The Greek City and its Institutions

ORIGINS OF DEMOCRACY

WHILST the great gene were monopolizing the growing power of the city, what was happening to all those who by their birth were relegated to an inferior position ? The artisans “worked for the public,” and the thetes, hardly distinguishable from slaves, could scarcely hope ever to better their lot. As for the peasants they saw their position grow worse from day to day· The patches of land which they cultivated in the sweat of their brow were swallowed up in the midst of great estates. The land of the nobles, protected against all alienation by the kinsman’s right of buying back an inheritance, was always being extended as a result of encroachments upon communal pasture grounds, the purchase of new territory, the realization of mortgages. Thus was formed in certain cities, above even the knights, an aristocracy of great landowners such as the class of pentacosiomedimni in Attica. On the other hand, although the villeins yielded themselves to the stern law of labour, “assigned to men by the gods,”¹ they could barely live. The wisest desired only one son in order that their land might not be split up and their children left poverty-stricken.² These succeeded, if circumstances were favourable, in forming a middle class of cultivators, possessing their yoke of oxen for ploughing and capable in case of war of arming themselves at their own expense. But the majority lived in privation. In bad years they were compelled to borrow from the neighbouring lord the few medimni of grain necessary for their subsistence and for their sowing; they had to return them with interest. Once caught in these toils they could not win free. The insolvent debtor fell into the hands of his creditors, himself, his wife and his children. And the most hopeless feature in the condition of the lower classes was that every man who did not form part of a privileged genos was delivered over without defence to the justice of grasping and irresponsible lords. For the “de-vourers of gifts” there was no more lucrative source of revenue than iniquity.³ Hesiod, witness and victim of “crooked” sentences, could only call upon Zeus the protector of Dike⁴ and recommend to the unhappy wretches who had fallen into the claws of the oppressors the resignation of the nightingale caught in the talons of the hawk.⁵

This state of affairs might have endured indefinitely if the economic regime of Greece had not been completely transformed at the end of the eighth century. Until then the cities had no resources worth speaking of save agriculture and stock breeding; though one might possibly add the profit gained from barter and piracy. But now the Greeks began to swarm over all the coasts of the Mediterranean looking for new lands and new customers; between the colonies and the mother countries agricultural produce, raw materials and manufactured goods flowed unceasingly; commerce and industry showed a hitherto undreamt of activity; near busy ports workshops multiplied and markets were organized. Henceforth the great thing was bargaining—to exchange some paltry trumpery for a few head of cattle or metal utensils. The reign of money had begun. With the shining coins of electrum, of gold and of silver, credit and the taste for speculation spread. Capitalism, growing more and more daring, dominated the Greek world. Down with the shabby life of ancient times ! Room for chrematistike.6

The economic revolution necessarily had strong repercussions in the social and political system. Certain cantons, it is true, remained outside the movement: the greater part of the Peloponnese, Bceotia and Phocis, Thessaly, Acarnania, Ætolia and Epirus conserved, with their agricultural and pastoral habits, institutions on the whole faithful to family and aristocratic principles. But everywhere else urban civilization developed in a remarkable manner. A large number of cities which gave themselves up to maritime navigation became great towns. In Asia Minor, in place of a single Kyme which was content to be a rural town under archaic laws, there were ports in dozens, with Miletus at their head, which enjoyed an undreamed of prosperity. In Euboea, on the shores of the Euripus, Eretria and Chalcis played a considerable part in colonization and joined to the products of the Lelantine plain those of the neighbouring mines. On the Saronic Gulf which was connected with the Gulf of Corinth by an isthmus of some few miles, all the important places, Corinth and Megara, Ægina and later Athens, attained political power through industry and commerce.

