Anaxagoras, formed marked exceptions to this rule1. So also Euripides, who in this as in other respects marks a transition to the succeeding age, shows many traces of pure philosophy, of speculative thinking, as opposed to practical politics. But the timid and fragmentary philosophical teaching of this great poet shows how a man who wrote for the Periclean public was obliged to conceal his speculations, and put on the stage plain practical politics and plain human passion. Thus even when their relaxation came we see that it bore the deep impress of their hurry and their public cares. The Old Comedy was essentially political, and directed to satirising public affairs and public characters, so that the Athenian statesman might well have complained that even in his leisure hours the strife of party and the fever of public life did not depart from him. In another respect, too, this Comedy was the relaxation of busy men, in the full flavour of its wit and the grossness of its vigorous satire. This is, I think, an universal feature in human nature. Men that live lives of excitement and exceeding fatigue, whether it be professional, or political, or commercial -men that are wild speculators in the market or in public affairs, cannot afford time and attention for 1 Stesimbrotus tells us, as quoted by Plutarch, that he used to discuss subtleties with Protagoras, and that they disputed for a whole day in the case of a fatal accident at an athletic contest, whether the dart which inflicted the wound, or the thrower, or the arrangers of the contest, were truly the cause of the accident. This case is discussed in Antiphon's second tetralogy, and seems therefore to have been a favourite subject for casuistry. gentle and soothing recreation, for the so-called Attic salt of mere leisure conversations, for philosophical disquisitions and for long rambles in the country. They will generally plunge from one excitement into another, and will not rest their minds save with such grosser bodily pleasures as expel all thought of serious things. They rest the man by indulging the beast within them. No one who has observed our great centres of life and business in the present day can have missed this prominent feature. I think this may be the reason why the Athenians of the first epoch, men of far more seriousness in many respects than their successors, delighted in public exhibitions which became coarse and unseemly in the eyes of their gentler but weaker successors. There was no time for Platonic dialogues, no taste for the quiet comforts of home life. The ribald scenes in Aristophanes were meant to satisfy far different wants. But who would have expected from this picture that, among these busy, hard, realistic politicians, art or literature would have prospered? Do not all the features adduced rather point to a state of things in which the leisure enforced by the tyrants, and their enlightened patronage, must be felt by the artist an irreparable loss? I am convinced this was so, and believe that, throughout Greece generally, the age following the time of the despots, which I call the Periclean age, but which reaches far beyond his death, was in literature decidedly an age of decline. There is no other reason why the lyric poetry, which was flourishing at the opening of the period, should have decayed, and almost vanished from Greece. Up to the rise of the Athenian and other democracies, we have art centres for sculpture, poetry, and architecture, all over Greece, at Samos, at Lesbos, at Corinth, in Sicily, we may say wherever there was a court. And so lyric poetry, like the epic which preceded it, was the general property of all Greece, sung and read everywhere, speaking to the heart of every Greek. All this now vanishes; the plaintive Mimnernus and the fierce Tyrtæus, the passionate Sappho, and the turbulent Alcæus, the voluptuous Anacreon, and the bombastic Pindar,-all these have left no successors. But this great and melancholy void is hidden from us by the dazzling splendour of Athens. And the exception is so great that it has obscured the rule and made historians speak of the Attic period as the most brilliant in Greek literature. This was due to two special causes: first, to the discovery of the drama, by which a poem could be produced before king Demos, as well as king Peisistratus, thus giving back to the poets a manyheaded and wealthier patron than the friendly despots. Secondly, to the substitution by Pericles of a presidency over subject states, for a tyranny over subject citizens. This great man was in many respects the direct successor of the older despots. He had the blood of despots in his veins, and their instincts in his heart, but he contrived, with extraordinary genius, to combine these instincts with a democratic policy. He made all his fellow-citizens into one great despot, subject to his own influence, taxing other states, and K applying the proceeds just as Polycrates or Peisistratus would have done, to the beautifying of his city and the active patronage of literature. Thucydides was not blind to this curious combination1. He saw that Athens was under Pericles a democracy only in name; he felt the concealed despot in him; but it is in Plutarch's life that we find all the details about sculptors, and painters, and architects, and writers, which show how thoroughly the Athenian prime minister had combined the tyrant's patronage of literature with the political life of a free constitution. Thus under this man, and owing to his exceptional genius, Athens enjoyed the advantages of both conditions, and consequently strode ahead of all the rest of Greece. But I repeat that it was at Athens alone, and for these special reasons, that civic democracy 1 As Mr. Müller Strübing observes (Aristoph. u. d. hist. Kritik. p. 82), this idea of Athens as a tyrannis is put forward in express terms in the speech of Pericles (Thuc. ii. 62), and that of Cleon (iii. 37), by Thucydides. He might have added Aristoph. Eq. III: ὦ Δῆμε, καλήν γ' ἔχεις also that Demosthenes (in Lept. p. 478) speaks of the Lacedæmonian rule in similar terms: ἡγοῦντο γὰρ οὐ μικρὰν τυραννίδα καὶ τοῦτον, τὴν Λακ. ἀρχὴν καταλύσαντα, πεπαυκέναι, speaking of Conon, and comparing his merits with those of Harmodius. The administrators of the common fund were Athenian citizens responsible to Athens alone. The tribute was fixed and assessed by the Athenians, who divided their empire into four provinces, comprising about 180 cities. The lists and amounts have now been recovered from inscriptions, and published with a most instructive map, in Kirchhoff's collection (vol. i. Berlin, 1873). was compatible with an advance in literature. We look for it in Samos, in Mitylene, in Syracuse, in vain. Throughout the rest of Greece the fever of politics, and the hardships of war, had acted fatally on literature.1 1 Though I freely confess the transcendent genius of Pericles, I see no reason for following the modern German school in the extravagant estimate of his moral character, which they have borrowed from Thucydides. There are not wanting evidences, to any one who will read his work not in blind admiration, but with a critical sense, that it is to a great extent what the Germans call a Tendenz-schrift, intended to magnify Pericles and his policy, while it traduces Cleon and others who succeeded the great statesmen. This sort of party-history has been written by Sallust, and detected by modern critics, who hold his two treatises to be political pamphlets, concealed under a garb of severe narrative. Perhaps Thucydides was to Sallust a more exact model than that historian suspected. Pericles (and Thucydides) stood to Cleon and his party in somewhat of the relation of the old Whigs in English politics to the modern Radicals. The former were great noblemen, who took up the cause of the people, and opposed the Tories, and so far the Radicals are their direct successors, just as Mr. Grote has shown that Cleon succeeded to the policy of Pericles. But nevertheless there are many old Whigs whose rank and traditions lead them to despise and dislike their modern allies, and to claim a distinct name, and assert on many points a distinct policy. Thus Thucydides, a follower of Pericles, certainly intends us to believe, and even insinuates strongly, that Cleon's policy was not the continuation of that of Pericles. But it is really strange how the genius of the historian has carried with him all the moderns, though he is almost the only contemporary, or nearly contemporary, authority, who estimates Pericles so highly. Thus, for example, the opinions of the two greatest Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, which are fortunately preserved, are apparently against him. Though the former was a decided aristocrat, and the latter a Liberal Conservative, and so opposed in principle to Pericles' Radicalism, as they thought it, yet as they judged him long after his death, when all personal bias had long passed away, their opinions are too weighty to be summarily set aside. Plato (Gorgias 515-18) does not indeed insist upon what seems to have |