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www.digressus.org Digressus 12 (2012) 48-55

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Pedro Ribeiro Martins (2011). Pseudo-Xenofonte. A Constituição dos Atenienses. Tradução do Grego, Introdução, Notas e Índices. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra. Pp. 119, incl. bibliography and index. ISBN 978-989-8281-99-9.

Denis Renan Correa Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia, Brasil [email protected]

There are few good translations from ancient Greek

texts to the Portuguese language, and many of the available

translations are not from the original language, but secondhand

translations, first translated for English or French and later

converted to Portuguese. The online library Classica Digitalia

of University of Coimbra has been covering this gap publishing

new original translations, making easy the first contact with

ancient sources for students and curious people who only know

Portuguese1.Among the works published by the Classica

Digitalia, we have The Athenians Constitution translated by

Pedro Ribeiro Martins. This work has an unidentified author,

with known aliases such as Pseudo-Xenophon and Old

Oligarch.

Martins provides to the readers an Introduction that is

half of the entire volume (11-67), in which he introduces the

main questions enfold in the reading of the ancient text.

Primary questions as authorship and dating have never been

1https://bdigital.sib.uc.pt/jspui/The Classica Digitalia project publishes books with low prices and offers freely the e-books version. This is very important in Portuguese-speaking countries with meager libraries.


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fully solved by modern scholars, so that the text’s interpretation

often restrained itself to answer these questions. Then Martins

arranged his introductory study with three key problems:

authorship (15-34), dating (35-52) and the text’s “nature” (53-

67).

To a work as The Athenians Constitution issues as

authorship, dating and what Martins called “nature of the work”

are relatives to each other. Aliases as Old Oligarch assume

identification between the text and given oligarch ideology,

disclosing not only an alias for the authorship but also an

interpretation about the intellectual and historical context in

which the text was written. An approach of the successive

interpretations of the text is relevant even to a non-scholar

reader, because the choice of a pseudonym could orientate the

text’s interpretation. Martins made a good choice resuming the

old controversy about the authorship, beginning with Demetrius

of Magnesia (Diogenes Laertius, 2.57) who disagreed for the

first time the ancient doxa that The Athenians Constitution was

a counterpart of The Lacedaemonions Constitution ascribed to

Xenophon, and going forward until the myriad of alternative

authors suggested by modern scholars (20-27).

Martins gathered with dedication and industry the

alternatives names, aliases and profiles for the unknown author

of The Athenians Constitution, what also happens when he

discusses the dating (35-52). However, the elaboration of an

accurate intellectual and historical context for the unknown

author remained fragile among the many references to the


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scholar literature. Martins loses too much time in weak

hypotheses, that as the repetitive use of the first person singular

uncovers a “extremely self-confident” psychological profile for

the author (27). In the same way, there are the hypotheses

about dating with basis in comparisons between historical

battles that took place in the Archidamian War and accounts of

the Old Oligarch about military benefits of the Athenian

thalassocracy or his digression about if Athens were an island

(37-42). These hypotheses are fragile because a reliable

interpretation of these similarities could not mean that the

author restrains himself to contemporary historical facts, but

that he shares ideas and conceptions with the historian

Thucydides, who wrote the accounts that describes these

events. To the task of building an intellectual context for

Pseud-Xenophon is more relevant to study the culture produced

from military and strategic accounts than trying place exactly

the chronological point of the Peloponnesian War in which The

Athenians Constitution was written. Similarities between

Thucydides and Pseud-Xenophon are well-known by the

scholars, Martins included (23-24), and it’s a richer ground for

researches. In other words, the first half of Martins’ book is a

good Introduction to the interpretive history of the text but it is

weakened by the lack of a personal contribution which could

easily put away many of these fragile interpretations and being

more dedicated in other profitable questions.

The chapter about the “nature” (53-67) of The

Athenians Constitution had the same problems. Martins did a


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bad decision when he chose the inaccurate word “nature” to

discuss some stylistic issues of the work and its relationship

with other ancient texts that have shared the term “politeia” as

a central concern. The Athenians Constitution is clearly the first

account of a specific literary gender from Ancient Greece, the

politeiai. Among this gender there were philosophic treats as

The Republic from Plato, politics pamphlets as The

Lacedaemonions Constitution from Xenophon, and institutional

histories as The Athenians Constitution ascribed to Aristotle.

Moreover, the ancient tradition did reference to lost works as

the Peri Politeias from Protagoras (Diogenes Laertius, 9.55),

many fragments ascribed to Critias, a hundred and half of

politeiai that Hesychius and Diogenes Laertius believed that

Aristotle and his students had wrote and gathered, and finally

the modern discovery of The Boetians Constitution included at

the Helenica Oxyrhynchia.

