Sparta was the highest type of oligarchy; Athens of democracy.
Ever since Aristotle distinguished them, there have been three recognized types of government—monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy—the rule of one man, the rule of a few men, and the rule of the people.
That the last is the just and the true form of polity, the enlightened opinion of the world has long ago irrevocably decided. Of the other two, experience shows that monarchy is more tolerable. A Nero may have stained the pages of history by the diabolic cruelty to which autocratic power gave free scope; a Napoleon may have poured out half the life-blood of his country to further his selfish personal ambition; yet, on the whole, the evils of one man’s rule have been more endurable than those of the domination of a class or “caste.” In latter days the sovereign has come to be looked upon less as a personal ruler than as an abstraction—an embodiment of theory expressed in the old maxim that “the king can do no wrong”—a conception far less offensive to the innate democracy of all manly peoples; or, he is regarded as a mere figure-head, as may be said to be the case is England, whose nominal monarch has far less practical influence upon the executive and legislative departments than has the President of the United States.
An oligarchy is the worst of all governmental systems. It has never made a people truly great. Wherever such a government has existed its record has almost always been dark and its end bloody.
Look, for example, at two of the most successful oligarchies of history—ancient Sparta and mediæval Venice. Sparta was, as Bulwer justly observes in his “Rise and Fall of Athens,” a “machine wound up by the tyranny of a fixed principle, which did not permit it even to dine as it pleased; its children were not its own—itself had no property in self. So it flourished and decayed, bequeathing to fame men only noted for hardy valor, fanatical patriotism, and profound but dishonorable craft—attracting, indeed, the wonder of the world, but advancing no claim to its gratitude and contributing no single addition to its intellectual stores.”
Such was the state that was ruled by the privileged “caste” of the Spartans and its administrative committee, the Ephoræ—a state remembered only for its brief military supremacy over her Grecian neighbors. Contrast her with one of those neighbors—Athens, the most typical and the most democratic of ancient democracies.[4] “The people of Athens,” says Bulwer, “were not, as in Sparta, the tools of the state—they were the state! In Athens the true blessing of freedom was rightly placed in the opinions and the soul. This unshackled liberty had its convulsions and its excesses, but it produced masterly philosophy, sublime poetry, and accomplished art with the energy and splendor of unexampled intelligence. Looking round us, more than four and twenty centuries after, in the establishment of the American Constitution, we yet behold the imperishable blessings which we derive from the liberties of Athens. Her life became extinct, but her soul transfused itself, immortal and immortalizing, throughout the world.”
Venice was another such oligarchy as Sparta—ruled by a small patrician “caste,” who chose an all-powerful Senate from their own number; and from the Senate was selected an Executive Council of Three—a name that has become proverbial for a body of secret and irresponsible tyrants. Venice’s strength was in commerce, in finance, as Sparta’s was in war. Her rich trade with the East and West made her seem
The pleasant place of all festivity,
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.[5]