| Domain | Canonization of the New (Classical Greece, 550-323 BCE) |
| Researcher(s) | Vladimir Gildin Zuckerman |
| University | Leiden University |
| Degree | PD |
| Date Range | January 2025 - Present |
| Supervisor(s) | Prof. Ineke Sluiter |
“Ordered,” “proportioned,” “plain” are concepts that came to be associated with the utopian notion of the “Classical.” Yet how did these affective and formal notions come to contain political meanings? Already in the 4th century BCE, thinkers were imagining a political future characterized by these concepts, which anchored it in an imagined past that preceded what they saw as the corruption of their contemporary societies.
“Ordered,” “proportioned,” “plain”: these are some of the categories that are linked to the aesthetics of the Classical. These formal and affective concepts have been recurrently evoked in European thought and persist even in contemporary politics (e.g. Trump 2020). My research project investigates the tie between aesthetic and political concepts of the 4th century Athenian authors Plato and Xenophon in order to shed light on how such affective notions emerged, what political and social values were attached to them, and how they became associated with the period that later came to be called Classical Athens.
Plato discussed cultural production extensively in his idealized polities, and Xenophon propounded his vision for an idealized social organization in the Oeconomicus, in which domestic culture is a key issue. Both authors thought that the visual culture in which people live deeply affects their moral composition and social lives, and both devoted much attention to the aesthetics of their imagined polities. This includes not only their reflections on the kind of art that should be produced in these ideal polities, but also how they sought to form the modalities of perception in their visions of polis and oikos in order to define the ways of living and acting that they promote.
A central concern for both authors is that the Athens of Socrates constituted a pivotal moment of change in cultural and aesthetic values, which were also driving social and political disruptions. Plato lamented the formal experimentation of that in his view corrupted Athenian culture; Xenophon, examining domestic rather than public culture, identified the harmful intrusion of an aesthetics of deception (ἀπάτη) and multiplicity (ποικιλία) into the household. In response, both authors looked to the past as a source of a culture and an ideal of beauty that was lost and corrupted by the end of 5th century Athens. Plato advocated for aesthetic forms that are regulated, plain, and ordered. Similar aesthetic categories are also central to Xenophon’s view of domestic culture. These values were conceptualized not simply as novel but as preceding corruption: a case of anchoring of an imagined future to an idealized past against what is perceived to be a corrupt present, that constituted an early but decisive step in the formation of the concept of Classical Athens as a cultural-political ideal.
