Historical context
The Constitution of the Athenians (Athēnaiōn Politeia) is the sole survivor of one of antiquity's most ambitious research projects: the collection, by Aristotle and his school at the Lyceum, of the constitutions of some 158 Greek cities, the empirical basis for the generalizations of the Politics. The platform reads it as one of the most important historical recoveries of the modern era — lost for two thousand years, it was rediscovered on a papyrus acquired by the British Museum and published in 1891, transforming our knowledge of Athenian history.
What it contains
The platform reads the work as falling into two parts: a history of the Athenian constitution from the earliest times through the reforms of Solon, the tyranny of Peisistratus, the democracy of Cleisthenes, and the developments of the fifth and fourth centuries; and a description of how the Athenian democracy actually worked in Aristotle's own day — its magistracies, its councils, its courts, the selection of officials by lot, the payment for public service. The platform reads this descriptive section as uniquely valuable: a near-contemporary account of the working machinery of the world's first great democracy, of a kind that survives for no other ancient state.
Significance
The platform reads the Constitution of the Athenians as the bridge between Aristotle's empirical method and his political theory. It shows the evidence-gathering that underlay the constitutional government of the Politics — the patient study of how actual cities were governed, from which Aristotle drew his classification of regimes and his analysis of stability and change. The platform reads its historical narrative with the usual caution (it is a fourth-century reconstruction, not a primary record of the archaic period), but reads its account of the contemporary democracy as a primary source of the first rank for the Athenian constitution.
Reception and influence
The platform reads the work as having revolutionized the study of Athenian democracy on its rediscovery, supplying detail available nowhere else and confirming or correcting the literary sources. For the platform it is doubly valuable: as the surviving specimen of Aristotle's vast comparative constitutional research, and as the fullest ancient account of how Athenian self-government actually functioned. The platform reads it as essential to Aristotle and constitutional government and to the Athenian reforms it documents.