The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Essays On Philosophy and the Classics
• Whately’s Elements of Logic 1828
• Notes On Some of the More Popular Dialogues of Plato 1834–35
• Editor’s Note
• The Protagoras
• The Phædrus
• The Gorgias
• The Apology of Socrates
• The Charmides
• The Euthyphron
• The Laches
• The Lysis
• The Parmenides
• Two Publications On Plato 1840
• Bailey On Berkeley’s Theory of Vision 1842, 1843
• Grote’s History of Greece [i] 1846
• Grote’s History of Greece [ii] 1853
• Bain’s Psychology 1859
• Grote’s Plato 1866
• Taine’s De L’intelligence 1870
• Berkeley’s Life and Writings 1871
• Grote’s Aristotle 1873
• Appendix: Bibliographic Index of Persons and Works Cited In the Essays, With Variants and Notes

GROTE’S HISTORY OF GREECE [II]

1853

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dissertations and Discussions, II (1867), 510-54, where under the title, “Grote’s History of Greece,” appears “Vols. IX. X. XI.” Reprinted from Edinburgh Review, XCVIII (Oct., 1853), 425-47, where it is headed “Art. V.—History of Greece. By George Grote, Esq. Vols. ix, x, xi. London: [Murray,] 1852-53”; running heads “Grote’s History of Greece, Vols. IX. X. XI.” Identified in JSM’s bibliography as “A review of vols. 9, 10 & 11 of Grote’s History of Greece, in the Edinburgh Review for October 1853” (MacMinn, 79). There are no corrections or alterations in the copy of the Edinburgh article in the Somerville College Library.

In the footnoted variants, “59” indicates D&D, II (1st ed.); “67” indicates D&D, II (2nd ed., the copy-text); “53” indicates Edinburgh Review. JSM quotes in several places from his earlier Spectator reviews of Grote’s History, and elsewhere paraphrases passages from those reviews. The relevant passages are indicated as variants, with the particular issue of the Spectator given in the note covering the whole passage; in the variants within quoted passages “S” indicates the Spectator, without date. For comment on the composition of the essay and related matters, see the Introduction and the Textual Introduction, xxxiii-xxxvii and lxxxvi-lxxxix above.

Grote’s History of Greece [II]^*

in his eighth volume, Mr. Grote brought the narrative of Grecian History to its great turning point—the subjugation of Athens by the Spartans and their confederates; including, as the immediate sequel of that event, the sanguinary tyranny of the Thirty—the rapid reaction in Grecian feeling—the return of the exiles under Thrasybulus, subsequently known at Athens by the designation of “those from Phyle” or “those from Piræus”—the restoration of Athens, under the tolerance of Sparta, to internal freedom though denuded of empire, and the inauguration of a new era of concord by the healing measures which made the archonship of Euclides memorable to succeeding generations. The recital of these stirring events was immediately followed by those admirable chapters on the Sophists and on Socrates, which may be pronounced the most important portion yet written of this History; whether we consider the intrinsic interest of their subjects—the deep-rooted historical errors which they tend to dispel—or the great permanent instruction contained in their display of the characteristics of one of the most eminent men who ever lived—a man unique in history, of a kind at all times needful, and seldom more needed than now.^†

The three volumes which we have here to notice contain no delineations belonging to the same elevated rank with that which closed so impressively the volume immediately preceding. The exposition and estimate of Plato, which alone would have afforded similar opportunities, though falling within the chronological period comprised in the eleventh volume, is not included in it, but reserved for one yet to come;^[*] except in so far as the philosopher is personally involved in the series of Sicilian transactions, through his connexion with Dion, whose remarkable and eminently tragic character and career form the centre of interest in the most striking chapter of these volumes.^[†] There is little scope in this portion of the work for bringing prominently forward any great ethical or philosophical ideas; and the illustrations it contains of Grecian character and institutions relate principally to points which the author had largely illustrated before. In no other part of the book is the continuity of the narrative so little broken by dissertation or discussion; but in the rapid succession of animating incidents, and the living display of interesting individual characters, these volumes are not inferior to any of the preceding.

