Concepts of Ideal Rulership from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Ancient works On Kingship have received a lot of attention in recent scholarship, where the main focus is usually on classic works such as Seneca’s On Clemency, Isocrates’ Cyprian Orations or Dio of Prusa’s Kingship Orations. In this volume, we deliberately turn to the periphery, to the grey zone where matters usually prove more complicated. This volume focuses on authors who deal with analogous problems and raise similar questions in other contexts, authors who also address powerful rulers or develop ideals of right rulership but who choose very different literary genres to do so, or works on kingship that have almost been forgotten. Departing from well-trodden paths, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate by bringing in new relevant material and confront it with well-known and oft-discussed classics. This confrontation even throws a new light upon the very notion of ‘mirrors for princes’. Moreover, the selection of peripheral texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance reveals several patterns in the evolution of the tradition over a longer period of time.