Who benefited from this ever-increasing movable wealth ? First of all, to a large extent, those who before had been rich in landed property. The nobles exploited the mines and quarries of their vast estates, converted into money their crops and the bullion piled away in their treasuries, gathered the thetes and the slaves in the workshops whose foundations they made, and, renouncing feats of piracy, threw themselves into safer and more fruitful enterprises. But the nobles were not the only ones to make fortunes. In the cities side by side with them there was now a wealthy middle class, some of whom were cadets or bastards of great families, others of plebeian origin. They were able to buy land whenever an opportunity presented itself; they, too, could breed horses if they so wished; and they lavishly displayed their newly acquired wealth. At first the aristocracy of birth disdained the upstart rich, just as formerly the pirate chiefs despised the captain of a merchant vessel. They did not hesitate, however, to ally themselves with them when they realized the possibilities of profitable misalliances: was it not true that “money makes the man” ?7 Henceforward plutocracy ruled the cities. At Colophon, for instance, the knights formed only one category of the Thousand. Under a government where power was proportionate to wealth, luxury was more than a satisfaction of pleasure or vanity, it was a social mark, a veritable criterion of political values.⁸

The system of industrial, commercial and monetary economy which altered the composition of the dominant class, often strengthened other classes or created new ones. It was that which henceforth was to oppose the demos to the nobles and the rich. In the Homeric epoch the artisans had no link with the husbandmen, but when the resources of each were estimated in money there was a natural rapprochement between people who derived from their labour a small competence. They thus formed a lower middle class. It was composed of citizens who were able to procure for themselves a suit of armour in a time when industrial progress facilitated the acquisition of arms. The number of foot- soldiers fighting in close phalanx was greatly augmented.⁹ The fighting strength of the cities increased proportionately; but the knights lost their military superiority. In places where power was not abandoned to the wider oligarchy of the hoplites, as was the case at Sparta, they saw rising against their egoism the claims of those who had rendered services sufficient to justify political rights and access to the offices of state. But the middle class—the μέσοι, as Aristotle calls them¹⁰—was not very large. It was constantly being depleted, from above by marriages with the nobility, from below by the burdens which were imposed on agriculture and manual labour.

Broadly speaking the new economy rapidly swelled the ranks of the lower classes and aggravated their condition. As the rich became more rich, the poor became more poor. Life was hard for the generations of peasants who had to accustom themselves to buying and selling through the medium of money. They had to pay heavily for the manufactured goods which they bought in the towns, whilst only a low price could be obtained for natural commodities as a result of the facilities offered to foreign competition by the extension of maritime navigation. More frequently than in the past they were compelled to contract debts, and now that all transactions were carried through in money their creditors became more exacting and demanded the commercial rate of interest which was very high. Usury ground down the small men. Once insolvent they were liable to be sold with all their family as slaves to foreign countries, and they thought themselves lucky if they were allowed to cultivate their own land as partiarii, sharing the produce with the owner on most unfair terms. One can hardly imagine the misery of these hektemoroi who had a right to only the sixth of their produce, in an Attica where the medimnus of grain ( bushels) and the metreta of wine (36 quarts) were worth not more than a drachma of silver (d.).11 If in the most prosperous times the Greek peasant absorbed by his work and isolated on his land held aloof from politics,¹² still less in the archaic epoch when he was haunted and degraded by poverty was he able to frequent the agora of the town and busy himself with public affairs. And yet there were in the lower classes elements capable of taking an interest in politics : namely the plebeians of the town, small artisans and shopkeepers, workmen and labourers, fishermen and sailors, the humblest of the craftsmen whom the epic calls demiourgoi and the whole mass of the hired men whom it classes under the name of thetes. This proletariat lived from hand to mouth on wages which the increasing use of that human chattel, the slave, was ever forcing down. Native born there mingled with foreigners of every country ; but the very fact that they were herded together in the same suburbs, in the same port, meant that ultimately they must become conscious of a feeling of solidarity and find a means of uniting themselves.

The army for the revolt was ready; it lacked only leaders. The bourgeoisie fitted by its courage, its habits of work, and its intelligence to exercise the political rights which were denied to it, placed itself at the head of the force which it found ready to its hand. From that time the city was split into two camps. The time was past when the discontented were content to groan and invoke the gods: mystics gave place to men of violence. The conflict of classes had begun.

