334 THE REVOLUTIONS. BOOK IV. they occujjy seats of stone ; the king makes an address, and calls his auditors sceptre-bearing kings. In Hesiod's city, the rocky Ascra, we find a class of men whom the poet calls the chiefs, or kings. They are those who administer justice to the people. Pin- dar also shows us a class of chiefs among the Cadraa9- aus ; at Thebes he extols the sacred race of the Sparti, from which, at a later date, Epaminondas derives his descent. We can hardly read Pindar without being struck with the aristocratic spirit which still reigned in Greek society in the time of the Persian wars. From this we may imagine how powerful the ai'istocracy was a century or two earlier. For what the poet boasts of the most in his heroes, is their fimiily ; and we must suppose that this sort of praise was at that time highly valued, and that birth still seemed tiie supreme good» Pindar shows us the great families which were then conspicuous in each city; in the single city of ^gina he names the Midylidaa, the Theandridaj, the Euxenidae,. the Blepsiadae, the Chariadae, the Balychidaj. At Syra- cuse lie extols a priestly family of the lamidje ; at Ag- rigentum, that of the Emmenida;, and so on for all the cities of which he has occasion to speak. At Epidaurus, the entire body of the citizens — that is to say, of those who had political rights — was for a long time composed of no more than one hundred and eighty members. All the rest " were outside the city." ' The real citizens were still fewer at Heraclea, where the younger members of the great families had no political rights." The case was a long time the same at Cuidus, at Istros, and at Marseilles. At Thera. ' Plutarch, Gr. Quest., I.
- Aristotle, Politics, VIII. 5, 2.
