Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/139

V seventh century B.C., and to increase in value greatly in the sixth. Here we begin to find our footing firmer, meeting as we do with the earliest lyric poetry, with archaic works of art, with an inscription here and there, and with historical traditions preserved in later writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Plutarch. Roman history proper begins later, in the fifth century, and is less certain, depending entirely on tradition, or on records of a doubtful character used by Livy and Dionysius as late as the age of Augustus. But both in Greece and Italy, as soon as the mist begins to lift, what we dimly see is much the same. We see aristocracies narrowed in interests, and brought into sharp opposition with the class below them; in some cases they triumph, as at Sparta, and prolong the age of aristocracy into a hard and barren period of oligarchic rule; in others they are gradually forced to give way, and to learn another and yet more difficult lesson than that of the art of government by a class. When this new lesson is learnt, new prospects of prosperity, both material and moral, are opened to the State which has had sufficient patience and good sense to learn it.

But how has this sharp opposition arisen between the few and the many? In the age of kingship, as we saw, the functions of government were religious, judicial, and military. These functions