FOOTNOTES:

Supported by public duties.

But in the first place let me repeat that they were one and all slave-holding democracies, and that for each freeman with a vote there were at least three or four slaves. Hence a Greek democracy can in no wise be compared with the modern democracies of artisans and labourers who have to do all their own drudgery, and have hardly any servants. Even very poor Athenians kept a slave or two; they were saved the worry of much troublesome or degrading manual labour; and so the Athenian or the Tarentine, even when poor and over-worked, was in a serious sense an aristocrat as well as a democrat: he belonged to a small minority ruling a far greater population. Still more eminently was this the case, when the democracy was, like Athens or Rhodes, an Imperial one, ruling over subjects, or allied with smaller politieswhich were little better than subjects. Holm argues that under Pericles the poorest citizen was paid by public money for doing public duties, and was thus above all care concerning his daily bread[89:1]. But when he adds that by this means Pericles succeeded in making the Athenians in one respect (materially) equal to the Spartans, in that they could be (if they performed public duties) noblemen and gentlemen like the latter, he surely overstates the case. The traditions of a landed aristocracy are wholly different from those of salaried paupers, however great may be the power wielded by these latter, or the privileges that they enjoy.

Athenian leisure.

Still it is quite possible that all the modern aids which our poor can use are not as efficient in helping them to attain culture as the leisure granted to the Greek democrat by slave-labour at home. Nor have we as yet any instance of a society becoming really refined without the aid of some inferior class, some Gibeonites, to hew wood and draw water.

The assembly an absolute sovran.

But if from this point of view the ancient artisan was far freer than his modern counterpart, in another he was not so. As against his brother-citizen, the laws secured him equality and justice; but against the demands of the State he had no redress. The Greek theory required that all citizens should beregarded simply as the property of the State; and such a thing as an appeal to a High Court of Judicature against the decree of the Assembly would have been regarded as absurd[90:1]. The Demos was indeed 'the sovran people,' but sovran in the sense of a tyrant, or irresponsible ruler, as Aristophanes tells the Athenians.

These are the general features of Greek democracy, which are not always understood by foreign, and not urged with sufficient clearness by English, historians.

[77:1]The reader who desires fuller details may consult the chapter on the 'Lyric Age' in mySocial Life in Greece, and the chapters on the lyric poets in myHistory of Greek Literature.

[78:1]Herodotus, vi. 58.

[78:2]The theorists were always framing policies after Spartan ideas.

[78:3]The two accounts of early Sparta which are cited with general approval are those of Duncker in his history, and Busolt's monograph,Die Lakedaimonier(Leipzig, 1878). But there is a host of additional literature, cf. Busolt, G. G. i. 95.

[79:1]Above,§ 8.

[80:1]It is likely enough that at no time were they really extinct in the Peloponnesus or in the lesser towns of northern Greece.

[80:2]There is a good note upon this word in the Greek argument to theŒdipus Tyrannus.

[81:1]Cf. above,§ 8.

[82:1]Mitford, who wrote in the days when tirades against tyrants were in high fashion, brought down a torrent of censure upon his head by saying his word for absolute government against democracy.

[82:2]Cf. myGreek Life and Thought, p. 416.

[86:1]I shall return to this subject of tyrants in connection with their later and Hellenistic features. Cf. below,§ 71.

[87:1]Three remarkable laws, all intended to save the Athenian democracy, whose ministers had no standing-army at their control, from sudden overthrow, seem to me never to have been clearly correlated by the historians. Solon's law (1) ordained that where an actualστάσιςhad arisen, every citizen must take some side, calculating that all quiet and orderly people, if compelled to join in the conflict, would side with the established Government. Cleisthenes saw that this appeal to the body of the citizens came too late, and indeed had failed when the usurpation of Peisistratus took place. He (2) establishedOstracism, which interfered before theστάσις, but when the rivalry of two leaders showed that the danger was at hand. So far Grote expounds the development. But this expedient also failed when the rivals combined, and turned the vote against Hyperbolus. It is from that date only—about 416B.C.—that I can find cases (3) of theγραφὴ παρανόμων, or prosecution for making illegalproposals, thus interfering at a still earlier stage. This last form of the safeguard replaced Ostracism, and lasted to the end of Athenian history. It was a democratic engine often abused, but always safe to be applied in good time.

