meanours. On such occasions, whether it was the aristocratic or the democratic party that had gained the upper hand in the petty commonwealths of Athens, of Corinth, or of Thebes, large bodies of obnoxious citizens were obliged, from motives of prudence as well as from sheer necessity, to submit simultaneously to voluntary exile, and to search for a home and a country on the coasts of Asia Minor or in the Ionian Islands, in Italy, and the island of Sicily, or even on the remote coast of France. Indeed, to suppose, with the celebrated Italian writer Filangieri, that there was anything analogous to the penal settlements of modern times, in the origin and constitution of the ancient Grecian colonies, merely because the latter were not unfrequently founded by bands of exiles, is egregiously absurd.[1]
Banishment or transportation, in all its degrees of severity, was known, as a species of punish-
- ↑ "Quand l'experience de toule l'antiquité, et surlout les exemples d'un grand nombre des colonies de la Grèce, ne nous attesteroient pas que le rebut d'une nation pent devenir une excellente société publique; quand l'histoire de nos temps modernes ne nous offriroit pas un pareil spectacle, la raison seule nous feroit sentir qu'il est possible de faire d'un malhonnete homme un homme de bien, en l'éloignant du théâtre de ses crimes, de son infamie, de sa condamnation."—Filangieri, La Science de la Législation. (French translation.)
