ABSTRACT
Aristotle is not known for his sense of humour.1 So, when he poses what look like frivolous questions, we should be ready to seek more serious problems behind them. At one point in his musings on the constitutional change he suddenly asks: ‘How are we to tell whether a state is still the same state or a different one?’ We could, he suggests, divide its physical territory and population into two, to see if that makes them two different states-but that, he decides, would be silly. He concludes: ‘That perhaps is not a very serious matter: it arises from our use of the word polis to mean both the state and the city’ (Politics 3.1276a 19-25, adapted from Saunders’ translation).
