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60 60 Dr Arnold on the in respect of its citizens, or of its Perioeci ; but they shew that, in estimating the character of a government, the superior and not the subject class was alone taken into the account. Thus Plato says that it was an aristocracy not by reason of the Perioeci, but of the gerons : and when he, Isocrates and others call it democratic, they allude to the power of the whole Spartan order in making laws, and in electing magis- trates, to the equality of education, to the public tables, &c. : which are democratical institutions in relation to the body of Spartans, though they were aristocratical in respect of the Perioeci and Helots ; that is, they were institutions contrived to perpetuate the rule of the Spartans over the inferior and subject orders by training them to an austere discipline, and forming them into an army of occupation in an enemy^s country. The principal authority for Dr Arnold's view that the Spartan constitution was oligarchical, because it was " an aris- tocracy of conquest, in which the whole conquering people stood towards the conquered in the relation of nobles to com- mons,'' (p. 640), is furnished by Thuc. iv. 126, where Brasidas exhorts his soldiers not to fear superior numbers, inasmuch as " they came from states, in which not the many rule over the few, but the few over the many, having gained their power by no other means than victory in the field." There is no doubt that this assertion is true, and that one of the most important characteristics of the Spartan system was the sub- jugation of the Perioeci and Helots, and the exclusive privi- leges of the Spartans : nevertheless it does not follow that the aristocratic character of the Spartan government was derived from this circumstance alone, or that the internal arrangement of the Spartans is to be entirely placed out of the question. Thus when Niebuhr justly compares the Spartans and Perioeci with the Roman patricians and plebeians (Vol. i. p. 476), it does not follow that he means that the Spartan government was called an oligarchy for the same reason that the early Roman government was an oligarchy : it does not follow that, because these two orders stood to each other in the same relation in both states, therefore the internal arrange- ment of any two corresponding orders was the same. A similar view is taken by Wachsmuth, Hell. Alt. 1. 1. p. 188,