CHAPTER VI.

[108:1]This is stoutly denied by Holm, G. G. iii. 15, and 181sq., who cites Breitenbach's Edition and Stern's researches in support of his opinion. He regards Xenophon as perfectly impartial to others throughout hisHellenica. Whether he was so to himself in theAnabasisis of course another question, which Holm has not touched. It may be perfectly true, as Holm insists, that not a single false statement has ever been proved against the author of theHellenica, but does this demonstrate that he was impartial? It is in the selection, in the suppression, in the marshalling of his facts; it is in hisperspectivethat disguised partiality seems to have been shown.

Political Theories and Experiments in the Fourth Century b.c.

Literary verdict of the Greeks against democracy.

§ 46. What may most properly make the modern historian pause and revise his judgment of the Athenian democracy, is the evident dislike which the most thoughtful classes, represented by these great historians, and by the professed pupils of Socrates, displayed to this form of society[110:1]. We are now so accustomed to histories written by modern Radicals, or by men who do not think out their politics, that we may perhaps be put off with the plea that the democracy which these authors and thinkers disliked and derided, and which some of them tried to overthrow, was a debased form of what had been established under Pericles, and that it was the accidental decay or the accidental abuses of democracy which disgusted them, whereas its genuine greatnesshad been clearly manifested by the great century of progress which had now come sadly to a close.

Vacillation of modern critics.

Grote's estimate of Pericles

Ernst Curtius, a Germansavantof the highest type, has so little thought out this subject that on one page we find him saying that the voluntary submission of the people to a single man, Pericles, was a proof of the high condition of their State; whereas on another he says their voluntary submission to a single man, Cleon, is a proof of its degeneracy. But we can hardly expect any real appreciation of the working of a democracy from a German professor brought up in the last generation. Indeed his inconsistencies, and his hypotheses of decay and regeneration in the Athenian Demos at various moments, are ably dissected by Holm in a valuable appendix to his chapter on Athens in 360B.C.[111:1]But our dealing is rather with Grote, who knew perfectly the conditions of the problem. He argues that Cleon, on the whole, and without military ability, tried to carry out the policy of Pericles, and that the policy of Pericles was a sound and far-seeing one, which would have preserved Athens through all her dangers, had she steadily adhered to it.

§ 47. I have already discussed at length the narrow basis of the Athenian imperial democracy, and expressed my judgment that even great successes would soon have brought about its fall.

compared with Plato's.

The war policy of Pericles.

But I join issue with Grote, and side with Plato, in thinking that the policy of Pericles, even within the conditions imposed upon him by the circumstancesjust mentioned, was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident thinker could have called it secure. Plato goes so far as to say that Pericles had made the Athenians lazy, frivolous, and sensual. Without actually indorsing this, we are warranted by the course of history to say that the hope of holding a supremacy by merely keeping up with all energy and outlay a naval superiority already existing and acknowledged, was truly chimerical. Pericles thought that by making the city impregnable—which was then, against the existing means of attack, quite feasible—and by keeping the sea open, he could amply support his city population and make them perfectly independent even of the territory of Attica. While they could derive money and food from their subjects and their commerce, they might gather in the rural population from the fields, and laugh at the enemy from their walls until his means were exhausted, or he was compelled to retreat for the purpose of protecting his own coasts against a hostile fleet.

His miscalculations.

Thucydides tells us in affecting language how this experiment actually turned out,—what was the misery of the country people crowded into the city without proper houses or furniture, sleeping in sheds and nooks of streets; what was the rage of the farmers when they saw their homesteads go up in flames, and the labour of years devastated with ruthless completeness. Pericles had not even reckoned with the immediate effects of his singularpolicy. Still less had he thought of the sanitary consequences of overcrowding his city, which must in any case have produced fatal sickness, and therefore deep indignation among those who suffered from its visitation, even though no one could have anticipated the frightful intensity of the plague which ensued.

