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The shepherd king and his flock: paradoxes of leadership and care in classical Greek philosophyWe bore in mind that, for example, cowherds are the rulers (archontes) of their cattle, that grooms are the rulers of horses, and that all those who are called herdsmen might reasonably be considered to be rulers of the animals they manage (epistatōsi).(Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 1.1.2) When Xenophon, the fourth-century BCE Athenian soldier and writer, and once one of Socrates' students, tried to explain the nature of leadership, in his extended case study and biography of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia in the sixth century BCE and founder of its empire, his Cyropaedia, he turned to a familiar image, that of the king or leader as shepherd. 1For Xenophon, Cyrus provided a model of how to lead and inspire troops, and how, after the campaign was over, to set up a stable government in the conquered territory. Xenophon explores what qualities enabled Cyrus to rule more successfully than others. But when he invokes the image of the king as shepherd, Xenophon opens a set of questions about the consequences of the unequal and asymmetric relationship between leaders and those they lead, as well as emphasising the centrality of care to ideas of what constituted good leadership. Like other thinkers of his time, the image of the ruler as shepherd enables a debate on the paradoxes of leadership and care (Brock 2013: 43-52).Among the questions were: does being led somehow dehumanise the led, or deprive them of agency? Does it imply a duty of care for the leader? Is this duty different when leading creatures of the same type (other humans) or different (animals)? What qualities in the ruler, such as intelligence and knowledge, might persuade subjects to obey him? Or could all humans be treated as if they were of the same status as the leader, dissolving the hierarchy implied by the power relationship of shepherding? Because a principal goal of ancient politics was to secure a happy or 'flourishing' existence (Aristotle's concept of eudaimonia, or living well), individuals' surrender of political agency could be seen to create obligations for the ruler to whom they had assigned their claim to political participation. The image of the shepherd king provided a means of exploring this problem from the perspectives of both rulers and ruled.

Aristotle's account of kingship in Politics 3 responds to the rich discourse on kingship that permeates Greek political thought (notably in the works of Herodotus, Xenophon and Isocrates), in which the king is the paradigm of virtue, and also the instantiator and guarantor of order, linking the political microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe. Both models, in separating the individual king from the collective citizenry, invite further, more abstract thought on the importance of the king in the foundation of the polity, whether the king can be considered part of, or separate from, the polis, and the relationship between polis and universe. In addressing these aspects of kingship theories, Aristotle explores a 'metaphysics of monarchy', part of the long-running mereological problem of parts and wholes in the construction of the polis, and connecting his account of kingship to his thought on citizenship and distributive justice within the polis. Aristotle's theoretical thought on monarchy occupies a peculiar position in the Politics, at the end of Book 3, which investigates the role of the citizen within the polis, largely against the background of democratic Athens. 1 Aristotle completes his radical contribution to the development of political theory with this critical engagement with the novel kingship theories from other Greek political theorists of his time. He responds to new models of the king as exemplar of virtue developed by Isocrates and Xenophon, which in turn develop the account of kingship developed by earlier thinkers, in which the king generates originary processes, uniting the people and instantiating cosmic order in the human world. 2 Aristotle, in responding to the rich discourse on kingship that permeates Greek political thought, must therefore address both the 'virtue' model in which the king is the paradigm of virtue, and the 'cosmic' model in which the king is the instantiator and guarantor of order, linking the political microcosm to the macrocosm of the universe.Both these theories of kingship, in separating the individual king from the collective citizenry, invite further, more abstract thought on the political ontology of kingship inGreek political thought: the importance of the king in the foundation of the polity, whether the king can be considered part of, or separate from, the polis, and the

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Athenian foundation myth includes stories of kings, retold in different genres to pursue distinct political agendas and to reshape the Athenian political imaginary. This article explores the transition from drama to history as a vehicle for these stories, and the exploitation of this transition in Isocrates' political rhetoric, conflating myth and history. While Euripides' democratic king Theseus represented an idealised active citizen, Isocrates retold Athenian myth to show that the good qualities of Athenian democracy depend on their origins in the city's political foundation by Theseus, and that citizens should achieve the good life through imitating virtuous monarchs.