It is in this debate that Thucydidês first takes notice of Kleon, who is, however, mentioned by Plutarch as rising into importance some few years earlier, during the lifetime of Periklês. Under the great increase of trade and population in Athens and Peiræus during the last forty years, a new class of politicians seem to have grown up, men engaged in various descriptions of trade and manufacture, who began to rival more or less in importance the ancient families of Attic proprietors. This change was substantially analogous to that which took place in the cities of mediæval Europe, when the merchants and traders of the various guilds gradually came to compete with, and ultimately supplanted, the patrician families in whom the supremacy had originally resided. In Athens, persons of ancient family and station enjoyed at this time no political privilege, and since the reforms of Ephialtês and Periklês, the political constitution had become thoroughly democratical. But they still continued to form the two highest classes in the Solonian census founded on property,—the pentakosiomedimni, and the hippeis, or knights: new men enriched by trade doubtless got into these classes, but probably only in minority, and imbibed the feeling of the class as they found it, instead of bringing into it any new spirit. Now an individual Athenian of this class, though without any legal title to preference, yet when he stood forward as candidate for political influence, continued to be decidedly preferred and welcomed by the social sentiment at Athens, which preserved in its spontaneous sympathies distinctions effaced from the political code.[404] Besides this place ready prepared for him in the public sympathy, especially advantageous at the outset of political life,—he found himself farther borne up by the family connections, associations, and political clubs, etc., which exercised very great influence both on the politics and the judicature of Athens, and of which he became a member as a matter of course. Such advantages were doubtless only auxiliary, carrying a man up to a certain point of influence, but leaving him to achieve the rest by his own personal qualities and capacity. But their effect was nevertheless very real, and those who, without possessing them, met and buffeted him in the public assembly, contended against great disadvantages. A person of such low or middling station obtained no favorable presumptions or indulgence on the part of the public to meet him half-way,—nor had he established connections to encourage first successes, or help him out of early scrapes. He found others already in possession of ascendency, and well-disposed to keep down new competitors; so that he had to win his own way unaided, from the first step to the last, by qualities personal to himself; by assiduity of attendance, by acquaintance with business, by powers of striking speech, and withal by unflinching audacity, indispensable to enable him to bear up against that