"The Hellenes followed no common political aim. … Independent and self-centred, they created, in a constant struggle of citizen with citizen and state with state, the groundwork of those forms of government which have been established in the world at large. We see monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, rising side by side and one after another, the changes being regulated in each community by its past experience and its special interests in the immediate present. These forms of government did not appear in their normal simplicity or in conformity with a distinct ideal, but under the modifications necessary to give them vitality. An example of this is Lakedæmon. If one of the families of the Heracleidæ [the two royal families-see SPARTA: THE CONSTITUTION] aimed at a tyranny, whilst another entered into relations with the native and subject population, fatal to the prerogatives of the conquerors, we can understand that in the third case, that, of the Spartan community, the aristocratic principle was maintained with the greatest strictness. Independently of this, the divisions of the Lakedæmonian monarchy between two lines, neither of which was to have precedence, was intended to guard against the repetition in Sparta of that which had happened in Argos. Above all, the members of the Gerusia, in which the two kings had only equal rights with the rest, held a position which would have been unattainable to the elders of the Homeric age. But even the Gerusia was not independent. There existed in addition to it a general assembly, which, whilst very aristocratic as regards the native and subject population, assumed a democratic aspect in contrast with the king and the elders. The internal life of the Spartan constitution depended upon the relations between the Gerusia and the aristocratic demos. … The Spartan aristocracy dominated the Peloponnesus. But the constitution contained a democratic clement working through the Ephors, by means of which the conduct of affairs might be concentrated in a succession of powerful hands. Alongside of this system, the purely aristocratic constitutions, which were without such a centre, could nowhere hold their ground. The Bacchiadæ in Corinth, two hundred in number, with a prytanis at their head, and inter-marrying only among themselves, were one of the most distinguished of these families. They were deprived of their exclusive supremacy by Kypselus, a man of humble birth on his father's side, but connected with the Bacchiadæ through his mother. … As the Kypselidæ rose in Corinth, the metropolis of the colonies towards the west, so in the corresponding eastern metropolis, Miletus, Thrasybulus raised himself from the dignity of prytanis to that of tyrant; in Ephesus, Pythagoras rose to power, and overthrew the Basilidæ; in