mer are to be cautious, and modest, and reserved. This was so well known in Greece, that an eagerness after employments in the state, was looked upon by wise men, as the worst title a man could set up: and made Plato say, That if all men were as good as they ought to be, the quarrel in a commonwealth would be, not as it is now, who should be ministers of state, but who should not be so. And Socrates is introduced by Xenophon[1] severely chiding a friend of his for not entering into the publick service, when he was everyway qualified for it: such a backwardness there was at that time among good men to engage with a usurping people, and a set of pragmatical ambitious orators. And Diodorus tells us[2], that when the petalism was erected at Syracuse, in imitation of the ostracism[3] at Athens, it was so notoriously levelled against all who had either birth or merit to recommend them, that whoever possessed either, withdrew for fear, and would have no concern in publick affairs. So that the people themselves were forced to abrogate it, for fear of bringing all things into confusion.
There is one thing more to be observed, wherein all the popular impeachments in Greece and Rome
- ↑ Lib. Memorab.
- ↑ Lib. 11.
- ↑ Ostracism was a kind of popular sentence to banishment passed against men whose personal influence, from whatever cause, was thought to render them dangerous to the state: the votes were given by writing the name of the person on a shell, by the Greeks, called ὄςρακον, and casting the shell into an urn.
Petalism was a sentence nearly of the same kind; and as ostracism was denominated from the shell, on which the name of the suspected party was written, petalism took its name from ϖέταλον, a leaf, which the Syracusians used for the same purpose.
