Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/148

124 the instinct of the many to consult their advantage also by appropriating the executive of the few; but this was a much harder task, and the many were almost always compelled to begin, not by abolishing or directly attacking it, but simply by setting it aside and creating a new and still stronger government in its place. This was a rude expedient, though perhaps the only possible one. It was in some instances so violent a remedy as to become in itself a formidable disease. It weakened the ideas of law and order, — the very ideas which the long ages of aristocratic government had created or confirmed; it set class against class; it roused dangerous ambitions in the minds of men who loved power and wealth; it broke roughly into the natural and tranquil course of political advance. Yet it was so universal in Greece in this age that we must believe it to have been a necessity; one which arose from the over-long acquiescence by the people in the aristocratic monopoly of wealth, education, and power.

To this strong executive, which practically meant absolutism, the Greeks gave two different names answering to the two ways in which it might be constituted. If it were set up by the general assent of the community, or by the action of an oligarchy more reasonable than usual, with the temporary object of adjusting the constitution to the needs of the age, its holder was called Aisymnêtês, or arbiter. If on the other hand an individual citizen, either with good or evil intent, pushed himself into the position of an autocrat, or