It was long and bitter. From the seventh century to the time of the Roman conquest Greek history is full of revolutions and counter-revolutions, of massacres, banishments and confiscations. Party hatred was never expressed with more ferocity than in the small cities where intestine struggles assumed the form of veritable vendettas. In the midst of tempests where always “the oncoming wave towered high above the waves which passed,”13 one hears blood-curdling cries of joy or savage fury. It is Alcæus the poet of Mitylene exulting in the news that the leader of the popular party has just been assassinated,¹⁴ or Theognis of Megara raging against the wretches who “but now were strangers to all right and all law, wearing on their flanks goat skins and pasturing outside the walls like deer,” venting his spleen on “the merchant- rulers,” thinking only of “ tearing with his claws a brainless populace,” and finally bursting forth with the savage exclamation: “Ah ! could I but drink their blood !”¹⁵ To understand to what paroxysms of hatred human passions can attain one must read Thucydides’ description of civil wars aggravated by foreign war.¹⁶ There is perhaps something even more hideous : the vow of hatred and ferocity which, in cold blood before the altar, the oligarchs of certain cities swore before entering the Council.¹⁷

The first claim which democracy was to make when it was organized in a party had for object the publication of the laws. All the opponents of aristocracy were united in interest on this point. Men had had enough of the “crooked” sentences which the Eupatridæ gave as the expression of the divine will and which were only too often the cynical exploitation of an odious and obsolete monopoly. Many generations had waited vainly for the judge, delivering sentence under solemn oath, to remember Orcus the avenger of perjury, and for the lamentations carried by Dike before the throne of Zeus to have their effect on earth.18 Now men wished to know what the laws were. The practice of writing, which had almost disappeared for many centuries, once more began to spread, and men began to demand written laws.

This progressive step was first made in the colonies of greater Greece and Sicily. In these new countries the work of codification was more urgent and more simple than in ancient Greece; for customs there were too few in number to afford solutions for all law suits nor had they the sanction of immemorial antiquity. Zaleucos gave a code to Locri about 663-2 ; thirty years later Charondas gave one to Catana. The work of these legislators met with great success, that of Charondas in particular: it was copied in other Chalcidian towns of the West and doubtless inspired Androdamas of Rhegium when he legislated for Thracian Chalcidice;¹⁹ then it passed into the island of Cos and thence into Asia Minor, to Teos, to Lebedos and as far as Cappadoeia.²⁰ It is not improbable that the influence of the Sicilian colonies was exerted in Corinth and in Thebes when the first of these cities received a code from Pheidon and the second from the Bacchiad Philolaus.²¹ But old Greece was not slow to furnish itself with written laws or codes according to its own methods. Crete seems to have made since the seventh century vigorous efforts to put an end in this way to private wars ; to this epoch can be ascribed a number of the laws contained in the famous code of Gortyna and a law concerning aggravated assault enacted by the obscure city of Eltynia.²² The Eleans for their part consecrated in the temple of Olympia a tablet of bronze on which was engraved a juridical document of the first importance, a rhetra which inflicted a decisive blow on the principle of collective responsibility.²³ One can see how the best known codes of all, those bestowed on Athens by Draco in 621-0 and by Solon in 594-3, fitted into the general scheme.

The publication of the laws had important consequences. Doubtless a great number of them, wrested from an oligarchy desirous of clinging to as many of its privileges as possible, had still a strongly aristocratic tinge. The inalienability of family patrimony and the establishing of a fixed number of estates; solemn formalities in cases of sale of landed property; the forbidding of transactions by intermediaries, of written contracts and credit transactions: such were the limitations set by the oldest legislators upon the mercantile class and the circulation of wealth. But the very fact that the laws were revealed to the knowledge of all and sanctioned by the city marked an epoch in the history of justice. The chiefs of the great gene lost for ever the privilege of making and interpreting at their pleasure the formulas which regulated social and political life. No longer were there themistes emerging from a shadowy tradition and distorted by treacherous memories or venal consciences ; but in their place was the nomos, publicly promulgated, specifying exactly the division of rights and duties and, though it too was regarded as sacred, variable according to the exigencies of common welfare. At one blow the family system was shattered, undermined at its very foundations. The State was placed in direct contact with individuals. The solidarity of the family, in its active rather than passive form, had no longer a raison d’être. In all cases where the State itself did not recognize, at least implicitly, the right of private vengeance and private transactions, it imposed its jurisdiction on the injured party and, to enforce it, suppressed all violence with a severity which could not, however, ever go beyond the law of retaliation. When it accorded to the plaintiff pecuniary satisfaction it deducted its share to cover the expenses of justice, thus making the fine come out of the composition. But, by the prohibition of the vendetta, the genos, despoiled of a collective right, was freed from a collective responsibility: the jurisdiction of the State could only impute to the individual the acts for which he himself was responsible. It is the proclamation of individual responsibility in the words, “Peace and safety to the kinsmen of the accused,” which gives to the Elean rhetra of the seventh century such moral grandeur and historic importance.

