ABSTRACT
Greek cities in certain respects were all alike whether large or small, powerful or weak, oligarchic or democratic, isolated or linked together in a federation, Peloponnesian league or Athenian empire. Being small they cannot be compared with the great empires of Egypt and the East; free, their destinies were confided to a group of citizens or to the whole people, and each individual had an interest in the life of the State; they did not have to submit against their will to a despot who ruled them according to his own will, and even in the times of the Macedonian monarchies they preserved a semblance of political independence unknown to the cities of the Orient. In a Greek city there was no one man in whom all power was concentrated. Even the authority of the kings of Sparta, the last survivors of the old monarchical principle, was more nominal than real, and was under the surveillance of the ephors of the senate. Elsewhere it was either an oligarchy in which the members mutually respected one another, or else, as at Athens and in certain subject and allied towns, a democracy in which the people was sovereign and fearful always lest any one person should raise himself above the rest. The tyrants, imitators of the Lydian Gyges—-whose beneficent influence on art, however, cannot be gainsaid, as witness the Athens of the Pisistratidse—disappeared with the expulsion of Hippias in 510.
