Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/114

90 have returned, or from some other cause his family may have given way before the aspiring chiefs, and the kingship, if not yet destroyed, must have passed out of the house which had long held it, and so have lost its oldest traditional claim to loyalty.

But the Homeric poems, as we saw in the last chapter, seem to point to a time when the City-State was not yet fully formed, but rather in process of formation. The picture of Telemachus and the suitors hardly helps us to understand why a monarchy which had become hardened by usage, as at Rome, into something resembling a constitution, should have easily given way to aristocracy, and why this revolution should have been so universal. Historians, in default of positive knowledge, are at pains to bring forward explanations a priori. Grote, for example, and Montesquieu before him, observed that monarchies are apt to last longer in large territorial States, while small States, like the Greek and the later Italian republics, seem naturally to develop an aristocratic or democratic constitution. The observation is a just one, and the reasons given in support of it are also worth attention. The smaller the State, and the more distinctly its life is centred in a city, the more obvious will the king's shortcomings be to the eye of his rivals and of the people. The monarchy of a mediæval State was hardly an object of criticism, even to the great lords who surrounded it, except when it impinged