Of the early history of Sikyôn, from the period when it became Dorian down to the seventh century B. C., we know nothing. Our first information respecting it, concerns the establishment of the despotism of Orthagoras, about 680-670 B. C. And it is a point deserving of notice, that all the three above-mentioned towns,—Corinth, Sikyôn, and Megara,—underwent during the course of this same century a similar change of government. In each of them a despot established himself; Orthagoras in Sikyôn; Kypselus in Corinth; Theagenês in Megara.
Unfortunately, we have too little evidence as to the state of things by which this change of government was preceded and brought about, to be able to appreciate fully its bearing. But what draws our attention to it more particularly is, that the like phenomenon seems to have occurred contemporaneously throughout a large number of cities, continental, insular, and colonial, in many different parts of the Grecian world. The period between 650 and 500 B. C., witnessed the rise and downfall of many despots and despotic dynasties, each in its own separate city. During the succeeding interval between 500 and 350 B. C., new despots, though occasionally springing up, become more rare; political dispute takes another turn, and the question is raised directly and ostensibly between the many and the few,—the people and the oligarchy. But in the still later times which follow the battle of Chæroneia, in proportion as Greece, declining in civic not less than in military spirit, is driven to the constant employment of mercenary troops, and humbled by the overruling interference of foreigners,—the despot with his standing foreign body-guard becomes again a characteristic of the time; a tendency partially counteracted, but never wholly subdued, by Aratus, and the Achæan league of the third century B. C.
It would have been instructive if we had possessed a faithful record of these changes of government in some of the more considerable of the Grecian towns; but in the absence of such evidence we can do little more than collect the brief sentences of Aristotle and others respecting the causes which produced them. For as the like change of government was common, near about the same time, to cities very different in locality, in race of inhabitants, in tastes and habits, and in wealth, it must partly have depended upon certain general causes which admit of being assigned and explained.
In the preceding volume, I tried to elucidate the heroic government of Greece, so far as it could be known from the epic poems,—a government founded (if we may employ modern phraseology) upon divine right as opposed to the sovereignty of the people, but requiring, as an essential condition, that the king shall possess force, both of body and mind, not unworthy of the exalted breed to which he belongs.[6] In this government, the authority which pervades the whole society, all resides in the king; but on important occasions it is exercised through the forms of publicity; he consults, and even discusses, with the council of chiefs or elders,—he communicates after such consultation with the assembled agora,—who hear and approve, perhaps hear and murmur, but are not understood to exercise an option or to reject. In giving an account of the Lykurgean system, I remarked that the old primitive Rhetræ, or charters of compact, indicated the existence of these same elements; a king of superhuman lineage (in this particular case two coördinate kings),—a senate of twenty-eight old men, besides the kings who sat in it,—and an ekklesia, or public assembly of citizens, convened for the purpose of approving or rejecting propositions submitted to them, with little or no liberty of discussion. The elements of the heroic government of Greece are thus found to be substantially the same as those existing in the primitive Lykurgean constitution: in both cases the predominant force residing in the kings,—and the functions of the senate, still more those of the public assembly, being comparatively narrow and restricted; in both cases the regal authority being upheld by a certain religious sentiment, which tended to exclude rivalry and to insure submission in the people up to a certain point, in spite of misconduct or deficiency in the reigning individual. Among the principal Epirotic tribes, this government subsisted down to the third century B. C.[7], though some of them had passed out of it, and were in the habit of electing annually a president out of the gens to which the king belonged. Starting from these points, common to the Grecian heroic government, and to the original Lykurgean system, we find that in the Grecian cities generally, the king is replaced by an oligarchy, consisting of a limited number of families,—while at Sparta, the kingly authority, though greatly curtailed, is never abolished. And the different turn of events at Sparta admits of being partially explained. It so happened that, for five centuries, neither of the two coördinate lines of Spartan kings was ever without some male representatives, so that the sentiment of divine right, upon which their preëminence was founded, always proceeded in an undeviating channel. That sentiment never wholly died out in the tenacious mind of Sparta, but it became sufficiently enfeebled to occasion a demand for guarantees against abuse. If the senate had been a more numerous body, composed of a few principal families, and comprising men of all ages, it might, perhaps, have extended its powers so much as to absorb those of the king: but a council of twenty-eight very old men, chosen indiscriminately from all Spartan families, was essentially an adjunct and secondary force. It was insufficient even as a restraint upon the king,—still less was it competent to become his rival; and it served indirectly even as a support to him, by preventing the formation of any other privileged order powerful enough to be an overmatch for his authority. This insufficiency on the part of the senate was one of the causes which occasioned the formation of the annually-renewed Council of Five, called the Ephors; originally a defensive board, like the Roman Tribunes, intended as a restraint upon abuse of power in the kings, but afterwards expanding into a paramount and unresponsible Executive Directory. Assisted by endless dissensions between the two coördinate kings, the ephors encroached upon their power on every side, limited them to certain special functions, and even rendered them accountable and liable to punishment, but never aspired to abolish the dignity. That which the regal authority lost in extent (to borrow the just remark of king Theopompus)[8] it gained in durability: the descendants of the twins Eurysthenês and Proklês continued in possession of their double sceptre from the earliest historical times down to the revolutions of Agis the Third, and Kleomenês the Third,—generals of the military force, growing richer and richer, and reverenced as well as influential in