mbition. Such a character may have had this origin, and
indeed Livy attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a
similar kind. But there is obviously no connection between the manner
in which the timocratic State springs out of the ideal, and the mere
accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a retired statesman.

The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even less
historical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek history of a
polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an oligarchy of wealth,
or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a democracy. The order of
history appears to be different; first, in the Homeric times there is
the royal or patriarchal form of government, which a century or two
later was succeeded by an oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and
in which wealth was only the accident of the hereditary possession of
land and power. Sometimes this oligarchical government gave way to a
government based upon a qualification of property, which, according to
Aristotle's mode of using words, would have been called a timocracy;
and this in some cities, as at Athens, became the conducting medium to
democracy. But such was not the necessary order of succession in States;
nor, indeed, can any order be discerned in the endless fluctuation of
Greek history (like the tides in the Euripus), except, perhaps, in the
almost uniform tendency from monarchy to aristocracy in the earliest
times. At first sight there appears to be a similar inversion in the
last step of the Platonic succession; for tyranny, instead of being the
natural end of democracy, in early Greek history appears rather as a
stage leading to democracy; the reign of Peisistratus and his sons is
an episode which comes between the legislation of Solon and the
constitution of Cleisthenes; and some secret cause common to them all
seems to have led the greater part of Hellas at her first appearance
in the dawn of history, e.g. Athens, Argos, Corinth, Sicyon, and nearly
every State with the exception of Sparta, through a similar stage of
tyranny which ended either in oligarchy or democracy. But then we must
remember that Plato is describing rather the contemporary governments
of the Sicilian States, which alternated between democracy and tyranny,
than the ancient history of Athens or Corinth.

The portrait of the tyrant himself is just such as the later Greek
delighted to draw of Phalaris and Dionysius, in which, as