Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians documents choregoi selection

If the Poetics anatomized plays, Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians cataloged the city that staged them. Composed around 330 BCE, the treatise includes a passage that reads like a production cue: “Afterwards he receives the Chorus-leaders nominated by the Tribes for the men’s and boys’ competitions and the comedies at the Dionysia …” [7][22]. The line freezes administration in prose.

In practice, this meant that on the south slope of the Acropolis, choruses drilled to the aulos’ cry because, earlier, in the Agora’s shadow, a magistrate and tribes had made appointments. The archon’s calendar and tribal nominations converted wealth into rehearsals. The orchestra’s dust was, in this sense, a legal product.

Three sites triangulate the bureaucratic ballet: the theater precinct (execution), the archon’s office near the Agora (assignment), and the east slope of the Acropolis (commemoration via inscriptions and monuments). The city’s rhythms—procession, performance, inscription—rest on selection and enforcement.

The prose’s dryness is part of its power. It confirms that the citizens treated choregia not as philanthropic whim but as a norm bound to other liturgies like trierarchy and gymnasiarchy. Exemptions, challenges, and suits happened against a background of rule [24][25]. The clack of kleroteria in lawcourts, the rustle of lists, the careful cutting of letters on stone—these are the theater’s inaudible sounds.

The passage also reveals comedy’s equal administrative dignity: choregoi are nominated for comedies as well as for men’s and boys’ choruses. The jokes that bit at the Lenaia and City Dionysia were funded by law, not luck. That standing mattered as comedy later changed shape.

Readers in the Lyceum or in private homes heard confirmation that art had a constitution. The city’s ability to stage Aeschylus and Aristophanes depended on this machinery, which Aristotle’s treatise makes legible and, in its way, beautiful.