to the word "best," and seems to contrast the virtue of the true aristocratic ruler with the wealth of the oligarch. But was he right in his belief that the government of the best had never been realised?
Undoubtedly the Greek aristocracies, like all modern ones, did not owe their political power simply to superior moral qualities. They obtained it as the result of certain advantages which they possessed, of which the chief were wealth and high descent. But we can hardly be wrong in believing that the excellence (ἀρετή) which they claimed for themselves — a claim which survived into much later times in the expressions καλοὶ κἀγαθοὶ, ἐπιεικεῖς, γνώριμοι, etc., applied to oligarchs who did not merit them — had at one time had a real existence. We must indeed, in order to understand what it was that they claimed, get rid for the moment of much of our modern notions of virtue or goodness; but there will still remain an element of ethical superiority which we may predicate of this nobility without misgiving. With them, so far as we can see, began the idea, so fruitful afterwards for Greek civilisation, that the mind and the body alike of each individual should be cultivated to the utmost for the benefit of the State. Here, if anywhere, we must look for the origin in Greece of the cultivation of the beautiful, in the human body, in the products of art, and, to some extent at least, in conduct too; and at Rome for the beginning of the
word ὀλιγαρχία Aristotle attaches the meaning, usual in Greece, of government by a few families, distinguished not by excellence but by wealth.