They commence with the expedition of Cyrus, and the retreat of Xenophon and the Ten Thousand: an episode fertile in exemplifications of Grecian and of Asiatic characteristics, and especially valuable as being the only detailed account of the personal adventures of any body of Greeks, or even of any individual Greek, which has been directly transmitted to us by an eye-witness and actor.^[*] Next follows the history of the short-lived Lacedæmonian ascendancy; its deplorable abuse, and the conspicuous Nemesis which fell on that selfish and domineering community, by the irreparable prostration of her power through the arms of Thebes, so many years the firm ally of Sparta, and for her treacherous conduct to whom, even more than for any other of her misdeeds, she, in the general opinion of Greece, deserved her fate. The chapters which describe this contest, relate also the resurrection of Athens, and her reattainment, in diminished measure and for a brief period, of something like imperial dignity. At this halting-place Mr. Grote suspends the main course of his narrative, and takes up the thread of the history of the Sicilian Greeks; the most interesting part of whose story is included in the present volumes. He illustrates, by the conduct and fortunes of the elder Dionysius, the successive stages of the “despot’s progress.”^[†] Here, too, the avenging Nemesis attends; but, as usual with the misdeeds of rulers, the punishment is vicarious. The younger Dionysius, a weak and self-indulgent, but good-natured and rather well-meaning inheritor of despotic power, suffered the penalty of the usurpation and the multiplied tyrannies of his energetic and unscrupulous father. The decline and fall of the Dionysian dynasty, and the restoration of Sicilian freedom, are related by Mr. Grote in his best style of ethical narrative, and with a biographical interest equal to the historical. For, as the chapters on the fall of Sparta are animated and exalted by the great qualities of Epaminondas—the first of Greeks in military genius, surpassed only by Pericles in comprehensive statesmanship, yet even more honourably distinguished among Grecian politicians by the unostentatious disinterestedness of his public virtue, and the gentleness and generosity of his sentiments towards opponents; so the Sicilian chapters are lighted up, first by the high-minded but chequered, and even in his errors eminently interesting, character of Dion, and afterwards by the steadier and more unmixed brilliancy of the real liberator of Sicily, the wise, just, and heroic Timoleon.

Last comes that gloomy period of Grecian history, the age of Philip of Macedon: during which, enfeebled by the long and destructive wars which had successively prostrated every one of her leading states, Greece fell a prey to an able and enterprising neighbour, who, at the head of a numerous population of hardy warriors implicitly obedient to his will, was enabled to turn her own military arts and discipline against herself. At the time when Philip commenced his career of aggrandisement, the only Grecian state in a condition to meet him with anything like equality of strength was Athens; still free and prosperous, but so lowered in public spirit and moral energy, that she threw away all her opportunities, and only rallied with a vigour worthy of her ancestors when it was too late to do more than perish honourably. These sad events, so far as their course can be traced through the extreme imperfection of our information, are related by Mr. Grote down to the fatal day of Chæroneia. And neither is this melancholy recital destitute of the relief afforded by the appearance on the scene of an illustrious character. Even in that age Athens possessed a man, of whom posterity has ratified the proud boast, drawn from him in self-vindication, that if there had been one such man in every state of Greece, or even in Thessaly and Arcadia^dalone^d , the attempts of Philip to reduce the Greeks to subjugation would have been frustrated. What one man, of boundless energy, far-reaching political vision, and an eloquence unmatched even at Athens, could do to save Greece from an inevitable doom, Demosthenes did. His life was an incessant struggle against the fatality of the time, and the weaknesses of his countrymen. And though he failed in his object, and perished with the last breath of the freedom for which he had lived, he has been rewarded by that immortal fame, which, as he reminded the Athenians in the most celebrated passage of his greatest oration,^[*] is not deserved only by the successful; and which he merited not more by his unequalled oratorical eminence, than by the fact, that not one mean, or selfish, or narrow, or ungenerous sentiment is appealed to throughout those splendid addresses, in which he strove to rouse and nerve his countrymen to the contest, or proudly mourned over its unsuccessful issue.