He depended on a city population against an army of yeomen.

But a far larger and more philosophical objection may be based upon the consideration that no city population, trusting mainly to money for a supply of soldiers and sailors, is likely to hold its own permanently against an agricultural population fighting, not for pay, but for the defence of its liberties, and with the spirit of personal patriotism. If you abolish the yeoman of any country, and trust merely to the artisan, you destroy the backbone of your fighting power; and no outlay will secure your victory if a yeoman soldiery is brought into the field against you and well handled. This was perfectly felt in Thucydides' day; for he makes the Spartan king, when invading Attica, specially comment on the fact that the Athenian power was acquired by money rather than native[113:1]; and on this he bases his anticipation that the army of Peloponnesian farmers will prevail. It would surely have been a safer and a better policy to extend the area of Athenian yeomen, and secure a supply of hardy and devoted soldiers as the basis of a lasting military and naval power.

Advantages of mercenaries against citizen troops.

§ 48. It will be urged, and it was urged in thosedays, that mercenary forces could be kept at sea more permanently than a body of farmers, who must go home frequently to look after their subsistence and work their fields. This is quite true; but mercenaries without a citizen force to keep them in order were always a failure, they became turbulent and unmanageable, and left their pay-master in the lurch when any new chance of immediate gain turned up. Besides, as the event proved in the next century, when Philip of Macedon rose to power, a mercenary force under a monarch will always defeat mercenaries under leaders directed by the discussion, the hesitation, the vacillation of a debating assembly[114:1].

The smaller States necessarily separatists.

The only excuse, therefore, for Pericles' policy was the impossibility of doing anything else with the materials he had at his disposal; and his materials were thus crippled because the Athenian democracy as a ruling power had not the confidence of the subject States. In fact, so long as these weresubjects, liable to oppression in any moment of panic or of passion, no solidarity, no common feeling of patriotism, no real union could possibly be attained. It has been rather the fashion, since Grote's influence has prevailed, to attribute the breakdown of all attempts at an empire among free Greeks to the incurable jealousy and the love of separatism in their small States. I fancy that at no period in the world's history could any smallcommunities have easily been persuaded to submit to this kind of union, which was built on far too narrow a foundation, and was far too distinctly worked for the almost exclusive benefit of the leading city.

It is necessary to insist upon these things,—the want of representation in a common assembly, the want of scope for talent in the outlying States, the difficulty of redress against the dominant people if they transgressed their State-treaties,—especially for a practical writer, who holds that historical analogies are most serviceable, and help to explain both ancient and modern history. But we must see clearly that the analogies are genuine, and that we are not arguing from an irrelevant antecedent or to an irrelevant consequent.

Attempt at federation

Yet the necessity of combination was so great, and so keenly felt during the tyrannical ascendency of Sparta at the opening of the next century, that several attempts were made to obtain the advantages, while avoiding the evils, of the old Athenian supremacy. The first, which was made immediately after the battle of Cnidos (394B.C.) and which seems to have been originated by Thebes, is passed over in silence by all our literary authorities, and was only discovered upon the evidence of coins. We know that Rhodes, Cnidos, Naxos, Samos, Ephesus, belonged to it, and that they adopted for their common coinage an old Theban emblem—Heracles throttling the snakes. The existence of this confederation seems to justify thehopes of Epaminondas to make his city a naval power, and thus protects the great Theban from a charge of political vanity, often repeated[116:1].

The second Athenian Confederacy;

its details,

The second was the well-known Athenian Confederacy of 377B.C.of which, however, the details are only preserved in an important inscription (No. 81 in Mr. Hicks' collection) which gives us most interesting information. It included Byzantium, Lesbos, Chios, Rhodes, Eubœa, and also Thebes. Western tribes and islands brought up the members to seventy in number. But its declared object was mainly to protect these members against Spartan tyranny, and it acknowledged the Persian supremacy in Asia Minor. The safeguards against Athenian tyranny, which were far more important, are a clause forbidding the acquisitions ofcleruchies, and the appointment of a synod of the allies to sit at Athens, in which Athens was not represented. Decrees proposed either in the Athenian assembly or in this synod (synedrion) must be sanctioned by the other body before becoming law[116:2].

its defects.

