Areopagiticus (66-70)

Yes, and who of my own generation does not remember that the democracy so adorned the city with temples and public buildings that even today visitors from other lands consider that she is worthy to rule not only over Hellas but over all the world;[*] while the Thirty neglected the public buildings, plundered the temples, and sold for destruction for the sum of three talents the dockyards[*] upon which the city had spent not less than a thousand talents?

And surely no one could find grounds to praise the mildness[*] of the Thirty as against that of the people’s rule! For when the Thirty took over the city, by vote of the Assembly,[*] they put to death fifteen hundred Athenians[*] without a trial and compelled more than five thousand to leave Athens and take refuge in the Piraeus,[*] whereas when the exiles overcame them and returned to Athens under arms, these put to death only the chief perpetrators of their wrongs and dealt so generously and so justly by the rest[*] that those who had driven the citizens from their homes fared no worse than those who had returned from exile.

But the best and strongest proof of the fairness of the people is that, although those who had remained in the city had borrowed a hundred talents from the Lacedaemonians[*] with which to prosecute the siege of those who occupied the Piraeus, yet later when an assembly of the people was held to consider the payment of the debt, and when many insisted that it was only fair that the claims of the Lacedaemonians should be settled, not by those who had suffered the siege, but by those who had borrowed the money, nevertheless the people voted to pay the debt out of the public treasury.[*]

And in truth it was because of this spirit that they brought us into such concord with each other and so far advanced the power of the city that the Lacedaemonians, who under the rule of the oligarchy laid their commands upon us almost every day, under the rule of the people came begging and supplicating us not to allow them to be driven from their homes.[*] In a word the spirit of the two parties was this: the oligarchies were minded to rule over their fellow-citizens and be subject to their enemies; the people, to rule over the world at large and share the power of the state on equal terms with their fellow-citizens.

I have recounted these things for two reasons: because I wanted to show, in the first place, that I am not in favor of oligarchy or special privilege, but of a just and orderly government of the people, and, in the second place, that even badly constituted democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than are oligarchies, while those which are well-ordered are superior to oligarchies in that they are more just, more impartial, and more agreeable to those who live under them.