TYRANNY

The legislator had practically always to perform his task in the midst of raging passions and civil wars. For him there was no retiring to his study, quietly to meditate upon his work; his business was to put an end to bloodshed by effecting a reconciliation. It was for him to suggest a compromise and intervene as arbiter between surging factions. Invested with extraordinary powers he became for the necessary time the supreme head of the city. It is not certain what title he bore in general; we only know that in Asia Minor the name of aisymnetes, which was often assigned to the chief magistrate, passed naturally to him who had, as the name suggests, to be versed in wise customs and to settle the law. Although Solon of Athens was called thesmothetes or simply archon, he was nevertheless an aisymnetes in its widest sense, as his contem-porary Pittacus of Mitylene was in its narrowest. A mission of this sort was temporary: sometimes it was given for an indeterminate time until the task assigned was completed, sometimes for a fixed period, a year, five years or even ten. In all cases it placed public power in the hands of a single man: for Aristotle it was an “elective tyranny”; for Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who had in mind the history of Rome, it was a “dictatorship,” a domestic dictatorship, be it understood.24 When the State had been saved by a peaceful revolution its preserver returned once more into private life.

It was often difficult to find in a city convulsed by party strife a man capable of inspiring confidence and of satisfying everybody: for ten years Pittacus had to struggle against the hostility of the oligarchic faction; Solon was exposed to the attacks of rich and poor alike. Frequently resort was had to foreign arbiters, to a sort of podesta, to put an end to discords and bring about legislative reform. Towards the middle of the sixth century the Athenian Aristarchus and the Mantinean Demonax, called in as conciliators by Ephesus and Cyrene respectively, formulated democratic constitutions for these towns.25 A little later Miletus, exhausted by the struggles which the Ploutis and the Cheiromacha had indulged in for two centuries, resolved to refer the matter to the Parians who, after holding an enquiry, placed the government in the hands of the landowners who had kept their estates in a good state of cultivation during the disturbances, that is in the hands of the middle class who had taken no part in the civil war.²⁶

But the oligarchy of the nobles and the rich had not always the wisdom to submit to compromise. Then, in order to overcome all resistance, and to obtain, cost what it might, some material amelioration of its lot and at least the semblance of political rights, the people had recourse to an extreme method : it gave itself up to a tyrant.

What was the nature of tyrannical rule ? Everything connected with it was extraordinary, abnormal. As a matter of fact the name of tyrant was almost fading away when it was introduced into the Greek world. It came probably from Lydia in the time of Gyges, and it had at first the signification of master or king, and, like its equivalent basileus, was applied to certain gods. On account of its origin, however, because it designated the despots of the East, it was applied in a depreciatory sense by its irreconcilable adversaries to those who held absolute power, not by right of lawful agreement between parties, but as the result of insurrection. They themselves never adopted the title of tyrant. They might have assumed the title of king, which had left behind no unpleasant memories and which would have given them a sort of sanction, had there not existed in most cities a king who was only a religious magistrate of secondary importance. There was, therefore, no official or general title to describe them, and for that reason since antiquity they have necessarily been known by the name with which their enemies stigmatized them. All the libels and all the calumnies with which the oligarchs assailed them were credited by democracy when it no longer stood in need of them and when it perceived that arbitrary government was not in accord with its principles. From that moment all Greeks vied with each other in attacking the abominable regime—that distortion of monarchy, that usurpation by craft and violence, that elevation of a man above all laws, was the worst of all governments. Since he was placed outside all law the tyrant could not enter within it again, and the life of this omnipotent master, himself proscribed, was at the mercy of anyone who cared to take it.²⁷