The Chæroneian catastrophe closes the epoch of Grecian history. Though much that is highly interesting remains, its interest is derived from other sources; the diffusion of Greek civilization through the Eastern nations by the expedition of Alexander and its consequences, and a few noble but vain efforts, against insuperable obstacles, in Greece itself, to regain a freedom and national independence irrecoverably lost. Of the period of Grecian greatness, we have now from Mr. Grote the completed history. We have the budding, the blossoming, and the decay and death. The fruits which survived—the permanent gifts bequeathed by Greece to the world, and constituting the foundation of all subsequent intellectual achievements—these he has not yet, or has only partially, characterised. But he has produced a finished picture of the political and collective life of Greece, and the distinctive characters of the form of social existence, during and by means of which she accomplished things so far transcending what has ever elsewhere been achieved in so marvellously short a space of time. From the legislation of Solon to the field of Marathon, a hundred years of preparation; from Marathon to Chæroneia, barely a hundred and fifty years of maturity:—that century and a half is all that separates the earliest recorded prose writing from Demosthenes and Aristotle, all that lies between the first indication to the outer world of what Greece was destined to be, and her absorption by a foreign conqueror. A momentous interval, which decided for an indefinite period the question, whether the human race was to be stationary or progressive. That the former condition is far more congenial to ordinary human nature than the latter, experience unfortunately places beyond doubt; and history points out no other people in the ancient world who had any spring of unborrowed progress within themselves. We have no knowledge of any other source from which freedom and intellectual cultivation could have come, any other means by which the light never since extinguished might have been kindled, if the world had been left, without any elements of Grecian origin, to be fought for between the unlettered Romans and the priest-led and despot-governed Asiatics. The people and the period on which this depended, must be important to posterity as long as any portion of the past continues to be remembered: and by the aid of Mr. Grote, we are now enabled to see them with a clearness and accuracy, and judge them with a largeness of comprehension, never before approached.

To disparage what mankind owe to Greece, because she has not left for their imitation a perfect type of human character, nor a highly improved pattern of social institutions, would be to demand from the early youth of the human race what is far from being yet realized in its more advanced age. It would better become us to consider whether we have, in these particulars, advanced as much beyond the best Grecian model, as might with reason have been expected after more than twenty centuries; whether, having done no more than we have done with all that we have inherited from the Greeks, and all that has been since superadded to their teachings, we ought not to look up with reverent admiration to a people, who, without any of our adventitious helps, and without the stimulus of preceding example, moved forward by their native strength at so gigantic a pace, though in an earlier portion of the path. It is true, that in institutions, in manners, and even in the ideal standard of human character as existing in the best minds, there is an improvement. All the great thinkers and heroic lives, from Christ downward, would have done little for humanity, if after two thousand years no single point could be added to the type of excellence conceived by Socrates or Plato. But it is not the moral conceptions of heroes or philosophers which measure the difference between one age and another, so much as the accepted popular standard of virtuous conduct. Taking that as the criterion, and comparing the best Grecian with the best modern community, is the superiority wholly on the side of the moderns? Has there not been deterioration as well as improvement, and the former perhaps almost as marked as the latter? There is more humanity, more mildness of manners, though this only from a comparatively recent date; the sense of moral obligation is more cosmopolitan, and depends less for its acknowledgment on the existence of some special tie. But we greatly doubt if most of the positive virtues were not better conceived, and more highly prized, by the public opinion of Greece than by that of Great Britain; while negative and passive qualities have now engrossed the chief part of the honour paid to virtue; and it may be questioned if even private duties are, on the whole, better understood, while duties to the public, unless in cases of special trust, have almost dropped out of the catalogue: that idea, so powerful in the free States of Greece, has faded into a mere rhetorical ornament.

