Although Greek political writers taught that there were, primarily, but three forms of government--monarchy, or the rule of one; aristocracy, that of the few; and democracy, that of the many --the latter always limited by the Greeks to the freemen--yet it appears that when anyone of these degenerated from its supposed legitimate object, the welfare of the state, it was marked by a peculiar name. Thus a monarchy in which selfish aims predominated became a tyranny; and in later Grecian history, such was the prevailing sentiment in opposition to kingly rule that all kings were called tyrants: an aristocracy which directed its measures chiefly to the preservation of its power became an oligarchy; and a democracy that departed from the civil and political equality which was its supposed basis, and gave ascendancy to a faction, was sometimes designated by the term ochlocracy, or the dominion of the rabble. "A democracy thus corrupted," says THIRLWALL, "exhibited many features of a tyranny. It was jealous of all who were eminently distinguished by birth, fortune, or reputation; it encouraged flatterers and sycophants; was insatiable in its demands on the property of the rich, and readily listened to charges which exposed them to death or confiscation. The class which suffered such oppression, commonly ill satisfied with the principle of the Constitution itself, was inflamed with the most furious animosity by the mode in which it was applied, and it regarded the great mass of its fellow-citizens as its mortal enemies." As in all the Greek states there was a large class of people not entitled to the full rights of citizenship, including, among others, persons reduced to slavery as prisoners of war, and foreign settlers and their descendants, so there was no such form of government as that which the moderns understand by a complete democracy. Of a republic also, in the modern acceptation of the term--that is, a representative democracy--the Greeks knew nothing. As an American statesman remarks, "Certain it is that the greatest philosophers among them would have regarded as something monstrous a republic spreading over half a continent and embracing twenty-six states, each of which would have itself been an empire, and not a commonwealth, in their sense of the word."[Footnote: Hugh S. Legaré's Writings, vol. i., p.440.] * * * * * I. CHANGES FROM ARISTOCRACIES TO OLIGARCHIES.