oerce, and perhaps to oppress, small and poor
men, had no means of keeping down rebellious nobles of their own rank,
such as Pisistratus, Lycurgus, and Megacles, each with his armed
followers. When we compare the drawn swords of these ambitious
competitors, ending in the despotism of one of them, with the vehement
parliamentary strife between Themistocles and Aristides afterward,
peaceably decided by the vote of the sovereign people and never
disturbing the public tranquillity--we shall see that the democracy of
the ensuing century fulfilled the conditions of order, as well as of
progress, better than the Solonian constitution.

To distinguish this Solonian constitution from the democracy which
followed it, is essential to a due comprehension of the progress of the
Greek mind, and especially of Athenian affairs. That democracy was
achieved by gradual steps. Demosthenes and AEschines lived under it as a
system consummated and in full activity, when the stages of its
previous growth were no longer matter of exact memory; and the dicasts
then assembled in judgment were pleased to hear their constitution
associated with the names either of Solon or of Theseus. Their
inquisitive contemporary Aristotle was not thus misled: but even
commonplace Athenians of the century preceding would have escaped the
same delusion. For during the whole course of the democratical movement,
from the Persian invasion down to the Peloponnesian war, and especially
during the changes proposed by Pericles and Ephialtes, there was always
a strenuous party of resistance, who would not suffer the people to
forget that they had already forsaken, and were on the point of
forsaking still more, the orbit marked out by Solon. The illustrious
Pericles underwent innumerable attacks both from the orators in the
assembly and from the comic writers in the theatre. And among these
sarcasms on the political tendencies of the day we are probably to
number the complaint, breathed by the poet Cratinus, of the desuetude
into which both Solon and Draco had fallen--"I swear (said he in a
fragment of one of his comedies) by Solon and Draco, whose wooden
tablets (of laws) are now employed by people to roast their barley." The
laws of Solon respecting penal offences, respecting inheritance and
adoption, respecting the private relations generally, etc., remained for
the most part in force: his quadripartite census also continued, at
least for financial purposes, until the a