Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/300

 276 HISTORY OF GREECE. one of the three higher classes. This restriction was now an- nulled, and eligibility extended to all the citizens. We may appreciate the strength of feeling with which such reform was demanded, when we find that it was proposed by Aristeides ; a man the reverse of what is called a demagogue, and a strenuous friend of the Kleisthenean constitution. No political system would work after the Persian war, which formally excluded '■th3 maritime multitude" from holding magistracy. I rather imagine, as has been stated in the previous volume, that election of magistrates was still retained, and not exchanged for drawing lots until a certain time, though not a long time, afterwards. That which the public sentiment first demanded was the recogni- tion of the equal and open principle : after a certain length of experience, it was found that poor men, though legally qualified to be chosen, were in point of fact rarely chosen : then came the lot, to give them an equal chance with the rich. The principle of sortition, or choice by lot, was never applied, as I have before remarked, to all offices at Athens, — never, for example, to the strategi, or generals, whose functions Avere more grave and re- sponsible than those of any other person in the service of the state, and who always continued to be elected by show of hands. In the new position into which Athens was now thrown, with so great an extension of what may be termed her foreign rela- tions, and with a confederacy which imposed the necessity of distant military service, the functions of the strategi naturally tended to become both more absorbing and complicated ; while the civil administration became more troublesome, if not more difficult, from the enlargement of the city, and the still greater enlargement of Peiraeus, — leading to an increase of town pop- ulation, and especially to an increase of the metics, or resident non-freemen. And it was probably about this period, during the years immediately succeeding the battle of Salamis, — when the force of old habit and tradition had been partially enfeebled by so many stirring novelties, — that the archons were withdrawn altogether from pohtical and military duties, and confined to civil or judicial administration. At the battle of Marathon, the pole- march is a military commander, president of the ten strategi :' ' Herod, vi, 109.