Aristide «imperialista» nell’Athenaion Politeia aristotelica

abstract – This paper focuses on the image of Aristides in the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia. In § 1 it provides a survey of the passages in which Aristides in mentioned. In § 2 it reconsiders the different traditions that emerge from the passages previously examined. In § 3 it scrutinises a piece of information supplied by Arist. Ath. Pol. 24, 1, according to which Aristides advised the Athenian citizens to move from their farms and live in the city, where they could find plenty of food and hold public or military offices. In the last paragraph (§ 4), the paper concludes that Aristotle mixed different and sometimes conflicting traditions on Aristides, but the genuine representation that he intended to provide was the one that appears in Ath. Pol. 41, 2, where Aristides is negatively depicted as a precursor of the radical democracy.