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Such a character may have had this origin, and indeed Livy

attributes the Licinian laws to a feminine jealousy of a similar

kind. But there is obviously no connection between the manner in

which the timocratic State springs out of the ideal, and the mere

accident by which the timocratic man is the son of a retired

statesman.

The two next stages in the decline of constitutions have even

less historical foundation. For there is no trace in Greek

history of a polity like the Spartan or Cretan passing into an

oligarchy of wealth, or of the oligarchy of wealth passing into a

democracy. The order of history appears to be different; first,

in the Homeric times there is the royal or patriarchal form of

government, which a century or two later was succeeded by an

oligarchy of birth rather than of wealth, and in which wealth was

only the accident of the hereditary possession of land and power.

Sometimes this oligarchical government gave way to a government

based upon a qualification of property, which, according to

Aristotle's mode of using words, would have been called a

timocracy; and this in some cities, as at Athens, became the

conducting medium to democracy.