Before becoming in this way a sinister figure of legend the tyrant had played an historic rôle. He had been the “demagogue” leading the poor against the rich, or the plebeians against the nobles, the leader whom the multitude blindly followed and in whose hands it left all powers provided that he worked for its welfare. But tyranny did not establish itself in all parts of Greece. Apart from Sicily, where tyranny put an end to intestine strife in order to organize national defence, it had arisen only in towns where an industrial and commercial regime tended to prevail over rural economy, but where an iron hand was needed to mobilize the masses and to launch them in assault on the privileged class. With his usual perspicacity Thucydides selected the increase of wealth as the determining cause of tyranny.28 Nothing could be more true. Class conflict might often be aggravated by race hatreds, as for example at Miletus, where the Gergithes brought ancient bitternesses to the party of the Cheiromacha,²⁹ and in particular at Sicyon where the Orthagoridæ urged the pre-Dorian populace on to vengeance; but nevertheless it is in proportion as cities grow prosperous that one infallibly sees tyranny propagating itself.³⁰ From the coasts of Asia Minor bordering on wealthy Lydia to the banks of the Euripus, the Saronic Gulf and the Gulf of Corinth, the list of tyrants coincides as it were with a map of the great ports. If Ægina was an exception it was because the merchants in this barren island had never to face a landed aristocracy. If Athens escaped the coup d’état attempted by Cylon in 631 and did not fall to tyranny until 560, it was because in the interval the legislation of Solon had forced a city, until then purely agricultural, into an entirely new path. It may seem paradoxical to affect a greater precision than Thucydides and to establish a connection between tyranny and the exportation of pottery; but the connection is obvious—ceramics, the clue to international commerce, shows us Miletus as mistress of the markets in the time of Thrasybulus, then Corinth under Cypselus and Periander, and finally Athens under the Pisis- tratidæ.

Just as in former times the first blows were struck at the regime of the genos by the cadets or bastards of great families, so the tyrants who made themselves the champions of the lower classes were generally fugitives from the opposite camp. They usually succeeded in seizing power through the exercise of a high office of state or a military command, and by employing at a favourable moment a band of armed partisans, Thrasybulus was a prytanis; Cypselus, basileus; Orthagoras, polemarch; the majority of the Sicilian tyrants, strategoi. Sometimes they relied upon the support of foreign countries: Cylon attempted a coup d’état with the aid of the Megarians; Pisistratus returned from exile with a band of mercenaries recruited from all sides, including the men whom Lygdamis brought to him; Lygdamis, in his turn, demanded help from Pisistratus in order to return as conqueror to Naxos; under Persian domination the tyrants of Asia Minor were appointed by the king of kings, who was their master in all things. In all cases the tyrant established himself on the acropolis surrounded by a strong bodyguard, then proceeded to a general disarmament, banished the most dangerous of the oligarchs and, to control the others, received hostages from them.

It was utterly useless after that to change the constitution, the more so as it might have been extremely perplexing to translate into legal forms the de facto situation. Hence the tyrants rarely suspended the political laws and never abolished the civil laws: they were content to accommodate the administration of them to their own interests and to supplement them, if occasion offered, by concessions favourable to the lower classes. They held the office which best fitted in with their plans and took care to reduce their colleagues to servile silence. Often they disdained for themselves public offices, and were content each year to invest their friends and especially their relatives, beginning with their sons, with them. Tyranny thus became a family government, a dynastic regime, and, from being an office of life tenure, tended to become hereditary. Useless for tyranny to consider appearances and respect constitutional forms, to leave the hearing of private suits to the ordinary tribunals, to have recourse from time to time to the Assembly and to take its vote, under the surveillance of club bearers, on proposals in other respects popular; all these devices, even when the master was benevolent and earned a place among the seven sages of Greece, did not disguise the revolutionary origins nor the despotic character of the government.

