Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy

Book excerpt: Three treatises survive from classical Greece under the loose title Politeiai (Constitutions) which are unique in character and indispensable to any student of the period. The longest and most important is Aristotle's Constitution of Athens which is both a history of Athenian constitutional development and a survey of the constitutional machinery of Aristotle's own day. The second, by Xenophon, is an account of the Spartan social and educational system, and the third, also attributed to Xenophon, The Constitution of the Athenians, though probably by an earlier author, is the first example in history of political pamphleteering. Dr. Moore has newly translated all three of these documents and an additional fragment The Boeotian Constitution written in the fourth century B. C. and the only surviving account of a genuinely oligarchic regime of the period. To these much needed, scholarly translations Dr. Moore has added brilliant introductions and commentaries which evaluate the documents, illumine their significance, and provide the background information which the writers assumed their readers to possess. In bringing together, translating, and annotating these constitutional documents from ancient Greece, Dr. Moore has produced an authoritative work of the highest scholarship which will place all students of constitutional history and of the Ancient World in his debt.