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Updated: May 4, 2025
The Athenian populace remained quiet, though sorely against its will, because of the terror inspired by the oligarchs, for no small number of citizens who had opposed the Four Hundred had been put to death; but the men of Samos, as soon as they heard the news, were indignant, and wished at once to sail to Peiraeus.
Again, Megara, we learn, was twice betrayed, once by the democrats to the Athenians, and again by the oligarchs to the Lacedaemonians. At Leontini the Syracusans were called in to drive out the popular party.
He goes so far as to assert that Leo X. and Clement VII. wished to give a liberal constitution to Florence, but that their plans were frustrated by the avarice and jealousy of the would-be oligarchs. See Arch. Stor. vol. i. pp. 121,131.
Thrasybulus, a patriot, collected the democratic fugitives at Phyle, defeated the Thirty, and seized the Piraeus. Critias was slain. Ten oligarchs of a more moderate temper were installed in power. In co-operation with the Spartan king, Pausanias, the two parties at Athens were reconciled. PHILOSOPHY: SOCRATES. At the head of the Greek philosophers is the illustrious name of Socrates.
Meanwhile the popular party at Argos little by little gathered new consistency and courage, and waited for the moment of the Gymnopaedic festival at Lacedaemon, and then fell upon the oligarchs. After a fight in the city, victory declared for the commons, who slew some of their opponents and banished others.
It is evident that these aspiring oligarchs, as a party, can have little essential strength; they can count upon nothing but their retainers.
And the end is that when they see the people, not of their own accord, but through ignorance, and because they are deceived by informers, seeking to do them wrong, then at last they are forced to become oligarchs in reality; they do not wish to be, but the sting of the drones torments them and breeds revolution in them. That is exactly the truth.
Accordingly there was always a party living in exile, and waiting for a turn of affairs which might enable them to return to their city, and wrest the power from that faction which had been the last to triumph. In the cities of Boeotia the leaders of the oligarchs had been driven into banishment after the battle of Oenophyta, and democracies were established under the control of Athens.
But the priests at his shrines, having waxed fat in honors, have at last so befogged his sentiments and wrested his arguments, that thousands of true men regard him sorrowfully as the promoter of that Slavery-Despotism which to-day blooms in treason. It is worth our while, therefore, to seek to know whether Jefferson the god of the Oligarchs is Jefferson the Democrat.
All have proved selfish and faithless, governing for their own interests only. Kings, oligarchs, democrats and mob-leaders have without exception regarded power as the object to be attained because of the spoils of office. Political leadership is thus a direct means of self-advancement, a temptation too strong for weak human nature.
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