Monday, 10 January 2011

Review of Rhodes' "A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia"

http://www.amazon.com/Commentary-Aristotelian-Athenaion-Clarendon-Paperbacks/dp/0198149425/ref=cm_cr-mr-title


Just what I was looking for. A Cambridge professor recommended this book for me and it helped me so much. It comments line by line the greek text of pseudo-Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians, that is, Athenaion Politeia (AP).

It is very detailed and comprehensive. Furthemore, it is very clear and readable. The greek is that of the AP, which should be easy or, at least, not difficult, even if you didn't study a lot of greek (between 1 and 2 years should be enough.)

1) It discusses, for example, the dokimasiai, the graphai paronomon, the difference between nomoi and psephismata, and many other topics minutely and percussively.

2) It reviews the existing literature in a wonderful manner, assessing the view of many different scholars. Mogens Herman Hansen's views are almost always mentioned. Generally, Rhodes disagrees with Hansen but he is, usually, very argumentative.

3) He investigates the functions of the guardianship of the Constituion, that were, at first, responsability of the boule h tou areou pagou (council of the areopagus), called he thes politeias fylake (the guardian of the Constitution), and that were, later, as Athens got more democratic, distributed between the dikasteria, the ekklesia and the boule. This analysis has become standard in the literature of the genre. It is repeated for example by Martin Ostwald in his book and makes a lot of sense to me.

I don't want to write too long of a review, therefore I'll stop here. But there are so many other reasons that make this book worth it. I absolutely recommend it. It makes the reading (or re-reading) of AP so much more informative and full of nice surprises.

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