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George Klosko
The common understanding of political obligation in the ancient world is that the subject was all but undiscussed. People should simply obey and not ask why. Recently, however, Mogen Herman Hansen has argued that adherence to oaths, which were a common feature of civic life, is the actual reason why people accepted requirements to obey the law. I question what these oaths actually meant for political obligations. Because of people's deep integration into their societies, taking such oaths does not meet contemporary standards for what is required to ground political obligations. Rather than choosing to become citizens, through their oaths, ancient citizens grew into this status, much like membership of their families. Thus their obligations to obey the law conformed more to ones based on membership than to obligations that were self-assumed. The oaths in question were declarative rather than constitutive of these moral requirements.
