Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/163

 POINTS OF CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY. 14J, erful men, when he came to pass through the trial of accounta- bility which followed immediately upon his year of office. There was little to make the office acceptable either to very po<ir men, or to very rich and ambitious men ; and between the middling persons who gave in their names, any one might be taken with- out great practical mischief, always assuming the two guarantees of the dokimasy before, and accountability after, office. This was the conclusion in my opinion a mistaken conclusion, and such as would find no favor at present to which the democrats of Athens were conducted by their strenuous desire to equalize the chances of office for rich and poor. But their sentiment Beems to have been satisfied by a partial enforcement of the lot to the choice of some offices, especially the archons, as the primitive chief magistrates of the state, without applying it to all, or to the most responsible and difficult. Nor would they have applied it to the archons, if it had been indispensably necessary that these magistrates should retain their original very serious duty of judging disputes and condemning offenders. I think, therefore, that these three points: J. The opening of the post of archon to all citizens indiscriminately ; 2. Tho choice of archons by lot ; 3. The diminished range of the ar- chon's duties and responsibilities, through the extension of those belonging to the popular courts of justice on the one hand and to the strategi on the other are all connected together, and must have been simultaneous, or nearly simultaneous, in the time of introduction : the enactment of universal admissibility to office certainly not coming after the other two, and probably coming a little before them. Now in regard to the eligibility of all Athenians indiscrimi- nately to the office of archon, we find a clear and positive testi- mony as to the time when it was first introduced. Plutarch tells us ' that the oligarchical, 2 but high-principled Aristeides, was himself the proposer of this constitutional change, shortly after the battle of Plataea, with the consequent expulsion of the Persians from Greece, and the return of the refugee Athenians 1 Plutarch, Arist. 22. 5 So at least the supporters of the constitution of Kleisthenes were called by the contemporaries of Perikles. VOL. TV. 7 lOoc.