Politics

​for some, being hard pressed because of the war, demanded to make a redistribution of the land.) Furthermore, [factions arise] if someone is great and able to be still greater, so that he may rule as monarch, just as Pausanias, who held the command during the Persian War, seems [to have done] in Lacedaemon, and Hanno in Carthage. And both polities and aristocracies are dissolved most of all because of the deviation from justice in the constitution itself. For the beginning [of this] is the fact that democracy and oligarchy have not been well mixed in the polity, and in aristocracy these and virtue, but most of all the two; and by the two I mean the people and oligarchy. For both polities and many of the so-called aristocracies attempt to mix these. For aristocracies differ from the so-called polities in this, and because of this, some of them are less and others are more stable; for those inclining more toward oligarchy they call aristocracies, and those toward the multitude, polities; wherefore such [constitutions] are safer than the other ones; for the majority is stronger, and they are more content when they have an equal share, whereas those in affluent circumstances, if the constitution gives them the superiority, seek to behave insolently and to take more than their share. And on the whole, in whichever direction the constitution inclines, in this direction it changes, as each of the two sides increases their own [power], for example, the polity into democracy, and aristocracy into oligarchy; or into the opposites, for example, aristocracy into democracy (for the poorer, as if being wronged, drag [the constitution] back into the opposite direction), and polities into oligarchy (for the only stable thing is equality according to worth and to have one’s own possessions); and what has been said happened in Thurii. For because the offices were on the basis of a higher property qualification, it changed to a lower one and to more offices, but because the notables acquired the whole land contrary to the law (for the constitution was rather oligarchical, so that they were able to take more than their share), the people, having been trained in the war, became stronger than the guards, until those who had more than their share of the land gave it up. Furthermore, because all aristocratic constitutions are rather oligarchical, the notables take more than their share, just as in Lacedaemon also properties come into the hands of few; and the notables are more permitted to do whatever they wish, and to contract marriage alliances with whomever they wish, wherefore also the city of the Locrians was ruined because of the marriage alliance with Dionysius, which would not have happened in a democracy, nor in an aristocracy well mixed.