Book 5
1306b
for their personal enemies stirred up party feeling against them so as to get them bound in the pillory in the market-place. Also many governments have been put down by some of their members who had become resentful because the oligarchies were too despotic; this is how the oligarchies fell at Cnidus See 1305b 13 n. and at Chios. And revolutions also occur from an accident, both in what is called a constitutional government and in those oligarchies in which membership of the council and the law-courts and tenure of the other offices are based on a property-qualification. For often the qualification first having been fixed to suit the circumstances of the time, so that in an oligarchy a few may be members and in a constitutional government the middle classes, when peace or some other good fortune leads to a good harvest it comes about that the same properties become worth many times as large an assessment, so that all the citizens share in all the rights, the change sometimes taking place gradually and little by little and not being noticed, but at other times more quickly.
1306b
Such then are the causes that lead to revolutions and factions in oligarchies (and generally, both democracies and oligarchies are sometimes altered not into the opposite forms of constitution but into ones of the same class, for instancefrom legitimate democracies and oligarchies into autocratic ones and from the latter into the former).
