The mischiefs which Aristotle regarded as attendant on democracies have certainly been found in some governments which have borne that name. Aristotle could not have denounced them as he does unless he had seen them exemplified in some Greek democracies: in the governments (nominally at least democratic), which ruled in Paris during the French Revolution, all and more than all the evils that he describes were to be found. Athens was practically exempt from them, and we may seek causes for its immunity. One cause, the long training that the Athenians went through under the constitution of Cleisthenes, has been already noticed: the other was that at Athens the principles on which Greek democracy was founded were actually followed out in the daily life of the community, the citizens gave their time and attention to the work of government, and the people was far more truly a self-governing people than any other that has ever existed.
From what has just been said it will be seen that I regard Athens as the sole historical example of a true democracy in the Greek sense of the term. The Florentine Republic after 1324 A.D. is often compared with the Athenian democracy: but, out of the three characteristics of Greek democracy, the Florentine constitution had only the two least important: the citizens had indeed, as far as possible, equal shares in the enjoyment of office, and the assembly was free to do as it liked: but the assembly was rarely convoked, and the true governors were not the assembled citizens, but some fifty citizens selected by drawing lots every two months or every four months to fill the various magistracies and boards which ruled the city[244]. In modern Switzerland some faint traces of actual self-government by the citizens can be detected in the yearly assemblies held in four of the smaller cantons, and in the cantonal and federal Referenda, or popular votes on new laws: but they are no more than traces, and do not make the Swiss government at all like the Athenian: and, beside this, Switzerland is a federal state while Athens was a city, and for that reason the two states are so unlike that it is useless to compare them.
(5) Oligarchy, or the rule of the few rich for the advantage of their own class, admits of several degrees and varieties. There is something of oligarchy wherever the enjoyment of public office is limited to those who have a certain amount of property: there is a larger element of oligarchy if the qualifying amount is fixed extremely high, or if the body of rulers fill up vacancies in their own number, or if offices descend from father to son: and the state is completely oligarchic if, besides all this, the law does not control the rulers but the rulers control the law[245]. We may detect a minute trace of oligarchy in Solon's constitution which excluded the poorest citizens from the archonship. Perfect oligarchies are exemplified in the Bacchiadæ of Corinth whose power was hereditary and set them above the law, so that they could order Labda's child to be killed, and in the Eupatridæ or hereditary nobles of Athens, whose oppressive rule necessitated Solon's reforms. Other instances of oligarchy are found in the exclusive rule of the patricians at Rome from 510 B.C. to 367 B.C., and in the monopoly of office which was enjoyed by the wealthiest class of the Romans between 150 B.C. and the time of Julius Cæsar. The most complete example of an oligarchy is found at Venice between 1310 and the fall of the republic in 1797.
(6) Tyranny, the rule of one man for his private interest, has been exemplified in the stories of the despots of Corinth and Athens. For other instances we must go to the great storehouse of illustrations of tyranny, the mediæval history of Italy where, besides the well known despots Eccelin da Romano, the Visconti, the Medici, and Cesar Borgia, there is such a host of minor tyrants that pages might be filled with a mere enumeration of their names.
We are now in a position to make some general remarks on Aristotle's classification of polities—to see in some measure what it was, and what it was not.
Aristotle defined a polity as "an ordering or arrangement of a state in respect of its offices generally and especially of the supreme office[246]": and from this definition, as well as from his use of the word πολιτεία, it is clear that he regarded a polity as the form on which a whole government and not merely a part of a government was constructed. But nevertheless he recognised that a government consisting wholly of kingship or wholly of aristocracy was, at least among the Greeks, merely an ideal or perhaps an imaginary government, and was not within the range of practical politics[247]. And herein Greek history shows that he was right: for we never find in it a whole government composed solely of kingship or wholly of aristocracy. On the other hand we find that not only kingship and aristocracy, but also oligarchy and democracy, constantly occur as forms or principles on which a part of a government was constructed: for example the ancient Spartan constitution was in one part kingly, in another aristocratic, in another democratic; Solon's constitution contained elements both of democracy and of oligarchy; and even the mature Athenian democracy contained a trace of aristocracy in the selection of the ten generals for merit and not by chance. Hence it is clear that, while kingship, aristocracy, polity, democracy, oligarchy and tyranny were polities, and each of them was a form on which a whole government either real or ideal could be erected, four of them at least, kingship, aristocracy, democracy and oligarchy, were also forms on which a part of a government could be constructed, and which entered in very various combinations into the making of actual governments.
From what has been said it will be seen that Aristotle's classification of polities was based much more on philosophic theory than on history and that, in some part at least of its extent, it is not a direct classification of actual and concrete governments.
The only actual governments which it directly and straightforwardly classifies are those which were constructed wholly on the lines of any single one of the six polities, and these were tyrannies, pure oligarchies and Polities. As to the rest of the governments which Aristotle knew, it enabled him to describe them admirably, but did not help him to assign to them brief, distinctive and convenient class-names: for instance, it enabled him to describe the Spartan government as containing elements of kingship, of aristocracy and of democracy, and the constitution of the Phœnician city of Carthage as containing elements of kingship, aristocracy, oligarchy and democracy; but it did not furnish him with any class-name for either of those governments other than the single word normal or the descriptions of them which have just been mentioned[248].
It has been necessary for me in speaking of the Greek governments to employ some class-names, and the names that I have used are tribal governments and city governments. The mere fact of using these names implied an assumption that the governments of the Greek tribes and the governments of the Greek cities formed in some way two distinct classes. With the aid of the Aristotelian polities and our historical examination of Greek governments we may now make some observations which will help us to see whether the assumption was justified by facts.
Firstly, it may be noticed that all governments of Greek tribes were mixed governments containing within them in combination both the rule of the one and the rule of the few, or both the rule of the few and the rule of the many: and all governments of Greek city states were pure or unmixed governments, that is to say pure oligarchy, or pure tyranny, or pure democracy (in so far as a pure democracy is in the nature of things possible). In making this general statement about the governments of city states I do not regard Argolis from the time of Pheidon to 480 B.C., and Athens in the days of Cleisthenes as city states in the strictest sense of the term: for in Argolis the central city of Argos was by no means the sole place of importance, but was counterbalanced by the two ancient cities of Tiryns and Mycenæ, and in Attica in the time of Cleisthenes the rural districts were in some respects as important as the city of Athens.