In political and social organization, the moderns, or some of them at least, have a more unqualified superiority over the Greeks. They have succeeded in making free institutions possible in large territories; and they have learnt to live and be prosperous without slaves. The importance of these discoveries—for discoveries they were—hardly admits of being overrated. For want of the first, Greece lost her freedom, her virtue, and her very existence as a people; and slavery was the greatest blot in her institutions while she existed. It is sufficient merely to mention another great blot, the domestic and social condition of women (on which point, however, Sparta, in a degree surprising for the age, formed an honourable exception); since, in this respect, the superiority of modern nations is not so much greater as might be supposed. Even on the subject of slavery there are many, and not inconsiderable palliations. Slavery in the ancient, as in the Oriental world, was a very different thing from American or West Indian slavery. The slaves were not a separate race, marked out to the contempt of their masters by indelible physical differences. When manumitted, they mixed on equal terms with the general community; and though, in Greece, seldom admitted, any more than other aliens, to the complete political franchise of their patron’s city, they could generally become full citizens of some new colony, or be placed on the roll of some old commonwealth recruiting its numbers after a disaster. The facility with which, in these small territories, slaves could escape across the frontier, must, at the worst, have been a considerable check to ill usage. The literature of the Athenians proves that they not only cultivated, but counted on finding, moral virtues in their slaves, which is not consistent with the worst form of slavery. Neither, in Greece, did slavery produce that one of its effects by which, above all, it is an obstacle to improvement—that of making bodily labour dishonourable. Nowhere in Greece, except at Sparta, was industry, however mechanical, regarded as unworthy of a freeman, or even of a citizen; least of all at Athens, in whose proudest times a majority of the Demos consisted of free artisans. Doubtless, however, in Greece as elsewhere, slavery was an odious institution; and its inherent evils are in no way lessened by the admission, that as a temporary fact, in an early and rude state of the arts of life, it may have been, nevertheless, a great accelerator of progress. If we read history with intelligence, we are led to think concerning slavery as concerning many other bad institutions, that the error was not so great of first introducing it, as of continuing it too long.

Though Grecian history is crowded with objects of interest, all others are eclipsed by Athens. Whatever in Greece most merits the gratitude of posterity, Athens possessed in fullest measure. If the Hellenic nation is in history the main source and most conspicuous representative of progress, Athens may claim the same honourable position in regard to Greece itself; for all the Greek elements of progress, in their highest culmination, were united in that illustrious city. This was not the effect of an original superiority of natural endowments in the Athenian mind. In the first exuberant outpourings of Grecian genius, Athens bore no more than her share, if even so much. The many famous poets and musicians who preceded the era of Marathon, the early speculators in science and philosophy, and even the first historians, were scattered through all the divisions of the Greek name; with a preponderance on the side of the Ionians of Asia Minor, the Sicilian and Italian Greeks, and the islanders, all of whom attained prosperity much earlier, as well as lost it sooner, than the inhabitants of Continental Greece. Even Bœotia produced two poets of the first rank, Pindar and Corinna, at a time when Attica had only yet produced one.^* By degrees, however, the whole intellect of Greece, except the purely practical, gravitated to Athens; until, in the maturity of Grecian culture, all the great writers, speakers, and thinkers were educated, and nearly all of them were born and passed their lives, in that centre of enlightenment. Of the other Greek states, such as were oligarchically governed contributed little or nothing, except in a military point of view, to make Greece illustrious. Even those among them which, like Sparta, were to a certain degree successful in providing for stability, did nothing for progress, further than supplying materials of study and experience to the great Athenian thinkers and their disciples. Of the other democracies, not one enjoyed the Eunomia, the unimpeded authority of law, and freedom from factious violence, which were quite as characteristic of Athens as either her liberty or her genius; and which, making life and property more secure than in any other part of the Grecian world, afforded the mental tranquillity which is also one of the conditions of high intellectual or imaginative achievement.

