This is a defense of the Athenian democracy by a great radical historian. Geoffrey de Ste. Croix shows how even its oddest features made sense, and illustrates the different factors influencing Athenian politics--for instance, trade and commercial interests mattered very little. Though written in the 1960s, these hitherto unpublished essays remain fresh and innovative.

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 The Constitution 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...