Antisseans also, having taken in those
who were banished from Chios, afterwards did the same thing; and
also the Zancleans, after having taken in the people of Samos. The
Appolloniats, in the Euxine Sea, having admitted their sojourners to
the freedom of their city, were troubled with seditions: and the
Syracusians, after the expulsion of their tyrants, having enrolled
[1303b] strangers and mercenaries amongst their citizens, quarrelled
with each other and came to an open rupture: and the people of
Amphipolis, having taken in a colony of Chalcidians, were the greater
part of them driven out of the city by them. Many persons occasion
seditions in oligarchies because they think themselves ill-used in not
sharing the honours of the state with their equals, as I have already
mentioned; but in democracies the principal people do the same because
they have not more than an equal share with others who are not equal
to them. The situation of the place will also sometimes occasion
disturbances in the state when the ground is not well adapted for one
city; as at Clazomene, where the people who lived in that part of the
town called Chytrum quarrelled with them who lived in the island, and
the Colophonians with the Notians. At Athens too the disposition of the
citizens is not the same, for those who live in the Piraeus are more
attached to a popular government than those who live in the city
properly so called; for as the interposition of a rivulet, however
small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any
trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not
so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue
and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches, and so on in
order, one cause having more influence than another; one of which that I
last mentioned.

CHAPTER IV

But seditions in government do not arise for little things, but from
them; for their immediate cause is something of moment. Now, trifling
quarrels are attended with the greatest consequences when they arise
between persons of the first distinction in the state, as was the
case with the Syracusians in a remote period; for a revolution in the
government was brought about by a quarrel between two young men who were
in office, upon a love affair; for one of them being absent, the other
seduced his mistress; he in his turn, offended with this, persuaded his
friend's wife to come and live with him; a