[Sidenote: that the Athenian democrat was a slaveholder and a ruler over subjects.]
Another and more serious objection to the position that Athens was a typical democracy, and that its high culture was the direct result of its political institutions, he seems to me to have practically ignored. The Athenian citizen, however poor, had indeed equal rights with every other citizen, could succeed to the same high offices, and appeal to the same laws. But the Athenian citizen, however poor, was a slaveholder, and the member of an imperial class, ruling with more or less absolutism over communities of subjects, treating as manifest inferiors even the many resident aliens, who promoted the mercantile wealth of his city. Hence, after all, he was one of a minority, controlling a vast majority of subjects and slaves with more or less despotic sway. Lord Redesdale[17:1] tells us that this was the point which his brother Mitford thought of capital importance, and which prompted him to write his history. He met, all through revolutionary France, and among the democrats in England, perpetual assertions that Greek democracy was the ideal at which modern Europe should aim, and he felt that these enthusiasts had considered neither the size of modern States, nor the essential difference just stated between the Athenian and the modern democrat.
[Sidenote: The Athenian not the ideal of the Greeks.]
And it is to me certain, that many of the virtues as well as the vices of the Athenian arose from his being an aristocrat in the strictest sense,--the member of a privileged and limited society ruling over inferiors, with the leisure obtainable by the poorest slaveholder, and the dignity always resulting from the consciousness of inherent superiority. And yet with all this, the type of perfection which the Greeks, as a people, ever held before them was not the polished democrat of Athens, but the blunt aristocrat of Sparta. This latter was admired and copied, so far as he could be copied, in like manner as the English aristocrat has been admired by all the nations of the world,--not because he lives under free institutions, but because he shows in him the traditions and the breeding of a dominant race long accustomed to the dignity and the splendour of ancient wealth and importance.