To humble the aristocracy and uplift the lower classes: such was the general principle which guided the tyrants. One knows the advice given by Thrasybulus to Periander, “to cut down all the ears of corn which tower above the others” :31 it was an extolling of executions, sentences of exile, confiscations, espionage. Recourse might be had to means more gentle and more permanent in effect. To demolish the framework of nobility one needed only to replace the gentile tribes by territorial tribes in which all the citizens had an equal place: Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, invented the notion and furnished an example which was studiously copied by his grandson and namesake, the democratic reformer of Athens.³²

It was essential also to diminish the prestige which accrued to the nobility from the possession of hereditary priesthoods and the celebration of traditional rites of worship. The tyrants had a religious policy. “They ought always moreover,” says Aristotle, “to seem particularly attentive to the worship of the gods ; for from persons of such a character men entertain less fears of suffering anything illegal while they suppose that he who governs them is religious and reverences the gods; and they will be less inclined to raise insinuations against such a one as being peculiarly under their protection.”33 They sought from divine right the legitimacy which human right refused them : it was their power, even their life, which the Cypselidæ, the Orthagoridæ and the tyrants of Sicily were defending when they heaped their offerings in the temples of Delphi and Olympia, when they consulted the oracles before embarking on any enterprise, when they built temples, immolated hecatombs, instituted feasts and led the processions. But they made a choice between religions. Their devotion went first to the pan-Hellenic and civic deities. They carefully avoided, however, giving a national aspect to those which had in the gene, the tribes and even the cities assumed an aristocratic character. On the other hand popular gods and rustic heroes received special honours, particularly when they were connected with the locality from which the family of the tyrant had issued and which thus had a dynastic at the same time as a democratic aspect. Cleisthenes ignomini- ously expelled from Sicyon the Adrastus dear to the Dorian nobility ; Pisistratus installed Artemis Brauronia on the Acropolis and loved to dilate on the legend of the Diacrian Theseus. In general the great vogue of Dionysus, god of the vine and of delight, dates from the time of the tyrants.

But the essential duty of the “demagogues” was to ameliorate the material condition of the lower classes. This was a constant preoccupation of the tyrants. The agrarian problem demanded a rapid solution, and for this use was doubtless made of the property of the banished. Whether that were so or not the fact remains that the peasants of Attica who had demanded in vain from Solon a redistribution of property, demanded it no longer after the rule of Pisistratus. In Megara Theagenes had gained power by attacking the flocks of the wealthy breeders at the head of a starving mob ;³⁴ he could not do otherwise than diminish the right of common pasture in order to distribute the lands among his partisans. Thanks to the tyrants there resulted a great work of reclamation which gave new extension to vineyards and olive groves. When once their demands were satisfied the new proprietors had to remain attached to the soil; there was no need for them to swell the urban plebs, nor even to fall into the habit of frequenting the agora.³⁵ To keep them in their own domains Pisistratus used to send out itinerant justices, Ortyges rendered justice at the gates of Erythræ and allowed no inhabitant of the demes to penetrate within, while Periander established local councils at the extremities of Corinthian territory.³⁶

The most complicated problem of all remained to be solved: how were the labouring classes of the towns to be protected and kept in a state of peace ? In this matter also the tyrants were clear-sighted. In an industrial centre such as Corinth slavery was a heavy burden upon wages ; Periander prohibited the introduction of new slaves.37 After assuring to labour a just remuneration and public respect,³⁸ he thought himself justified, as did his contemporary Solon, in renewing the ancient prescriptions of the gene against the parasites who lived on the common stock without taking their share in the common labour: he passed a law against idleness.³⁹

The tyrants, at least those who are recorded in history, did even more, for they were great builders. This was one of their principles. Aristotle gives a fantastic explanation of the fact: according to him they wished to impoverish their subjects in order that they should be engrossed in their daily labour and so have no time for conspiracies.⁴⁰ But this was not so ; if they desired to keep the workpeople occupied, the reason was, on the contrary, that they might grow rich and that they might thereby be deprived not of the time, but of the desire to rebel. They had other reasons too: by works of public utility (aqueducts and breakwaters) they made easier the existence of the townsmen and encouraged maritime commerce; by works of adornment they won over the gods to their cause and inspired in their people a civic pride which made them forget their lost liberty. The name of Periander will be associated for ever with the spring of Pirene. Nothing contributed more to the popularity of Pisistratus than the fountain of the Nine Spouts (the Enneacrounos) and the temple of the hundred feet (the Hecatompedon). The works of Polycrates became proverbial in Greece: Herodotus who knew them de visu speaks of them with admiration.⁴¹ Thus in wishing to protect in every way industry, commerce and navigation the tyrants were thinking of the haussmannisation of their capital.

