WHEREAS my Lord Archon, being from Moses and Lycurgus the first legislator that hitherto is found in history to have introduced or erected an entire commonwealth at once, happened, like them also, to be more intent upon putting the same into execution or action, than into writing; by which means the model came to be promulgated or published with more brevity and less illustration than are necessary for their understanding who have not been acquainted with the whole proceedings of the Council of legislators, and of the prytans, where it was asserted and cleared from all objections and doubts: to the end that I may supply what was wanting in the promulgated epitome to a more full and perfect narrative of the whole, I shall rather take the commonwealth practically; and as it has now given an account of itself in some years' revolutions (as Dicearchus is said to have done that of Lacedaemon, first transcribed by his hand some three or four hundred years after the institution), yet not omitting to add for proof to every order such debates and speeches of the legislators in their Council, or at least such parts of them as may best discover the reason of the government; nor such ways and means as were used in the institution or rise of the building, not to be so well conceived, without some knowledge given of the engines wherewithal the mighty weight was moved. But through the entire omission of the Council of legislators or workmen that squared every stone to this structure in the quarries of ancient prudence, the proof of the first part of this discourse will be lame, except I insert, as well for illustration as to avoid frequent repetition, three remarkable testimonies in this place.
The first is taken out of the Commonwealth of Israel: "So Moses hearkened to the voice of Jethro, his father-in-law, and did all that he had said. And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people;" tribunes, as it is in the vulgar Latin; or phylarchs, that is, princes of the tribes, sitting upon twelve thrones, and judging the twelve tribes of Israel; and next to these he chose rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, which were the steps and rise of this commonwealth from its foundation or root to its proper elevation or accomplishment in the Sanhedrim, and the congregation, already opened in the preliminaries.
The second is taken out of Lacedaemon, as Lycurgus (for the greater impression of his institutions upon the minds of his citizens) pretended to have received the model of that commonwealth from the oracle of Apollo at Delphos, the words whereof are thus recorded by Plutarch in the life of that famous legislator: "When thou shalt have divided the people into tribes (which were six) and oboe (which were five in every tribe), thou shalt constitute the Senate, consisting, with the two Kings, of thirty councillors, who, according as occasion requires, shall cause the congregation to be assembled between the bridge and the river Gnacion, where the Senate shall propose to the people, and dismiss them without suffering them to debate." The oboe were lineages into which every tribe was divided, and in each tribe there was another division containing all those of the same that were of military age, which being called the mora, was subdivided into troops and companies that were kept in perpetual discipline under the command of a magistrate called the polemarch.
The third is taken out of the Commonwealth of Rome, or those parts of it which are comprised in the first and second books of Livy, where the people, according to the institution by Romulus, are first divided into thirty curias or parishes, whereof he elected, by three out of each curia, the Senate, which, from his reign to that or Servius Tullius, proposed to the parishes or parochial congregations; and these being called the Comitia curiata, had the election of the kings, the confirmation of their laws, and the last appeal in matters of judicature, as appears in the case of Horatius that killed his sister; till, in the reign of Servius (for the other kings kept not to the institution of Romulus), the people being grown somewhat, the power of the Curiata was for the greater part translated to the Centuriata comitia instituted by this King, which distributed the people, according to the sense of valuation of their estates, into six classes, every one containing about forty centuries, divided into youth and elders; the youth for field-service, the elders for the defence of their territory, all armed and under continual discipline, in which they assembled both upon military and civil occasions. But when the Senate proposed to the people, the horse only, whereof there were twelve centuries, consisting of the richest sort over and above those of the foot enumerated, were called with the first classes of the foot to the suffrage; or if these accorded not, then the second classes were called to them, but seldom or never any of the rest. Wherefore the people, after the expulsion of the kings, growing impatient of this inequality, rested not till they had reduced the suffrage as it had been in the Comitia curiato to the whole people again; but in another way, that is to say, by the Comitia tributa, which thereupon were instituted, being a council where the people in exigencies made laws without the Senate, which laws were called plebiscita. This Council is that in regard whereof Cicero and other great wits so frequently inveigh against the people, and sometimes even Livy as at the first institution of it. To say the truth, it was a kind of anarchy, whereof the people could not be excusable, if there had not, through the courses taken by the Senate, been otherwise a necessity that they must have seen the commonwealth run into oligarchy.