This was the city which banished Themistocles, starved Aristides, forced into exile Miltiades, drove out Anaxagoras, and poisoned Socrates.

This was a city which changed the form of its government with the moon; eternal conspiracies, revolutions daily, nothing fixed and established.

A republic, as an ancient philosopher has observed, is no one species of government, but a magazine of every species; here you find every sort of it, and that in the worst form.

As there is a perpetual change, one rising and the other falling, you have all the violence and wicked policy by which a beginning power must always acquire its strength, and all the weakness by which falling states are brought to a complete destruction.
Rome has a more venerable aspect than Athens; and she conducted her affairs, so far as related to the ruin and oppression of the greatest part of the world, with greater wisdom and more uniformity.

But the domestic economy of these two states was nearly or altogether the same.
An internal dissension constantly tore to pieces the bowels of the Roman commonwealth.