After thesis and antithesis, what else but synthesis? If there has been a single underlying theme running through this book, it is the difference – or, rather, the alterity (otherness) – of the Greek city. Whatever the ancient Greek polis and its politics were, they were emphatically not ‘liberal’ as that term is today understood in mainstream Western political theory. Any attempt to detect even a quasi-metaphorical ‘liberal temper’ in Greek politics is deeply misguided (Havelock 1957; cf. Brunt 1993: 389–94); but does that inevitably entail that the ancient Greek political experience has nothing to teach us today?

A reading of Nietzsche in sombre mood would indeed suggest so: ‘The classicist is the great skeptic in our cultural and educational circumstances’, since ‘if we understand Greek culture, we see that it is gone for good’ (‘Wir Philologen’, as cited by Williams 1993: 171 n. 10; emphasis in original).