As might be expected, all these Leagues failed. The precautions against the tyranny of the leading States only hampered the unity and promptness of action of the League, and did not allay jealousy in the smaller, or ambition in the greater, members. Yet these abortive attempts are important to the historian, as showing the intermediate stages in the history of Confederations between the old Attic Empire and the Achæan League.

Political theories in the fourth century.

§ 49. The century at which we have now arrived in our survey—the fourth before Christ—was eminently the age of political theories devised by philosophers in their studies; and they give us the conclusions to which able thinkers had come, after the varying conflicts which had tested the capacities of all the existing States to attain peace with plenty at home, or power abroad. The Athenian supremacy had broken down; the Spartan, a still more completehegemony, as the Greeks called it, had gone to pieces, not so much by the shock of the Theban military power, as by its own inherent defects. Epaminondas has passed across the political sky, a splendid meteor, but leaving only a brief track of brilliancy which faded into night.

Greece and Persia.

Theoretical politics.

And in every generation, if the military efficiency of Persia grew weaker, her financial supremacy became more and more apparent. In the face of all these brilliant essays and signal failures, in the face of the acknowledged intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, coupled with their continued exhibitions of political impotence in foreign policy, it was fully to be expected that Greek thinkers should discuss the causes of these contrasts, and endeavour to ascertain the laws of public happiness and the conditions of public strength. And so there were a series of essays, of which several remain, on the Greek State and its proper internal regulation, and a series of solutions for the practical difficulties of the day, especially the external dangers to which theHellenic world was exposed. These documents form the main body of the splendid prose Literature of the Attic Restoration, as I have elsewhere called it[118:1], and of the period which closed with the actual solution of the difficulties in foreign politics by the famous Philip of Macedon[118:2].

Inestimable even to the practical historian.

The historian of Greece must evidently take into account these speculations, though they be not strictly history; but the facts can hardly be understood and appreciated without the inestimable comments of the greatest thinkers and writers whom the country produced.

Plato.

Xenophon.

Aristotle.

Foremost among these in literary perfection is Plato, whose speculations on the proper conditions—the internal conditions only—of aPolityin the Hellenic sense will ever remain a monument of genius, though his ideal could hardly lead, or be intended to lead, to practical results. Then we have Xenophon, who in his political romance on theEducation of Cyrusstands half-way between the mere philosopher and the practical man of the world. The most instructive of all is Aristotle, who, though he lived to see the old order pass away, and a new departure in the history of the race, nevertheless confined himself to the traditional problems, and composed a special book—hisPolitics—on the virtues and vices of the ordinary Greek polity. The practical side, the necessarysteps to reform and strengthen the leading States of Greece, especially in their external policy, and in the face of powerful and dangerous neighbours, we find discussed in the pamphlets of Isocrates and the public speeches of Demosthenes. It is on the proper place of these documents, and the weight assigned to them in modern histories, that I invite the reader's attention.

Sparta ever admired but never imitated.

§ 50. I have already mentioned the remarkable fact that though, at every period of this history, Spartan manners and Spartan laws commanded the respect and the admiration of all Greece, though the Spartan constitution had proved stable when all else was in constant flux and change, still no practical attempt was ever made in older Greek history to imitate this famous constitution. It shows, no doubt, in the old Greek legislators, a far keener sense of what was practical or possible that, instead of foisting upon every new or newly emancipated State the ordinances which had succeeded elsewhere as a legitimate, slow, and historic growth, they rather sought to adapt their reforms to the conditions of each State as they found it. They fully appreciated the difference between the normal and the exceptional in legislation.

Practical legislation wiser in Greece than in modern Europe.

