[1289b]
[1]
or be based on the outstanding superiority of the man who is
king; so that tyranny being the worst form must be the one farthest removed from
constitutional government, and oligarchy must be the second farthest
(for aristocracy is widely separated from that constitution),
while democracy must be the most moderate. An account of their relative merits has indeed already
been given also by one of the former writers,1 though not on the same principle as ours; for he inclined to judge that
there were good varieties of all the forms, for instance a good sort of
oligarchy and so on, and that democracy was the worst among these, but the best
among the bad varieties, whereas we
say that the deviations are wholly wrong, and that it is not right to speak of
one form of oligarchy as better than another, but only as less bad. But let us
for the present dismiss the question of a classification of this nature. Our
business is first to distinguish how many different forms of the constitutions
there are, assuming that there do exist several kinds of democracy and of
oligarchy; next, which form is most
general, and which most desirable after the best constitution, and also if there
exists some other form that is aristocratic in nature and well constructed but
not fitted to the largest number of cities, which this is; next, which of the
other forms too is desirable for what people (since probably for some
democracy is necessary more than oligarchy, and for others oligarchy more than
democracy);
[20]
and after
this, in what way should one proceed who wishes to set up these constitutions, I
mean the various forms of democracy and of oligarchy; and finally, when as far
as possible we have concisely touched upon all these questions, we must endeavor
to review what are the agencies that destroy and what are those that preserve
constitutions generally and each variety of constitution in particular, and what
are the causes by which it is most natural for these events to be brought
about.Now the reason of there being several forms of constitution is
that every city has a considerable number of parts. For in the first place we
see that all the cities are composed of households, and then again that of this
multitude some must necessarily be rich and some poor and some between the two,
and also of the rich and the poor the former class is heavy-armed and the latter
without armor. And we see that one portion of the common people is agricultural,
another engaged in trade and another mechanic. And the upper classes have
distinctions also corresponding to their wealth and the amounts of their
property (for example in a stud of horses—for it is not easy
to rear horses without being rich, and this is why in ancient times there were oligarchies in all the states
whose strength lay in their cavalry, and they used to use horses for their wars
against their neighbors, as for instance did the Eretrians and Chalcidians and
the people of Magnesia on the
Maeander and many of the other
Asiatic peoples). Moreover in addition to differences in wealth there
is the difference of birth, and that in regard to virtue,
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.