[87:2]These have been increased for us by the text of the AristotelianἈθηναίων Πολιτεία, from which Plutarch cited, but not fully, his quotations in theLife of Solon.

[88:1]Hist. of Greece, vol. ii. chap. xix. § 2. He claims in his interesting preface to the last edition to have attained Grote's conclusions independently thirty years ago, when they were regarded in France as dangerous paradoxes.

[89:1]G. G. ii. 391. There is a very curious summary of the various classes of public employments on which the Attic citizen lived in the AristotelianἈθηναίων Πολιτεία, § 24. The author estimates the total number of civil servants or pensioners at over 20,000.

[90:1]This has for the first time been clearly put by Duruy in hisHistory of Rome. Our irresponsible and final Houses of Parliament, whose acts may annul any law, are a very dangerous modern analogy.

The Great Historians.

§ 39. I now pass on to the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, and their treatment by ancient and modern critics.

Herodotus and Thucydides.

Herodotus superior in subject.

It is our peculiar good fortune to have these two wars narrated respectively by the two greatest historians that Greece produced,—Herodotus and Thucydides. Unfortunately, perhaps, after the manner of most historians, they have made wars their chief subject; but this criticism applies less to Herodotus, who in leading up to his great climax has given us so many delightful digressions on foreign lands and their earlier history, that his book is rather a general account of the civilized world in the sixth century, with passages from older history, than a mere chronicle of the great war. Nor does he disdain to tell us piquant anecdotes and unauthorized gossip,—all giving us pictures of his own mind and time, if not an accurate record of older history. Making, therefore,every allowance for the often uncritical, though always honest[92:1], view he took of men and affairs, there can be no doubt that the very greatness of his subject puts him far above Thucydides, whose mighty genius was unfortunately confined to a tedious and generally uninteresting conflict, consisting of yearly raids, military promenades, very small battles, and only one large and tragic expedition, throughout the whole course of its five-and-twenty years.

Narrow scope of Thucydides.

His deliberate omissions,

Still sadder is that this great man, having undertaken to narrate a very small, though a very long, war, so magnifies its importance as to make it out the greatest crisis that ever happened, and therefore excludes from his history almost everything which would be of real interest to thepermanent study of Greek life. He passes briefly over the deeply interesting but now quite obscure period of the rise of the Athenian power. A detailed history of the fifty years preceding his war would indeed have been an inestimable boon to posterity. He passes in contemptuous silence over all the artistic development of Athens. The origin of the drama, Æschylus, Susarion, Cratinus; the growth of sculpture, Pheidias, Ictinus, the building of the Parthenon, of the temple of Theseus,—all this is a blank in his narrative. And yet he does not think it inconsistent with his plan to give us a sketch of the famousfifty yearsthat elapsed between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. He proposes to correct the inaccuracies of Hellanicus, his only predecessor in this field, and there can be no doubt that what he has condescended to give us is both accurate and valuable. But so scanty are his details, so frequent his silence on really important public events, that we are fain to turn to any inferior author to fill the gap.

supplied by inferior historians.

Diodorus.

Date of the destruction of Mycenæ.

Of these there are (apart from the poets) two extant, Diodorus and Plutarch. Both these men lived long after the events, and were beholden to literary sources for their information. The whole tone and the arrangement of Diodorus' eleventh book show that he used Ephorus as his chief authority. The citations from Ephorus by other authors make this conclusion unavoidable. The value of Diodorus' account, when it adds to what Thucydides hassaid, is therefore to be estimated by the value of Ephorus as an independent historian. On this I have already declared my opinion (§ 30), to which I need only add that I fully agree with Busolt when he says that for the early years of the period Ephorus had no other authority than Thucydides of any value. The only new fact that Diodorus preserves for us is the alleged destruction of Mycenæ by the Argives (circ.464B.C.), at a moment, he infers, when Sparta was in the crisis of the Helot insurrection, and unable to interfere.

