Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/138

114 the society which was to shelter under it. In the council of nobles men must have begun to learn what government means — how to deliberate with due regard for order, for the opinions of others, and for the good of the State. Here were learnt, if we are right, those necessary lessons in the grammar of politics, which are so much a part of our own mental furniture that we can hardly conceive of a time when they had still to be slowly and painfully acquired.

But the very learning of this lesson was a process which must in time have narrowed the interests and prejudices of the learners. Where we first meet with aristocracies in records which may be called historical, we can see that while much progress has been made in the art of government, the governors have become a class whose sympathies are limited, and whose motives are self-regarding. Government has in fact become a science known only to the few, and as the few were also the rich, their political education has taught them not only how to govern, but how to make government protect and advance their own interests. Some indication was given in the last chapter of the way in which this might come about, when we endeavoured to explain how the nobility found it expedient to put an end to kingship. We must now look at the same tendency from a different point of view, and show how, perhaps at the same time, the few began to slide into a sharper opposition to the many than had as yet been felt since the beginning of the City-State.

Greek history proper may be said to begin in the