In this brief chapter, which coheres closely with III i, Aristotle points out that various common practical definitions of a citizen (e.g. as someone both of whose parents were citizens, or as a person who has been ‘made’ into a citizen by some state official empowered to do so) encounter certain difficulties. His own preference is to abandon such formal and legalistic criteria of citizenship, in favour of a functional one: do candidates for the title ‘citizen’ share in deliberative and judicial office, as explained in III i? If so, they are citizens, and may be properly described thus irrespective of their parentage or the manner in which they came to exercise the required functions; and that a man may come to exercise them unjustly does not in itself disqualify him from actually being a citizen in practice. Aristotle’s approach is thus both neat and pragmatic.
1275b22 For practical purposes a citizen is defined as one of citizen birth on both his father’s and his mother’s side; some would go further and demand citizen descent for two, three, or even more generations. But since these are only crude definitions, employed by states for practical purposes, some people pose the puzzle of how a great or great-great-grandfather’s citizenship can itself be determined. Gorgias of Leontini, partly perhaps in puzzlement and partly in jest, said that, as mortars are what mortar-makers make, so Larissaeans are those made by the workmen, some of whom were Larissaean-makers.1 The answer to such objectors is simple: if they participated in the constitution in the manner prescribed in our definition,2 they were citizens. Of course, the criterion of having citizen-parents cannot be applied in the case of the original colonists or founders.
1275b34 I think however that there is perhaps a more important puzzle here, namely about those who got a share in the constitution because it had changed – as for example after the expulsion of the tyrants from Athens, when Cleisthenes enrolled many foreigners and slaves in the tribes.3 The question here is not ‘Are these persons citizens?’, but whether they are citizens justly or unjustly. Some would go further and question whether anyone can be a citizen unless he is justly so, on the ground that unjust and false mean the same thing. But when persons exercise their office unjustly, we continue to say that they rule, though unjustly; and as the citizen has been defined by some kind of office (i.e. if he shares in such and such an office, he is, as we said, a citizen), we cannot deny the propriety of using the term even in these cases.