While Grecian history, considered philosophically, is thus almost concentrated in Athens, so also, considered æsthetically, it is an epic, of which Athens, as a collective personality, may be called the hero. The fate of Athens speaks to the imagination and sympathies like that of the Achilles or Odysseus of an heroic poem; absorbing into itself even the interest excited by the long series of eminent Athenians, who seem rather like successive phases under which Athens appears to us, than individuals independent and apart from it. Nowhere does history present to us a collective body so abounding in human nature as the Athenian Demos. In them all the capacities, all the impulses and susceptibilities, the strength and the infirmities, of human character, stand out in large and bold proportions. There is nothing that they do not seem capable of understanding, of feeling, and of executing; nothing generous or heroic to which they might not be roused; and scarcely any act of folly, injustice, or ferocity into which they could not be hurried, when no honest and able adviser was at hand to recal them to their better nature. Ever variable, according to the character of the leading minister of the time; alike prudent and enterprising under the guidance of a Pericles; carelessly inert or rashly ambitious when their most influential politicians were a Nicias and an Alcibiades; yet never abdicating their own guidance, always judging for themselves, and, though often wrong, seldom choosing the worst side when there was any one present capable of advocating the better. Light-hearted too, full of animal spirits and joyousness; revelling in the fun of hearing rival orators inveigh against each other; bursting with laughter at the mingled floods of coarse buffoonery and fine wit poured forth by the licensed libellers of their comic stage against their orators and statesmen, their poets, their gods, and even themselves—“that angry, waspish, intractable little old man, Demos of Pnyx,”^* the well-known laughing-stock of one of the most successful comedies of Aristophanes. They are accused of fickleness; but Mr. Grote has shown on how false an estimate of historical facts that imputation rests,^† and that they were much rather remarkable for the constancy of their attachments. They were not fickle, but (a very different quality, vulgarly confounded with it) mobile; keenly susceptible individually, and of necessity still more collectively, to the feeling and impression of the moment. The Demos may be alternately likened to the commonly received idea of a man, a woman, or a child, but never a clown or a boor. Right or wrong, wise or foolish, Athenians are never ἀπαίδευτοι; theirs are never the errors of untaught or unexercised minds. They are always the same Athenians who have thrilled with the grandeur and pathos of Æschylus and Sophocles, who were able to ransom themselves from captivity by reciting the verses of Euripides, who have had Pericles or Demosthenes for their daily instructor and adviser, and have heard every species of judicial case, public and private, civil and criminal, propounded for their decision, in the most finished compositions ever spoken to a public assembly. They are the same Athenians, too, who live and move among the visible memorials of ancestors, the greatest of whose glories was that they had dared and suffered all things rather than desert the liberty of Greece. Their just pride in such progenitors, and their sense of what was due to the dignity and fame of their city, were ever ready to be evoked for any noble cause. Even at the last, when their energies, too late aroused, had been insufficient to save them, and they lay crushed at the feet of a conqueror, they earned the admiration of posterity by bestowing, instead of displeasure, additional distinctions on the author and adviser of the struggle which had preserved their honour, though not their safety or their freedom.

In every respect Athens deserved the high commendation given her by Pericles in his Funeral Oration, of being the educator of Greece.^‡ And we cannot better set forth the characteristics of this great commonwealth at its greatest period, than by following Mr. Grote in quoting some passages from that celebrated discourse.

This picture, drawn by Pericles and transmitted by Thucydides, of ease of living, and freedom from social intolerance, combined with the pleasures of cultivated taste, and a lively interest and energetic participation in public affairs, is one of the most interesting passages in Greek history: placed, as it is, in the speech in which the first of Athenian statesmen professed to show “by what practices and by what institutions and manners the city had become great.”^† This remarkable testimony, as Mr. Grote has not failed to point out, wholly conflicts, so far as Athens is concerned, with what we are so often told about the entire sacrifice, in the ancient republics, of the liberty of the individual to an imaginary good of the state. In the greatest Greek commonwealth, as described by its most distinguished citizen, the public interest was held of paramount obligation in all things which concerned it; but, with that part of the conduct of individuals which concerned only themselves, public opinion did not interfere: while in the ethical practice of the moderns, this is exactly reversed, and no one is required by opinion to pay any regard to the public, except by conducting his own private concerns in conformity to its expectations. On this vital question of social morals, Mr. Grote’s remarks, though belonging to an earlier volume than those which we are reviewing, are too valuable, as well as too much to the purpose, to require any apology for quoting them.

