Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/29

HATRED OF MONARCHS AMONG THE GREEKS. iy the mischiefs likely to flow from proclaiming the duty of peremj- tory obedience to an hereditary and unresponsible king, who cannot be changed without extra-constitutional force. But such larger observation was not open to Aristotle, the wisest as well as the most cautious of ancient theorists ; nor if it had been open, could he have applied with assurance its lessons to the govern- ments of the single cities of Greece. The theory of a constitu- tional king, especially as it exists in England, would have appeared to him impracticable : to establish a king who will reign without governing, in whose name all government is carried on, yet whose personal will is in practice of little or no effect, exempt from all responsibility, without making use of the exemp- tion, receiving from every one unmeasured demonstrations of homage, which are never translated into act except v/ithin the bounds of a known law, surrounded with all the ; uiapher- nalia of power, yet acting as a passive instrument in the hands of ministers marked out for his choice by indications which he is not at liberty to resist. This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and license with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king : the events of our history have brought it to pass in England, amidst an aristocracy the most powerful that the world has yet seen, but we have still to learn whether it can be made to exist elsewhere, or whether the occurrence of a single king, at once able, aggressive, and resolute, may not suffice to break it up. To Aristotle, certainly, it could not have appeared otherwise than unintelligible and impractica- ble : not likel} r even in a single case, but altogether inconceiv- able as a permanent system and with all the diversities of temper inherent in the successive members of an hereditary dynasty When the Greeks thought of a man exempt from legal responsi- bility, they conceived him as really and truly such, in deed as well as in name, with a defenceless community exposed to his oppressions ;* and their fear and hatred of him was m-^isured by 1 Euripides (Suppliccs, 429) states plainly the idea of a -loavvof, as received in Greece the antithesis to laws : Qvfiev rvpuwov dvaficvecTcpov TTO/.CL 'O~ov, TO uev TrpurioTov, OVK eiviv vofMi Koivol, Kparei ff elf, rbv vofiov KKTtjfivo Aiirbc Trap* alVo. Compare Soph. Antigon. 737.