The Four Hundred at Athens were all peers,—equals, rivals, and personally known among one another,—who had just raised themselves by joint conspiracy to supreme power. Theramenês, one of the number, conceives himself entitled to preëminence, but finds that he is shut out from it, the men who shut him out being this small body of known equals and rivals. He is inclined to impute the exclusion to personal motives on the part of this small knot; to selfish ambition on the part of each; to ill-will, to jealousy, to wrongful partiality; so that he thinks himself injured, and the sentiment of injury is embittered by the circumstance that those from whom it proceeds are a narrow, known, and definite body of colleagues. Whereas, if his exclusion had taken place under the democracy, by the suffrage of a large, miscellaneous, and personally unknown collection of citizens, he would have been far less likely to carry off with him a sense of injury. Doubtless he would have been mortified; but he would not have looked upon the electors in the light of jealous or selfish rivals, nor would they form a definite body before him for his indignation to concentrate itself upon. Thus Nikomachidês—whom Sokratês (see Xenophon, Memor. iii, 4) meets returning mortified because the people had chosen another person and not him as general—would have been not only mortified, but angry and vindictive besides, if he had been excluded by a few peers and rivals. Such, in my judgment, is the comparison which Thucydidês wishes to draw between the effect of disappointment inflicted by the suffrage of a numerous and miscellaneous body of citizens, compared with disappointment inflicted by a small knot of oligarchical peers upon a competitor among their own number, especially at a moment when the expectations of all these peers are exaggerated, in consequence of the recent acquisition of their power. I believe the remark of the historian to be quite just; and that the disappointment in the first case is less intense, less connected with the sentiment of injury, and less likely to lead to active manifestation of enmity. This is one among the advantages of a numerous suffrage. I cannot better illustrate the jealousies pretty sure to break out among a small number of ὅμοιοι, or rival peers, than by the description which Justin gives of the leading officers of Alexander the Great, immediately after that monarch’s death (Justin, xii, 2):— “Cæterum, occiso Alexandro, non, ut læti, ita et securi fuere, omnibus unum locum competentibus: nec minus milites invicem se timebant, quorum et libertas solutior et favor incertus erat. _Inter ipsos vero æqualitas discordiam augebat_, nemine tantum cæteros excedente, ut ei aliquis se submitteret.” Compare Plutarch, Lysander, c. 23.