“Twenty-three years after the coming of Timoleon [338 BC] a rich man’s revolution suppressed the Syracusan democracy, and put the government into the hands of six hundred oligarchic families. These divided into factions, and were in turn overthrown by a radical revolution in which four thousand persons were killed and six thousand of the well to do were sent into banishment. Agathocles won dictatorship by promising a cancellation of debts and a redistribution of the land. So, periodically, the concentration of wealth becomes extreme, and gets righted by taxation or by revolution.”
—Will Durant, THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION: The Life of Greece (1939)