Among the Spartan tribes the ephoralty was instituted at a very early period to limit the powers of the basileis in consequence of a similar experience. Although the functions of the council in the Homeric and the legendary periods are not accurately known, its constant presence is evidence sufficient that its powers were real, essential and permanent. With the simultaneous existence of the agora, and in the absence of proof of a change of institutions, we are led to the conclusion that the council, under established usages, was supreme over gentes, phratries, tribes and nation, and that the basileus was amenable to this council for his official acts. The freedom of the gentes, of whom the members of the council were representatives, presupposes the independence of the council, as well as its supremacy.
Thucydides refers incidentally to the governments of the traditionary period, as follows: “Now when the Greeks were becoming more powerful, and acquiring possession of property still more than before, many tyrannies were established in the cities, from their revenues becoming greater; whereas before there had been hereditary basileia with specified powers.” (πρότερον δὲ ἦσαν ἐπὶ ῥητοῖς γέρασι πατρικαὶ βασιλεῖαι)[267] The office was hereditary in the sense of perpetual because it was filled as often as a vacancy occurred, but probably hereditary in a gens, the choice being by a free election by his gennêtes, or by nomination possibly by the council, and confirmation of the gentes, as in the case of the rex of the Romans.
Aristotle has given the most satisfactory definition of the basileia and of the basileus of the heroic period of any of the Grecian writers. These then are the four kinds of basileia he remarks: the first is that of the heroic times, which was a government over a free people, with restricted rights in some particulars; for the basileus was their general, their judge and their chief priest. The second, that of the barbarians, which is an hereditary despotic government, regulated by laws; the third is that which they call Aesymnetic, which is an elective tyranny. The fourth is the Lacedaemonian, which is nothing more than an hereditary generalship.[268] Whatever may be said of the last three forms, the first does not answer to the idea of a kingdom of the absolute type, nor to any recognizable form of monarchy. Aristotle enumerates with striking clearness the principal functions of the basileus, neither of which imply civil powers, and all of which are consistent with an office for life, held by an elective tenure. They are also consistent with his entire subordination to the council of chiefs. The “restricted rights,” and the “specified powers” in the definitions of these authors, tend to show that the government had grown into this form in harmony with, as well as under, gentile institutions. The essential element in the definition of Aristotle is the freedom of the people, which in ancient society implies that the people held the powers of the government under their control, that the office of basileus was voluntarily bestowed, and that it could be recalled for sufficient cause. Such a government as that described by Aristotle can be understood as a military democracy, which, as a form of government under free institutions, grew naturally out of the gentile organization when the military spirit was dominant, when wealth and numbers appeared, with habitual life in fortified cities, and before experience had prepared the way for a pure democracy.
Under gentile institutions, with a people composed of gentes, phratries and tribes, each organized as independent self-governing bodies, the people would necessarily be free. The rule of a king by hereditary right and without direct accountability in such a society was simply impossible. The impossibility arises from the fact that gentile institutions are incompatible with a king or with a kingly government. It would require, what I think cannot be furnished, positive proof of absolute hereditary right in the office of basileus, with the presence of civil functions, to overcome the presumption which arises from the structure and principles of ancient Grecian society. An Englishman, under his constitutional monarchy, is as free as an American under the republic, and his rights and liberties are as well protected; but he owes that freedom and protection to a body of written laws, created by legislation and enforced by courts of justice. In ancient Grecian society, usages and customs supplied the place of written laws, and the person depended for his freedom and protection upon the institutions of his social system. His safeguard was pre-eminently in such institutions as the elective tenure of office implies.
The reges of the Romans were, in like manner, military commanders, with priestly functions attached to their office; and this so-called kingly government falls into the same category of a military democracy. The rex, as before stated, was nominated by the senate, and confirmed by the comitia curiata; and the last of the number was deposed. With his deposition the office was abolished, as incompatible with what remained of the democratic principle, after the institution of Roman political society.
The nearest analogues of kingdoms among the Grecian tribes were the tyrannies, which sprang up here and there, in the early period, in different parts of Greece. They were governments imposed by force, and the power claimed was no greater than that of the feudal kings of mediæval times. A transmission of the office from father to son through a few generations in order to superadd hereditary right was needed to complete the analogy. But such governments were so inconsistent with Grecian ideas, and so alien to their democratic institutions, that none of them obtained a permanent footing in Greece. Mr. Grote remarks that “if any energetic man could by audacity or craft break down the constitution and render himself permanent ruler according to his own will and pleasure—even though he might rule well—he could never inspire the people with any sentiment of duty towards him. His sceptre was illegitimate from the beginning, and even the taking of his life, far from being interdicted by that moral feeling which condemned the shedder of blood in other cases, was considered meritorious.”[269] It was not so much the illegitimate sceptre which aroused the hostility of the Greeks, as the antagonism of democratical with monarchical ideas, the former of which were inherited from the gentes.
When the Athenians established the new political system, founded upon territory and upon property, the government was a pure democracy. It was no new theory, or special invention of the Athenian mind, but an old and familiar system, with an antiquity as great as that of the gentes themselves. Democratic ideas had existed in the knowledge and practice of their forefathers from time immemorial, and now found expression in a more elaborate, and, in many respects, in an improved government. The false element, that of aristocracy, which had penetrated the system and created much of the strife in the transitional period connected itself with the office of basileus, and remained after this office was abolished; but the new system accomplished its overthrow. More successfully than the remaining Grecian tribes, the Athenians were able to carry forward their ideas of government to their logical results. It is one reason why they became, for their numbers, the most distinguished, the most intellectual and the most accomplished race of men the entire human family has yet produced. In purely intellectual achievements they are still the astonishment of mankind. It was because the ideas which had been germinating through the previous ethnical period, and which had become interwoven with every fibre of their brains, had found a happy fruition in a democratically constituted state. Under its life-giving impulses their highest mental development occurred.
The plan of government instituted by Cleisthenes rejected the office of a chief executive magistrate, while it retained the council of chiefs in an elective senate, and the agora in the popular assembly. It is evident that the council, the agora and the basileus of the gentes were the germs of the senate, the popular assembly, and the chief executive magistrate (king, emperor and president) of modern political society. The latter office sprang from the military necessities of organized society, and its development with the upward progress of mankind is instructive. It can be traced from the common war-chief, first to the Great War Soldier, as in the Iroquois Confederacy; secondly, to the same military commander in a confederacy of tribes more advanced, with the functions of a priest attached to the office, as the Teuctli of the Aztec Confederacy; thirdly, to the same military commander in a nation formed by a coalescence of tribes, with the functions of a priest and of a judge attached to the office, as in the basileus of the Greeks; and finally, to the chief magistrate in modern political society. The elective archon of the Athenians, who succeeded the basileus, and the president of modern republics, from the elective tenure of the office, were the natural outcome of gentilism. We are indebted to the experience of barbarians for instituting and developing the three principal instrumentalities of government now so generally incorporated in the plan of government in civilized states. The human mind, specifically the same in all individuals in all the tribes and nations of mankind, and limited in the range of its powers, works and must work, in the same uniform channels, and within narrow limits of variation. Its results in disconnected regions of space, and in widely separated ages of time, articulate in a logically connected chain of common experiences. In the grand aggregate may still be recognized the few primary germs of thought, working upon primary human necessities, which, through the natural process of development, have produced such vast results.