The Athenian Constitution Written in the School of Aristotle by P.J. Rhodes (review)

The Athenian Constitution contains the most detailed description we have of how Athenian democracy worked on a day-to-day basis, not to mention one of our most detailed run-throughs of Athenian constitutional history. It is also the only text that survives from the great series of 158 polis constitutions compiled in the Lyceum in the late fourth century bc.

For almost forty years now, anyone who has wanted to know anything about this important work has turned to P.J. Rhodes' monumental commentary.¹ If Rhodes' original commentary had any limitation, it was its sheer completeness: the volume could be forbidding, even to advanced students of the period. While I was doing my Ph.D., I used to meet a friend (also a Greek historian) every week to read through the Ath. Pol. along with Rhodes' commentary. Even we often found ourselves skipping over some of the longer and more bibliographic sections of his work.

In other words, there has long been a need for a commentary on the Athenian Constitution that would serve as an accessible entry point for people who are interested in Athenian democracy, but who are operating at a somewhat less Olympian level of scholarship than Rhodes. It is entirely appropriate that this task should have been carried out by Rhodes himself, who has long been, and remains, the world's foremost authority on this crucial source. The result is what we might call a "shorter Rhodes"—a handy, snappy distillation of the original commentary, which dispenses with some of its more technical sections while retaining much of its authoritativeness.

This is without even mentioning one of the most commendable features of this new commentary: the way Rhodes has kept abreast of the considerable amount of scholarship that has been done on the Ath. Pol. since the full-length commentary was published in 1981. As with the original commentary, the range is truly impressive, encompassing dissertations and reviews as well as books and articles (in several different languages, of course). Phrases such as "R. Loeper, in an article published in Russian in 1896" (313) come as no surprise to the reader.

More substantially, it is good to see Rhodes taking into account Mirko Canevaro and Edward Harris' bold recent challenge to the authenticity of decrees quoted in the orators, an intervention that has sent ripples through the study of Athenian political history.² Rhodes has also taken into consideration another audacious and influential recent assault on scholarly orthodoxy, Josine Blok's insistence that citizenship had more to do with sharing in communal rites than with the political rights stressed by Aristotle.³

Inevitably, there are a few pieces relevant to the Ath. Pol. that came out so recently that even Rhodes cannot be expected to have taken them into account. One that I happen to be aware of is "Associations and Institutions in Athenian Citizenship Procedures,"⁴ in which it is argued that Ath. Pol.'s account of how young men were confirmed as citizens is basically correct (in spite of Rhodes's protestations). Basically, Ath. Pol. 42.1–2 tells us that a young man's deme voted on both his age and his legal status, but that the courts and the Council voted on only one of these things each; Rhodes rejects this, claiming instead that the courts and the Council must also have voted on both these criteria for citizenship. I will not go into more detail here (if you are interested, you can look up the article).

Though Rhodes does offer a few arguments against what it says in that passage, one of his reasons for rejecting the Ath. Pol.'s account is that he finds the procedure it outlines "improbably haphazard" (repeated here on p. 340). This looks a lot like a version of what Richard Dawkins has called the Argument from Personal Incredulity, and, though it...