^qr The difference here pointed out between the temper of the Athenian and that of the modern mind, is most closely connected with the wonderful display of individual genius which made Athens illustrious, and with the comparative mediocrity of modern times. Originality is not always genius, but genius is always originality; and a society which looks jealously and distrustfully on original people—which imposes its common level of opinion, feeling, and conduct, on all its individual members—may have the satisfaction of thinking itself very moral and respectable, but it must do without genius. It may have persons of talent, who bring a larger than usual measure of commonplace ability into the service of the common notions of the time; but genius, in such a soil, is either fatally stunted in its growth, or if its native strength forbids this, it usually retires into itself, and dies without a sign.^q

The ambitious external policy of Athens is one of the points in Greek history which have been most perversely misjudged and misunderstood. Modern historians seem to have succeeded to the jealous animosity of the Corinthians, and other members of the Spartan alliance, at the opening of the Peloponnesian war, though by no means at one with them in the reasons they are able to assign for it. The Athenians certainly were not exempt from the passion, universal in the ancient world, for conquest and dominion. It was a blemish, when judged by the universal standard of right; but as a fact, it was most beneficial to the world, and could not have been other than it was without crippling them in their vocation as the organ of progress. There was scarcely a possibility of permanent improvement for mankind, until intellect had first asserted its superiority, even in a military sense, over brute force. With the barbarous part of the species pressing in all^saround^s , to crush every early germ of improvement, all would have been lost if there had not also been an instinct in the better and more gifted portions of mankind to push for dominion over the duller and coarser. Besides, in a small but flourishing free community like Athens, ambition was the simple dictate of prudence. No such community could have had any safety for its own freedom, but by acquiring power. Instead of reprobating the Athenian maritime empire, the whole of mankind, beginning with the subject states themselves, had cause to lament that it was not much longer continued; for that the fate of Greek civilization was bound up with it, is proved by the whole course of^tthe^t history. When the jealousies of the other Greek states stripped Athens of her empire, and nominally restored the subject allies to an independence which they were wholly incapable of maintaining, Greece lost her sole chance of making successful head against Macedonia or Rome. And considering what the short period of Athenian greatness has done for the world, it is painful to think in how much more advanced a stage human improvement might now have been, if the Athens of Pericles could have lived on in undiminished spirit and energy for but one century more.