Such works had the same concern of understanding and

improving theoretically the ancient Greek polis (as Pseudo-

Xenophon stated in 3.9), with different approaches that change

according to the author. Felix Jacoby (1949) suggested the

classification of the politeiai into philosophical, political and

scientific2 – Martins quoted this classification, but without

reference to the proper author (58). Instead of discussing the

“nature” of the text, Martins’ introduction study could be more

profitable if he had examined better The Athenian Constitutions 2F. Jacoby (1949). Atthis: the local chronicles of Ancient Athens (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 211-212.


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as the founder text of the politeia gender, which also could help

him surpass the inconclusive hypotheses about the text’s exact

dating or about the author’s “psychological profile”, questions

that remain not totally answered.

Martins offers us few notes about scholarship

controversy in the text’s translation, what it has positive and

negative aspects. The notes are mainly about relevant historical

facts about the text, something great to a translation that intends

to reach a wider audience, addressing the historical events and

context that enfold the text and are unknown to the common

audience. But even to non-scholar readers some questions

could be approached, as I am going to argue in the next

paragraph. For now it is worth mentioning one minor

typographic mistake: there are two notes number 6 in the page

44. Martins also could have chosen to translate quotations from

English or German, to avoid keeping off non-scholars readers.

But these minor mistakes do not testify against Martins’serious

and correct translation of the work.

There is no commentary from Martins, for example,

about the complex translation of the term politeia for modern

political vocabulary. Jacqueline Bordes3 had studied this

subject in her work Politeia dans la pensée grecque jusqu'a

Aristote (1982), and she distinguished the “individual meaning”

of the term (the political rights of the citizenship) from the

“collective meaning”, that is the form of the civil regime of the 3J. Bordes (1982). Politeia dans la pensée grecque jusqu'a Aristote (Paris: Belles Lettres) 16-161.


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polis, which since Herodotus (I, 80-83) are classified according

the extension of sovereignty for only one (Monarchy), to a few

(Oligarchy) or to many mans (Democracy). The Athenians

Constitution is totally placed in this intellectual tradition, which

it answers with its evaluation of advantages and disadvantages

on democracy. Moreover, the text discloses a tension between

the author’s aristocratic moral and his positions within a

democratic regime that, at the same time, seduces him through

its power expressed in the Athenians maritime imperialism.

In that way, Martins mentions that Pseudo-Xenophon’s

work is contradictory, because it shows us oligarchic criticism

about Democracy at the same time in which he defends many

aspects of the Athenian regime (11, 27-18, 30-31, 56-7). Such

contradictions are mentioned also when Martins comments the

hypothesis of Luciano Canfora (1980) who argued that the text

is a dialogue and for that it has ideas that contradict themselves

(30-31, 56-57, 76). Many scholars understand the political

aspect of an author framing it in labels established, as

“oligarchic”, “moderate democratic” or “radical democratic”.

Notwithstanding the paradox presented by the text, there is

coherence in the work that has similarity with the democratic

conception of the Funeral Oration ascribed to Pericles

(Thucydides, II, 34-64). This resemblance goes beyond the

account that binds Democracy and Thalassocracy which is

well-known by scholars. The main theme of The Athenians

Constitution is to debate the conflict between aristocratic values

and democratic rule, and Pericles answer to that same tension


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when says that Democracy is not a birth aristocracy, but a

meritocratic one (II, 27). In other words, both texts are critical

appreciations of Democracy in an aristocratic intellectual

environment. The so-called “Old Oligarchy” didn’t have

ideological roots very different from the unquestionable

democratic Pericles. Even if they were political adversaries,

both of them share the same historical and ideological context.

The politeiai have a political ideology dynamic that is

not totally understood only labeling each text within the simple

antilogy of Democracy against Oligarchy. The political

positions of the ancient men weren’t immutable, but

changeable according to the context. Lysias already had stated

that “no human being is democratic or oligarchic by nature, but

by interest” (Defense against a charge of subverting the

Democracy, 8). Therefore, the political ideas of Pseudo-

Xenophon should be understood as such it seems: the internal

conflict of interests of an aristocratic Athenian citizen living in

a Democracy and defending the maritime power of Athens

which existence he admits to be credited to the democratic

regime. There is no absolute contradiction, but a political

tension. The attempt to expel the paradox by Canfora’s

dialogue hypothesis takes us to disregard the conflict which

The Athenians Constitution is a major source: the strain

between the noble hoplitic order and the emergence of popular

groups through the role accomplished by them in the

democratic Athenian Thalassocracy. Pseudo-Xenophon did

explicit references to this strain when he mentioned his


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disapproval to the Athenian regime at the same time he

accepted that the Democracy was well-preserved (2.20-3.1).

In conclusion, it is important to reaffirm that Martins’

edition of The Athenian Constitution covers the gap of a good

Portuguese translation to this ancient source, what is welcome.

This translation will motivate critical reading and scholar

interpretation from a work that, I believe, still has many

questions to offer to moderns researchers. It brings new readers

from countries and languages that do not have strong tradition

in classic studies, and it is also a way to bring new questions

about old texts.

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