The politicians of modern Europe, who are repeating gaily, and without any sense of its absurdity, the experiment of handing over the British parliamentary system to half-civilized and hardly emancipated populations, and who cryinjustice and shame upon those who decline to follow their advice—these unhistorical and illogical statesmen might well take lessons from the sobriety of Greek politicians, if their own common-sense fails to tell them that the forest-tree of centuries cannot be transplanted; nay, even the sapling will not thrive in ungrateful soil.

Sparta a model for the theorists.

A small State preferred.

But although the real rulers of men in Greece saw all this clearly, it was not so with the theorists, nor indeed were they bound to observe practical limitations in framing the highest ideal to which man could attain. Hence we see in almost all the theorists a strong tendency to make Spartan institutions the proper type of a perfect State. Plato will not even consider the duties of an imperial or dominating State, he rather regards large territory and vast population as an insuperable obstacle to good government. But as a philosopher deeply interested in the real culture of the mind, perhaps as a theorist deeply impressed with the haphazard character of the traditional education, he felt that to intrust an uneducated mob with the control of public affairs was either to hand over the State to unscrupulous leaders, who would gain the favour of the crowd by false and unworthy means, or to run the chance of having the most important matters settled by the caprice of a many-headed and therefore wholly irresponsible tyrant.

Plato's successors.

Their general agreement,

Every theorist that followed Plato seems to have felt the same difficulties, and therefore he and they adopted in the main the Spartan solution,—first,in limiting the number and condition of those to whom they would intrust power; secondly, in interfering from the beginning, more or less, in the education and training of the individual citizen. They differed as to the amount of control to be exercised,—Plato and the Stoic Zeno were the most trenchant, and thought least of the value of individual character;—they differed as to the particular form of the actual government; whether a small council of philosophic elders, or some limited assembly of responsible and experienced citizens, or, still better, one ideal man, the natural king among men, should direct the whole course of the State.

(1) especially on suffrage,

But on the other two points they were firm. First, universal suffrage had been in their opinion proved a downright failure. And let the reader remember that this universal suffrage only meant the voting of free citizens,—slaves never came within their political horizon,—still more, that the free citizens of many Greek democracies, notably of the Athenian, were more highly educated than any Parliament in our own day[121:1].

We now have as an additional document on the same side, the newly discoveredPolity of the Athenians[121:2],which, whether it be really Aristotle's work or not, certainly was quoted as such freely by Plutarch, and represents the opinions of the early Peripatetic school. Nothing is stranger in the book than the depreciation of Pericles, as the founder of the extreme democracy of Athens, and the praise of Thucydides (son of Melesias), Nicias, and Theramenes, as the worthiest and best of the later politicians,—Theramenes especially, whose shiftiness is explained as the opposition of a wise and temperate man to all extremes, while he was content to live under any moderate government.[122:1]

even though their suffrage was necessarily restricted.

I have already pointed out what important differences in the notions of democracy—the absence of all idea of representation, of all delay or control by a second legislative body, of the veto of a constitutional sovran—make this strong and consistent verdict not applicable by analogy to modern republics. Not that I reject Hellenic opinion as now of no value—far from it; but if we argue from analogy, we are bound to show where the analogy fits, and where it fails,—above all to acknowledge the latter cases honestly. For we are not advocates pleading a cause, but inquirers seeking the truth from the successes and the sufferings of older men of like passions with ourselves.

(2) Education to be a State affair.

Polybius' astonishment at the Roman disregard of it.

§ 51. Secondly, the education of the citizensshould not be left to the sense of responsibility in parents, or to the private enterprise of professional teachers, but should be both organized and controlled by the State[123:1]. So firmly was this principle engrained into Greek political thinkers that Polybius, who came at the close of all their rich experience, and whose opinion is in many respects more valuable than any previous one, expresses his astonishment how the Romans, a thoroughly practical and sensible people, and moreover eminently successful, could venture to leave out of all public account the question of education, and allow it to be solved by each parent as he thought fit. He pointed out this as the most profound existing contrast to the notions of Greek thinkers[123:2].

