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Analyzing the "democratic" features and institutions of the Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., Martin Ostwald traces their development from Solon's judicial reforms to the flowering of popular sovereignty, when the people assumed the right both to enact all legislation and to hold magistrates accountable for implementing what had been enacted.

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A magisterial work on a theme as complex as it is crucial: the evolution of Athenian democracy. Ostwald (Swarthmore College) details the transition from Cleisthenes's ad hoc legislation (507 BCE) through popular sovereignty to a system-worked out in the wake of a bitter civil war (403-400 BCE)-by which Council and Assembly deferred in the matter of law to written statutes and the jury courts. The author sees that this process cannot be treated simply as a political phenomenon, but embraces ``all major aspects of public life.'' The process involves religious traditionalism and its bitter struggle against the new learning of the Sophistic movement as well as the ingrained class prejudices that continued to flourish amid political egalitarianism. The way in which such themes are developed and counterpointed is a truly marvelous achievement: here, at last, we have the vue d'ensemble for which previous scholars (e.g., W.K.C. Guthrie, C. Hignett, E.R. Dodds, M.H. Hansen) had provided no more than partial approaches. There are some drawbacks. Sometimes an avalanche of detail will overrun and bury the central argument. Furthermore, Ostwald overendorses the high idealism that modern idealists profess to find in Athenian popular government, just as he consistently understresses its violence, hysteria, and irrationality. But his magnum opus remains a monument, a landmark, that no student of Western civilization can afford to ignore. Recommended for public, college, and university libraries.-P.M. Green, University of Texas at Austin

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Martin Ostwald is W. R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Classics at Swarthmore College, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of Autonomia: Its Genesis and Early History (1982).