Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/216

 individual emigrants in Greece, and which enabled them gradually to assume the government in that country, did the whole race of the Colonists here acquire authority and power among the Savages with whom they associated themselves;—and whatever political arrangements these Colonists might have introduced among themselves, there arose nevertheless, so far as the natives were concerned, an Aristocratic Government. The ancient manners and even the original language of the country were changed by the new comers. The Colonists became the ruling Tribe just as we found ruling Nations in Central Asia. Here also, as in Asia, an extensive empire might have arisen, had not new Colonies arrived while yet the first Colonists had scarcely been able to cultivate sufficiently for their purposes the natives who had been already subdued, and these new Colonies again subjugated other sections of the original inhabitants. So long as the Aristocracy were not forced to dwell too closely under the eye of their subjects; so long as they were not urged by necessity to lay upon the latter burdens which were beyond their strength, and these latter were not compelled by the same necessity to resist them,—matters might remain in this position. As soon as these conditions were at an end, a strife between the two parties was inevitable. In one of the States composed of these two ingredients in the population of Central Italy—in Rome, namely—the conditions under which alone this state of things was tolerable first disappeared. We here lay aside the consideration that at first Rome was governed by Kings: these Kings always belonged to the Aristocratic races who were scattered over the whole of Central Italy; they were in fact the heads of the Aristocracy, and fell as soon as they attempted aught against it. Thus much however is clear, that in Rome there were from the first two leading classes of Citizens:—the Patricians, or descendants of the Aristocratic colonist-races, and the