the state, though the directory of ephors were their superiors. And the ephors became, in time, quite as despotic, in reference to internal affairs, as the kings could ever have been before them; for the Spartan mind, deeply possessed with the feelings of command and obedience, remained comparatively insensible to the ideas of control and responsibility, and even averse to that open discussion and censure of public measures, or officers, which such ideas imply. We must recollect that the Spartan political constitution was both simplified in its character, and aided in its working, by the comprehensive range of the Lykurgean discipline, with its rigorous equal pressure upon rich and poor, which averted many of the causes elsewhere productive of sedition,—habituating the proudest and most refractory citizen to a life of undeviating obedience,—satisfying such demand as existed for system and regularity,—rendering Spartan personal habits of life much more equal than even democratical Athens could parallel; but contributing, at the same time, to engender a contempt for talkers, and a dislike of methodical and prolonged speech, which of itself sufficed to exclude all regular interference of the collective citizens, either in political or judicial affairs.
Such were the facts at Sparta; but in the rest of Greece the primitive heroic government was modified in a very different manner: the people outgrew, much more decidedly, that feeling of divine right and personal reverence which originally gave authority to the king. Willing submission ceased on the part of the people, and still more on the part of the inferior chiefs, and with it ceased the heroic royalty. Something like a system or constitution came to be demanded.
Of this discontinuance of kingship, so universal in the political march of Hellas, the prime cause is, doubtless, to be sought in the smallness and concentrated residence of each distinct Hellenic society. A single chief, perpetual and unresponsible, was noway essential for the maintenance of union. In modern Europe, for the most part, the different political societies which grew up out of the extinction of the Roman empire embraced each a considerable population and a wide extent of territory and the monarchical form presented itself as the only known means of union between the parts, the only visible and imposing symbol of a national identity. Both the military character of the Teutonic invaders, as well as the traditions of the Roman empire which they dismembered, tended towards the establishment of a monarchical chief, the abolition of whose dignity would have been looked upon as equivalent, and would really have been equivalent, to the breaking up of the nation, since the maintenance of a collective union by means of general assemblies was so burdensome, that the kings themselves vainly tried to exact it by force, and representative government was then unknown.
The history of the Middle Ages, though exhibiting constant resistance on the part of powerful subjects, frequent deposition of individual kings, and occasional changes of dynasty, contains few instances of any attempt to maintain a large political aggregate united without a king, either hereditary or elective. Even towards the close of the last century, at the period when the federal constitution of the United States of America was first formed, many reasoners regarded[9] as an impossibility the application of any other system than the monarchical to a territory of large size and population, so as to combine union of the whole with equal privileges and securities to each of the parts. And it might, perhaps, be a real impossibility among any rude people, with strong local peculiarities, difficult means of communication, and habits of representative government not yet acquired. Hence, throughout all the larger nations of mediæval and modern Europe, with few exceptions, the prevailing sentiment has been favorable to monarchy; but wherever any single city, or district, or cluster of villages, whether in the plains of Lombardy, or in the mountains of Switzerland, has acquired independence,—wherever any small fraction has severed itself from the aggregate,—the opposite sentiment has been found, and the natural tendency has been towards some modification of republican government;[10] out of which, indeed, as in Greece, a despot has often been engendered, but always through some unnatural mixture of force and fraud. The feudal system, evolved out of the disordered state of Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, always presumed a permanent suzerain, vested with large rights of a mixed personal and proprietary character over his vassals, though subject, also, to certain obligations towards them the immediate vassals of the king had subordinate vassals of their own, to whom they stood in the same relation: and in this hierarchy[11] of power, property, and territory blended together, the rights of the chief, whether king, duke, or baron, were always conceived as constituting a status apart, and neither conferred originally by the grant, nor revocable at the pleasure, of those over whom they were exercised. This view of the essential nature of political authority was a point in which the three great elements of modern European society,—the Teutonic, the Roman, and the Christian,—all concurred, though each in a different way and with different modifications; and the result was, a variety of attempts on the part of subjects to compromise with their chief, without any idea of substituting a delegated executive in his place. On particular points of these feudal monarchies there grew up, gradually, towns with a concentrated population, among whom was seen the remarkable combination of a republican feeling, demanding collective and responsible management in their own local affairs, with a necessity of union and subordination towards the great monarchical whole; and hence again arose a new force tending both to maintain the form, and to predetermine the march, of kingly government.[12] And it has been found in practice possible to attain this latter object,—to combine regal government with fixity of administration, equal law impartially executed, security to person and property, and freedom of discussion under representative forms,—in a degree which the wisest ancient Greek would have deemed hopeless.[13] Such an improvement in the practical working of this species of government, speaking always comparatively with the kings of ancient times in Syria, Egypt, Judæa, the Grecian cities, and Rome,—coupled with the increased force of all established routine, and the greater durability of all institutions and creeds which have once obtained footing throughout any wide extent of territory and people, has caused the monarchical sentiment to remain predominant in the European mind, though not without vigorous occasional dissent, throughout the increased knowledge and the enlarged political experience of the last two centuries.
