to the feelings of modern Europe, still less to the very peculiar
feelings of England, respecting kingship: and it is the application,
sometimes explicit and sometimes tacit, of this unsuitable standard,
which renders Mr. Mitford’s appreciation of Greek politics so often
incorrect and unfair.
[15] Euripides (Supplices, 429) states plainly the idea of a
τύραννος, as received in Greece the antithesis to laws:—
Οὐδὲν τυράννου δυσμενέστερον πόλει·
Ὅπου, τὸ μὲν πρώτιστον, οὔκ εἰσιν νόμοι
Κοινοὶ, κρατεῖ δ᾽ εἷς, τὸν νόμον κεκτημένος
Αὐτὸς παρ᾽ αὑτῷ.
Compare Soph. Antigon. 737. See, also, the discussion in Aristot.
Polit. iii, sect. 10 and 11, in which the rule of the king is
discussed in comparison with the government of laws; compare
also iv, 8, 2-3. The person called “a king according to law” is,
in his judgment, no king at all: Ὁ μὲν γὰρ κατὰ νόμον λεγόμενος
βασιλεὺς οὔκ ἐστιν εἶδος καθάπερ εἴπομεν βασιλείας (iii, 11, 1).
Respecting ἰσονομίη, ἰσηγορίη, παῤῥησία,—equal laws and equal
speech,—as opposed to monarchy, see Herodot. iii, 142, v. 78-92;
Thucyd. iii, 62; Demosthen. ad Leptin. c. 6, p. 461; Eurip. Ion.
671.
Of Timoleon it was stated, as a part of the grateful vote passed
after his death by the Syracusan assembly,—ὅτι τοὺς τυράννους
καταλύσας,—ἀπέδωκε ~τοὺς νόμους~ τοῖς Σικελιώταις (Plutarch.
Timoleon. c. 39).
See Karl Fried. Hermann, Griech. Staatsalterthümer, sect. 61-65.
When we try to explain the course of Grecian affairs, not from the
circumstances of other societies, but from those of the Greeks
themselves, we shall see good reason for the discontinuance as
well as for the dislike of kingship. Had the Greek mind been as
stationary and unimproving as that of the Orientals, the discontent
with individual kings might have led to no other change than the
deposition of a bad king in favor of one who promised to be better,
without ever extending the views of the people to any higher
conception than that of a personal government. But the Greek mind
was of a progressive character, capable of conceiving and gradually
of realizing amended social combinations. Moreover, it is in the
nature of things that any government,—regal, oligarchical, or
democratical,—which comprises only a single city, is far less stable
than if it embraced a wider surface and a larger population: and when
that semi-religious and mechanical submission, which made up for the
personal deficiencies of the heroic king, became too feeble to serve
as a working principle, the petty prince was in too close contact
with his people, and too humbly furnished out in every way, to get
up a prestige or delusion of any other kind: he had no means of
overawing their imaginations by that combination of pomp, seclusion,
and mystery, which Herodotus and Xenophon so well appreciate among
the artifices of kingcraft.[16] As there was no new feeling upon
which a perpetual chief could rest his power, so there was nothing
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