The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians

Two short treatises on Greek constitutions. The Polity of the Lacedaemonians describes the institutions Lycurgus was held to have given Sparta — the breeding and rearing of children, the common messes, the training of the young, the discipline of the army in camp and on the march, the powers of the kings and the ephors — and closes by observing that in the writer's own day the Spartans no longer keep them. The Polity of the Athenians is an altogether different thing: a brief, hostile and extremely shrewd argument that Athenian democracy, however much its author dislikes it, is perfectly designed for what it is for, and that every feature a critic complains of follows necessarily from letting the rowers of the fleet govern.

Both have come down under Xenophon's name. The treatise on Athens is now generally thought to be by an earlier, anonymous writer — conventionally the Old Oligarch — and may be the oldest surviving work of Attic prose. This edition is Henry Graham Dakyns's English translation.

This Bibliomancer edition presents both treatises complete.