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Rh but the bourgeoisie against the form. The mere abolition of an order that had become obsolete was no novelty — Cromwell and the heads of the First Tyrannis had done that. But, that behind the ruins of the visible there is no longer the substance of an invisible form; that Robespierre and Napoleon find nothing either around or in them to provide the self-evident basis essential to any new creation; that for a government of high tradition and experience they have no choice but to substitute an accidental régime, whose future no longer rests secure on the qualities of a slowly and thoroughly trained minority, but depends entirely on the chance of the adequate successor turning up — such are the distinguishing marks of this turning of the times, and hence comes the immense superiority that is enjoyed for generations still by those states which manage to retain a tradition longer than others.

The First Tyrannis had completed the Polis with the aid of the non-noble; the latter now destroyed it with the aid of the Second Tyrannis. As an idea, it perishes in the bourgeois revolutions of the fourth century, for all that it may persist as an arrangement or a habit or an instrument of the momentary powers that be. Classical man never ceased, in fact, to think and live politically in its form. But never more was it for the multitude a symbol to be respected and venerated, any more than the Divine Right of Kings was venerated in the West after Napoleon had almost succeeded in making his own dynasty "the oldest in Europe."

Further, in these revolutions too, as ever in Classical history, there were only local and temporary solutions — nothing resembling the splendid sweep of the French Revolution from the Bastille to Waterloo — and the scenes in them were more atrocious still, for the reason that in this Culture, with its basically Euclidean feeling, the only possible way seemed to be that of physical collision of party against party, and the only possible end for the loser, not functional incorporation in the victor's system as in the West, but destruction root and branch. At Corcyra (427) and Argos (370) the possessing classes were slaughtered en masse; in Leontini (422) they were expelled from the city by the lower classes, which carried on affairs for a while with slaves until, in fear of an avenging return, they evacuated altogether and migrated to Syracuse. The refugees from hundreds of these revolutions inundated the cities, recruited the mercenary armies of the Second Tyrannis, and infested the routes by land and sea. The readmission of such exiled fractions is a standing feature in the peace-terms offered by the Diadochi and later by the Romans. But the Second Tyrannis itself secured its positions by acts of this kind. Dionysius I (407-367) secured his hegemony over Syracuse — the city in whose higher society, along with that of Athens, centred the ripest culture of Hellas, the city where Æschylus had produced his Persian trilogy in 470 — by wholesale executions of educated people and confiscations of their property; this he followed up by entirely rebuilding the population, in the upper levels by granting large