in the circumstances of the community which rendered the maintenance of such a dignity necessary for visible and effective union:[17] in a single city, and a small circumjacent community, collective deliberation and general rules, with temporary and responsible magistrates, were practicable without difficulty. [16] See the account of Deiokês, the first Median king, in Herodotus, i, 98, evidently an outline drawn by Grecian imagination: also, the Cyropædia of Xenophon, viii, 1, 40; viii, 3, 1-14; vii, 5, 37 ... οὐ τούτῳ μόνῳ ἐνόμιζε (Κῦρος) χρῆναι τοὺς ἄρχοντας τῶν ἀρχομένων διαφέρειν τῷ βελτίονας αὐτῶν εἶναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ καταγοητεύειν ᾤετο χρῆναι αὐτοὺς, etc. [17] David Hume, Essay xvii, On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, p. 198, ed. 1760. The effects of the greater or less extent of territory, upon the nature of the government, are also well discussed in Destutt Tracy, Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Loix de Montesquieu, ch. viii. To maintain an unresponsible king, and then to contrive accompaniments which shall extract from him the benefits of responsible government, is in reality a highly complicated system, though, as has been remarked, we have become familiar with it in modern Europe: the more simple and obvious change is, to substitute one or more temporary and responsible magistrates in place of the king himself. Such was the course which affairs took in Greece. The inferior chiefs, who had originally served as council to the king, found it possible to supersede him, and to alternate the functions of administration among themselves; retaining probably the occasional convocation of the general assembly, as it had existed before, and with as little practical efficacy. Such was in substance the character of that mutation which occurred generally throughout the Grecian states, with the exception of Sparta: kingship was abolished, and an oligarchy took its place,—a council deliberating collectively, deciding general matters by the majority of voices, and selecting some individuals of their own body as temporary and accountable administrators. It was always an oligarchy which arose on the defeasance of the heroic kingdom: the age of democratical movement was yet far distant, and the condition of the people—the general body of freemen—was not immediately altered, either for better or worse, by the revolution; the small number of privileged persons, among whom the kingly attributes were distributed and put in rotation, being those nearest in rank to the king himself, perhaps members of the same large gens with him, and pretending to a common divine or heroic descent. As far as we can make out, this change seems to have taken place in the natural course of events and without violence. Sometimes the kingly lineage died out and was not replaced; sometimes, on the death of a king, his son and successor was acknowledged[18] only as archon, or perhaps set aside altogether to make room for a prytanis,