[7] Plutarch, Pyrrh. c. 5. Aristot. Polit. v, 9, 1.
[8] Aristot. Polit. v, 9, 1.
Such were the facts at Sparta; but in the rest of Greece the
primitive heroic government was modified in a very different manner:
the people outgrew, much more decidedly, that feeling of divine right
and personal reverence which originally gave authority to the king.
Willing submission ceased on the part of the people, and still more
on the part of the inferior chiefs, and with it ceased the heroic
royalty. Something like a system or constitution came to be demanded.
Of this discontinuance of kingship, so universal in the political
march of Hellas, the prime cause is, doubtless, to be sought in
the smallness and concentrated residence of each distinct Hellenic
society. A single chief, perpetual and unresponsible, was noway
essential for the maintenance of union. In modern Europe, for the
most part, the different political societies which grew up out of
the extinction of the Roman empire embraced each a considerable
population and a wide extent of territory and the monarchical form
presented itself as the only known means of union between the parts,
the only visible and imposing symbol of a national identity. Both
the military character of the Teutonic invaders, as well as the
traditions of the Roman empire which they dismembered, tended towards
the establishment of a monarchical chief, the abolition of whose
dignity would have been looked upon as equivalent, and would really
have been equivalent, to the breaking up of the nation, since the
maintenance of a collective union by means of general assemblies was
so burdensome, that the kings themselves vainly tried to exact it by
force, and representative government was then unknown.
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