The Constitution Of Athens And Its Citizen Body

Athens is believed to be the most representative city-state in the ancient Greece. This is not only because the preeminent achievements of Greek culture were produced in this city, but also because Athens exercised great influence on the rest of Greece and the whole east Mediterranean both in the field of policy and military. So somebody might say that the prosperity of Athens was the basis of the boom of the Greek world. The thesis is desperate to retrospect the process of the constitution of Athens roughly from 800 B.C. to 450 B.C., and through discussing the shaping of the constitution of Athens, I want to analyze the citizen body of Athens under the special constitution.When Athens got over the situation of chaos through their particular ability, Solon, Peisistratos and Cleisthenes established and optimized the constitution, under which the citizen body of Athens was gradually formed. The consciousness of the citizen body exhibited two different facets at the same time. The two facets were that on the one hand, the interior of Athens'citizen body was united, but on the other hand, the citizen body embodied the inclination of exclusiveness: firstly, in the interior of the citizens, different phratry sometimes produced conflicts because of their different interests; secondly, even in Athens though non-citizens were admitted to the citizenship and enjoyed considerable political influence, they never appear to have lost the stigma of social inferiority; finally, conflicts and even the battles continuously occurred between Athens and the other city-states in Greece, especially Sparta. In the struggles with the other city-states in Greece, Athens impaired the others, but her own traditional constitution was undergoing the invisible injury, and the citizen body of Athens was dying away.The Athenian constitution is a central key to understand ancient Athenian history. The transition of Athens'political system and its deep influence on the development of society is the motivating come behind Athenian history and occupied the attention of contemporary analysts of civic conflict and imperialism. The master degree thesis composes of three parts: in the first part I want to analyze the meaning of constitution and their political theory from the point of etymon; in the second part, the paper discuss how did Athens establish the constitution by their ability, and how did the citizen body of Athens was formed; in the last part, I want to commend on the consciousness of Athens'citizen body.