To add to its splendour and to augment their personal prestige these sovereigns resolved to live no longer in formidable isolation on their acropolis, in the midst of guards. They led a court life. Around them thronged a numerous household ; they had their doctor, their goldsmith, sometimes their favourites. To the people they gave magnificent festivals which did not consist merely of sacrifices, eating and drinking, but whose splendour was enhanced by contests in verse and theatrical representations. Their liberality attracted from all quarters architects, sculptors and poets. Like the princes of the Italian Renaissance the Greek tyrants competed with one another in enticing men of genius to their courts and in raising monuments which should surpass all others in beauty.

These rivalries, however, did not pass beyond the bounds of courtesy. As a general rule, with the exception of the Sicilian strategoi who had to justify their omnipotence by victories over the Siculi and the Carthaginians, the tyrants were peace lovers: they knew well that war-fever is an irresistible force and that the smallest defeat would cost them their power and their life. They felt between themselves a common bond: for had they not to cope with a common danger, the hostility of the aristocracy ? Periander took counsel with Thrasybulus and offered his good offices to Pittacus; Lygdamis aided Pisistratus, on condition of assistance in his turn, and, at peace in his island, made himself the gaoler of the hostages which his one-time protégé, now his protector, entrusted to his care. To the bond of common interest the tyrants added the bond of marriage; they extended from town to town the family policy which each practised in his own city. Procles of Epidaurus gave his daughter in marriage to Periander, Theagenes took for son- in-law Cylon, while in Sicily alliances of this sort were innumerable. If the regime of tyranny could have endured who knows but that it might not have broken through the narrow autonomy of the cities and led Greece, if not to unity, at least to a type of federalism. Already Pisistratus had attempted, not without success, to force the primacy of Athens on the Ionians of the islands, and Polycrates undoubtedly thought himself adequate to represent the Hellenic race before the Persian empire.

But tyranny nowhere endured. After it had performed the services which the popular classes expected of it, after it had powerfully contributed to material prosperity and to the development of democracy, it disappeared with an astonishing rapidity. Not even genius could save it. The only example of a dynasty which maintained itself in power for a century is that of the Orthagoridæ at Sicyon. Elsewhere the son of the founder managed to retain power, but inheritance went no further than that. When consulted by Cypselus, so it was said, the oracle of Delphi assured him of good fortune “for himself and his children, but not for his children’s children”:42 whether it was prophetic or merely prophecy after the event the oracle was of general application.

Why was so powerful a regime so ephemeral ? The personal character of the tyrants, some cruel, some weak, and the difficulty of assuring the transmission of a usurped power in a family rent by jealousy, these are only contingencies which do not explain a universal fact. Must one, therefore, join in alleging the vices of the regime, such as are depicted by the historians of antiquity, and assign as cause an inevitable reaction against abominable excesses ? Some tyrants, indeed, found it in accordance with their interests to depress the public spirit, to excite distrust among the people, to crush out individual initiative, free thought and talent, and to admit around them only baseness and mediocrity, espionage and flattery. It is none the less true that the system directed against aristocracy persisted everywhere so long as it had the support of the people. But that support could only be provisional. The people regarded tyranny only as an expedient. They used it as a battering ram with which to demolish the citadel of the oligarchs, and when their end had been achieved they hastily abandoned the weapon which wounded their hands. “There is no free man,” says Aristotle, “who would willingly endure such a power.”43 Men bore with it of necessity, or shook it off with joy. The tyrant, set up on a pinnacle by the mob and ready to work for it, was followed by a successor divided from them by his upbringing, usually more harsh and less capable. In proportion as it became useless tyranny became oppressive. An inherent contradiction doomed it to death as soon as it had infused life into democracy.