Primary source ยท literary
Politics, Book II.11 (the Carthaginian constitution)
Aristotle
Composition
c. 335 BCE
Language: greek
Reliability
contemporary access
0Aristotle devotes Politics II.11 to a sustained analysis of the Carthaginian constitution, identifying suffetes, the Council of 104, the senate, and the popular assembly, and praising the city's institutional stability. Despite its brevity (a few pages of Greek), the passage is the single most important external description of Carthaginian government we possess, fuller and more analytic than anything in the Roman tradition, and uniquely free of the Punic-Wars frame that distorts most surviving accounts. Indispensable for any treatment of Carthaginian institutions.
Bias and reliability notes
Strictly contemporary with the Carthaginian constitution he describes, 4th-century BCE Athens looking across the Mediterranean to a polity Greek philosophy classed as one of the few non-Greek constitutions worth serious analysis. Aristotle's frame is comparative: he discusses Carthage alongside Sparta and Crete as a "well-ordered" mixed constitution. The account is schematic and idealized rather than ethnographic, Aristotle is interested in institutional types, not Carthaginian self-understanding, but the detail is precise enough that he plainly worked from informants.