The form of government natural to such infant states as the expansion of the original social monad, the FAMILY, is a loose but not unkindly mixture of monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy--the aristocracy being always the preponderating element. In the single family, of course, we have only the monarchical element in the father, and the democratic element in the children; but, as families expand into townships, it could not be but that the heads of the families composing it, partly from their age and experience, partly from the force of individual character, should form a sort of natural aristocracy, while the less notable and less prominent members would form the δῆμος, or great body of the constantly increasing multitude of the associated families. Below these three dominant elements of the body social, there would always be found a loose company of dependents and onhangers--the class called Θῆτες in Homer (Od., iv. 644), and in the Solonian constitution--who had no civic rights any more than the serfs and vassals of our medieval feudalism. The weakness of the monarchical and the strength of the aristocratic elements in the early societies arose from the original equality of the heads of families, and from the jealousy with which they would naturally look on any functions of superiority exercised by any of their order naturally no better than themselves. The king, accordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer, would claim the homage which the title implies only for purposes of common action; and even in such cases would always be kept in check by a βουλή, or council of the aristocracy, of whose will properly he was only the executive hand; while the great mass of the people, occupied with the labours that belong to an agricultural and pastoral population, and unaccustomed to the large views which statesmanship and generalship require, would come together only on rare occasions of peculiar urgency.