"The idea of the polis, in fact, long preceded its full implementation, just as it long survived its political obsolescence. One major key to Greek history during this period is the endless contrapuntal tension between rational progressivism and emotional conservatism, civic ideals and ties of consanguinity, blood-guilt and jury justice, old religion and new secularizing philosophy. It is in this clash which provides the main dialectic underlying Greek (in effect Attic) drama, and which also lurks behind the constant polarization of polis-dwellers into two mutually destructive groups: the Few and the Many, oligarchs and populists, reactionaries and radicals. Cross-currents abounded; the lines were neither clearly nor neatly drawn; but the central dichotomy existed, to form a major, often a tragic, element in Greek political history. Legitimate political dissent was often hard to distinguish from treachery or pure sedition, stasis; and stasis could, all too easily, escalate into bloody civil war. Conservatives praised eunomia as the bulwark of the community; radicals countered with isonomia, equality under the law, the implementation of which produced - according to one's viewpoint - either democracy or mob rule."
- Ancient Greece, A Concise History by Peter Greene, 1973, pg. 64.
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