leaders were to feel and act as Athenians, as the people of one corporate and living city-state, these distracting ties must be weakened and these tribal allegiances annulled.

Hence the fundamental change made by Cleisthenes was a distribution of the four Ionic tribes into ten new ones, and the whole town and country into a much larger number of neighbourhoods or working demes. The latter took over local functions, and became important as the working groups through which should be realized the duties and privileges of a common Athenian citizenship.1 The deme kept the register of citizenship, collected taxes, and saw to it that a proper quota of its men should present themselves for the juries, to make up the six thousand called for by Cleisthenes' constitution. Afterwards Pericles kept up their numbers still more effectively by providing a day's wage for every juryman.

A permanent administrative body was the Council, established by Solon, and from the time of Cleisthenes numbering five hundred, fifty from each tribe. The Councilmen, like the jurymen, were taken by lot from the contingents chosen by the respective demes. The Council controlled the finances of the city, which became miniature imperial finances after the middle of the fifth century; it

1 See A. E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, Part II. chap. vi. (1911; 2nd ed., 1914), to which these pages are much indebted.

also arranged for the selection of magistrates, including the ten generals, by lot or by election as the case might be. The most influential of these generals might remain in Athens, like Pericles, who as general" directed Athenian policy for thirty

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years.

As a result of the constitution, itself energized by the spirit of the Athenians, a large proportion of the citizens of Athens were employed upon the public business of the state, even when Athens was, comparatively speaking, at peace; for she was scarcely ever quite at peace with all her world. One may repeat that Athens never followed an exclusive policy, like Sparta, but from time to time opened her citizenship to foreign residents within the borders of Attica. These residents, even when not full citizens, were loyal and self-sacrificing for the city whose liberal policy had closely knit their prosperity to hers.

The impulse or compulsion of circumstances had never been absent from the causes making for the development of the Athenian constitution. But thought, discretion, and free determination entered and fashioned each part and made them into an harmonious whole. The establishment and the growing prosperity and stability of such a state hung upon the courage and intelligence and rational self-control of its citizens; hung upon those civic and human qualities depicted in the Thucydidean speech of Pericles over the Athenians fallen in the

first year of the Peloponnesian war. A more tragic proof lies in the downfall of the Athenian State, which came so quickly when the Athenian democracy failed in intelligence and self-control and gave itself to lust of conquest.

Athens rose to conscious strength from the defeat of Persia; she then, according to the necessities of the situation and her opportunity, built up her seapower and a compact empire, consisting mainly of her fellow-Ionians on the Aegean Islands and the coasts of Asia Minor. Her revenues enabled the majority of her citizens to devote themselves to her service, in the government of the city and its empire, on the juries, in the fleet and in the army. She was strong in her walled city and the long walls joining her to the sea and to the unrivalled navy with which she ruled and policed it. Above all, she was strong in the bravery and energy and intelligence of her citizens. Sparta and her allies could not have defeated her, had she not cast herself away in the Syracusan expedition, attempting conquests absurdly beyond her strength. So she broke her citizen army, lost her ships, made new enemies, and entered the path of downfall.

She had been blessed with councillors exceptionally wise. The statesmanship of Pericles seems to us flawless. Athens was wise enough to re-elect him to power for thirty years and follow his counsels. Perhaps the strain of wisdom had been too much for her for any democracy! for any sovereign

e

people! At all events, on committing her fortunes to such as Cleon and Alcibiades, she quickly wrecked herself. Here was her corporate unwisdom.

Athens was only the centre and apex of Greek intelligence. The other little city-states fought with each other and their poverty, and within themselves as well. Each one in accordance with its circumstances and its opportunities, its courage, intelligence, and self-control-or lack of these qualities-built up a government and constitution which seems in no instance to have been an exact replica of any other. In the politics of each Greek city, under the pressure of a penurious environment, or stepping briskly with opportunity, one discerns the Greek intelligence working in some sort of freedom. The variegated constitutional history of the Greek cities is a convincing exemplification of the at least partially free working of the human mind in history.

III

ROMAN JURISPRUDENCE

Seeking further illustration of the action of human ingenuity in fashioning political institutions, we pass from Greece to Rome. There the earlier centuries of political growth terminated in the dominance of a Senate. Originally composed of Patricians, it came to include Plebeians, as these

made good their claim to share in the various magistracies. It was not an hereditary body, and yet its aristocratic sentiment continued unimpaired by the admission of citizens who, through their wealth or family, or their abilities, had been elected consuls or praetors. It was thus recruited, under the supervision of the Censors, from the surest bearers of the Roman tradition as well as from the best political and military ability in Rome. If it represented in fact an upper class, the conditions of the recognition and existence of this class made it the best in the community. To the close of the Republic the Senate embodied the energies and qualities of Rome, and maintained a steady continuity of Roman policy.

But turning from the constitutional history of Rome, let us take an illustration from the Roman law, and note some of the incidents of its expansion into that system of jurisprudence which underlies the best legal intelligence of Europe and America.1

1 It is historically unjust to pass over the remarkable body of private law emanating from Babylonia, with its ample foundations set in the code of Hammurabi, the conquering and restoring king who reigned in the twenty-fourth century before Christ during a period of commercial activity. His code was copied and recopied for some fifteen hundred years, as appears by Babylonian and Assyrian tablets. It represents a more voluminous and complex body of private law than is contained in the Laws of the Twelve Tables, and may have been as logically arranged. Both codes require formal modes of contracts, which in the Babylonian code were drawn up by a notary upon clay tablets, and deposited in a temple. Beyond formal requirements, both codes permitted