Matthew Landauer’s Dangerous Counsel is a lively, erudite, and judicious presentation of ancient Greek thinking about accountability and advice. To best understand the adviser or counselor (sumboulos), it argues that we ought to look at “Greek conceptions of both democratic and autocratic politics,” because given “the structural similarity between [them]…both the demos and the autocrat were recognized as unaccountable rulers” (p. 4). At the book’s core lies the demos–tyrant analogy. In a democracy the adviser stands before “a sovereign, nearly all-powerful demos” (p. 10; see also p. 58) empaneled on a jury or in attendance at the assembly; like the adviser of an autocrat, he is in an asymmetrical relation with the officeholder. This comparative approach positions Landauer to argue against democratic exceptionalism, which casts the counseling orators and the decision-making demos as co-deliberators in ancient Athens (p. 7): such claims are undercut by the “structural parallels between the tyrant’s role and the demos’ in accountability politics” (p. 143). A reader will not find abstract claims, be they inferences or deductions, about the aims of counsel, nor does Landauer offer a set of characteristics that make for a good adviser. “The problem of logos in politics cannot be treated merely abstractly,” he writes (p. 105). Dangerous Counsel thus demonstrates the importance of thinking about accountability not merely comparatively but also relationally and in context. A sure-footed guide through numerous incidents and several texts from the ancient world, Landauer, through his transparent and concise prose, stops short of overwhelming the reader and, importantly, of reducing the complexity of the original texts.

Dangerous Counsel consists of six chapters bookended by an introduction (pp. 1–24) and conclusion (pp. 179–85). The first two chapters delineate the two faces of unaccountability: the idiôtês and the tyrant. Chapter 1 (pp. 25–58) analyzes the Athenian institutions of accountability, the assembly and the lawcourts, showing that the demos was unaccountable—a status justified in part by construing the citizen as an idiôtês, “an amateur participant in politics” (p. 54). Chapter 2 (pp. 59–82) documents the link between tyranny and unaccountability, with special focus on the unaccountable juror Philokleon in Aristophanes’s comedy Wasps and, through Xenophon’s Hellenica, on how the institutional procedure of charging advisers of the assembly with making an illegal proposal (the graphê paranomôn) maintained the unaccountability of the demos, in the historian’s account of the trial after the battle of Arginusae (406 BCE).

The next two chapters continue mining Greek history, first Herodotus in chapter 3 (pp. 83–104) followed by Thucydides in chapter 4 (pp. 105–28). Landauer reads the former, perhaps a mite vigorously, as providing a “theory of political counsel” (p. 84) that “dramatiz[es] the process of advice-giving, [and] furnishes readers with resources for thinking about—and practically confronting—the problem” (p. 90). To Thucydides, whose account of the debate between Cleon and Diodotus in the Athenian assembly (427 BCE) is the focus of chapter 4, Landauer attributes no such theory. But he does read him in a similar exploratory way: “Canvassing multiple possibilities and explicitly endorsing none, Thucydides has left the right way to understand responsibility for the Mytilenean revolt open to competing interpretations” (p. 110).

The last pair of chapters turn first to fourth-century BCE Athenian orators and then to Plato’s Gorgias, a fourth-century dialogue about oratory set in wartime Athens in the late fifth century BCE. In chapter 5 (pp. 129–48), Landauer discusses frank speech (parrhêsia) and flattery in Isocrates’s counsels to the Macedonian regent Antipater and the Cypriot king Nicocles, and Demosthenes’s counsel to Athens. The asymmetries of accountability caused the “paramount democratic cultural value” (p. 130) of frank speech to operate “as a remedial virtue” (p. 132; emphasis in original), practiced in democratic and autocratic regimes alike. Chapter 6 (pp. 149–78) contrasts the all-powerful orator whom Gorgias posits to Socrates’s portrayal of the same as a slave to the whims of the demos. Plato “points to the limits of the power” (p. 156) of orator and demos alike and “holds out the possibility of a kind of learning on the part of the demos” (p. 176).

