Rhodes Peter John - The Athenian Constitution

An anonymous pupil of Aristotle would not have looked attractive on the title page, and would have been awkward for purposes of reference; but although the Athenian Constitution was regarded in the ancient world as the work of Aristotle, and is accepted as such by some modern scholars, it was more probably written by an anonymous pupil and not by Aristotle himself. It is, however, a work of great importance. Classical Athens was the model of democracy in a world in which different city-states lived under different degrees of democracy or oligarchy, and in writing a study of the Athenian democracy first a historical account showing how the classical form of the democracy had been brought into existence, and then an analysis of how the democratic constitution worked in his own day the author has produced a work of a kind which no one had attempted until Aristotle set some of his pupils to study the constitutions of different Greek states.

Aristotle was born at Stagirus, in north-eastern Greece, in 384 BC. He was in Athens, as a pupil of Plato, from 367 until Platos death in 347; he then left Athens, and after periods elsewhere was appointed by king Philip of Macedon to be tutor to his son, Alexander the Great. In 336 Alexander succeeded Philip, and in 335 Aristotle returned to Athens and opened a philosophical school there. In 323, on the death of Alexander, Athens embarked on a war against Macedon, and Aristotle left the city; in 322 he died, and Athens and her allies were defeated in the war; in 321 the democratic constitution of Athens was overthrown, at the insistence of the Macedonians.

Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics ends with a transitional passage leading to his Politics, and towards the end of this passage he says (X. 1181b):

First, if any individual points have been well made by previous writers, let us try to follow them up; then from the collection of constitutions we must examine what sort of thing preserves and what sort of thing destroys cities and particular constitutions, and for what reasons some are well administered and others are not.

The corpus of Aristotles works transmitted to us by medieval and renaissance scribes does not include a collection of constitutions, but there are lists of Aristotles works made in antiquity, which mention far more than the surviving corpus, and which do include a collection of 158 constitutions. A man called Heraclides probably Heraclides Lembus, who lived in Alexandria in the second century BC produced a set of excerpts from the collection; later someone else produced a set of excerpts from the excerpts, which survived to be copied by medieval scribes: we have what amounts to a page or two of print on Athens (translated here on pp. 11718), followed by much briefer passages on forty-three other states. Also we have references to and quotations from the collection by other ancient writers, and a collection of these fragments made by V. Rose in 1886 filled 110 pages and ranged over sixty-eight or sixty-nine of the constitutions.

Meanwhile, in 1881, it had been suggested by T. Bergk that some fragments of papyrus acquired by the Egyptian Museum in Berlin two years earlier were from a text of the Athenian Constitution. Not everyone accepted the suggestion, and Bergk himself could not believe that a long quotation from a poem by Solon, in one of the fragments, belonged to the Athenian Constitution. Then, early in 1890, F. G. Kenyon, who was working on a set of papyri bought for the British Museum by E. A. T. W. Budge, identified as the Athenian Constitution a text written on the back of some abandoned financial accounts of the late 70s AD (and found that the Berlin fragments, including the quotation from Solon, did indeed belong to this work). The first public announcement was made in The Times on 19 January 1891, and Kenyon published the first edition of the text on 30 January 1891. Later a few separate, small fragments were found to belong to the British Museums papyrus; but no other text of this work has been found, and no text of any of the other constitutions.