Athenian Constitution

The years in question are 335 to 323 BC. Aristotle, who had been a pupil of Plato at the Academy for two decades and had served as tutor to Alexander the Great in Macedonia, returned to Athens when his pupil embarked on his dazzling military career, and there, at the Lyceum, he founded the famous Peripatetic school. Whilst Alexander, having subjugated Greece, conquered the entire Persian Empire in just twelve years, pushing as far as India, Aristotle carried out the work of a thinker that would prove central to world culture. Upon the king’s death in 323, Aristotle left Athens, where a revolt against the Macedonians was beginning to take hold. The Athenaion Politeia, the Constitution of the Athenians, had already been composed and revised. The work, attributed to Aristotle since antiquity, has not, however, been handed down to us, like the others, through medieval manuscripts, but only on papyri now preserved in Berlin (a fragment) and London (the bulk of the text) and rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century. It is likely that it was not composed by Aristotle himself, but by a disciple, although the master’s interest in the themes of polity is well documented. It is, in fact, a treatise devoted to the history and forms of constitutional organisation in Athens from its beginnings up to the end of the 5th century, and to the way in which the constitution functioned in Aristotle’s time. An indispensable work for the reconstruction of ‘Democracy in Greece’.