Frederick Douglass testified often to his experiences and the injustice of slavery. Yet how did he explain those who were unmoved, and what did he envision as compelling them to act? I turn to The Heroic Slave to investigate Douglass on white unwillingness. A fictional account of the factual mutiny of the enslaved Madison Washington in 1841, Douglass's novella narrates Washington's emancipation through the perspectives of a white northerner and southerner who waver in response to testimony when confronted by the spaces and scripts of white society. Although Douglass suggests that friendship may encourage whites, I find in the story's contents as well as its publication a heroic imagination in which black resistance is inevitable and natural, independent of white alliance, opposition, and judgment itself. This story was for Douglass another means of motivating whites, and for us illustrative of how racial justice demands not only evidence but imagination.

Among contemporary scholars who write about classical Greece, Josiah Ober and Paul Rahe are especially adept at navigating the territory shared by history and political theory and illuminating the relevance of Greek history for our time. The historical approach each takes in the works under review does not easily fall into the categories—monumental, antiquarian, and critical history— delineated by Nietzsche in the essay to which my subtitle alludes. Yet, in treating these works together, I am guided by a question that Nietzsche raises at the conclusion of his “untimely meditation” in recalling the Delphic injunction Gnōthi seauton, “Know thyself.” The Greeks’ cultural inheritance, he argues, was a chaos of foreign ideas—Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian—and gods, and it was only when the Greeks began to organize this chaos in accordance with the Delphic injunction that they were prevented from being swamped by their own history and became the model for all civilized peoples. The works under review are extraordinarily rich, and I will not do justice to their many arguments. Rather, I organize my consideration of them by focusing on this question: What is the relation between the study of Greek history and the search for self-knowledge at the core of Greek political philosophy?

John P. McCormick has become the leading proponent of a new democratic—or, now, “populist”—reading of Machiavelli. The authors of all three of the other books reviewed here cite McCormick as a source and inspiration; and he has written positive blurbs for their books. In Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011) McCormick argued that Machiavelli's praise of Roman “offices or assemblies that exclude the wealthiest citizens from eligibility; magistrate appointment procedures that combine lottery and election; and political trials in which the entire citizenry acts as ultimate judge over prosecutions and appeals” constitutes “a robust, extra-electoral model of elite accountability and popular empowerment” very different from, and much superior to, the aristocratic “republicanism” attributed to Machiavelli by the “Cambridge school.” In Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics, McCormick extends his previous analysis by offering “original readings of crucial themes within … The Prince, the Discourses, and the Florentine Histories” (1–2). He also expands his critique of competing interpretations of Machiavelli and Rome by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Strauss, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner.