life. Further, the constitution within the
framework of which the ordinary process of administration and passing
of decrees went on, was always regarded as the work of a special man or
body of men, the lawgivers. If we study Greek history, we find that the
position of the legislator corresponds to that assigned to him by
Plato and Aristotle. All Greek states, except those perversions
which Aristotle criticises as being "above law," worked under rigid
constitutions, and the constitution was only changed when the whole
people gave a commission to a lawgiver to draw up a new one. Such was
the position of the AEsumnetes, whom Aristotle describes in Book III.
chap, xiv., in earlier times, and of the pupils of the Academy in the
fourth century. The lawgiver was not an ordinary politician. He was
a state doctor, called in to prescribe for an ailing constitution. So
Herodotus recounts that when the people of Cyrene asked the oracle of
Delphi to help them in their dissensions, the oracle told them to go to
Mantinea, and the Mantineans lent them Demonax, who acted as a "setter
straight" and drew up a new constitution for Cyrene. So again the
Milesians, Herodotus tells us, were long troubled by civil discord, till
they asked help from Paros, and the Parians sent ten commissioners
who gave Miletus a new constitution. So the Athenians, when they were
founding their model new colony at Thurii, employed Hippodamus of
Miletus, whom Aristotle mentions in Book II, as the best expert in
town-planning, to plan the streets of the city, and Protagoras as the
best expert in law-making, to give the city its laws. In the Laws Plato
represents one of the persons of the dialogue as having been asked
by the people of Gortyna to draw up laws for a colony which they were
founding. The situation described must have occurred frequently in
actual life. The Greeks thought administration should be democratic and
law-making the work of experts. We think more naturally of law-making
as the special right of the people and administration as necessarily
confined to experts.

Aristotle's Politics, then, is a handbook for the legislator, the expert
who is to be called in when a state wants help. We have called him a
state doctor. It is one of the most marked characteristics of Greek
political theory that Plato and Aristotle think of the statesman as one
who has knowledge of what ought to be done, and can help those who call
him in to prescribe for them, rather