Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/147

Rh nobles of their own rank, such as Peisistratus, Lykurgus, and Megaklês, each with his armed followers. When we compare the drawn swords of these ambitious competitors, ending in the despotism of one of them, with the vehement parliamentary strife between Themistoklês and Aristeidês afterwards, peaceably decided by the vote of the sovereign people, and never disturbing the public tranquillity,—we shall see that the democracy of the ensuing century fulfilled the conditions of order, as well as of progress, better than the Solonian constitution.

To distinguish this Solonian constitution from the democracy which followed it, is essential to a due comprehension of the progress of the Greek mind, and especially of Athenian affairs. That democracy was achieved by gradual steps, which will be hereafter described: Demosthenes and Æschinês lived under it as a system consummated and in full activity, when the stages of its previous growth were no longer matter of exact memory; and the dikasts then assembled in judgment were pleased to hear the constitution to which they were attached identified with the names either of Solon, or of Theseus, to which they were no less partial. Their inquisitive contemporary Aristotle was not thus misled: but even the most common-place Athenians of the century preceding would have escaped the same delusion. For during the whole course of the democratical movement from the Persian invasion down to the Peloponnesian war, and especially during the changes proposed by Periklês and Ephialtes, there was always a strenuous party of resistance, who would not suffer the people to forget that they had already forsaken, and were on the point of forsaking still more, the orbit marked out by Solon. The illustrious Periklês underwent innumerable attacks both from the orators in the assembly and from the comic writers in the theatre; and among these sarcasms on the political tendencies of the day, we are probably to number the complaint breathed by the poet Kratinus, of the desuetude into which both Solon and Drako had fallen. " I swear, said he, in a fragment