Deus ex machina? Rereading the ancient Greek lawgivers and Rousseau’s Legislator

Rousseau's appeal to the Legislator in the Contrat Social is often viewed by scholars as a failure: part of a fruitless effort to square the circle of how knowledge (embodied in that figure as a deus ex machina) and legitimacy (embodied in the general will) might come to coincide.  By reconsidering the functions of the ancient Greek lawgivers themselves, however, both in light of later Greek understandings and modern scholarship, we can better understand how Rousseau could have taken this figure to constitute part of a genuine solution to that challenge.