The practical result in Rome.

We know very well how the Roman aristocracy in their best days solved the matter; but we must deeply regret that there are no statistics, or even information, how the poorer classes at Rome fared in comparison with the Greeks. National education in Greece was certainly on a far higher level; but here again we have an old civilization to compare with a new one, and must beware of rash inferences.It is, for example, of great importance to note that the Greek State was essentially a city with its suburbs, where the children lived so near each other that day-schools could be attended by all. In a larger State, which implies a population scattered through the country, much more must be intrusted to parents, since day-schools are necessarily inadequate[124:1]. This is but one of the differences to be weighed in making the comparison. To state them all would lead us beyond reasonable limits.

Can a real democracy ever be sufficiently educated?

Still, I take the verdict of the philosophers as well worth considering,—and, indeed, there is no question which now agitates the minds of enlightened democrats more deeply than this: How can we expect uneducated masses of people to direct the course of public affairs with safety and with wisdom? It is certain that even in the small, easily manageable, and highly cultivated republics of the Greeks, men were not educated enough to regard the public weal as paramount, to set it above their narrow interests or to bridle their passions. Is it likely, then, that Education will ever do this for the State? Are we following anignis fatuusin setting it up as the panacea for the defects of our communities?

Christianity gives us a new force.

§ 52. To these grave doubts there is an obvious but not, I think, a real rejoinder, when we urge that the position of the Christian religionin modern education makes the latter a moral force for good far superior to any devices of legislators.

Formal religion always demanded by the Greeks.

While admitting unreservedly the vast progress we have attained by having the Christian religion an integral part of all reasonable education, we must urge on the other side that to most people, and at all times, religion is only a very occasional guide of action, and that what we have attained with all our preaching and teaching is rather an acquiescence in its excellence than a practical submission to its directions. So far as this mere acquiescence in moral sanctions is to be considered, all Greek legislators took care to inculcate the teaching and the observance of a State religion, with moral sanctions, and with rewards and punishments. They knew as well as we do that a public without a creed is a public without a conscience, and that scepticism, however consistent with individual sobriety and goodness, has never yet been found to serve as a general substitute for positive beliefs.

Real religion the property of exceptional persons.

But when we come to the case of superior individuals, to whom religion is a living and acting force, then we have on the Greek side those splendid thinkers, whose lives were as pure a model as their speculations were a lesson, to the world. These men certainly did not require a higher faith to make them good citizens, and were a 'law unto themselves, showing forth the work of law written in their hearts,' with a good conscience. The analogy, then, between the old Greek States andours as regards education may be closer than is usually assumed by those who have before them the contrast of religions.

Greek views on music

I will mention a very different point on which all the ancient educators were agreed, and which seems quite strange to modern notions,—I mean the capital importance of music, on account of its direct effect upon morals. They all knew that the Spartan pipes had much the same effect as the Highland pipes have now upon the soldiers who feel them to be their national expression. Hence all music might be regarded as either wholesome or unwholesome stimulant, wholesome or unwholesome soothing, to the moral nature; and not only does the sober Aristotle discuss with great seriousness and in great detail the question of this influence, but he agrees with Plato in regarding the State as bound to interfere and prevent those strains, 'softly sweet in Lydian measure,' which delighted, indeed, and beguiled the sense, but disturbed and endangered the morals of men.

discussed in myRambles and Studies in Greece.

On this fascinating but difficult subject I have already said my say in the last chapter of mySocial Life in Greece[126:1], and I will only repeat that if the Greeks put too much stress on this side of education as affecting character, the moderns have certainly erred in the opposite directions, and are quite wrong in regarding music as an accomplishment purely æsthetic, as having nothing to say to thepractical side of our nature,—our sensual passions and our moral principles.

Xenophon's ideal.

