Suppose the whole population of a city to
be 1300, and that of these 1000 are rich, and do not allow the
remaining 300 who are poor, but free, and in an other respects their
equals, a share of the government- no one will say that this is a
democracy. In like manner, if the poor were few and the masters of the
rich who outnumber them, no one would ever call such a government,
in which the rich majority have no share of office, an oligarchy.
Therefore we should rather say that democracy is the form of
government in which the free are rulers, and oligarchy in which the
rich; it is only an accident that the free are the many and the rich
are the few. Otherwise a government in which the offices were given
according to stature, as is said to be the case in Ethiopia, or
according to beauty, would be an oligarchy; for the number of tall
or good-looking men is small. And yet oligarchy and democracy are
not sufficiently distinguished merely by these two characteristics
of wealth and freedom. Both of them contain many other elements, and
therefore we must carry our analysis further, and say that the
government is not a democracy in which the freemen, being few in
number, rule over the many who are not free, as at Apollonia, on the
Ionian Gulf, and at Thera; (for in each of these states the nobles,
who were also the earliest settlers, were held in chief honor,
although they were but a few out of many).
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