Do the virtues “vary according to regime type” (p. 2)? In his new book, Ryan Balot takes up this question through a wide-ranging analysis of courage in the ancient Greek world. He reconstructs a “distinctively democratic” courage professed by the Athenians. Democrats departed from the “standard model” prevalent in Greece, in which courage was the product of “traditional social norms sustained by fear,” buttressed by rigid and punitive practices of shaming (pp. 198–99). By contrast, Balot argues, Athenian democratic courage was uniquely reflective and deliberative. The Athenians self-consciously and collectively trained their “civic emotions” (p. 247). They deliberated and reflected upon the ends to which courage could be put, and they integrated courage within a wider eudaimonistic framework that linked a flourishing Athens to a good (democratic) life for her citizens.

One of the great strengths of the book under review is the diversity of sources upon which Balot draws. He finds evidence for a distinctive Athenian democratic approach to courage across the range of genres that political theorists now recognize as crucial to the study of ancient political thought. So historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides can tell us much about the differences between Athenian courage and the courageousness of Spartans or Persians. The canonical philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, can be read as taking part in a conversation about courage initiated by democratic theory and practice. And evidence abounds internal to democratic practice: in the speeches of orators in the law courts and the assembly; in the funeral orations that prominent Athenian citizens gave over the city’s fallen soldiers; and in the comic and tragic theater, where Athenian citizens were encouraged to reflect on their democratic politeia. Balot moves assuredly between history and rhetoric, philosophy and drama, to build toward a nuanced picture of courage in Athenian political theory and practice.

Balot’s aim is not only to offer an account of the place of courage in Athenian political life, however. He also argues that the Athenian approach to courage was distinctive. He must therefore avoid both false positives and negatives. With respect to the former, even if we can recover from our sources a sense of the ideals that the Athenians professed, can we be confident that they lived up to them? Balot is fully aware of the challenge here, and Courage in the Democratic Polis is a model of how to confront it. Throughout the book (but see especially Chapters 10–13), he entertains the possibility that the Athenians did not always live up to their own highest standards with respect to courage, whether owing to the seductions of imperialism or their own “implicit traditionalism” (p. 287). While arguing that “democratic shame” was a more “deliberate emotion” in Athens than elsewhere, a product of an Athenian culture of self-reflection (p. 253), Balot nonetheless is attentive to instances where Athenians straightforwardly relied on fear to elicit courage (p. 240). He concludes that in Athens, ideology and practice were largely in agreement, but he does not shy away from confronting the evidence that might undermine or complicate that view.

Avoiding false negatives is perhaps more difficult. We know far more about Athens than we do any other Greek polis. This is particularly true with respect to oratory: The numerous speeches we have from democratic Athens are not matched by similar evidence from anywhere else. This asymmetry can pose problems. It is a striking fact that the funeral oration—which Balot persuasively demonstrates to have been an occasion for reflecting on courage and its place in the democratic city—was a uniquely Athenian institution. But we should not necessarily conclude (as the author seems to) that a city such as Sparta lacked the institution “because the city saw no need to reflect on its own history, ideals, or regime” (p. 209). Rather, other poleis may well have had other means, formal and informal, to reflect on the nature of courage and its place in their politics. Consider for example, Xenophon's suggestive claim in the Constitution of the Lacedaemonians that Sparta's common meals were occasions to educate the young through disucssions of noble deeds done in the polis (5.5–6).

Here, Balot’s attempts to link Athens to contemporary deliberative democratic theory might lead him astray. As Balot puts it, “Strikingly, the Athenians’ system, at least in this ideological representation, overlaps to some extent with the theories of deliberative democracy offered by modern political theorists” (pp. 58–59). The language and concepts of deliberative democracy pervade the argument. Indeed, at times they threaten to substitute for engagement with the actual terms used in the Greek sources. For example, in his discussion of Euripides’ The Suppliants, Balot writes,“Theseus adds that if he makes a public, transparent, and rationally convincing case for recovering the Argives, then he will make the Athenian demos more zealous in pursuing this virtuous project” (p. 251). This language of a “public, transparent, and rationally convincing case” is not obviously present in the lines of the play he references (lines 349–51).

Assimilating Athenian democracy to contemporary deliberative democracy obscures the possibility that the ideal of a reflective and deliberative courage may not have been distinctively democratic. The Suppliants returns again and again to the themes of counsel and judgment—but it does not frame these issues as distinctively democratic concerns. The Theban Herald, the character least sympathetic to democracy in the play, is also the one to offer a view of courage close to Balot’s take on democratic courage: “courage is forethought” (Supp. 510). More broadly, the play makes clear that euboulia (good judgment), including with respect to when and how courage should be exercised (see, e.g., Supp. 161), is a problem for all political regimes. This comes out clearly in Theseus’ claim that any regime can make poor decisions when led astray by bad counsel, but can also make good decisions, too, under the right conditions (Supp. 235–45). Or take Herodotus’s reflections on the success of Athens in the Persian war. Balot sees in Herodotus’s praise of Athens as the saviors of Greece a recognition of the value of a distinctively democratic form of deliberation: “It is difficult to imagine the same scene at Sparta” (p. 96). But elsewhere in his text, Herodotus depicts scenes of counseling and decision making outside democratic contexts, such as Cyrus’s war council in book I, that share in some of the supposedly distinctively democratic virtues.

I have only touched on some of what this rich book offers. I have said nothing, for instance, about the cautious but thought-provoking arguments that Balot advances concerning the intellectual debts owed by philosophy to democracy. All political theorists interested in ancient politics, the role of the virtues in politics, and democratic theory more broadly will benefit from a serious engagement with his argument. That courage is only one among the virtues, that reflection and deliberation are required for putting courage in its place within a properly ordered human life, that our emotional responses are subject to training and shaping and are amenable to reason: Balot sheds much light on these deep and engaging theses. But I am not convinced that they are distinctively democratic commitments. Greek literature and political reflection find a place for all of them outside of democratic contexts. Rather than finding democracy’s distinctiveness in its focus on reflection and deliberation, perhaps we should seek it in its egalitarianism—the thought that these are problems for all citizens, not just the few.