The Constitution of the Athenians by Aristotle has been preserved almost in its entirety on a papyrus discovered only in 1890. Its composition and circulation are dated between 329 and 327 BCE, that is, toward the end of Aristotle’s life and that of his pupil Alexander the Great, as well as the end of the entire Classical period.
By narrating the origins and development of Athens and of radical democracy, it demonstrates that man is indeed a “political animal by nature,” as also argued in his Politics.
This is the author’s second book on the Stagirite, following Aristotle and Crete, which has been published alongside Plato and Crete in the same series.
Andreas Panagopoulos was a distinguished PhD graduate of the University of London.
He studied at the Universities of Athens, Freiburg, and London, and has taught at the University of Crete, the University of Patras, as well as at Princeton, Rutgers, Lehigh, Queen’s University (New York), Humboldt University (Berlin), Nankai University (China), and the University of Bologna.
Andreas Panagopoulos resigned from his position as assistant in Athens in November 1967 and subsequently taught in private education.
He returned to the university after the restoration of democracy in Greek higher education in 1974. In February 1998, he was elected professor in the Department of Philology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Patras (this election is mentioned twice in the original text).
He worked extensively on Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as on comparative philology and literary criticism. He specialized in the use of electronic tools (THESaurus Linguae Graecae) for research and teaching in Classical Philology, supported by a Fulbright scholarship.
He authored numerous books and also translated works from Ancient Greek, Latin, English, and Spanish. He wrote book reviews for Kathimerini, contributed articles to Ardην, and produced the television program We and the Ancients. He was also the founder and president of the Hellenic Blood Donors Association (ST.ELL.A.).
He passed away in June 2009. Five of his books are published by our publishing house.