t>ECURITIES AGAINST ABUSE OF OSTEACISM. 159 a perversion, involving all the mischief of the ostracism, without its protective beneh'ts. Care was taken to divest the ostracism of all painful conse- quence except what was inseparable from exile ; and this is not one of the least proofs of the wisdom with which it was devised. Most certainly, it never deprived the public of candidates for political influence : and when we consider the small amount of individual evil which it inflicted, evil too diminished, in the cases of Kimon and Aristeides, by a reactionary sentiment which augmented their subsequent popularity after return, two remarks will be quite sufficient to offer in the way of justifi- cation. First, it completely produced its intended effect ; for the democracy grew up from infancy to manhood without a single attempt to overthrow it by force, 1 a result, upon which no reflecting contemporary of Kleisthenes could have ventured to calculate. Next, through such tranquil working of the democratical forms, a constitutional morality quite sufficiently complete was produced among the leading Athenians, to enable the people after a certain time to dispense with that exceptional security which the ostracism offered. 2 To the nascent democ- 1 It is not necessary in this remark to take notice, either of the oligarchy of Four Hundred, or that of Thirty, called the Thirty Tyrants, established during the closing years of the Pcloponnesian war, and after the ostracism had been discontinued. Neither of these changes were brought about by the excessive ascendency of any one or few men : both of them grew cut of the embarrassments and dangers of Athens in the latter period of her great foreign war.
- Aristotle (Polit. iii. 8, 6) seems to recognize the political necessity of
the ostracism, as applied even to obvious superiority of wealth, connection, etc. (which he distinguishes pointedly from superiority of merit and char- acter), and upon principles of symmetry only, even apart from dangerous designs on the part of the superior mind. No painter, he observes, will permit a foot, in his picture of a man, to be of disproportionate size with the entire body, though separately taken it may be finely painted ; nor will the chorus-master allow any one voice, however beautiful, to predominate beyond a certain proportion over the rest. His final conclusion is, however, that the legislator ought, if possible, so to construct his constitution, as to have no need of such exceptional remedy ; but, if this cannot be done, then the second-best step is to apply the ostracism. Compare also v, 2, 5. The last centiuy of the free Athenian democracy realized the first of these alternatives.
