Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/461

 ■CHAP. XII. KICn AND POOR — THE TYRANTS. 455 rich afterwards returned to the city, and became mas- ters of it. They took, in their turn, the cliihlren of the poor, covered them with pitch, and burnt theni alive.' What, then, became of the democracy? They were not precisely responsible for these excesses and crimes; «till they were the first to be affected by them. There were no longer any governing rules; now, the de- mocracy could live only under the strictest and best observed rules. We no longer see any government, but merely factions in power. The magistrate no longer exercised his authority for the benefit of peace and law, but for the interests and greed of a party. A -command no longer had a legitimate title or a sacred ■character; there was no longer anything voluntary in obedience; always forced, it was always waning for an opportunity to take its revenge. The city was now, as Plato said, only an assemblage of men, where one ' Heracleides of Pontus, in Athenaeus, XII. 26. It is quite the fashion to accuse the Athenian democracy of having set Greece the example in these excesses and disorders. Athens was, on the contrary, the only Greek city, known to us, that did not see this atrocious war hetween rich and poor wjthin its walls. This iD.elligent and wise people saw, from the day when this series of revolutions commenced, that they were moving towards a goal where labor alone could save society. They therefore en- couraged it and rendered it honorable. Solon directed that all men who had not an occupation should be deprived of political Tights. Pericles desired that no slave should labor in the construction of the great monuments which he raised, and re- served all this labor for free men. Jloreover, property was so divided up, that a census, taken at the end of tiie fifth century, shows little Attica to have contained more than ten thousand proprietors. Besides, Athens, living under a somewhat better fconoMiical regime than the other cities enjoyed, was less vio- lently agitated than the lest of Greece ; the quarrels between rich «nd poor were calmer, and did not end in the same disorders.