Aristotle, the Agricultural Democracy, and the Aphytaians (Pol. 6, 1319a 14-19)

Aristotle normally used historical notations to support his arguments. This is somewhat true for all the works of the corpus, but above all for Politics: the nature, objectives, and methodology of the investigations in this treatise present the strongest links with actual and concrete data, and therefore with historia. Obviously even the Aristotle of Politics is not a historian who wants to report known historiographical traditions; however, regardless of his intentions, there is no doubt that the work in question (more than all the others attributed to the philosopher) contains precious ‘fragments’ of history which, in general, confirm or supplement our knowledge. There are, however, cases in which the Aristotelian exempla end up filling in the omissions and gaps of the available sources, such as the cursory reference to the nomos of the Aphytaians, which appears in the section of Book 6 dedicated to the so-called agricultural democracy.