Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/111

IV of one family, or of a few, or of many, — such is the simplest way of expressing the long series of changes in constitutional form which we have to trace; and looking forward from the age of monarchy we can guess without much difficulty how such changes would be likely to run.

We might naturally suppose that if the monarchies gave way at all, they would give way, not to the people, who had neither knowledge, experience, property, renown, or high descent, but to those noble families who surrounded the king, supplied him with advisers, and were on the same social level as his own family. And so it was. Universal tradition, both in Greece and Italy, told of the displacement of the kings by these noble families, and of a long period of aristocratic government which followed. When history really begins in Greece and Italy, hardly a single kingship of the old type is to be found.

Of the immediate causes of this universal change we have scarcely any positive knowledge, and we may be fairly sure that ancient writers had no more than we have. Aristotle, in mentioning it, writes in quite general terms, and does not, as his habit is, quote examples to support what he tells us. The causes that he suggests are disagreement among the members of the kingly house, and a tendency to arbitrary government by the kings