dmission of the people would not have been so
astonishingly fruitful in positive results, if the course of public
events for the half century after Clisthenes had not been such as to
stimulate most powerfully their energy, their self-reliance, their
mutual sympathies, and their ambition. I shall recount in a future
chapter these historical causes, which, acting upon the Athenian
character, gave such efficiency and expansion to the great democratical
impulse communicated by Clisthenes: at present it is enough to remark
that that impulse commences properly with Clisthenes, and not with
Solon.

But the Solonian constitution, though only the foundation, was yet the
indispensable foundation, of the subsequent democracy. And if the
discontents of the miserable Athenian population, instead of
experiencing his disinterested and healing management, had fallen at
once into the hands of selfish power-seekers like Cylon or
Pisistratus--the memorable expansion of the Athenian mind during the
ensuing century would never have taken place, and the whole subsequent
history of Greece would probably have taken a different course. Solon
left the essential powers of the state still in the hands of the
oligarchy. The party combats between Pisistratus, Lycurgus, and
Megacles, thirty years after his legislation, which ended in the
despotism of Pisistratus, will appear to be of the same purely
oligarchical character as they had been before Solon was appointed
archon. But the oligarchy which he established was very different from
the unmitigated oligarchy which he found, so teeming with oppression and
so destitute of redress, as his own poems testify.

It was he who first gave both to the citizens of middling property and
to the general mass a _locus standi_ against the Eupatrids. He enabled
the people partially to protect themselves, and familiarized them with
the idea of protecting themselves, by the peaceful exercise of a
constitutional franchise. The new force, through which this protection
was carried into effect, was the public assembly called _Heliaea_,
regularized and armed with enlarged prerogatives and further
strengthened by its indispensable ally--the pro-bouleutic, or
pre-considering, senate. Under the Solonian constitution, this force was
merely secondary and defensive, but after the renovation of Clisthenes
it became paramount and sovereign. It branched out gradually into those
numerous popular dicasteries which so powerfully mo