Alcmaeonid, either spontaneously, or from finding himself worsted in his party strife with Isagoras, purchased by large popular concessions the hearty cooeperation of the multitude under very dangerous circumstances.  While Solon, in his own statement as well as in that of Aristotle, gave to the people as much power as was strictly needful—­but no more—­Clisthenes (to use the significant phrase of Herodotus), “being vanquished in the party contest with his rival, took the people into partnership.”  It was, thus, to the interests of the weaker section, in a strife of contending nobles, that the Athenian people owed their first admission to political ascendancy—­in part, at least, to this cause, though the proceedings of Clisthenes indicate a hearty and spontaneous popular sentiment.  But such constitutional admission of the people would not have been so astonishingly fruitful in positive results, if the course of public events for the half century after Clisthenes had not been such as to stimulate most powerfully their energy, their self-reliance, their mutual sympathies, and their ambition.  I shall recount in a future chapter these historical causes, which, acting upon the Athenian character, gave such efficiency and expansion to the great democratical impulse communicated by Clisthenes:  at present it is enough to remark that that impulse commences properly with Clisthenes, and not with Solon.

But the Solonian constitution, though only the foundation, was yet the indispensable foundation, of the subsequent democracy.  And if the discontents of the miserable Athenian population, instead of experiencing his disinterested and healing management, had fallen at once into the hands of selfish power-seekers like Cylon or Pisistratus—­the memorable expansion of the Athenian mind during the ensuing century would never have taken place, and the whole subsequent history of Greece would probably have taken a different course.  Solon left the essential powers of the state still in the hands of the oligarchy.  The party combats between Pisistratus, Lycurgus, and Megacles, thirty years after his legislation, which ended in the despotism of Pisistratus, will appear to be of the same purely oligarchical character as they had been before Solon was appointed archon.  But the oligarchy which he established was very different from the unmitigated oligarchy which he found, so teeming with oppression and so destitute of redress, as his own poems testify.

It was he who first gave both to the citizens of middling property and to the general mass a locus standi against the Eupatrids.  He enabled the people partially to protect themselves, and familiarized them with the idea of protecting themselves, by the peaceful exercise of a constitutional franchise.  The new force, through which this protection was carried into effect, was the public assembly called Heliaea, regularized and armed with enlarged prerogatives and further strengthened by its indispensable ally—­the