Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/355

 JHAP. VI. THE CLIENTS BECOME FREE. 349 We see clearly that in Greece the clients attftined their object ; but we do not know by wl)at means. How much time and how many efforts were required for this we can only guess. Possibly the same series of social changes took place in antiquity which Europe saw in the middle ages, when the tjlaves in the coun- try became serfs of the glebe, wheu the latter, from «erfs, taxable at will, were changed to serfs with a fixed rent, and when finally they were transformed, in the course of time, into peasant proprietors. 2. Clientship disappears at Athens. The Work of Solon. This sort of a revolution is clearly marked in the history of Athens. The efiect of the overthrow of royalty had been to revive the regime of the ytfo;^ families had returned to their isolated condition, and oach had begun to form a little state, with a Eu- patrid for a chief, and a multitude of clients for sub- jects. This government appears to have weighed heavily upon the Athenian population, for they retained an unfavorable recollection of it. The people thought themselves so unhappy that the preceding period ap- peared to have been a sort of golden age. They re- gretted their kings, and began to imagine that under the monarchy they had been happy and free ; that they had then enjoyed equality, and that it was only since the fill of the kings that inequality and suffering had commenced. This was such an illusion as men often entertain. Popular tradition placed the commence- ment of the inequality at the time when the people began to find it odious. This clientship, this sort of slavery, which was as old as the constitution of the