Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/135

IV consistent account we have of any such revolution, and the mutilated beginning of the lately discovered "Constitution of Athens" has not placed the corresponding change at Athens equally beyond doubt in its leading features. At Rome we can see quite plainly how an aristocracy with a strong political and legal instinct went about the difficult task of getting the executive into its own hands, neither diminishing its efficiency on the one hand, nor yet leaving it so uncontrolled as to be capable of further misuse.

But from Athenian, as from Roman, history we may learn at this point a most valuable lesson. Our complicated modern constitutions make it hard for us to realise the fact that the earliest form of government was simply an executive power, and nothing more. It consisted of a single man's power to command, unrestricted save by moral checks. Such a power, such a discipline, were necessary to the infant State, as they had been also to the family. There might be a council of high-born advisers, and there might be assemblies of the people held from time to time, but neither of these had any direct share in the government of the State, which was the task of the king alone.

Now it must be placed to the credit of the aristocracies that just as they first developed the idea of duty to the State, so they transformed this executive government from a primitive contrivance into a part of a real constitutional system. Had they destroyed the executive power, they would probably have destroyed the State too; had they attempted to pass it over to their council, and so to