the only true statesmen (πολίται).[1] What wonder then, once more, if these men and their families believed themselves to be the only lawful possessors of secrets of government, as well as of religion, which they might turn to their own particular advantage?
Even in military matters — the third department of government — the same tendency is seen; for the aristocracy took the greater risk in actual warfare, and were at greater expense than the commons in providing themselves with horses and superior arms.[2] They, like the chivalry of the middle ages, were the flower of the State's army; they had a greater stake in the State and they bore the greater burden. What wonder, then, if they, like their mediæval counterparts, came to look down on the people as louts who could not or would not fight, unworthy alike of honour on the battlefield, and of power in the constitution?[3]
Thus we may be sure that in course of time there came to be a greater distinctness of outline in
- ↑ In Homer the πολίτης is literally the dweller in the πόλις as opposed to the dweller in the ἄγρος: Il. ii. 806; Od. vii. 131, xvii. 206. The latter two passages may indicate a time when the word was beginning to be used in its later sense; for it is the nobility that dwells in the πόλις, as in the Mycenæan age it was, perhaps, only the βασιλεύτατος.
- ↑ Aristotle, Pol. 1297 B; Gilbert, ii. 274.
- ↑ This contempt is visible even in Homer, where, however, it may be rather a reflex from the age of the compilers (ninth to seventh century) than a feature of the "Mycenæan" age: Od. i. 411, iv. 64, vi. 187; and even in Il. xiv. 126, xvi. 570. Fanta, Der Staat, etc. p. 14. The next point at which we meet it is in the poems of Theognis.
