42 Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, edited and translated with an introduction by P. J. Rhodes. Penguin Classics, 208pp. Nobody would claim that the treatise on the Athenian constitution written by Aristotle or one of his students is the most entertaining contemporary source for Athenian democracy, or the most philosophically insightful. For a raunchy, no-holds-barred sidelight on the democracy, we can turn to Aristophanes—though his zany humour makes using his plays as a historical source a complicated endeavour. For a beautifully-crafted historical narrative (and some editorializing from one of history’s great cynics), we have Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War. But no text that survives deals with the democracy as fully or as directly as the Aristotelian one, written sometime in the late 4 th century BC; when it was pulled out of the sands of Egypt in 1879, it increased our knowledge of the workings of the Athenian system at a stroke. About half of the text is a chronological overview of the various stages of the Athenian constitution; the other half is a detailed description of the Athenian democracy’s various institutions and ofcials. Packed with detail, it’s an unrivalled source for how the Athenian democracy worked on a day to day basis—and for anyone with an interest in popular rule, that should be excitement enough. Moses I. Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, revised edition. Rutgers University Press, 208pp. Midway through the nineteenth century, the English banker George Grote published a twelve-volume History of Greece in which he dared to depict the Athenian democracy in a positive light. More than a hundred years after Grote broke with the anti- democratic tradition that had previously reigned supreme in the study of ancient democracy, the topic was still not getting the attention it deserved. Moses Finley’s book went some way towards changing that. Finley was an American who was expelled from his home country during the McCarthy era on the basis that he was a member of the Communist Party. His book contains a number of short, sharp essays (originally lectures), often aimed at scholarly misconceptions about Athenian popular rule. One classic chapter, for example, explained how the much- maligned ‘demagogues’ were in fact part and parcel of the Athenian democratic system; and went on to point out the strangeness of the conventional view that classical Athens produced one of the greatest cultural fowerings of human history under the worst political system ever conceived. At this stage (1973), drawing attention to some of the inconsistencies of the conventional view of Athenian democracy as mob rule was still an important task, one that Finley carried out with élan. The Best Books on Athenian Democracy James Kierstead Senior Lecturer in Classics Victoria University of Wellington Athenaeum Master InDesign v2.indd 44 9/12/18 8:36 AM