Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/232

208 employment on the estates of their richer neighbours. Their motives in this struggle may have been less pure than Solon's, but their efforts were plainly directed to the same end as his.

Their work marks, indeed, a stage of development in some sense even nearer to democracy than that of Solon. The highest executive office was now open to all citizens; the popular legislative assemblies were sovereign in the constitution; and if these laws were faithfully carried out there would be a fairly even distribution of wealth throughout the community, such as would enable all to take a reasonable amount of interest in the government, proportionate to their own share in the general wellbeing. On the face of things there was no reason why genuine democratic institutions should not have taken root and grown, and there are some signs in the annals a generation or two later that such a growth was actually beginning. But true democracy is a plant of very great rarity, which will not grow on every soil. Why it withered at Rome — why after all, the Romans never learnt to govern themselves like the Athenians — will be explained in another chapter.