How To Preserve Power

It is fitting also that the magistrates on entering office should offer magnificent sacrifices or erect some public edifice, and then the people who participate in the entertainments, and see the city decorated with votive offerings and buildings, will not desire an alteration in the government, and the notables will have memorials of their munificence. - Aristotle, Politics, Book 6, Part VII, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Here Aristotle was referring to the efforts of oligarchs to remain in power.