Page:The Ancient City- A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome.djvu/464

 458 THE EEVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. <iesire of personal revenge; he was disturbed by fear; he knew that he had enemies all about him, and that public opinion approved assassination, when it was a tyrant that was struck down. We can imagine what the government of such a man must have been. With two or three honorable exceptions, the tyrants who were set up in all the Greek cities in the fourth and third centuries reigned only by flattering all that was worst in the multitude, and by destroying all that was superior in birth, wealth, or merit. Their power was unlimited. The Greeks could see how easily a republican government, when it did not profess a great respect for individual rights, was changed into a des- potism. The ancients had conferred such powers upon the state that, the day when a tyrant took this om- nipotence in hand, men no longer had any security against him, and he was legally the master of their lives and their fortunes. CHAPTER XIII. Eevolutions of Sparta, We are not to believe that Sparta remained ten cen- turies without seeing a i-evolution. Thucydides tells us, on the contrary, "that it was torn by dissensions more than any other Greek city." ' The history of these in- ternal dissensions, it is true, is little known to us; but this is due to the fact that the government of Sparta made a rule and a custom of surrounding itself with the most profound mystery,* The greater part of the ' Thucydides, I. 18. =* Thucydides, V. 68.