just now said, it is not
only more usual, but everything is better and sooner done, when one
thing only is allotted to one person: and this is evident both in the
army and navy, where almost every one, in his turn, both commands and
is under command. But as their government inclines to an oligarchy, they
avoid the ill effects of it by always appointing some of the popular
party to the government of cities to make their fortunes. Thus they
consult this fault in their constitution and render it stable; but
this is depending on chance; whereas the legislator ought to frame his
government, that there the no room for insurrections. But now, if there
should be any general calamity, and the people should revolt from their
rulers, there is no remedy for reducing them to obedience by the laws.
And these are the particulars of the Lacedaemonian, the Cretan, and the
Carthaginian governments which seem worthy of commendation.

CHAPTER XII

Some of those persons who have written upon government had never any
share in public affairs, but always led a private life. Everything
worthy of notice in their works we have already spoke to. Others
were legislators, some in their own cities, others were employed in
regulating the governments of foreign states. Some of them only composed
a body of laws; others formed the constitution also, as Lycurgus; and
Solon, who did both. The Lacedaemonians have been already mentioned.
Some persons think that Solon was an excellent legislator, who could
dissolve a pure oligarchy, and save the people from that slavery which
hung over them, and establish the ancient democratic form of government
in his country; wherein every part of it was so framed as to be well
adapted to the whole. In the senate of Areopagus an oligarchy was
preserved; by the manner of electing their [1274a] magistrates, an
aristocracy; and in their courts of justice, a democracy.

Solon seems not to have altered the established form of government,
either with respect to the senate or the mode of electing their
magistrates; but to have raised the people to great consideration in the
state by allotting the supreme judicial department to them; and for this
some persons blame him, as having done what would soon overturn that
balance of power he intended to establish; for by trying all causes
whatsoever before the people, who were chosen by lot to determine them,
it was necessary to flatter a tyrannical populace who had got this
po