Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/117

IV have of surviving. The king may even be forced out of sympathy with the class to which he naturally belongs, and into more intimate relation with the poorer and unprivileged classes. If then we can show that the Greek aristocracies had a tendency to grow narrower, and that the facts and ideas on which their predominance rested were such as might easily increase this tendency, we shall at once have an explanation of the decay of monarchy, even if we cannot trace the causes of decadence within the monarchy itself. And at the same time we shall be providing ourselves with some account, imperfect though it be, of the characteristics of the aristocracies we are concerned with. Then we may pass on to consider the few known facts as to the method by which the destruction of monarchy was brought about.

Aristocracy literally means the rule of the best. But in what sense of the word "best" did the Greeks use their word, and by what standard did they estimate the class which displaced the early kings? Aristotle, whose knowledge of the early aristocracies was certainly not large, writes as if he thought that the rule of the "best" were an ideal which had never been attained to in Greece, and warns his pupils not to fall into the popular error of confusing it with the oligarchical forms of government prevalent in his own day. He thus attaches a distinctly ethical meaning