The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface
• Introduction
• A.: Editions
• B.: Dates of Composition and Publication
• I.: The First Edition
• II.: The Second Edition
• C.: Historical Setting
• I.: ‘anarchy and Confusion’
• II.: ‘aierie Modells’
• D.: Milton’s Ideal Republic
• E.: Two Formative Influences
• I.: Mediæval Republican Thought
• II.: The Rota Club
• F.: Sources
• I.: Scriptural Authority and Illustration
• II.: Classical Precedent
• 1.: Greek Commonwealth-theory
• 2.: The Roman Republic and Its Expounders
• III.: Modern Political Theorists
• 1.: Machiavelli
• 2.: Bodin
• 3.: Miscellaneous Contributors
• G.: Style
• H.: Significance
• The Text a Reproduction of the First Edition With Variants From the Second Edition
• Editor’s Note
• The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth
• Glossary
• Appendices
• A.: the Process of Revision
• B.: Contemporary Criticism

1.

Greek Commonwealth-Theory

In his proposed curriculum, as also in his own extensive reading, Milton had given a prominent place to ‘those extolled remains of Grecian lawgivers, Lycurgus and Solon.’ And while we are not to imagine him now, in his anxious haste and infirmity of blindness, as painfully groping among Athenian and Spartan constitutions, it is nevertheless true that he incorporates in his model much of their spirit, and many of their practical expedients. Milton seems to have read of the curb, or ‘bridle’-device, of the Ephori, in the charming pages of Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus. There is also an allusion to the peculiar Spartan form of election in his unwillingness to commit all ‘to the noise and shouting of a rude multitude.’ Throughout the treatise there runs an implied commendation of Spartan frugality, simplicity, discipline, and patriotic fervor.

But it was for the Athenian commonwealth, as founded by Solon and further democratized by his successors, that Milton reserved his profoundest admiration. Like Milton, Solon was a poet turned statesman, an unselfish reformer, and an unsuccessful opposer of tyrants. But, unlike Milton’s, his political ideas had the good fortune to become the basis of the constitution of the republic. Milton found these reflected in Plutarch’s Life of Solon—itself largely derived¹ from Aristotle’s recently recovered Constitution of Athens. Here are set forth the ideas of a supreme and perpetual council of the Areopagus; proportionate eligibility to office; the right of appeal to living judges. Solon himself, as here described, furnishes a splendid example of unselfish public service, and of supreme contempt for royal ostentation. And Milton’s proposed combination of local and national authority—legislative, executive, and judicial—he finds ‘to have been practised in the old Athenian commonwealth.’ We may now turn to the strictly political writings of the Greeks to which our book is indebted. We have seen that Milton professed to hold in some derision the idealistic proposals of Plato—‘a man of high authority indeed, but least of all for his commonwealth.’¹ Nevertheless, almost a score of Plato’s social and political ideas reappear in The Ready and Easy Way. The nature of the state, the origin of law, the purpose of government, the relation of tyranny to moral progress, magistracy as service, due liberty—these are some of the subjects upon which Milton’s thought accords with Plato’s. Most of these ideas, it is true, Milton met again far down the stream and in other forms, for we are here at the fountainhead of modern commonwealth-theory; but it is also true that he received the initial impression of these conceptions from the pages of the Republic and the Laws. Finally, Aristotle, a much more practical philosopher, is acknowledged as ‘chief instructer,’ and especially cited as authority (31. 5).

[1 ]Sandys, Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, Introd., p. xxiv.

[1 ]Areop. (Bohn 2. 71).