Politics is a work of political philosophy by Aristotle, a 4th-century BC Greek philosopher. The end of the Nicomachean Ethics declared that the inquiry into ethics necessarily follows into politics, and the two works are frequently considered to be parts of a larger treatise, or perhaps connected lectures, dealing with the "philosophy of human affairs." The title of the Politics literally means "the things concerning the polis." Aristotle's Politics is divided into eight books which are each further divided into chapters. Citations of this work, as with the rest of the works of Aristotle, are often made by referring to the Bekker section numbers. Politics spans the Bekker sections 1252a to 1342b. After studying a number of real and theoretical city-states' constitutions, Aristotle classified them according to various criteria. On one side stand the true (or good) constitutions, which are considered such because they aim for the common good, and on the other side the perverted (or deviant) ones, considered such because they aim for the well being of only a part of the city. The constitutions are then sorted according to the "number" of those who participate to the magistracies: one, a few, or many. Aristotle's sixfold classification is slightly different from the one found in The Statesman by Plato. The diagram above illustrates Aristotle's classification. The literary character of the Politics is subject to some dispute, growing out of the textual difficulties that attended the loss of Aristotle's works. Book III ends with a sentence that is repeated almost verbatim at the start of Book VII, while the intervening Books IV–VI seem to have a very different flavor from the rest; Book IV seems to refer several times back to the discussion of the best regime contained in Books VII–VIII. Some editors have therefore inserted Books VII–VIII after Book III.

Three treatises survive from classical Greece under the loose title Politeiai (Constitutions) which are unique in character and indispensable to any student of the period. The longest and most important is Aristotle's Constitution of Athens which is both a history of Athenian constitutional development and a survey of the constitutional machinery of Aristotle's own day. The second, by Xenophon, is an account of the Spartan social and educational system, and the third, also attributed to Xenophon, The Constitution of the Athenians, though probably by an earlier author, is the first example in history of political pamphleteering. Dr. Moore has newly translated all three of these documents and an additional fragment The Boeotian Constitution written in the fourth century B. C. and the only surviving account of a genuinely oligarchic regime of the period. To these much needed, scholarly translations Dr. Moore has added brilliant introductions and commentaries which evaluate the documents, illumine their significance, and provide the background information which the writers assumed their readers to possess. In bringing together, translating, and annotating these constitutional documents from ancient Greece, Dr. Moore has produced an authoritative work of the highest scholarship which will place all students of constitutional history and of the Ancient World in his debt.

Hellenism is the living culture of the Greek-speaking peoples and has a continuing history of more than 3,500 years. The Encyclopedia of Greece and the HellenicTradition contains approximately 900 entries devoted to people, places, periods, events, and themes, examining every aspect of that culture from the Bronze Age to the present day. The focus throughout is on the Greeks themselves, and the continuities within their own cultural tradition. Language and religion are perhaps the most obvious vehicles of continuity; but there have been many others--law, taxation, gardens, music, magic, education, shipping, and countless other elements have all played their part in maintaining this unique culture. Today, Greek arts have blossomed again; Greece has taken its place in the European Union; Greeks control a substantial proportion of the world's merchant marine; and Greek communities in the United States, Australia, and South Africa have carried the Hellenic tradition throughout the world. This is the first reference work to embrace all aspects of that tradition in every period of its existence.

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Tyrants and tyranny are more than the antithesis of democracy and the mark of political failure: they are a dynamic response to social and political pressures.This book examines the autocratic rulers and dynasties of classical Greece and Rome and the changing concepts of tyranny in political thought and culture. It brings together historians, political theorists and philosophers, all offering new perspectives on the autocratic governments of the ancient world.The volume is divided into four parts. Part I looks at the ways in which the term 'tyranny' was used and understood, and the kinds of individual who were called tyrants. Part II focuses on the genesis of tyranny and the social and political circumstances in which tyrants arose. The chapters in Part III examine the presentation of tyrants by themselves and in literature and history. Part IV discusses the achievements of episodic tyranny within the non-autocratic regimes of Sparta and Rome and of autocratic regimes in Persia and the western Mediterranean world.Written by a wide range of leading experts in their field, Ancient Tyranny offers a new and comparative study of tyranny within Greek, Roman and Persian society.