By the eighth century the royal families had generally lost most of their power to small groups of nobles. In the next two centuries the position of the aristocrats was in its turn eroded by the increase in mercantile wealth […] [8]

The appearance of written laws in the seventh century goes naturally together with this stage of political evolution. In the kingly aristocratic regimes, law had been unwritten and was administered, but reference to inherited traditions, by the hereditary rulers. This kind of jurisdiction was likely to prove unfit to meet the demands of the merchants, who would begin to require a definite and relatively sophisticated code governing power in the hands of those who sat, by birthright, in judgement. The age of the tyrants is the age of the lawgivers […]

For the first time in human history, it seems, communities of men were regulated by impartial rules which they themselves had deliberately chosen and assented to, and which could be discussed and altered with the consent of the majority. 

It will be suggested in the next chapter that the political evolution which has just been outlined was a necessary condition or at least an important factor for the origin of Presocratic thought. 

The prerequisites seem to include: an alphabetic script, a fairly general distribution of wealth, and a sense of belonging to a natural community, upon the welfare of which one’s own welfare closely depended. [9]