144 HISTORY OF GREECE. would in all probability be the fact, the constituted authority such as Solon saw before him in Attica, even after his own or- ganic amendments was not strong enough to maintain the peace ; it became, in fact, itself one of the contending parties. Under such given circumstances, the sooner every citizen publicly declared his adherence to some one of them, the earlier this sus- pension of legal authority was likely to terminate. Nothing was so mischievous as the indifference of the mass, or their disposi- tion to let the combatants fight out the matter among themselves, and then to submit to the victor :' nothing was so likely to en- courage aggression on the part of an ambitious malcontent, as the conviction that, if he could once overpower the small amount of physical force which surrounded the archons and exhibit himself in armed possession of the prytaneium or the acropolis, he might immediately count upon passive submission on the part of all the freemen without. Under the state of feeling which Solon incul- cates, the insurgent leader would have to calculate that every man who was not actively in his favor would be actively against him, and this would render his enterprise much more dangerous ; indeed, he could then never hope to succeed except on the double supposition of extraordinary popularity in his own person, and universal detestation of the existing government. He would thus be placed under the influence of powerful deterring motives, and mere ambition would be far less likely to seduce him into a course which threatened nothing but ruin, unless under such encourage- ments from the preexisting public opinion as to make his success a result desirable for the community. Among the small political societies of Greece, and especially in the age of Solon, when the number of despots in other parts of Greece seems to have been at its maximum, every government, whatever might be its form, was sufficiently weak to make its overthrow a matter of compara- tive facility. Unless upon the supposition of a band of foreign mercenaries, which would render it a government of naked force, and which the Athenian lawgiver would of course never contem- plate, there was no other stay for it except a positive and pro- nounced feeling of attachment on the part of the mass of citizens: 1 See a case of such indifference manifested by (he people of Argos, in Plutarch's Life of Aratus, c. 27.