The Athenian empire was the purest in its origin of all the empires of antiquity. It was at first a free and equal confederacy for defence against the Persians, organized by Aristides with a justice worthy of his name. It never would have become anything else, but that the majority of the allies, consisting of the comparatively unwarlike and^uunenergetic^uvAsiatic^v Greeks, chose to make their contribution in money instead of personal service, preferring to pay Athens for protecting them, rather than protect themselves. Even the removal of the treasury of the confederacy from Delos to Athens was no act of the Athenians, but of the synod of the confederacy, on the proposition of Samos. When, at a later date, some of the states attempted to secede from the alliance, and enjoy the peace and security which it afforded, without sharing in the cost, the general sentiment of the confederates at first went along with Athens in bringing back the recusants by force of arms. But, with these small town communities, to be defeated was to be conquered, and the conquered, by the universal custom of antiquity, received the law from the conqueror. That law, in the case of Athens, was only occasionally either harsh or onerous; yet thus, by degrees, the once equal allies sunk into tributaries. The few who had neither revolted, nor commuted personal service for pecuniary payment, retained their naval and military force, and their immunity from tribute, and had nothing to complain of, but that, like the dependencies of England or of any modern nation, they were compelled to join in the wars of the dominant state, without having any voice in deciding them. They do not seem to have alleged any other practical grievances against the Athenian community: their complaints, recorded by Thucydides, turn almost solely upon offence to the Grecian sentiment of city independence and dignity. Under the protection of the powerful Athenian navy, the allied states enjoyed a security never before known in Greece, and which no one of them could possibly have acquired by its own efforts. Many of them grew rich and prosperous. With their internal government Athens, as a general rule, did not interfere; in Mr. Grote’s opinion, not even to make it democratical, when it did not happen to be so already. Like all the weak states of antiquity, whether called independent or not, they were liable to extortion and oppression; not, however, from the Athenian people, but from rich and powerful Athenians in command of expeditions, against whom the Demos, when judicially appealed to, was ready to give redress. The most express testimony is borne to this general fact by the able oligarchical conspirator Phrynichus, as reported by the oligarchically inclined Thucydides, in his account of that remarkable incident in Athenian history, the revolution of the Four Hundred. The historian represents Phrynichus as reminding his fellow-conspirators that they could expect neither assistance nor good-will from the allies, since these well knew that it was from the oligarchical Athenians they were liable to injury, and looked upon the Demos as their protector.^* The reality of the protection is exemplified by the case of Paches, the victorious general who had just before captured Mitylene. The resentment of the Athenians against that revolted city was such, that they were (as is well known) persuaded by Cleon to pass a decree for putting the whole military population to death, though they recalled the mandate before it had been executed. Yet, Paches having abused his victory by violating two women of Mitylene^w(having first put their husbands to death)^w was prosecuted by them before the Athenian dicastery, and the facts being proved, was so overwhelmed by the general burst of indignation, that he slew himself in open court. This incident (which until its real circumstances had been hunted out by Niebuhr,^[*] was one of the stock examples of Athenian and popular ingratitude) is a striking illustration of the difference between the Athenian empire and the Lacedæmonian; for when Spartan citizens, in repeated instances, committed similar enormities, not against conquered enemies but friendly allies, no redress could be obtained. It required the field of Leuctra to avenge the daughters of Skedasus, or appease the manes of the victims of the harmost Aristodemus.

However unpopular the dominion of Athens may have been among her subjects, though it appears to have been so with the leading men rather than with the majority, they had reason enough to regret it after it was at an end; for not only was the little finger of Lacedæmon heavier than the whole body of Athens, but many of them only exchanged Greek dominion for that of the barbarians. Sparta was never able, for more than a few years, to protect the Asiatic Greeks even against Persia; and at the height of her power, as soon as the obligation of defending them became inconvenient, she, by the peace of Antalcidas, actually ceded the whole of that great division of Greece to the Persian king,^[†] to whom it remained subject until the invasion of Alexander. Several of the most prosperous of the islanders fared no better: Cos, Chios, and Rhodes, when by the Social War they succeeded in detaching themselves from the second Athenian empire, fell almost immediately into dependence on the Carian despot Mausolus, against whom the Rhodians had soon to appeal again to their enemy, Athens, for assistance. So mere a name was that universal autonomy, which was used so successfully to stir up the feelings of the Hellenic world against its noblest member; so entirely did the independence of Greece turn on the maintenance of some cohesion among her multifarious particles, while the political instincts of her people obstinately rejected the merging of the single city-republic in any larger unity.

