What makes a good leader? Greek and Roman writers asked that question constantly and answered it in strikingly different ways depending on when they were writing and what kind of text they were writing. This volume examines how leadership was imagined across classical literature, from the fifth century BCE to the fourth century CE. Historians, poets and philosophers all drew on one another as they built their portraits of kings, generals and statesmen, borrowing and adapting the models they inherited – and often arguing with them. The historian Polybius pushed back against the fashion for writing history as the story of great men, insisting that leaders be understood inside a wider and far less predictable world. The poet Lucan drew on Lucretius’ portrait of the philosopher Epicurus to shape his own disquieting Julius Caesar.
Read together, these texts show that the qualities expected of a leader – mercy, eloquence, memory, self-command – were shaped as much by literary form as by political circumstance. What emerges is not a single idea of leadership but a set of competing and sometimes contradictory ones. Ranging from Athenian tragedy to Augustan poetry, imperial biography and Greek oratory under Rome, the volume sets these ancient arguments alongside modern thinking about what leadership is and how it is learned.
