This book examines how ancient authors explored ideas of kingship as a political role fundamental to the construction of civic unity, the use of kingship stories to explain the past and present unity of the polis, and the distinctive function or status attributed to kings in such accounts.
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"Atack's elegant and clever book situates itself amid recent discussions of kingship, from Graeber and Sahlins to Strathern. It focuses on texts from Herodotus to Aristotle, between the Homeric king and the late Hellenistic period of Philodemus. The focus is Greek even when speaking of foreign kings, and notwithstanding Atack's impressive awareness of the huge literature on external kings in their own contexts (and bibliography in general)... [The book] works on at least two levels. First, it offers astute readings of some well-known texts, and succeeds without any doubt in reconceptualizing the Greek discourse of kingship (and kingliness) in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, in Athens especially. Second, it asks challenging methodological questions about sole rule and regality, which make the book of a wider interest. Atack's framework might work interestingly in relation to the Roman emperor, for example. The argument is concise and clear, and should provoke debate at the same level of seriousness and intellectual ambition with which it is written." - Bryn Mawr Classical Review