This book has been built round the four Wiles Lectures that I had the honour to give at the Queen's University, Belfast, in May 1980. Four of the chapters are revised versions of those lectures, whereas chapters 2 and 6 were written afterwards and were first made public in a shorter form as a J. C. Jacobsen Memorial Lecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (and published in early 1982 in the Academy's Meddelelser).

The English word ‘polities’ has a semantic range that differs somewhat from that of its synonyms in other western languages. On the one hand, ‘politics’ is not normally employed in the sense of ‘policy’; on the other hand, it has more of the implication of the ways, informal as much as formal, in which government is conducted and governmental decisions are arrived at, and of the accompanying ideology. Politics in that sense are essentially my theme.

I am unaware of any previous book-length account of my subject, with which I have been concerned and on which I have published a few articles over the past twenty-odd years. I have found the subject not an easy one, especially once I took the decision to discuss Greece and Rome comparatively, and I have not hesitated to draw on the knowledge and the thinking of friends and colleagues. My warm thanks go to them all, although I name only those who read and commented on the typescript of this book: Tony Andrewes, Peter Brunt, John Dunn, Peter Garnsey, Wilfried Nippel and Dick Whittaker.