Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/147

V narrower, the occasions of meeting became naturally fewer.

It was among this lower population that the questioning we have spoken of was first heard. Some of them may have advanced in position and wealth in an age which developed a great commercial system, and in some States numbers left their homes and settled in the colonies which the same commercial enterprise was now forming. But in Attica, which shared but little in this colonising movement, the mass of the people became steadily depressed, as we shall see, by the aristocracy, or, as we may now call it, the oligarchy; and social discontent and economical difficulties began to have their natural result upon politics. The age of fermentation sets in. In the rest of this chapter we can only trace the leading characteristics of this fermentation in Greece, and especially at Athens, where alone we get any comprehensive view of it; later on we shall deal with the parallel movement at Rome.

Let us note in the first place that in Greece the disturbance almost everywhere took the form of a tendency to set up an executive power stronger than that of the existing oligarchy. The few had formerly suited their own interests by appropriating the executive power of the kings, which was not usually a difficult process, as they belonged to the same class as the king. It was now becoming