§ 53. It remains for us to note the chief variations between the positions of the various theorists on the ideal State. Xenophon tells us his views under the parable of the ideal education and government of a perfect king. But as he did not conceive such a personage possible in the Hellenic world, he chooses the great Cyrus of Persia,—a giant figure remote from the Greeks of his day, and looming through the mists of legend[127:1]. But he makes it quite plain that he considers the monarchy of the right man by far the most perfect form of government, and his tract on the Spartan State shows how he hated democracy, and favoured those States which reserved all power for the qualified few.

Aristotle's.

Aristotle's Politics ignore Alexander.

Nor is Aristotle at variance with Xenophon, as both hisEthicsandPoliticsagree in conviction that there were single men superior to average society, and intended by Nature, like superior races, to rule over inferior men. It starts at once to our recollection that Aristotle had before his mind that wonderful pupil who transformed theEastern world, and opened a new era in the world's politics. But no. The whole of Aristotle'sPoliticslooks backward and inward at the old Greek State, small, and standing by the side of others of like dimensions, differing as despotisms, aristocracies, republics will differ, but not pretending to carry out a large foreign policy or to dominate the world.

Evidence of the newPoliteia.

The recently discovered treatise on the History of the Athenian Constitution does not give us any further light as to the foreign policy which Aristotle thought best for a Greek State. Many critics are, moreover, inclined to deny the genuineness of the work, and a sharp controversy is now proceeding, in which, strange to say, the Germans are for the most part ready to accept the work as Aristotle's, while the English are mostly for its rejection. Against it has been urged (1) its general style, which in its easy straightforwardness does not remind the reader of the Aristotle we know; (2) the particular occurrence of a number of words and phrases not elsewhere extant in the very large vocabulary of his works; (3) certain inconsistencies not only with thePolitics, but with Xenophon, and indeed, with the generally accepted facts of earlier Greek history. Thus while the political activity of Themistocles is prolonged, and that of Aristides is exalted beyond the other extant estimates of these men, that of Pericles is lessened into second-rate proportions. The praise of Theramenes as a moderate politician, as a conservative in a very radicalmoment, affords no difficulty, for it is not foreign to what we know of Aristotle's views. These, however, are the main objections urged by the English critics who have flooded the literary papers with their emendations. On the other hand, great German scholars,—Gomperz, Wilamowitz von Möllendorf, Kaibel, and others,—have stoutly maintained that there are no adequate reasons for doubting the unanimous testimony of later antiquity, proved as it is by many citations in Plutarch, many more in the Greek grammarians and lexicographers. They add, that we know little or nothing of Aristotle's popular style, and that his lost dialogues have been praised for their easy flow. I do not feel prepared, as yet, to offer an opinion for or against the treatise—adhuc sub judice lis est.

Alexander was to all the theorists an incommensurable quantity.

But in any case the monarchy of Alexander is quite foreign to anything contemplated in the theories or in the reflections of Aristotle. The Greek theorist, even such as he was, could not adjust this new and mighty phenomenon to the laws of Greek human nature. I shall presently show how other great men of that day manifested the same purblindness; but I note it here specially in the case of Aristotle'sPolitics, because it has not been brought out with sufficient emphasis by modern historians. The one man who made Plato and Aristotle the subjects of exhaustive studies, George Grote, did not live to complete his account of Aristotle's theories on the State, and relegated his masterly account of Plato and Xenophon into aseparate book, long difficult to procure, and more so to master[130:1].

Mortality of even perfect constitutions.

Contrast of Greek and modern anticipations.