The persuasiveness of any comparative project depends on the similarities and differences the author draws. Of the three features Landauer identifies as salient to Athenian institutions of accountability, only their (1) popular character is unique to democracies, whereas (2) discretionary judgment and (3) asymmetrical accountability are shared with autocracies (p. 29). Glossing (1) as “democratic inclusion” Landauer concludes that it “did not fundamentally alter the structure of the problems these authors sought to explore” such as incentives and trust (p. 182). Much hangs on what we understand by inclusion: interpreting it as openness to challenge or ideologically could, pace Landauer, alter the structure of incentives and trust, respectively. I illustrate these in turn.

In Athens, one who claimed at his defense trial to abstain from politics, Socrates of Alopece, found himself presiding over the assembly at the Arginusae trial simply because it was his deme’s turn to do so; as a consequence, he tried to persuade the demos that putting the generals on trial en masse would violate the law as he understood it. Even if Socrates failed, the incident shows that anyone might challenge the demos, an occurrence hard to imagine in tyrannies that are more likely to be contested by disaffected members of the domestic elite or foreign regimes. It is arguable, then, that the structure of incentives is indeed regime dependent.

Similarly for the operation of trust, which increases as it divides across a population, if we interpret democratic inclusion ideologically; that is, according to the sum of its habits, pursuits, and expressed self-justifications. Consider Against Leocrates, a speech from an impeachment (eisangelia) and subsequent trial of an Athenian citizen who had sold his property and fled after the city’s defeat by Macedon at Chaeronea (338 BCE) and had since returned (331 BCE). Its author is Lycurgus, a prominent prodemocracy politician, who charged Leocrates with treason, calling on Athenian democratic ideology capacious enough to include not only those presently counted among the many but also the regime’s normative commitments and collective memory. Lycurgus makes universalizing appeals (e.g., what would happen if everyone left Athens (para. 59–62)?), recounts the democracy’s past victories against Persia (para. 68–73 et passim), and recites that which “preserves our democracy” (para. 79; Landauer quotes the very same line at p. 43); namely, the Ephebic Oath that confirmed young Athenians as citizens in a festival in which they presented themselves fully armored to the city. The inclusion that democratic ideology brings in its train seems to recast the problem of trust; as was the case with incentives, the relevant comparison with an autocracy would be one of difference rather than similarity. Perhaps democratic exceptionalism is not dead after all.

For all the ground that it covers, Landauer’s expert reconstruction of the Greek tradition of “the politics of advice” (pp. 14, 21 et passim) overlooks its concern with the soul (psuchê) of the advisee. We hear Isocrates advise Nicocles that the daily struggles he will face means that “kings are required to train their souls (psuchai) as no athlete trains his body” (2.11) and recommend he associate with wise advisers to develop the qualities necessary for good ruling (2.13). The orator also draws Antipater’s attention to the nature of rulers: Do they have a noble soul (psuchê) and thus value frank speech (parrhêsia), or is their nature “weaker than their circumstances would require” (4.5)? The concern with the soul extends, in Plato’s Gorgias, to another kind of perilous accountability absent from Dangerous Counsel and without doubt present in the texture of ancient Greek life where religion and politics were inseparable: accountability to the gods. Although Landauer recognizes that Socrates privileges the care of the soul over politics as these are ordinarily understood (pp. 158–59), he stops short of discussing its apotheosis in the eschatological myth with which the dialogue ends (Grg. 523a–27e). Therein, and by contrast to Landauer’s logocentric Athens, both judge and judged are silent, the gods judging souls naked and unadorned, without accompanying witnesses. Quaint as it might sound to modern, secular ears, the concern with the soul and with accountability to the gods is still with us. As Lycurgus’s ideological appeal and Socrates’s myth both suggest, it will not get us very far to say democracies do not have a collective soul. Not only are we well aware of the soul-ministering religious figures who orbit around aspiring and elected representatives alike but also, and like their ancient counterpart, modern democracies shape the souls of the demos through the ethos that they expound and practice.

These reservations and omissions notwithstanding, I would recommend the book to anyone interested in the politics of advice. Those familiar with the material will find much to grapple with; those who are less so will recognize contemporary political science terminology brought to bear on ancient worlds; and both sets of readers may, like this reviewer, find themselves carried along by Landauer’s zest for making the past useful to the present.