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Wellsprings
politics

Kingship

βασιλεία

When is it just for one man to rule all? Only, the Greeks answered, when his virtue so outshines the rest that he is law made flesh.

For Greek thinkers, kingship was the rule of a single legitimate sovereign governing for the good of all — the first and best of the three "correct" constitutions, whose corrupt shadow is tyranny. Aristotle pressed the hardest case: the pambasileus, an all-ruling king so surpassingly virtuous that subjecting him to law would be like subjecting a god to mortals. Polybius wove kingship into his famous cycle of regimes, where legitimate monarchy slides into tyranny before being overthrown. In the Hellenistic age, treatises "On Kingship" recast the ideal ruler as "living law," a benevolent image of divine order on earth.

Where this idea shows up

18 Greek sources·2 Jewish-canon citations

Where to read it