Elections in the Ancient World

Extract

It is with the Greeks that I shall be mainly concerned. I know much less about those sons of Aeneas, the Romans, whose mother was Venus (so legend and Lucretius tell us), but with whom, for all that, I have never fallen so much in love as I have with the Greeks. In speaking of elections among the Greeks I shall be concerned with their ideas about principles, mainly as those ideas are recorded by Plato and Aristotle, rather than with the methods which actually they used: in other words, I shall attempt an analysis of the general political thinking that lay behind their behaviour, rather than a description of the working of their particular electoral systems. But I must first of all lay a foundation—a foundation of distinctions and definitions—before I attempt that analysis.