It is important to show that the monarchical institutions and monarchical tendencies prevalent throughout mediæval and modern Europe have been both generated and perpetuated by causes peculiar to those societies, whilst in Hellenic societies such causes had no place,—in order that we may approach Hellenic phenomena in the proper spirit, and with an impartial estimate of the feeling universal among Greeks towards the idea of a king. The primitive sentiment entertained towards the heroic king died out, passing first into indifference, next,—after experience of the despots,—into determined antipathy.
To an historian like Mr. Mitford, full of English ideas respecting government, this anti-monarchical feeling appears of the nature of insanity, and the Grecian communities like madmen without a keeper: while the greatest of all benefactors is the hereditary king, who conquers them from without,—the second-best is the home-despot, who seizes the acropolis and puts his fellow-citizens under coercion. There cannot be a more certain way of misinterpreting and distorting Grecian phenomena than to read them in this spirit, which reverses the maxims both of prudence and morality current in the ancient world. The hatred of kings as it stood among the Greeks, whatever may be thought about a similar feeling now, was a prëeminent virtue, flowing directly from the noblest and wisest part of their nature: it was a consequence of their deep conviction of the necessity of universal legal restraint—it was a direct expression of that regulated sociality which required the control of individual passion from every one without exception, and most of all from him to whom power was confided. The conception which the Greeks formed of an unresponsible One, or of a king who could do no wrong, may be expressed in the pregnant words of Herodotus:[14] “He subverts the customs of the country: he violates women: he puts men to death without trial.” No other conception of the probable tendencies of kingship was justified either by a general knowledge of human nature, or by political experience as it stood from Solon downward: no other feeling than abhorrence could be entertained for the character so conceived: no other than a man of unprincipled ambition would ever seek to invest himself with it.
Our larger political experience has taught us to modify this opinion by showing that, under the conditions of monarchy in the best governments of modern Europe, the enormities described by Herodotus do not take place,—and that it is possible, by means of representative constitutions acting under a certain force of manners, customs, and historical recollection, to obviate many of the mischiefs likely to flow from proclaiming the duty of peremptory obedience to an hereditary and unresponsible king, who cannot be changed without extra-constitutional force. But such larger observation was not open to Aristotle, the wisest as well as the most cautious of ancient theorists; nor if it had been open, could he have applied with assurance its lessons to the governments of the single cities of Greece. The theory of a constitutional king, especially as it exists in England, would have appeared to him impracticable: to establish a king who will reign without governing,—in whose name all government is carried on, yet whose personal will is in practice of little or no effect,—exempt from all responsibility, without making use of the exemption,—receiving from every one unmeasured demonstrations of homage, which are never translated into act except within the bounds of a known law,—surrounded with all the paraphernalia of power, yet acting as a passive instrument in the hands of ministers marked out for his choice by indications which he is not at liberty to resist. This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and license with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king: the events of our history have brought it to pass in England, amidst an aristocracy the most powerful that the world has yet seen,—but we have still to learn whether it can be made to exist elsewhere, or whether the occurrence of a single king, at once able, aggressive, and resolute, may not suffice to break it up. To Aristotle, certainly, it could not have appeared otherwise than unintelligible and impracticable: not likely even in a single case,—but altogether inconceivable as a permanent system and with all the diversities of temper inherent in the successive members of an hereditary dynasty. When the Greeks thought of a man exempt from legal responsibility, they conceived him as really and truly such, in deed as well as in name, with a defenceless community exposed to his oppressions;[15] and their fear and hatred of him was measured by their reverence for a government of equal law and free speech, with the ascendency of which their whole hopes of security were associated,—in the democracy of Athens more perhaps than in any other portion of Greece. And this feeling, as it was one of the best in the Greek mind, so it was also one of the most widely spread,—a point of unanimity highly valuable amidst so many points of dissension. We cannot construe or criticize it by reference to the feelings of modern Europe, still less to the very peculiar feelings of England, respecting kingship: and it is the application, sometimes explicit and sometimes tacit, of this unsuitable standard, which renders Mr. Mitford’s appreciation of Greek politics so often incorrect and unfair.