Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/253

VIII assembly; but as a consequence of the popular veneration for families of tried worth, the really powerful senators almost always belong to a limited social oligarchy. In the Senate is gathered all the wisdom and experience of the State; but this wisdom and experience is not to be looked for outside of a certain boundary line of society. This is oligarchy, and oligarchical machinery, of the most admirable and effective kind. The executive and its advising council form together a compact and narrow body of identical interest; a government of the capable minority such as no other constitution has ever developed. The English Whig oligarchy of the eighteenth century was powerful enough, but it was far from being as compact, or as capable, as the Roman senatorial oligarchy. Perhaps the only modern State to which we can look for a parallel is mediæval Venice, whose Grand Council, administering a great empire, reminds us in some ways of the Senate in its best days.

Let us now turn to consider how the oligarchy, thus constituted on the basis of a hereditary claim to govern, actually secured and exercised power in a State legally and theoretically democratic. For it must be clearly understood that the Senate, the essential organ of the oligarchic families, had in constitutional law no independent power of its own; it was merely the advising council of the king, and afterwards of the consul. It could not meet unless