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AbstractAristophanes in his comedy theAcharnianseducates the crowd that he creates as a character on stage, as well as the crowd gathered to watch his comedy, about what is truly in their interest: the peace that allows them to be happy by satisfying their longings for good food and frequent sex. I suggest, invoking the medieval language ofvox populi vox dei, that Aristophanes (like the politicians and demagogues of today) competes to become the one who gives the people their voice. His comedy imagines that both the crowd in the play and the audience in the theater learn through the action of the comedy the value of peace for private happiness. The crowd so educated will give voice to Aristophanes's wisdom when they vote in their democratic assemblies about what seems best to the people.

Who bears responsibility for the actions of a city or state? Is it the entity that we sometimes call a nation? Or the individual members of the nation? Shakespeare's Henry V includes a brief interchange the night before the battle at Agincourt that addresses this question. A disguised king and the common soldiers of his army debate who is responsible for the deaths that will occur during the forthcoming battle if the war they are fighting is unjust: the king or his soldiers? Who will be punished on Judgment Day? The interchange opens up reflections on the challenge of deciding who acts when a state acts. Henry V is a play that emphasizes the role of the imagination as central to both stagecraft and the politics of creating a nation. Engaging with the medieval theory of the "king's two bodies," the Henry of Shakespeare's play is caught between the desire to be the embodiment of the imagined nation and yet be his own "natural person" when questions of responsibility for the actions of the nation emerge. Dependent on the imagination to build a unified nation of diverse peoples, Henry desires to escape responsibility for the potentially unjust actions of the nation by focusing on the private actions of his individual subjects. The play thereby brings questions of responsibility for the actions of collective bodies founded by the imagination to the fore and forces us to explore who is responsible when states or nations act.

Abstract
This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call 'hyphenated-democracies', each of which adds a conceptual framework developed in early modern Europe to the language of democracy: representative-democracy, liberal-democracy, constitutional-democracy, republican-democracy. These hyphenated-democracies emphasize the restraints placed on the power of political authorities. In contrast, Athenian democracy with the people ruling over themselves rested on the fundamental principle of equality rather than the limitations placed on that rule. However, equality as the defining normative principle of democracy raises its own problems, namely: How do we – of limited vision – identify who is equal, and what injustices attend the criteria used to establish who is equal? Consideration of several ancient tragedies illustrates how the Athenian playwrights explored these questions and how they identified the challenges faced by those who understand democracy as grounded on egalitarian principles.

Ancient Greece has long exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of modern political science. But until fairly recently, this influence has largely been philosophical, related to the origins of many theoretical concepts—including the concept of politics itself—in the ancient world. In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Josiah Ober offers a synoptic and ambitious social theoretical account of the ancient Greek world, the sources of its power, the causes of its decline, and the lessons that can be drawn from this story for contemporary social and political science. We have thus invited a range of political scientists to comment on Ober's account of classical Greece and its relevance to contemporary political inquiry.

Jean Elshtain, in an essay published inSignsin 1982 and entitled "Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and Meaning," addressed one of the many issues with which feminist theorists were then grappling: the oppressive power of language as a tool of control over those who had been silenced throughout history, leaving those wanting to resist that control with the task of discovering new modes of communication. Acknowledging that language has the potential to oppress, Elshtain was, however, not ready to abandon the past, to urge her readers to imagine a world where one could escape the languages and discourses that were bequeathed to us over the generations.

Liberalism begins with the free individual; the liberal state comes into being in order to preserve that freedom. Part of that freedom, to use the language of John Stuart Mill, is choosing one's own life plan, escaping the forms and lifestyles imposed on us by history or nature. Two texts from ancient Athens—Euripides'Bacchaeand Plato'sRepublic—explore the challenge posed by what I call "the escape from form." TheBacchae, while capturing our longing for a freedom from form, portrays the devastation of a city invaded by just that freedom; theRepublic, while capturing the epistemological and political need for form, portrays a frightening vision of a city so bound by form that it becomes immobile. Socrates' self-critique in his reconsideration of the artisan inRepublic10, however, unites the forms his Callipolis demands with the multiplicity of human identities that the god Dionysus brings to Thebes in Euripides' tragedy.