ording
as they declared their pedigrees, had the like right as to their
families; but neither in these nor the former was there any hereditary
right to the Sanhedrim: though there be little question but the wise men
and understanding, and known among their tribes, which the people took
or elected into those or other magistracies, and whom Moses made rulers
over them, must have been of these, seeing they could not choose but be
the most known among the tribes, and were likeliest by the advantages of
education to be the most wise and understanding.

"Solon having found the Athenians neither locally nor genealogically,
but by their different ways of life, divided into four tribes--that
is, into the soldiery, the tradesmen, the husbandmen, and the
goatherds--instituted a new distribution of them, according to the sense
or valuation of their estates, into four classes: the first, second, and
third consisting of such as were proprietors in land, distinguished by
the rate of their freeholds, with that stamp upon them, which making
them capable of adding honor to their riches, that is to say, of the
Senate, and all the magistracies, excluded the fourth, being the body
of the people, and far greater in number than the former three, from all
other right, as to those capacities, except the election of these, who
by this means became an hereditary aristocracy or senatorian order
of nobility. This was that course which came afterward to be the
destruction of Rome, and had now ruined Athens. The nobility, according
to the inevitable nature of such a one, having laid the plot how to
divest the people of the result, and so to draw the whole power of the
commonwealth to themselves; which in all likelihood they had done, if
the people, coming by mere chance to be victorious in the battle of
Plataea, and famous for defending Greece against the Persians, had not
returned with such courage as irresistibly broke the classes, to which
of old they had borne a white tooth, brought the nobility to equal
terms, and the Senate with the magistracies to be common to both; the
magistracies by suffrage, and the Senate (which was the mischief of
it, as I shall show anon in that constitution) by lot only." The
Lacedaemonians were in the manner, and for the same cause with the
Venetians at this day, no other than a nobility even according to the
definition given of nobility by Machiavel; for they neither exercised
any trade, nor labored their lands or lo