Essay Questions for Thinking through Sources 3

1. Making comparisons: How would you describe the range of political thinking and practice expressed in these sources? What, if any, common elements do they share? Another approach to such a comparison is to take the ideas expressed in one source and ask how they might be viewed by several of the others. For example, how might Darius (who commissioned the Behistun Inscription), Pericles, or Han Fei have responded to Ashoka? How might Augustus, Darius, or Athenian leaders have responded to the funerary complex of Qin Shihuangdi and the political ideology it represented?
2. Comparing ancient and modern politics: What enduring issues of political life do these sources raise? What elements of political thinking and practice during the second-wave era differ most sharply from those of the modern world of the last century or two? What are the points of similarity?
3. Distinguishing “power” and “authority”: “Power” refers to the ability of rulers to coerce their subjects into some required behavior, while “authority” denotes the ability of those rulers to persuade their subjects to obey voluntarily by convincing them that it is proper, right, or natural to do so. What appeals to “power” and “authority” can you find in these sources? How does the balance between them differ among these documents?
4. Noticing point of view: From what position and with what motivation did these writers compose their documents? How did this affect what they had to say?
5. Considering religion and political life: To what extent and in what ways did religion underlie political authority in the civilizations of the second-wave era?