Added to this religious zeal, felt more especially among the less cultured classes, there was the patriotic gratitude of nearly all. Most of the more educated had felt for some time that a change must be made in the institutions of the state, if she was to combat successfully against the oligarchic and despotic enemies gathering around her, who had not the disadvantage of the unstable and variable policy incident to government by the voices of the masses. Certain it is that, seizing the opportunity offered by the present feeling of the population, the numberless clubs which honeycombed Athenian politics, and represented the majority of those citizens who took the chief part in the affairs of state, came forward, and urged Alkibiades to suppress the constitution, to banish the demagogues and the orators, who, they declared, had been the constant cause of all their troubles, and suggested that he who was already autocrat in war, master of the forces by land and sea, both in and out of Athens, and feared by the whole of Greece, should accept from them a kingly crown. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XXV ‘Tu proverai sì come sa di sale Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’ DANTE: _Par._, xvii. ‘Thou shalt find how salt doth taste another’s bread, How hard the way is up and down another’s stairs.’ IN the course of this story we have had to watch the hero of it assailed by many temptations. We have seen him give way to some which many of us think we should have overcome, and overcome others to which most of us would certainly have given way. This that stood before him now, beckoning him, as it were, with wizard hand, was the greatest of them all, and came in most specious shape. All his life he had desired to excel. As a boy, and as a young man, his greater gifts had enabled him to excel and rule his compeers. The desire for pre-eminence and command had not grown less as, in his maturer years, he had found that his proper place was at their head, and that the others ceded that position to him as of right. Yet in his most ambitious moods there had not come to him the thought that he should ever rule alone, supreme, in Athens.