ABSTRACT
The hoplite organization's dramatic success over the Persian superpower early in the fifth century helped to inspire the precocious development of Greek political speculation, in which the relationship between the constitution and warfare was a central theme. Polybius was the first and only historian to make constitutional theory the main key to history and the ultimate cause of the rise and fall of states, rather than an occasional factor among many others. A halfhidden constitutional theory can be discerned in Herodotus, less articulated than the more archaic levels of explanation in terms of personal motivation and moral values. Herodotus wrote about the traditional Greek way of war, which assumed a constitution dominated by the hoplite class, essentially a broad oligarchy. But after the Persian Wars there appeared an alternative constitutional model: the naval democracy of Athens. In the late fourth century, Greek political discourse was taking on a marked "introspective" quality, as Sheldon Wolin puts it.
