common people, and lowered the nobles. There is equally ample evidence that they enforced order, and in some cases put down with a strong hand open immorality 1, so that cities that had been racked with revolution and violence for generations, first came to feel the blessings of a strong government, and the benefits of a peace to which they had been total strangers. This gave them time to develope commerce and to cultivate art-the latter specially encouraged by the tyrants as a class. I hold, then, that Greece, when the tyrants passed away, was in a condition vastly superior to its aristocratic age—in fact, in a condition fit to develope political life. This would have been impossible but for the fusion of classes and the development of culture enforced by the tyrants.

One memorable example will suffice by way of illustration. What was the state of Athens when Solon arose? It had been torn by factions for years, the country was languishing, men were weary of turmoil and confusion, when this great genius was entrusted with the regulation of public affairs. He tells us plainly enough in extant poems that he endeavoured to lay down a fair constitution, raising the lower classes gradually, curbing the violence of the nobles, tempering all the extremes into a great whole

1 This is certain from the evidence we have in the fragments of Theopompus (cf. frag. 252) about the tyrants of Mitylene. Curtius has an ingenious theory that the tyrants were the evidence of a mercantile Ionic reaction against the aristocratic Doric ascendancy brought about by the greatness of Sparta. This theory, if proved, does not contradict what is said in the text, but concerns the political side of a question, which I am regarding from a social point of view.

in which all should have an interest. Here, then, was a fair and just constitution offered to a state in the pre-despotic stage. What was the result? In spite of all his efforts, in spite of his self-imposed absence, and the oath taken to avoid changes, the aristocrats could not be restrained. They openly ridiculed Solon, as he tells us, for not grasping the tyranny, in fact they could not conceive his declining to do so; and even the lower classes seem not to have understood his great benefits, for the noble legislator complains, in language which still touches us across a great gulf of centuries, how he stands alone without friend or support in the state 1.

It is to be observed, farther, that the lessons which he taught, and the ideas which he strove to instil into the Athenian mind, were no obscure metaphysics, no lofty

1 The ridicule of his aristocratic friends is told us in quotations from Solon's own poems by Plutarch in chap. xvi. of his precious life of Solon. ‘But his intimates more particularly depreciated him, because he thought ill of monarchy on account of its name, as if it did not forthwith become a kingship [instead of a tyranny?] by the merit of the holder, and as they had the precedents of Tynnondas in Euboea and Pittacus in Mitylene. None of these things made Solon to swerve from his policy, but he said to his friends that a tyranny was a fair position with no escape from it. . . .' He has thus described the ridicule of those who derided him for avoiding the tyranny: Solon is no man of sound sense or counsel, for when God gave him a fine chance he himself would not take it; but when he had made a miraculous draught, in amazement he did not haul in the great net, through want both of spirit and of sense. He should have been content, having got power and abundant wealth, and being tyrant of Athens for a single day, to be then flayed alive and have his race destroyed.' It is with reference to such friends that Solon speaks of himself (frag. 37) as a wolf worried by dogs crowding about him.

flights of fancy, but the plainest homespun morality, so plain indeed that his practical lessons appear to us mere truisms. His moral attitude differs toto cælo from that of Eschylus, and stands so close to that of Hesiod and Theognis, that they dispute with him the authorship of sundry reflections.

Of

This very plain teaching, and this great moral and political pre-eminence of Solon, were nevertheless to all appearance useless. No sooner had he completed his work and left Athens, than the old strife of parties. revived. His return made no change in this wretched state of things. His laws were powerless, his lessons were unheeded. He had cast his pearls before swine, and they were ready to turn again and rend him. His solution of the problem was without doubt theoretically far the best, but practically it was a decided failure. Peisistratus, a man of very inferior genius, but of greater vigour and boldness, saw better how to solve it. course Peisistratus had private ends, like Julius Cæsar, like Alexander, like Napoleon. But when a great man's private ends happen to coincide with the good of the state, he ought not to lose all credit because he happens to benefit himself. There is ample evidence that Peisistratus was not only a wise but a humane and orderly ruler. Despite of the violent opposition of the aged Solon, he treated him with respect, and is said to have strictly observed his laws. This shows his estimate of Solon's theory. But if he did approve of Solon's laws, he introduced the new element in which Solon was wanting. After all, the aristocrats who had ridiculed the lawgiver for not turning tyrant, had some

wisdom in their taunts. Laws must not only be made,

they must be enforced. Peisistratus enforced Solon's laws. He insisted on peace and order in the city. He stopped by main force the perpetual political agitation which is the ruin of any commonwealth. He developed the tastes of the lower classes, giving them intellectual and social pleasures to compensate for the loss of higher but more dangerous excitement. The reading of Homer, the feasts of Dionysus, the newest lyric poems, attracted the attention of the public, instead of the wild fever of conflicting rights and opposing privileges. Of course the great nobles found the change intolerable. They retired, like Miltiades, to their country mansions. They gladly left the country to found colonies, and regain as foreign princes the importance they had lost at home. Athens stood still in political training, but she gained immensely in culture. Let the reader remember that without sound intellectual culture all political training is and must be simply mischievous. A free constitution is perfectly absurd, if the opinion of the majority is incompetent. Until men are educated, they want a strong hand over them a fact which very few in this country will be disposed to dispute. I fear it is almost hopeless to persuade English minds that a despotism may in some cases be better for a nation than a more advanced constitution. And yet no students of history can fail to

1 See the remarkable passage in Plato's Laws, iv. 711, in which he shows how rapidly a tyrant was able, even by merely setting the fashion, to alter the laws and customs of a state. He is distinctly of opinion that there is no other means at all so rapid and complete.

observe that even yet very few nations in the world are fit for diffused political privileges. The nations that are fit, are so manifestly the greatest and best, and consequently the most prosperous, that inferior races keep imitating their institutions, instead of feeling that these institutions are the result and not the cause of true national greatness. Of course the result reacts upon the cause, and becomes itself a cause in due time, but only where it has grown up naturally, not where it has been superinduced artificially. Thus the attempts at democracy of the French, of the American negroes, and of all such non-political races, must for generations to come end in failure. The case of the Irish is still more remarkable. The English nation has in vain given them its laws, and even done something to enforce them. The nation will not thrive, because this is the very constitution not fit for it. I believe the harshest despotism would be more successful, and perhaps in the end more humane.

When the Greek tyrants had done their work, the day of liberty came, and with it a great struggle, which nerved and braced the people's energies against an outward foe. The literature of free Athens shows us a perfectly new attitude. Of course it were absurd to attribute this memorable national development-the most miraculous the world has ever seen-to any single cause. A concurrent number of great causes alone could ever have produced such an effect. But I claim as one cause the literary culture which Athens received at the hands of Peisistratus and his sons. The hearers of Eschylus were intellectually men widely different from the

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