Kleisthenês had learned some wisdom during his long exile; and as he probably continued, for some time after the introduction of his new constitution, to be the chief adviser of his countrymen, we may consider their extraordinary success as a testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their courage and unanimity. [245] Herodot. v, 69. Κλεισθένης,—ὑπεριδὼν Ἴωνας, ἵνα μὴ σφισι αἱ αὐταὶ ἔωσι φυλαὶ καὶ Ἴωσι. [246] Such a disposition seems evident in Herodot. i, 143. Nor does it seem unreasonable to give him credit for a more generous forward movement than what is implied in the literal account of Herodotus. Instead of being forced against his will to purchase popular support by proposing this new constitution, Kleisthenês may have proposed it before, during the discussions which immediately followed the retirement of Hippias; so that the rejection of it formed the ground of quarrel—and no other ground is mentioned—between him and Isagoras. The latter doubtless found sufficient support, in the existing senate and public assembly, to prevent it from being carried without an actual appeal to the people, and his opposition to it is not difficult to understand. For, necessary as the change had become, it was not the less a shock to ancient Attic ideas. It radically altered the very idea of a tribe, which now became an aggregation of demes, not of gentes,—of fellow-demots, not of fellow-gentiles; and it thus broke up those associations, religious, social, and political, between the whole and the parts of the old system, which operated powerfully on the mind of every old-fashioned Athenian. The patricians at Rome, who composed the gentes and curiæ,—and the plebs, who had no part in these corporations,—formed for a long time two separate and opposing fractions in the same city, each with its own separate organization. It was only by slow degrees that the plebs gained ground, and the political value of the patrician gens was long maintained alongside of and apart from the plebeian tribe. So too in the Italian and German cities of the Middle Ages, the patrician families refused to part with their own separate political identity, when the guilds grew up by the side of them; even though forced to renounce a portion of their power, they continued to be a separate fraternity, and would not submit to be regimented anew, under an altered category and denomination, along with the traders who had grown into wealth and importance.[247] But the reform of Kleisthenês effected this change all at once, both as to the name and as to the reality. In some cases, indeed, that which had been the name of a gens was retained as the name of a deme, but even then the old gentiles were ranked indiscriminately among the remaining demots; and the Athenian people, politically considered, thus became one homogeneous whole, distributed for convenience into parts, numerical, local, and politically equal. It is, however, to be remembered, that