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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: kings, features so strikingly foreign and Asiatic, that they called for special notice from Herodotus1. If therefore Agamemnon inherited his splendour from such predecessors, it will follow that the earliest form of the monarchy was not patriarchal but despotic, and that the Homeric King of men succeeded to a power with great pretensions, but practically limited in all directions by the rise of petty chieftains, more or less independent. The general tone of the Iliad and Odyssey implies then, not a nascent, but a decaying order of things; subordinate chiefs rebelling against their suzerains; nobles violating the rights of their absent chiefs. The fierce spirit of independence in the Greek already stood opposed to the idea of a monarchy hallowed by precedent and tradition; and it was even then plain to thinking men (like Hesiod) that this profound antagonism could only be solved by such a change in the order of things as would give the majority an interest in maintaining the government. This majority, at first, only included the aristocracy, and so, when the Dorian invasion had dislocated Greece, aristocratical types of government resulted. But with the development of commerce, and with the depression of the nobles by the tyrantswho rose up among them, the lower classes awoke to a sense of their rights, and so, upon a second dislocation of Greece (the Persian wars) democracies resulted as an equally natural development. 1 vi. 58. ' The custom of the Lacedaemonians upon the death of their kings is the same as that of the barbarians in Asia, for most of the barbarians now practise the same custom when their kings die.' He describes these customs in detail. The public lament over the deceased king, ' affirming that the last king is always the best, ' is very like the Irish cry' st.
| ISBN-13 | 9780217142304 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217142303 |
| Weight | 0.95 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.65 In |
| List Price | $20.96 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 290 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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