Silence of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

I have long since explained (in Schliemann'sMycenæ) why I discredit the whole story. Holm is the only writer who seems to feel with me the difficulty of supposing such an event to have been passed over with indifference by the patriotic Greek States, whom the Mycenæans and Tirynthians had joined in the great Persian crisis. And when Holm urges political expediency to account for Sparta's non-interference, he surely forgets that the literary men of Athens were restrained by no such considerations. Thucydides (i. 102) mentions Argos at this moment: is it likely that even he would pass over this territorial aggrandisement of Argos without a syllable of notice? But apart from this mass of reticences, what of Æschylus, the comrade of the Mycenæans on the field of battle, what of Sophocles, what of Euripides, all of whom ought to have celebrated Mycenæ, and who celebrate Argos instead? They seem to have absolutely forgotten Mycenæ! What of the absolute reticence of the remains found bySchliemann, not one of which belongs to the fifth or sixth centuryB.C., but all to a long anterior period? The whole affair is, therefore, placed two centuries too late, and, for all we know, may not be derived from Ephorus at all, but from some inferior source, or from Diodorus' own combination. Even if Ephorus was the source, I refuse to accept his authority.

Value of Plutarch'sLives.

When we turn to Plutarch, whose object was indeed rather artistic and moral than historical, we are in a far better plight. For although hisLivesof Themistocles and Cimon do not give us much material of a trustworthy kind beyond what we know from Thucydides, this is not the case with theLife of Pericles, in which he has collected much valuable information from sources now lost to us, which all the researches of the Germans have not even succeeded in specifying by name. Our whole picture of the splendour of Athens in her greatest moment is derived not so much from the vague phrases of the speeches in Thucydides as from the deeply interesting facts preserved by Plutarch. His brilliant sketch and the narrative of Thucydides have been illustrated, since the days of Curtius and of Grote, by the recovery of a large number of inscriptions, chiefly from the Acropolis at Athens, recording the quotas paid from the tribute of the several allied cities to Athena and to the other gods. These lists, together with several fragments of treaties with the various cities, and the lists of offerings recently found at Delos, haveafforded Holm the materials for his fascinating chapters upon Imperial Athens[96:1].

The newly-found tractOn the Constitution of Athens.

But even since the appearance of his book (1889) a new and important review of the obscure moments of Athenian growth has been recovered in the work of Aristotle onThe Polity of the Athenians[96:2]. He does not indeed concern himself either with the foreign policy or with the artistic grandeur of the city. But as regards her internal development he brings us several new and curious facts. He ascribes the creation of the sovran Demos living at Athens on salaries for public duties, not to Pericles, but to Aristides. The whole democratic reform is in fact completed before the former arrives at power. The political activity of Themistocles is also prolonged for several years later than we had suspected, and it is even at his instigation that Ephialtes attacks the Areopagus. The politicalrôleof Pericles is in fact so reduced, that we almost suspect ananimusagainst him in the author, who elsewhere shows his preference for the conservative side in politics. We should indeed rejoice could we confront this Aristotle with Thucydides, and see what truth there is in his departure from our received histories. Plutarch, who uses the work constantly in theLifeof Solon, evidently disregards it when he comes to treat of Themistocles and Pericles. Had Thucydides been a little fuller, had he given himself the trouble to preserve a few more details, we should be in a better position to face this new historical problem, and estimate the really great period of the history of Athens.

Effects of his literary genius.

The Peloponnesian war of no world-wide consequence.

And yet such was his literary genius, such his rhetorical force, that, crabbed and sour as he may have been, he has so impressed his own and his subject's importance upon the learned world as to bring the Peloponnesian war into much greater prominence than the greater events of Greek history. Thus in a well-known selection of fifteen decisive battles from the world's history, the defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse figures as a world event; whereas it only settled the question whether one kind of Greek or another should dominate in Sicily, and perhaps in Greece. The domestic quarrels within the limits of a single nationality are not of this transcendent import. If the Carthaginians had crushed Rome, or the northern hordes of Asia destroyed the civilization of Persia when it was growing under Cyrus, there indeed a great battle might be called a decisive event. But even had the Athenians conquered Syracuse, it is quite certain that their domination of the Greek world would have broken down from within, from the inherent weaknesses in all Greek democracies, which Plato and Aristotle have long ago analyzed and explained.

