I am grateful to Dr M. L. Sharp of Cambridge University Press for inviting me to prepare a second edition of this book, and to Routledge (as successors to Croom Helm) and to the University of Oklahoma Press for making that possible by returning my rights in the book to me.

The book originated in a request from Mr R. Stoneman, then of Croom Helm, that I should compile a source book on ‘Greek political systems’. In revising it I had in any case wanted not only to correct a few errors and to do some updating but also to make a clearer typographical distinction between the ancient texts and my editorial material than was possible in the first edition, and to add some further texts; and further changes in presentation and additions to the texts were suggested by the publisher's advisers. The upshot is that in this edition all the material in the first edition has been retained, but the texts are now numbered in a single sequence; in Chapter Five what was a section on ‘citizens, metics and slaves’ has become a section on ‘citizens, foreigners and slaves’, with a few additional texts; there are new chapters on women and children, on economic life and on religion (though there is some material on all of these dispersed through the other chapters); and the chapter on the Hellenistic and Roman periods has been enlarged with a section showing ‘variations on a theme’ (though there was more material on these periods in the first edition than one hasty reviewer supposed).