Those who have denied in conquest or colonization the origin of hereditary aristocracy, appear to me to have founded their reasonings upon the imperfectness of their knowledge of the savage states to which they refer for illustration.
[68] Accordingly we find in the earliest records of Greek history--in the stories of the heroic and the Homeric age--that the king possessed but little authority except in matters of war: he was in every sense of the word a limited monarch, and the Greeks boasted that they had never known the unqualified despotism of the East.

The more, indeed, we descend from the patriarchal times; the more we shall find that colonists established in their settlements those aristocratic institutions which are the earliest barriers against despotism.
Colonies are always the first teachers of free institutions.

There is no nation probably more attached to monarchy than the English, yet I believe that if, according to the ancient polity, the English were to migrate into different parts, and establish, in colonizing, their own independent forms of government; there would scarcely be a single such colony not republican! [69] In Attica, immigration, not conquest, must have led to the institution of aristocracy.

Thucydides observes, that owing to the repose in Attica (the barren soil of which presented no temptation to the conqueror), the more powerful families expelled from the other parts of Greece, betook themselves for security and refuge to Athens.
And from some of these foreigners many of the noblest families in the historical time traced their descent.

Before the arrival of these Grecian strangers, Phoenician or Egyptian settlers had probably introduced an aristocratic class.
[70] Modern inquirers pretend to discover the Egyptian features in the effigy of Minerva on the earliest Athenian coins.