No representation in Greek assemblies.

§ 40. This statement requires some further illustration to the modern reader, who thinks, I suppose rightly, that the surest and most stable of governments is that based upon the free resolve of the whole nation. But the Athenian imperial democracy was no such government. In the first place, there was no such thing asrepresentationin their constitution. Those only had votes who could come and give them at the general Assembly, and they did so at once upon the conclusion of the debate[98:1]. There was no Second Chamber or Higher Council to revise or delay their decisions; no Crown; no High Court of Appeal to settle claims against the State. The body of Athenian citizens formed the Assembly. Sections of this body formed the jury to try cases of violation of the constitution either in act or in the proposal of new laws.

No outlying members save Athenian citizens settled in subject towns.

The result was that all outlying provinces, even had they obtained votes, were without a voice inthe government. But as a matter of fact they had no votes, for the States which became subject to Athens were merely tributary; and nothing was further from the ideas of the Athenians than to make them members of their Imperial Republic in the sense that a new State is made a member of the present American Republic.

Similar defect in the Roman Republic.

This it was which ruined even the great Roman without any military reverses, and when its domination of the world was unshaken. Owing to the absence ofrepresentation, the Empire of the Roman Republic was in the hands of the city population, who were perfectly incompetent, even had they been in real earnest, to manage the government of the vast kingdoms their troops had conquered. In both cases the outsiders were governed wholly for the benefit of the city crowd.

Hence an extended Athenian empire not maintainable.

The mistakes and the injustices which resulted in the Roman executive were such that any able adventurer could take advantage of the world-wide discontent, and could play off one city faction against the other. It is not conceivable that any other general course of events would have taken place at Athens, had she become the ruler of the Hellenic world. Her Demos regarded itself as a sovran, ruling subjects for its own glory and benefit; there can, therefore, be no doubt that the external pressure of that widespread discontent which was the primary cause of the Peloponnesian war, would have co-operated with politicians within, if there were no enemies without, and that ambitiousmilitary chiefs, as at Rome, would have wrested the power from the sovran people either by force or by fraud.

Hence I contend that the result of the Peloponnesian war even in its largest crisis had little import in the world's history. That the little raids and battles, the capture of a couple of hundred Spartans, or the defeat of twenty ships should still be studied with minuteness, and produce libraries of modern criticism, is due solely to the power of the historian and the just preeminence of the famous language in which he wrote his book.

The glamour of Thucydides.

§ 41. This is, I think, the most signal instance on record of the falsification of the properperspectiveof history by individual literary genius. It was a commonplace in old days that Achilles and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Diomede, all the famous heroes of the Trojan war, would have died in obscurity and passed out of sight but for the voice of the inspired poet. How much truer is it that Phormion and Brasidas, Gylippus and Lamachus would have virtually disappeared from history but for the eloquence of the Attic historian! Pericles would have remained an historic figure, and so does Lysander (who is almost beyond the period), whether any single historian intended it or not. The rest were important in their day and to their city, not beyond these limits. The really great spirits from whom the Athens of that day derives her eternal supremacy, which no Lysander could take away, are, except Pericles, never mentioned in all hiswork. No one could ever suspect, from this severe and business-like narrative, that the most splendid architects, sculptors, and dramatic poets the world has yet seen were then jostling each other in the streets of Athens.

His calmness assumed.

It seems thankless to complain of what Thucydides has not done, instead of acknowledging what he undertook to do and has performed with extraordinary ability. Never was the history of a long war written with more power, judgment, and, I was going to say, impartiality. But I honestly believe that his book would have been far inferior had it indeed been coldly impartial; and I think Grote has shown, what I have supplemented in myGreek Literature, that strong personal feelings underlie the apparent calmness of his decisions[101:1].

