Geoffrey de Ste. Croix was Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at New College, Oxford from 1953 until 1977. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972. He published Origins of the Peloponnesian War in 1972 and The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World in 1981; the latter book was translated into Spanish and Greek, and won the Isaac Deutscher Memorial prize for 1982.

• Editors' Introduction ; 1. The Solonian Census Classes and the Qualifications for Cavalry and Hoplite Service ; 2. Five Notes on Solon's Constitution ; 3. Solon, the Horoi and the Hektemoroi ; 4. Cleisthenes I: The Constitution ; 5. Cleisthenes II: Ostracism, Archons, and Strategoi ; 6. The Athenian Citizenship Laws ; 7. Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia and Early Athenian History ; 8. The Metra in Aristotle, Eth. Nic. V.vii.1134b 35-35a3 ; 9. How Far was Trade a Cause of Early Greek Colonization? ; 10. But What About Aegina? ; 11. Herodotus and King Cleomenes of Sparta ; Index

... an unusual book on every level ... Here then are missing pieces of two interconnected jigsaws: one, that of the intellectual biography of one of the most striking figures in classical scholarship in the second half of the twentieth-century; the other, that of his contributions to 'Athenian Democratic Origins' and other problems in Greek history ... anyone with a serious interest in either or both of these fields will rejoice in this volume and be grateful to its editors for allowing us to hear again the inimitable scholarly voice of Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de Ste. Croix.