Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/454

 448 THE REVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. he was a heliast, and passed all that year in the courts of justice, occupied in hearing cases and applying the law. There was hardly a citizen who was not called upon twice in his life to be a senator. Then for a year he sat every day from morning till evening, receiving the depositions of magistrates, demanding their ac- counts, replying to foreign ambassadors, drawing up instrnctions for Athenian ambassadors, examining into all affairs that were to be submitted to the people, and preparing all the laws. Finally, he might be a magis- trate of the city, an archon, a strategus, or an astynome, if the lot or suffrage designated him. It was, we see, a heavy charge to be a citizen of a democratic state. There was enough to occupy almost one's whole ex- istence, and there remained very little time for per- sonal affairs and domestic life. Therefore Aristotle says, very justly, that the man who had to labor in order to live could not be a citizen. Such were the requirements of a democracy. The citizen, like the public functionary of our day, was required to devote himself entirely to the state. He gave it his blood in war and his time during peace. He was not free to lay aside public affairs in order to give more attention to his own ; it was rather his own that he was required to neglect in order to labor for the profit of the city. Men passed their lives in governing themselves. De- mocracy could not last except through the incessant labor of all citizens. Let their zeal diminish ever so little, and it perished or became corrupt. deduct from this second number 3,000 or 4,000, who might have been thrown out by the ioxifiuaia.