The Athenian Constitution

Overview

About a hundred pages, one of a hundred and fifty-eight constitutions of Greek city-states that Aristotle’s school at the Lyceum is reported to have compiled as source material for the comparative political analysis in the Politics, and the only one of those hundred and fifty-eight to survive today in anything approaching complete form. Ancient testimony credited the collection to Aristotle himself, though modern scholarship generally regards this particular text as produced by a student or associate working under his direction and using his methods, rather than written entirely in his own hand.

Its survival is itself a remarkable story. The text was lost for well over two millennia, known only from scattered quotations in later ancient authors, until 1890, when scholars at the British Museum, working through a set of papyrus rolls acquired in Egypt, identified substantial portions of the work preserved on the back of an estate account, reused, as was common practice, for a copy of this treatise sometime after the original document had served its first purpose. The recovery was a sensation in classical scholarship, restoring at a stroke a major primary source for the workings of Athenian democracy that had simply not existed, as an available text, for the entire span of Western intellectual history up to that point.

The treatise divides naturally into two parts of different character. The first is historical, tracing the development of the Athenian constitution through a series of successive changes from the earliest period down to the author’s own time. The second is descriptive, a detailed, almost procedural account of how the Athenian democracy of the 320s BCE actually functioned in practice, institution by institution.

The argument

The historical narrative. The first part of the treatise identifies eleven distinct changes to the Athenian constitution across roughly three centuries, and works through them in sequence, drawing on earlier historical and documentary sources, some of which no longer survive independently, making this section valuable evidence for periods otherwise poorly documented.

It begins with Draco’s law code, notorious for its severity, before turning at greater length to Solon, whose early sixth-century reforms canceled existing debts, freed citizens who had been enslaved for debt, and reorganized political participation according to a graded system of property classes rather than birth alone, a reform the treatise treats as a foundational, if incomplete, step toward broader participation.

It then covers the tyranny of Peisistratus and his sons, presented with more nuance than the term tyranny might suggest, noting genuine popular benefits alongside the illegitimacy of one-man rule, before reaching Cleisthenes, whose reforms at the end of the sixth century reorganized the citizen body into new tribes cutting across older kinship and regional loyalties specifically to break the power of entrenched noble families, and whose changes the treatise credits as the true foundation of the democracy in its more developed form.

The narrative continues through the fifth century’s expansion of democratic participation, including the introduction of pay for jury service and other public duties that made political participation practically accessible to poorer citizens who could not otherwise afford the time away from earning a living, and covers, in more detail than most surviving sources, the two periods when the democracy was overthrown: the oligarchic coup of 411 BCE during the strain of the Peloponnesian War, and the more violent oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants installed after Athens’s final defeat in 404, followed in both cases by the democracy’s restoration.

The functioning democracy. The second, longer part shifts from narrative history to systematic description, cataloguing the institutions of the Athenian democracy as they actually operated in the author’s own time, the 320s BCE, in a level of procedural detail found nowhere else in surviving ancient sources.

It describes the Assembly, the sovereign body of all citizens who chose to attend, meeting regularly to debate and vote directly on matters of policy, law and war. It describes the Council of Five Hundred, chosen annually by lot, fifty members from each of the ten tribes, which prepared business for the Assembly and managed a wide range of ongoing administrative functions, with its presidency rotating among the ten tribal delegations so that different groups of citizens held the practical center of daily government in turn throughout the year.

It describes the popular courts in unusual detail: the pool of six thousand citizens sworn annually as potential jurors, and the elaborate lottery mechanisms, including a specific device for randomly assigning jurors to particular courts on the morning of trial itself, designed explicitly to prevent any litigant from knowing in advance which jurors would hear his case and therefore from being able to bribe or otherwise improperly influence the panel.

And it describes the magistrates, the great majority of whom were selected by lot rather than by election, a deliberate democratic mechanism intended to prevent any wealthy family, faction or demagogue from monopolizing office through campaigning, patronage or bribery, since a lottery, unlike an election, cannot be won by any of these means. The treatise notes the significant exception: offices requiring specific technical or military expertise, most importantly the generalships, remained elective, on the reasonable ground that competence in these particular roles genuinely mattered and could not safely be left to chance.

How to read it

Read the two parts as distinct projects with distinct purposes, and adjust your expectations accordingly. The historical first part is a compressed, sometimes uneven narrative drawing on earlier and partly lost sources, useful chiefly as evidence for periods we would otherwise know much less about. The second, descriptive part is closer to a functioning organizational manual, and it is this second part that gives the treatise its unique and irreplaceable value as direct evidence for how Athenian democracy actually operated.

Pay particular attention to the mechanisms specifically designed to prevent corruption and capture by wealthy factions, the jury lottery system especially. These details, found nowhere else in comparable specificity, reveal how seriously the Athenian democracy took the practical problem of insulating its institutions from the influence of wealth and connection, a problem every subsequent democracy has had to address in its own way.

Notice the treatment of selection by lot as a deliberate democratic principle rather than a primitive or arbitrary alternative to election. Sortition strikes many modern readers as a strange way to choose officials, but the treatise’s own explanation, that it removes the opportunity for wealth and campaigning to determine outcomes, makes clear that it was understood by the Athenians themselves as a specific and considered democratic safeguard rather than an accident of tradition.

Read this treatise alongside Aristotle’s Politics if you can. The Politics develops general theoretical arguments about the best forms of constitution and government; this treatise supplies the kind of detailed empirical case study that theoretical work in the Politics explicitly says such theorizing should be grounded in, and reading the two together shows Aristotelian political science working at both its theoretical and its empirical registers.

Keep the story of the text’s recovery in mind as you read. Every sentence you are reading was, for roughly two thousand years, simply unavailable to anyone, recovered only by chance from a reused papyrus roll in Egypt in 1890, and knowing this adds a particular weight to a text that otherwise reads, in places, like a plain administrative manual.

Questions it raises

• Does selection of most officials by lot represent a genuinely defensible democratic principle, or does it sacrifice competence for a kind of fairness that election could achieve by other means?
• The treatise’s jury lottery system was designed specifically to prevent bribery by making it impossible to know panel composition in advance. What does the sophistication of this mechanism suggest about how seriously ancient Athenians took the problem of corruption?
• How reliable is a text composed by Aristotle’s school, working from earlier historical sources of uncertain reliability themselves, as evidence for the earliest period of Athenian constitutional history it describes?
• The treatise treats Cleisthenes’s tribal reorganization as the true foundation of the mature democracy. What does deliberately cutting across existing kinship and regional loyalties accomplish that other kinds of reform could not?
• Elected generals and lottery-selected magistrates coexisted throughout Athenian democracy. What principle determines which kinds of office deserve which method of selection?
• What does the text’s near-total loss for two millennia, followed by its chance recovery from a reused papyrus, suggest about how much other significant evidence for ancient political history may be permanently gone?