摘要：Herodotus' Constitutional Debate is an important contribution to the develop-ment of political thought, since Herodotus provides in it definitions of the three forms of government, democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy. Yet the narrative context of the de-bate, as well as the Histories entire, often undermines these descriptions. In this article I attempt to show how Herodotus focuses much more on the pragmatic goals of govern-ment—accountability, good decision making, and stability—than on pure constitutional forms, and such a pragmatic focus suggests that Herodotus may be an early proponent of a 'mixed' constitution
