Athenian Democratic Origins and other essays

In these interconnected essays the late Geoffrey de Ste. Croix defends the institutions of the Athenian democracy, showing that they were much more practical, rational, and impartial than has usually been acknowledged. A major essay provides a new view of Aristotle's use of sources in TheConstitution of the Athenians, on which so much of our knowledge of Athenian constitutional history depends. Ste. Croix also argues that commercial factors had much less influence on Greek politics than modern scholars tend to assume, and that there was no such thing in any Greek state as a'commercial aristocracy'. As always, he works out these general positions with the utmost lucidity and pungency, and in meticulous detail. Though written in the 1960s, these hitherto unpublished essays by a great radical historian will still constitute a major contribution to contemporary debate.The editors and other specialists have supplied an updating Afterword to each chapter, and the book contains a thorough index.

Geoffrey de Ste. Croix was Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford from 1953 until 1977. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972. He published Origins of the Peloponnesian War in 1972 and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World in 1981; the latter book was translated into Spanish and Greek, and won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize for 1982.