Antik Atina'da demokrasinin gelişim sürecini bize aktarmasıyla çok faydalı bir eser. ( )

It has been a while now since I read Herodotus and Thucydides, and reading the Athenian Constitution was welcome opportunity to reengage with the stories of interesting Greek characters and political figures like Solon, Pisistratus, Cleisthene, Aristides, Pericles, Themistocles. The author of the Athenian Constitution (who was almost certainly not Aristotle himself, but likely a pupil) has a notable bias for the aristocratic agenda in his historical accounts, but also appears to draw from sources now lost to us.

Even more interesting is the author's account of the contemporary political bureaucracy of his day. There are not many other documents in the world that so explicitly discuss how an urban centre circa 325 BCE is organized: from who fixes the roads and repairs the temples, to who makes sure that the women who are hired for playing flutes at parties are not overpaid (i.e. price-fixing the market to keep the cost of entertainment low and women poor/ socially dependent). This is a glimpse into another world, where power, economics, and social stratification is both bizarrely different and sometimes unsettlingly familiar.

185 ARI