Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/438

 432 THE REVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. epoch, belonged to birth, were, during some time, en- joyed by fortune alone. This aristocracy of wealth was established in all the cities, not by any calculation, but by the very nature of the human rain<l, which, escaping from a regime of great inequality, could not arrive at once at complete equality. We have to remark that these new nobles did not found their superiority simply upon wealth. Every- where their ambition was to become the military class. They undertook to defend the city at the same time that they governed it. They reserved for themselves the best arras and the greater part of the perils in bat- tle, desiring to imitate in this the nobility which they had replaced. In all the cities the wealthiest men formed the cavalry, the well-to-do class composed the body of hoplites, or legionaries. The poor were ex- cluded from the army, or at most they were employed as skirmishers or light-armed soldiers, or among the rowers of the fleet.' Thus the organization of the army corresponded with perfect exactitude to the political organization of the city. The dangers were propor- tioned to the privileges, and the material strength was found in the same hands as the wealth.* ■ Lycias, in Alcib., I. 8; II. 7. Isaeus, VII. 39. Xenoplion, Uellen., VII. 4. llarpocration, 0i]Tf?. manifest: at Home the centuriate assembly was no other thar the army. So true is this, that men who had passed the age for military service no longer had the right to vote in these comitia. Historians do not tell us that there was a similar law at Athens; but there are figures that are significant. Thucydidcs says (II. 31, 13) tiiatat the beginning of the war, Athens iiad thirteen thousand hoplites; if to these we add the knigiits, numbered by Aristophanes (in the Wasps) at about a thousand, we arrive at the number of fourteen thousand soldiers. Now, Plutarch tells
 * The relation between military service and political rights is