Now at length a sense of shame hath perished among mankind, but shamelessness reigns over the earth. Everyone honours a rich man but dishonours a poor: And in all men there is the same mind.... No one of the present race of men doth the sun look down upon, being entirely good and moderate.... When I am flourishing, friends are many; but should any calamity have chanced upon me, few retain a faithful spirit. For the multitude of men there is this virtue only, namely, to be rich: But of the rest, I wot, there is no use. The fact is obvious that already in the history of the Greeks the love of property and the rise of the aristocratic spirit had gained such a foothold that a democracy was no longer desired by the more influential citizens, and that it was the moneyed classes and the aristocratic party who were growing restless under institutions which acknowledged the equality of all free-born citizens. Doubtless the power which had been hitherto exercised by the gentes had already been drawn to the moneyed classes; still, this attempt to organize society into classes on the basis of property and station was perhaps the first regulated movement openly to curtail the hitherto recognized power of the individual members of the gens, and doubtless constituted the first formulated step towards the subsequent removal of this ancient institution from its original position as the unit in the governmental series. From accessible facts to be gathered relative to early Greek society, it is plain that individual liberty perished with the gens, and that monarchy, aristocracy, and slavery were the natural results of the decline of the altruistic principles upon which early society was founded. CHAPTER II WOMEN IN EARLY HISTORIC TIMES As it is claimed that the history of the natural growth of society is represented by the extant tribes in the varying stages of advancement from savagery to civilization, and as upon our first acquaintance with the Greeks we find them just emerging from barbarism and preparing to enter upon a civilized career, we may naturally expect to find in their various traditions, customs, forms of marriage, etc., some hint of that influence which, but little more than one ethnical period before, had been exercised by women, and some clue to the processes involved in the change from female to male supremacy. From the facts which are gradually coming to light concerning society in the early historic period, it is observed that the extant mythoses and traditions of the ancients contain a mixture of history, mythology, and astrology. Until a comparatively recent time no attempt has been made to separate the former from the latter two.