Constant’s Dikaiopolis: War, Commerce and “Modern” Freedom in Athenian Political Comedy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.48162/rev.100.017Keywords:
Benjamin Constant, Liberty of the ancients, Aristophanes, Akharnians, IndividualismAbstract
This paper aims to discuss some reflections postulated by Benjamin Constant in his famous lecture “On the liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns” (1819) in the light of certain passages from Greek Old Comedy, in particular Aristophanes’ Akharnians (425 B.C.E.). The way in which the play represents the tension between personal interests and the common welfare allows us to conclude that, already in the democratic Athens of the late 5th century BC, the ideal of a collective freedom to which individuals were subjected seems to have coexisted with a dimension not far removed from what Constant manages to identify, in much more recent times, as the “liberté des Modernes”.
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