue, however, the sustaining moral force of the republic, cannot coexist with inequality. Even the spectacle of modest wealth is enough to kindle avarice in the hearts of the republic’s poorest citizen. Given the apparent success of the Lycian federation, Gillies is at pains to point out that it was neither the practice of representation nor their republican principles but their virtuous manners that made the Lycians ‘a happy people.’
