opposite direction;… dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the
most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form
of liberty.
By the time of Plato’s death (347 B.C.) his hostile analysis of Athenian
democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history. Athens
recovered wealth, but this was now commercial rather than landed wealth;
industrialists, merchants, and bankers were at the top of the reshuffled
heap. The change produced a feverish struggle for money, a pleonexia, as
the Greeks called it–an appetite for more and more. The nouveaux riches
(neoplutoi) built gaudy mansions, bedecked their women with costly robes
and jewelry, spoiled them with dozens of servants, rivaled one another in
the feasts with which they regaled their guests. The gap between the rich
and the poor widened; Athens was divided, as Plato put it, into “two
cities:… one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, the one at war with
the other.”
The poor schemed to despoil the rich by legislation,
taxation, and revolution; the rich organized themselves for protection
against the poor. The members of some oligarchic organizations, says
Aristotle [Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)], took a solemn oath: “I will be an
adversary of the people” (i.e., the commonalty), “and in the Council I will
do it all the evil that I can.”
“The rich have become so unsocial,” wrote
Isocrates [Isocrates (436-338 B.C.)] about 366 B.C., “that those who own
property had rather throw their possessions into the sea than lend aid to the
needy, while those who are in poorer circumstances would less gladly find
a treasure than seize the possessions of the rich.”
captured control of the Assembly, and began to vote the money of the rich
into the coffers of the state, for redistribution among the people through
governmental enterprises and subsidies. The politicians strained their
ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. In some cities the
decentralizing of wealth was more direct: the debtors in Mytilene
massacred their creditors en masse; the democrats of Argos fell upon the
rich, killed hundreds of them, and confiscated their property. The moneyed
