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operation of the law, but the character of its author's power, that, when his house had been stricken with disease which spared neither son of his lawful nuptials, a child he had by Aspasia was admitted to the franchise as his successor.218 The immediate legacy of Pericles to his countrymen was the Peloponnesian War. He may not, possibly, have provoked,219 but he did not prevent, the hostilities from which the freedom of Greece must be said to date its ruin.

Even the allies of Athens, her subjects, as Pericles would have forced them to become, were so weary of the principles by which they had been governed, that, at the close of a conflict protracted for nearly thirty years,220 they who had not already deserted their mistress 221 rejoiced in her overthrow. The horrors of the war were increased by the factions which rent nearly every state engaged in it; nor were they in any way tempered by the conduct of the leaders on either side, who seemed to revel in the hatred which was kindled amongst their neighbours and between their cities. Nicias, an honest man, but so timid that he would keep his doors barred or refuse to tarry with a friend,222 was one of the few who wished for peace; while, on the other hand, Cleon, the thorough demagogue, inflated with ignorance and airs, and Alcibiades,223 proud of his descent from Ajax

218 Plut., Per., 37.

219 His feeling is pretty distinctly proved to have inclined towards war

in Plut., Per. 21.

220 A. C. 431-404.

within the first seven years of the war. Thucyd., IV. 88.

222 Plut., Nic., 5.

223 Plut., Alc., 12, 18; where the extraordinary gifts he received

221 of which there were instances and the still more extraordinary de

and from Jupiter, unscrupulous in his demands and his designs, at once a fondler and a despiser of his countrymen, were fierce for war in Athens; and the Spartan heroes, Brasidas and Lysander, did not belie the laws which were now interpreted as ordering cruelty and encouraging pride. Details of the campaign from year to year,-alternations of success in favor of Sparta or of Athens, the two great combatants under which the rest were ranged, enormous efforts made in Greece, on the seas, and in Sicily, -and terrors of carnage, pestilence, and affliction, were all such as might have been expected in a conflict where passions and forces were nearly equal on both sides. It was the contest for superiority, not only with regard to the state or the states that might be subdued, but over all the Grecian nations. Foreign powers were enticed into the affray; Athens obtained the aid or the alliance of Thrace and Macedonia, while Sparta leaned upon the promises of the Persian king, too willing to behold the laceration of his enemies by their own hands.

Of this deplorable contest, which exposed every thing that was feeblest in Greece to observation and to influences the most hostile to freedom, Thucydides is the monumental historian. Without concealing the truth, which he was too great in spirit to deny, he seems to have compressed his lips in sorrow for the relation he had to give; his nervous words and

signs he formed upon Carthage, cyd., VI. 15; Corn. Nep., Alcib., Libya, Italy, and the Peloponnesus Cap. I.

will be found described. See Thu

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.224 The 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.

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

224 Plut., Lysand., 15. These were, of course, the Thirty Tyrants. Xen., Hell., II. 2, sect. 3 et seq.; 3, sect. 2.

225 As Xenophon says, Пáσŋs τs 'EXλádos πроστáraι, Hell., III. 1,

sect. 3. In their treaties with Persia they had sacrificed the Greek cities of Asia. Thucyd., VIII. 18, 37, 58. Their treatment of Elis after the war was horrible. Xen., Hell., II. 2, sect. 25 et seq.

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.** 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.
227 "EXeos and Aidós. Paus., I.

226 'Epyán. 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

228 Thucyd., II. 41.

ophers seemed more and more unsatisfactory to account for the things and the beings he beheld. His 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, "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-
gence to their disposal." II. 6.
230 Plat., Phædo.
231 Plut., Per.,
232 Ibid.

32.

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