The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

184 ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIANS LECT.

seems to have reflected very little on the subject,
or rather to have confined his reflexions within very
narrowly drawn lines. The formalism of his conception is most evident in the way in which lie
treats, or fails to treat, the Athenian empire. To
a modern student, who should undertake to write
a constitutional history of Athens, one of the most
important problems would be to examine how the
democracy governed the empire and how the
empire reacted on it. Aristotle dismisses the
empire in about four lines (c. 24). Moreover,
although he has traced the constitutional changes
in relation to the political crises which brought
them about, he has, in general, his eye merely on
the dead machinery; he tells us the names of the
parts, but he does not show how the machine
worked. Even when we come to the democracy
of the fourth century, we get only a full account
of the official organization and the formal procedure; no effort is made to gain an insight into
the political efficiency of the institutions. It is
doubtful whether even here he consulted the laws
themselves, or rather used an analysis written by
somebody else.1 And if in this historical treatise
he fails to show the actual working of the constitution and to explain the unwritten Staatsrecht,
his scientific treatise, the Politics, does not supply
this want.
Plato troubled himself little with history, but
it is not improbable that one of his speculations
I See Wilamowitz, op. cit. i. c. 7..