Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/125

IV arising from the narrow and selfish spirit in which the noble families used this source of wealth. There was a secret poison in the possession of it, which would sooner or later begin to act. So long as wealth was not an end in itself, and did not cause friction with their dependants, this poison did not work; but there must have come a time when it began to narrow their views of life and its ends, and brought them into collision both with the king and with the people. The earliest glimpses we get of ancient law show us that the disputes to be decided were disputes about property; and the earliest political revolutions of which we have any knowledge arose out of unequal distribution of wealth. It is not too much, then, to conjecture that at a very early period these noble families found it convenient to take into their own hands the control of the unwritten law, and that one reason at least why the monarchies had to disappear was because they stood in the way of this. The king, as we saw, was the fountain of justice; and if his decisions interfered with the interests of the nobility in their dealings with their inferiors, his power must be limited or got rid of entirely. The assembly of nobles which had acted as his advising body must also be able to control him, or the executive power he possessed must pass directly into the hands of the members of it.

Thus narrowed and strengthened both in the pride of birth and in the power of wealth, the aristocracies both in Greece and at Rome set their hands to modify the form of government so as to bring it