All these theorists, though in close contact with politicians, were themselves outside the sphere of practical affairs, whether from choice or compulsion. As they looked upon the changing phases of society which make up that complicated and various whole called Greek history, they were led to one general conclusion. No State, however perfectly framed, however accurately balanced, was intended by Nature to last for ever. Polities, like individuals, had their youth, development, and decay, and would in the lapse of time give way to newer growths. In this we find one of the most curious contrasts between the buoyant, hopeful Greek and the weary, saddened modern. The former had no hope of the permanent and indefinite improvement of the human race; the latter adopts it almost as an historical axiom. Each modern State hopes to escape the errors and misfortunes which have ruined its predecessors, and makes its preparations for a long futurity. The Greeks were fuller in their experience or fainter in their hope; they would have regarded our expectations as chimerical, and our anticipations as contradicted by all the past records of human affairs.

[110:1]The tractde Repub. Athen.handed down to us among Xenophon's works, is now, by general agreement, assigned to some author who lived earlier, and wrote it before the close of the Peloponnesian war. It does not, therefore, express the individual opinion of Xenophon, though it is an attack upon the Athenian democracy by a determined and bitter aristocrat. Upon the details, cf. myGk. Lit.ii. p. 47.

[111:1]G. G. iii. pp. 221sq.

[113:1]ὠνητὴ μᾶλλον ἣ οἰκεῖος.

[114:1]Cf. on this point Polybius, xi. 13, whom I have quoted in myGreek Life and Thought, p. 416.

[116:1]Cf. the excellent summary in Holm iii. 54-7.

[116:2]Cf. Holm iii. 96sqq.

[118:1]That is, the Restoration of its legitimate democracy. Cf. myHistory of Greek Literature, part ii. cap. v.

[118:2]Roughly speaking, 400-340B.C.

[121:1]This Professor Freeman has admirably shown in hisHistory of Federal Governments; and it is generally admitted by all competent scholars.

[121:2]It is perhaps worth calling attention to the fact that the tract on Athens in the Xenophontic collection has the same title as the newly-discovered treatise, so that some distinction is necessary in citing them. For the present the novelty of the Aristotelian book has cast the older document into oblivion.

[122:1]Cf.Ἀθ. Πολ.c. 28. Holm (ii. p. 583) controverts my use of Plutarch's quotation from this chapter of Aristotle, and thinks that I had mistranslated the termβέλτιστος. The full text now shows that Holm was mistaken and I was right.

[123:1]It is well to add, lest the reader might be misled by a false analogy, that this supervision applied to the appointment of teachers, and the regulation of teaching and of school discipline. The Greeks would have despised any system such as ours, which limits the State control to examinations, and which tests efficiency by success in them. The modern notion of disregarding the moral and social conditions under which the young are brought up, provided they can answer at a high-class examination, would have struck them as wicked and barbarous.

[123:2]Cf. the citation in Cicerode Repub.iv. 3. 3.

[124:1]The makeshift of boarding-schools was unknown to the ancients, but at Sparta, young men were kept together even in their hours of leisure, and away from their homes, so that we must here admit a qualified exception. But what we know of this separate life is rather that of a barrack than of a school.

[126:1]Seventh Edition. It had been formerly the last chapter of myRambles and Studies in Greece.

[127:1]It was an artistic device, to make this paternal despot a foreign prince, living in a bygone age, of the same kind as the device of Æschylus to narrate the Persian war from the Oriental side, and make Darius a capital figure. No Greek or contemporary person could have sustained the figure of Cyrus in Xenophon's book. I need only remind the reader that the tract on the Athenian State now preserved among Xenophon's works is by an unknown author, and therefore an authority independent of Xenophon.

[130:1]Grote'sPlato and the other Companions of Socrates, 3 vols. (Murray, London.) HisAristotleis posthumous and fragmentary, and does not include thePolitics. Mr. Jowett's expected Essays on thePoliticsmay perhaps supply this deficiency.

Practical Politics in the Fourth Century.

The practical politicians.

§ 54. Let us now pass on to the practical politicians of the day, or to those who professed to be practical politicians, and see what they had to propose in the way of improving the internal condition of Greek society, as well as of saving it from those external dangers which every sensible man must have apprehended, even before they showed themselves above the political horizon.

Isocrates,

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