Mr. Morgan’s answer to the question is as follows:
The primitive Grecian government was essentially democratical, reposing on gentes, phratries, and tribes organized as self-governing bodies, and on the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Our views upon Grecian and Roman questions have been moulded by writers accustomed to monarchical government and privileged classes, who were perhaps glad to appeal to the earliest known governments of the Grecian tribes for a sanction of this form of government, as at once natural, essential, and primitive.[159]
We have noted the precautions which during the second and latter periods of barbarism were necessary to keep in check the increasing thirst for power, and it may not be doubted that through the growth of the aristocratic tendency during the latter ages of the existence of the gens, the office of _basileus_ gave to its incumbent a degree of distinction closely allied to that of king.
In the eleventh century B.C. upon the death of Codrus, so necessary had it become to check the continually increasing power of the military chieftains that the office was abolished and the archonship established in its place; but as an election or confirmation was necessary before the duties of either office could be entered upon, it is plain that at the period referred to a democratic form of government still prevailed.
Now archon is the term which had been applied to the chief of the early gentes at a time when fraternity, liberty, and equality were the cardinal virtues of society; and the abolition of the office of _basileus_, to which had become attached a considerable degree of power, was doubtless an attempt on the part of the people to return to the simpler and purer methods of government which had formerly prevailed; but the institution known as the Agora, Ecclesia, or Appella, which had proved the great bulwark of safety to early democratic institutions, had, through the strengthening of the aristocratic element, become gradually weakened, hence the nobles were in a position to draw to themselves not only much of the power originally exercised by the military commander, but that also which had formerly belonged to the assembly of the people. We have observed that not only among the Greeks of the heroic age, but among the tribes and nations which preceded them, as far back in the history of the past as the close of the second stage of barbarism, there had always been an assembly of the people whose duty it was to guard the rights of the tribe, to protect it against usurpation, and to keep down the rising tendency toward imperialism. Of this institution, Mr. Rawlinson says: “Thus at Athens, as elsewhere, in the heroic times, there was undoubtedly the idea of a public assembly consisting of all freemen.”[160]