The main thesis of this paper and much of the argument has already been glanced at in my Emergence of Greek Democracy, but at the cost of some repetition I think it may be useful to state it again rather more bluntly and baldly. It is, I think, important – it may even be true. The paper was first given at Yale in the autumn of 1968 to an audience which included both Adam Parry and Christopher Dawson. It seems proper, therefore, to print it in a volume which is a memorial to both; proper too to offer it in the casual form in which it was delivered without much more than a passing bow to that demand for scholarly paraphernalia which both of them knew so well how to keep in its place. The only alterations I have made to the text are due to the shrewd and friendly criticism that they gave at the time or afterwards; they and others, colleagues and students in New Haven and elsewhere.

Of colleagues I shall not speak, but it is well known that students are revolting. In some places they have been more revolting than in others, but overall the pattern has been roughly the same; for some reason or other they no longer want to sit back and be coddled in the cosy comfort of capitalist prosperity, or for that matter communist prosperity.