anxious thoughts are as the fears of his nation for the future rather than as their memories of the past. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides wrote of the present, beating and sweeping around him; but it was the issue that he watched through a tempest of which the thunder had not yet ceased nor the lightning disappeared. Athens at last succumbed, after frightful losses and dissensions amongst her citizens, who beheld their powers forfeited and their persons at the mercy of thirty Archons appointed by their enemies for the city, with ten besides for the Piræus.22 day of her downfall was regarded as the day of liberation to her tributaries; though the Spartans were, more than they had ever been, the masters of Greece, and likely to be cruel ones.225 It seemed that the end of Athens, if of no other state or city, was arrived. The There was that, however, in Athens, even when her navy was lost, her armies humbled, and her walls destroyed, which might have filled her wiser children with hopes that a new and a higher glory was but then beginning for them and for their mother land. The spirit which had animated Solon and Aristides and Eschylus was at its culmination in the mind and life of Socrates. Amongst the shrines of the city, none was, none had been, so honored as that of Mi nerva, for whom the olive was planted and the Parthenon was raised; and as if to prove that the Wisdom personified by the blue-eyed goddess was not a fable, like her own existence, the title of the Industrious 226 was given her, and the altars of Modesty and Mercy 227 stood nigh at hand to hers. If these were only names, there was yet a reality behind them which gave Pericles the right to call his Athens the instructress of his country, Greece.223 Amidst the works which Phidias and his brother artists had left to the eye, and the words which poets, orators, and historians had more lastingly uttered to the ear of man, the day shone with serener light, the festival resounded with more joyous cries, the sacrifice was offered with more trusting pomp, than elsewhere appear to have prevailed. Yet the number of those who sought a higher knowledge than the multitude obtained was small and always timid. It was easier to give the god a form in marble, or to chant the exploits of the hero, than to break through the distance which lay between the truth as it was and as it was to be disclosed. Some led the way, but there were few to follow; and they who did were not undaunted nor uninjured. Anaxagoras came from Clazomenæ, in his youth, to Athens, before the close of the Persian war. As he grew in years and wisdom, the researches of earlier philos the pagan conceptions," etc. Lands Classical and Sacred, Ch. I. 226 'Epyávŋ. Paus., I. 24. "That which was specially received and worshipped, as the protecting deity of Athens, was," says Lord Nugent, 17. "perhaps the most splendid of all VOL. I. 27 227 "EXeos and Aidos. Paus., I. 228 Thucyd., II. 41. His ophers seemed more and more unsatisfactory to account for the things and the beings he beheld. inspiration to farther advances than they had made may well enough have come from the magnificence and the genius by which he was surrounded in his adopted home; and, reasoning, perhaps, from the works of men, he taught that the world, instead of owing its form and life to moisture or any other physical principle, was the result of a Divine Intelligence acting upon a chaos already in existence.229 He was very far from being faithful, as Socrates is said to have remarked, to his own discovery; 230 but for merely announcing it, he was accused of infidelity to the Athenian religion, and banished, not so much against the consent as is generally thought of his professed friend and patron, Pericles.231 The Sophists, as they are called, followed; entitled, indeed, to fill the schools with doubts, artifices, and phantoms, after the condemnation of Anaxagoras for having but proposed a more earnest philosophy. A law, bearing the name of Diopithes,232 forbade the superstitions of the Athenians to be disturbed, under pain, not merely of exile, but of death. It then remained to be proved whether the fear of death or the hope of truth would triumph amongst men whose minds were scarcely warmed with any 229 His own words, แ 'pleasant and magnanimous," are thus reported by Diogenes Laertius: Πάντα χρήματα ἦν ὁμοῦ, εἶτα Νοῦς ἐλθὼν αὐτὰ διεκοσμήσε, “ All things 66 were together; then came Intelli- 230 Plat., |