Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/380

 374 THE REVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. distinguished except by wealth. The rule of the Eu- patrids disappeared. The Eupatiid was no longer of any account, unless he was rich; he had influence through his wealth, and not through birth. Thence- forth the poet could say, " In poverty the noble is of no account," and the people aj)plauded In the theatre this line of the poet ■ "Of what rank is this man? — Rich, for those are now the noble." ' The system which was thus founded had two sorts of enemies — the Eupatrids, who regretted tlieir lost privileges, and the poor, who still suffered from the inequality of their rank. Hardly had Solon finished his work when agitation recommenced. "The poor," says Plutarch, "showed themselves the fierce enemies of the rich." The new government displeased them, perhaps, quite as much as that of the Eupatrids. Besides, seeing that the Eupatrids could still be archons and senators, many imagined that the revolution had not been complete. Solon had maintained the republican forms ; now the people still enteitained a blind hatred against these forms of government under which they had seen, for four centuries, nothing but the reign of the aristocracy. Alter the example of many Greek cities, they wished for a tyrant. Peisistratus, a Eupatrid, but following his own per- sonal ambition, promised the poor a division of the lands, and attached them to himself. One day he ap- peared in the assembly, and, pretending that he had been wounded, asked for a guard. The men of the higher clxisses were about to reply and unveil his false- hood, but "the people were ready to resort to violence ' Euripides, Phceniss. Alexis, in Athcnseus, IV. 49. It