Aristotle’s “other Politeiai”

It is possible that the School of Aristotle had a ‘broad’ model as a point of reference for the Politeia of a community (pre-Greek, ktisis, places, toponyms, ethnonyms, heroic age, archaiologia, history of the community and/or institutions, laws and legislators, ancient kings and tyrants, 4th century institutions, coins, public or aristocratic banqueting, agogai, usages and customs, products of the earth, cults, myths, proverbs, poets, various episodes, mirabilia, ethnographic elements). The differences in character or structure will have been determined by the characteristics of the community and the documentation that the School in its in own time unearthed on each community. Although there undoubtedly was a tendency towards a certain form of structure and this is evident, the structuring of an opusculum into obligatory parts, as fixed contents, is rather a tendency of modern analysis. A definition of the Athenaion Politeia as ‘atypical’ must therefore be avoided since, in their variety, the quoted sources and the Heraclidean extracts demonstrate that such a fixed model does not exist