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nia–justice–friendship. Ch.8 puts together the alternatives of political paideia that Aristotle confronted: the theoretical proposal of Plato’s Republic (a well-designed system for the education of the ruling class), the practice of Normalpolis (incidental education for all by the execution of age-old rituals), and the intermediate proposal of Plato’s Laws (the systematic education of the whole citizenry). Ch.9 shows how Aristotle’s paideia educates all the members of the polis by using institutions of the oikos and the polis and by habituating people, morally and politically, through mimêsis. As EN X.9.1180b3-28 nicely puts it, oikos and paideia have complementary educational functions: the former offers the general aims and guidelines, which the latter, being more situationistic, implements. Still, the multiplicity of constitutions entails a range of different models of paideia that, nevertheless, are to be enacted by the oikos and the various rituals of the polis. Nagle’s argument depends on a distinction derived from Pol. I.2-3, between complete and incomplete oikoi with reference to their autarchy (85-8). This is significant for both the socio-economic (since it relates to the necessities for a self-sustained oikos of chs 3-4) and the political (since it complements the argument for the interconnection between types of ruling of the oikos and the polis of chs 6-7) models. An entailment is that the better the polis the more complete its constituent oikoi would be. Moreover, the inferiority of natural slaves, barbarians and metics is explained with reference to the far from complete oikoi in which they grew up and lived, rather than some chauvinistic explanation, while the lack of authority of women is reduced to their being politically inactive, rather than to a permanent deficiency. I am still unclear precisely how the oikos is the foundation of the polis, as the title of the book suggests. Instead, I believe that oikos and polis are interconnected; this is especially clear in the case of the complete oikos, but it also holds with reference to the incomplete versions. In that connection, N. rightly claims that the political constitution would determine the completeness (economic and political), the ruling relations and the paideutic aims of the oikos. One would expect N. to defend his thesis with reference to Aristotle’s criticism of the Platonic rejection of oikos in Pol. II.2-4, a locus classicus for the importance of oikos, but surprisingly N. does not take this path. The plethora and variety of sources (historical, archaeological, etc.) in the book is impressive, regardless of several errors in transliteration (e.g. the repeated use of acholê, instead of ascholia, even in a heading, on 274-6). This account of the historical background is, however, disproportionately lengthy, at the expense of a discussion of the theoretical alternatives that Aristotle confronts. Yet I cannot be critical on that, since N. informs us in the very first sentence that his aim is the historical contextualization of the Aristotelian account of oikos and polis against its economic and cultural background. Thus the book complements nicely those treatments that focus on the theoretical background, by focusing on the historical context of Aristotle’s political theory and would therefore be of value to classicists as well as political theorists. CHARILAOS PLATANAKIS Birkbeck, University of London c.platanakis@philosophy.bbk.ac.uk