two orders (the
husbandmen and mechanics) the remainder of the people. The care of
religion, the explanation of the laws, and the situations of
magistrates, were the privilege of the nobles. He thus laid the
foundation of a free, though aristocratic constitution--according to
Aristotle, the first who surrendered the absolute sway of royalty, and
receiving from the rhetorical Isocrates the praise that it was a contest
which should give most, the people of power, or the king of freedom. As
an extensive population was necessary to a powerful state, so Theseus
invited to Athens all strangers willing to share in the benefits of its
protection, granting them equal security of life and law; and he set a
demarcation to the territory of the state by the boundary of a pillar
erected in the Isthmus, dividing Ionia from Peloponnesus. The Isthmian
games in honour of Neptune were also the invention of Theseus.

VIII. Such are the accounts of the legislative enactments of Theseus.
But of these we must reject much. We may believe from the account of
Thucydides that jealousies among some Attic towns--which might either
possess, or pretend to, an independence never completely annihilated
by Cecrops and his successors, and which the settlement of foreigners
of various tribes and habits would have served to increase--were so
far terminated as to induce submission to the acknowledged supremacy
of Athens as the Attic capital; and that the right of justice, and
even of legislation, which had before been the prerogative of each
separate town (to the evident weakening of the supreme and regal
authority), was now concentrated in the common council-house of
Athens. To Athens, as to a capital, the eupatrids of Attica would
repair as a general residence [93]. The city increased in population
and importance, and from this period Thucydides dates the enlargement
of the ancient city, by the addition of the Lower Town. That Theseus
voluntarily lessened the royal power, it is not necessary to believe.
In the heroic age a warlike race had sprung up, whom no Grecian
monarch appears to have attempted to govern arbitrarily in peace,
though they yielded implicitly to his authority in war. Himself on a
newly-won and uncertain throne, it was the necessity as well as the
policy of Theseus to conciliate the most powerful of his subjects. It
may also be conceded, that he more strictly defined the distinctions
between the nobles and the remaining classe