He is backed by the scholastic interest,

§ 42. This estimate of Thucydides is, however, one which will make its way but slowly in the English classical world,—by which I mean that large and important body who teach classics to schoolboys and college students,—and the schoolmaster interest so completely commands our literary journals that any opinion which runs counter to scholastic traditions is sure to be set down there also as the outcome of rashness or of ignorance. For Thucydides, in addition to his just influence as a great writer, has enlisted in his favour all those to whom Greek grammar with its intricacies is the most divine of all pursuits.

on account of his grammatical difficulties.

If his speakers, as one of them tells us, strove hard to conceal what they had to say under new and startling forms, in order to outrun in smartness the cleverness of their audience, and play a sort of intellectual hide-and-seek with their critics, so Thucydides himself plays hide-and-seek with the grammarians, both ancient and modern. To make out exactly what he means his speakers to say, and to render it with every shade of nicety into modern English, is a task to which many acute men have devoted years, and upon its success very considerable reputations depend. It is but natural that this school, or these schoolmen, should become so enamoured of his intricacies as to love them with a love passing the love of women, and consequently to resent bitterly any word of depreciation which affects the importance of their idol.

He remains the special property of critical scholars.

Enthusiastic study of any subject is always praiseworthy; the insistence upon minute accuracy, and contempt for slovenliness in writing, are always to be admired and encouraged, for it is to these qualities in the minute scholars that we owe much of our precision in thinking, and still more the sense of clearness and correctness in style. To this class, therefore, let Thucydides remain forever the foremost of books; but let them not bully us into the belief that because they have studied his grammar more carefully than any other, they are therefore to decide that he is absolutely faultless as a narrator, and absolutely trustworthy as a historian.

Herodotus underrated in comparison.

I have already dealt with this latter point[103:1]; what I am here concerned with is the exaggerated place given in our modern histories to the petty feuds and border-raids of his often tedious chronicle,—tedious only because the events he describes are completely trivial. Herodotus, on the other hand, is apt to be underrated in these modern days. The field he covers is so wide, and the chances of error in observation so great, that it is impossible he should not often be found wrong. But what would our notions of earlier Greece or Asia Minor be without his marvellous prose epic?

The critics of Thucydides.

The reader will pardon me for expressing my satisfaction, that this comparative estimate of the two great historians which I published some twenty years ago, and which is still regarded by many of my English critics as a mere paradox, has now become a widely and solidly defined belief among the best German critics. Of course they began by exaggerating the new view. Müller-Strübing especially, as has been freely exposed by his opponents, has advanced from criticism to censure, from censure to contempt of Thucydides. This is of course silly pedantry. Thucydides was a very great historian, and whoever cannot recognize it, shows that he has no proper appreciation for this kind of genius. But let the reader consult the passages in which the newest, and perhaps the best, of Greek histories, Holm's, gives a summary of the researches on the contrasted masters of historiography, and he will seethat the result is much the same as that which I have long advocated. Holm argues (ii. pp. 346sq.) that Herodotus has been underrated; he argues (ibid.pp. 369sq.) that Thucydides has been overrated. Let me call particular attention to the details of the latter estimate, as one to which I thoroughly subscribe. But let no one charge me with despising the great Athenian; I believe I appreciate his greatness far better than do his random panegyrists.

§ 43. Let us pass by anticipation to another remarkable case of distorted perspective, likewise due to transcendent literary ability.

The Anabasis of Xenophon.

The next great author who has fascinated the world by the grace and vividness of his style is the Athenian Xenophon. In his famousAnabasis, or Expedition of the Ten Thousand to assist the insurgent Cyrus, he has told us the story of what must have happened (on a smaller scale) many times before, of Greek mercenaries being induced by large pay to serve in the quarrels of remote Asiatic sovrans, and finding their patron assassinated or defeated. They had then their choice of taking service under his rival (with the chance of being massacred), or of cutting their way out of the country to some Hellenic colony. It seems to have been mainly due to the ability and eloquence of Xenophon that the present very large and formidable body of mercenaries chose and carried out the latter course. His narrative of this Retreat, in which he claims to have played the leading part, is one of the most delightful chapters of Greek history.

The weakness of Persia long recognized.

