History of Greece, when speaking of the democratic form of government as treated of by Aristotle, says, We shall not confine ourselves to the technical lan guage of his system, but will endeavour to define the notion of democracy, as the word was commonly under stood by the Greeks, so as to separate the essence of the theory from the various accidents, which have sometimes been confounded with it by writers, who have treated Greek history as a vehicle for conveying their views on questions of modern politics, which never arose in the Greek republics.