Kendall Sharp, the Sheffield Family Distinguished Instructor in the Basic Program, delivers this First Friday lecture tracing the concept of civic virtue across four centuries of Greek political thought. Starting from the political vocabulary itself, Sharp shows that the Greek word for citizen, polites, was inseparable from the polis, and that the constitution, politeia, meant not a document but the living arrangement of citizens sharing sovereignty. Citizenship was participation, not status. The Greek idiom was not to have citizenship but to have a share in it, and that equal share was inseparable from the idea of political freedom. Sharp works through Aristotle’s Politics to show that civic virtue, polites arete, meant knowing how to rule and be ruled in turn. Deliberation, deference, and the rotation of office were not procedures but expressions of what freedom required among equals.
The lecture turns then to Pericles, as reported by Thucydides, whose Funeral Oration Sharp reads as an earlier and closely matching account of the same principles. Pericles describes a democracy where the public sphere is kept strictly separate from the economic and the social, where poverty and obscure birth cannot block a citizen from advancement through demonstrated virtue, and where deliberation before action is treated as a source of strength rather than hesitation. Sharp draws a line from Homer’s warrior ideals of deed and counsel through the archaic boule, Plato’s Protagoras, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to show how deliberative speech became the center of political virtue over time. The Q&A covers justice and consent in Aristotle, whether these concepts are Greek or specifically Athenian, the influence of this tradition on the American founders, and how Socrates in the Crito understood his own relationship to the laws of Athens.