But in all the modern accounts, without exception, both the events and the narrator have assumed what seem to me gigantic proportions. It is not the least true that the Greeks were dependent upon this source for their knowledge of the weakness of the Persian Empire. The campaigns of Agesilaus in Asia Minor, which were almost synchronous, and not by any means suggested (so far as we know) by the expedition, showed the same facts clearly enough. The military weakness of the Empire was already a commonplace. Its financial power, in the face of the poor and divided Greek States, was the real difficulty in the way of a Hellenic conquest.

Reception of the Ten Thousand on their return.

The manner in which the Ten Thousand were received, upon their return to Greek lands, shows all this plainly enough. Instead of being hailed as pioneers of a new conquest, as heroes who had done what nobody dreamed of doing before, they were merely regarded as a very large and therefore very dangerous body of turbulent marauders, who had acquired cohesion and discipline by the force of adversity, and who might make a dangerous attack on any civilized city, unless a little time were gained, during which their strength and harmony would give way to defections, and quarrels among themselves. Their ill-gotten wealth would soon be squandered, and they must then be induced to seek new service separately, and not in such a mass as to intimidate their employers.

The army dissipated.

This is the rational account of what historiansoften represent as the shabby, or even infamous, conduct of the Lacedæmonians, then the leading power in Greece. The policy they adopted was as prudent as it was successful, and the Ten Thousand melted away as quickly as they were gathered; but we can hardly hope that many of them retired into so innocent and cultivated a leisure as Xenophon did in after years.

Xenophon's strategy.

His real strategy was literary.

§ 44. So much for the expedition; now a word or two concerning this famous Xenophon. If his expedition had indeed made the figure in the contemporary world that it does in hisAnabasisand in modern histories, who can doubt that he would have been recognized as one of the chief military leaders of the age; and, as his services were in the market, that he would have been at once employed, either as a general or as a minister of war, in the memorable campaigns which occupied the Greeks after his return? Why did he never command an army again[106:1]? Why washe never tried as a strategist against Epaminondas, the rising military genius of the age? The simple fact is that he has told us the whole story of his Retreat from his own point of view; he has not failed to put himself into the most favourable light; and it is more than probable that the accounts given by the other mercenaries did not place him in so preeminent a position. TheAnabasisis a most artistic and graceful self-panegyric of the author, disguised under an apparently candid and simple narrative of plain facts, perhaps even brought out under a false name,—Themistogenes of Syracuse,—to help the illusion; nor was it composed at the spur of the moment, and when there were many with fresh memories ready to contradict him, but after the interest in the affair had long blown over, and his companions and rivals were scattered or dead.

A special favourite of Grote.

It is of course an excellent text for Grote to develop into his favourite historical sermon, that the broad literary and philosophical culture of the Athenian democracy fitted any man to take upsuddenly any important duties, even so special as the management of a campaign. But however true or false this may be, it is certain that Xenophon's contemporaries did not accept him as a military genius, and that he spent his after years of soldiering in attendance upon a second-rate Spartan general as a volunteer and a literary panegyrist.

Xenophon on Agesilaus and Epaminondas.

Injustice of the Hellenica.

§ 45. For in me the suspicion that Xenophon may have been guilty of strong self-partiality in theAnabasiswas first awakened by the reflection that his later works show the strongest partiality for his patron, and the most niggardly estimate of the real master of them all, the Theban Epaminondas. If instead of spending his talents in glorifying the Spartan king—a respectable and no doubt able but ordinary personage, he had undertaken with his good special knowledge to give us a true account of the military performances of Epaminondas, then indeed he would have earned no ordinary share of gratitude from all students of the world's greatness. He was in the rare position of being a contemporary, a specialist, standing before the greatest man of the age, and capable of both understanding his work and explaining it to us with literary perfection; yet hisHellenicais generally regarded as a work tending to diminish the achievements of the Theban hero[108:1].

Happily we have here means to correct him, and to redress the balance which he has not held with justice. Shall we believe that when he had no one to contradict him, and his own merits to discuss, he is likely to have been more strictly impartial?

Yet Xenophon is deservedly popular.

