Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/136

112 share it amongst their whole number, they would have weakened it irretrievably. As it was, they kept the power intact, but they made it a duty as well as an honour — a duty to be shared by the holder with one or two others, and for a set time only; a duty for the good performance of which the holders would be made responsible as soon as they returned to the life of private citizens.

This, then, is the point at which the constitutional history of the ancient State really begins. It is a great epoch, for now begins also the idea of political order; not of order only in the sense of traditional and trustful obedience to a hereditary monarchy, but order in the sense of conscious organisation by an intelligent body of privileged individuals. From our better knowledge of later history we are apt to see both Greek and Roman aristocracies in a bad light; we do not easily recognise the value of their contribution to political history, because we find them acting as a purely conservative social force, and acting usually from self-regarding motives in the later series of political changes. But it was really to them that even the democracies themselves owed those traditions of solid government which enabled them to govern at all; and it will hardly be going too far to say that all the three constitutional germs which we find in the infant State — the king, the council, and the people, or the executive, the deliberative and the legislative elements in the later constitutions — owed both their survival and their development to the political intelligence of the aristocracies.