Xenophon will never cease to be a popular figure, and most deservedly; for he added to the full education of an Athenian citizen in general intelligence, in politics, and in art, the special training given by the conversations of Socrates, and the tincture of occasional abstract thinking. But this was only a part of his education. He learned knowledge of the world and of war by travel and exciting campaigns, and completed his admirable and various training by a close intimacy with the best and most aristocratic Spartan life, together with that devotion to field-sports which is so far more gentlemanly and improving than training for athletics. In the whole range of Greek literature he appears the most cultivated of authors, in his external life he combines everything which we desire in the modern gentleman, though his superficiality of judgment and lesser gifts place him far below Thucydides, or even Polybius.

[92:1]Mr. Sayce will not admit even this, and indeed the habit of appropriating previous work, which Greek literary honesty seems to have allowed, must naturally offend an original inquirer like Mr. Sayce, whose ideas are so often pilfered without acknowledgment. But Greek historians seldom name their authority unless they are about to differ from it, and criticise or censure it. It is for this reason that I distrust the usual enumeration of Herodotus' travels (e.g. Busolt, G. G. ii. 90sq.), which assumes that whatever lands he describes he must himself have seen. I feel sure that he borrowed a great deal, even a great many bare facts, from other books. But I call attention with pleasure to the suggestion of Holm (ii. 330), who shows that with the extended trade relations of Periclean Athens, information upon Pontus, Persia, and Egypt was of great practical value, and that the story of the ten talents reward given him by the Athenians may point to a real reward for his valuable reports, which were most important to their 'Foreign Office.' Hence the great and immediate popularity of his work. Holm feels as I do, that Herodotus has been underrated, in comparison with Thucydides (G. G. ii. 346).

[96:1]ii. 11, 12, 16-20.

[96:2]I call it the work of Aristotle, in spite of the many critical doubts expressed in England, for I cannot ignore the persistent citations of Plutarch and of many good Greek grammarians and antiquarians, who express no word of doubt, nor do the peculiarities of style seem to me to prove anything more than carelessness in revision, or perhaps the work of a pupil under the master's direction. Cf. § 53.

[98:1]Cicero specially mentions this as a grave defect in Greek democracies, and compares it with the Roman precaution of making the voting by tribes or centuries a formal act at a distinct time. Here is this important and little-known passage (pro Flacco, cap. vii.): 'Nullam enim illi nostri sapientissimi et sanctissimi viri vim concionis esse voluerunt; quae scisceret plebes, aut quae populus juberet, summota concione, distributis partibus, tributim et centuriatim descriptis ordinibus, classibus, aetatibus, auditis auctoribus, re multos dies promulgata et cognita, juberi vetarique voluerunt.Graecorum autem totae respublicae sedentis concionis temeritate administrantur.' The Roman safeguards were, however, quite insufficient, as the course of history proved. The Athenians also had some safeguards, especially in preparing resolutions for the assembly by a previous council; but these too were almost useless.

[101:1]Cf. myHist. Gk. Lit.ii. 1, chap. 5.

[103:1]Above, § 28.

[106:1]Some of the historians note naïvely enough, that the performance of Xenophon is very wonderful, seeing he had never learned the art of war, or commanded in any previous campaign. Wonderful indeed, but was it a real fact? Holm, who seems to me really awake to the common-sense difficulties which seldom strike learned men, feels this, but accounts for it (iii. 182) in a very surprising way. I may premise that Xenophon is perhaps his favourite authority, whom he defends against all attacks with great spirit. His answer to the question why Xenophon never again commanded an army, is this: He could have, but he would not, because he was exiled from his native city, and despised the career of a mercenary chief! In other words a very ambitious young man, who had deliberately chosen the profession of foreign adventure, when he had succeeded and shown his transcendent powers, stops short because he despises that profession. Is not this most improbable? Had Xenophon brought home with him a really first-rate reputation, he would not have been required to fight the battles of his native city as a mercenary leader: he would very soon have recovered himself in popularity, and have become a leading Athenian. It was not therefore because he could and would not, but because he would and could not, that he retired into obscurity. There is no reason to think he had excited any great or lasting odium at Athens. We hardly know for certain why he was banished.

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