The intellectual and moral pre-eminence which made Athens the centre of good to Greece, and of the good to after-generations of which Greece has been the medium, was wholly the fruit of Athenian institutions. It was the consequence, first of democracy, and secondly, of the wise and well-considered organization, by which the Athenian democracy was distinguished among the democratic constitutions of antiquity. The term democracy may perhaps be deemed inapplicable to any of the Grecian governments, on account of the existence of slavery; and it is inapplicable to them, in the purest and most honourable sense of the term. But in another sense, not altogether inappropriate, those governments, the first to which the word democracy was applied, must be considered entitled to the name; in the same manner as it is given to the northern States of America, although women are there excluded from the rights of citizenship; an exclusion which, equally with that of slaves, militates against the democratic principle. The Athenian Constitution was so far a democracy, that it was government by a multitude, composed in majority of poor persons—small landed proprietors and artisans. It had the additional democratic characteristic, far more practically important than even the political franchise; it was a government of boundless publicity and freedom of speech. It had the liberty of the bema, of the dicastery, the portico, the palæstra, and the stage; altogether a full equivalent for the liberty of the press. Further, it was the only government of antiquity which possessed this inestimable advantage in the same degree, or retained it as long. Enemies and friends alike testify that the παῤῥησία of Athens was paralleled in no other place in the known world. Every office and honour was open to every citizen, not, as in the aristocratic Roman republic (or even the British monarchy), almost nominally, but really: while the daily working of Athenian institutions (by means of which every citizen was accustomed to hear every sort of question, public and private, discussed by the ablest men of the time, with the earnestness of purpose and fulness of preparation belonging to actual business, deliberative or judicial) formed a course of political education, the equivalent of which modern nations have not known how to give even to those whom they educate for statesmen. To their multitudinous judicial tribunals the Athenians were also indebted for that habitual love of fair play, and of hearing both sides of a case, which was more or less a quality of the Greeks generally, but had so firm a hold on the Athenians that it did not desert them under the most passionate excitement. The potency of Grecian democracy in making every individual in the multitude identify his feelings and interests with those of the state, and regard its freedom and greatness as the first and principal of his own personal concerns, cannot be better described than in the words of Mr. Grote. After quoting a remarkable passage from Herodotus, descriptive of the unexpected outburst of patriotic energy at Athens after the expulsion of the Pisistratidæ and the establishment of the Cleisthenean constitution,^* Mr. Grote proceeds as follows.

The influences here spoken of were those of democracy generally. For the peculiar and excellent organization of her own democracy, Athens was indebted to a succession of eminent men. The earliest was her great legislator, Solon; himself the first capital prize which Athens drew in the dispensations of the Destinies; a man whose personal virtue ennobled the city^xfor^x which he was chosen to legislate, and the merit of whose institutions was a principal source of the deep-rooted respect for the laws, which distinguished Athens beyond any other of the ancient democracies. The salutary forms of business established by Solon, and calculated to secure as much caution and deliberation as^ywere^y compatible with ultimate decision by a sovereign Ecclesia, lived through the successive changes by which the Constitution was rendered more and more democratic. And though it is commonly supposed that popular passion in a democracy is peculiarly liable to trample on forms when they stand between it and its object—which is indeed, without question, one of the dangers of a democracy—there is no point in the character of the Athenians more remarkable, than their respect and attachment to the forms of their Constitution. In the height of their anger against Pericles, for not leading them out to defend their lands and houses from the ravages of the Peloponnesians—because he, standing on his privilege as a magistrate, abstained from calling an assembly, no assembly met. There is indeed but one marked instance known to us in Athenian history, of that violation of forms which was the daily practice of most of the oligarchical governments. That one was a case of great and just provocation, the “cause célèbre” of the six generals who neglected to save their drowning countrymen after the sea fight of Arginusæ: and there was, as Mr. Grote has shown, no injustice in the fact of their condemnation by the people, though there was a blameable violation of the salutary rules of criminal procedure established for the protection of the innocent. It was in this case that the philosopher Socrates, accidentally that month a senator of the presiding tribe, as firm against the “civium ardor prava jubentium” as afterwards against the “vultus instantis tyranni,”^[*] singly refused to join in putting the question to the assembly contrary to the laws; adding one to the proofs that the man of greatest intellect at that time in Athens was also its most virtuous citizen.

After Solon (omitting the intervening usurpation of Pisistratus), the first great constitutional change was the reformation of Cleisthenes, an eminent man, to whose character and historical importance no one before Mr. Grote had done justice. The next was that in which the immediate mover was Aristides, at the re-establishment of the city after the Persian war, when the poorest class of citizens was first admitted to share in public employments. The final measures which completed the democratic constitution were those of Pericles and Ephialtes; more particularly the latter, a statesman of whom, from the unfortunate absence of any cotemporary history of the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars except the brief introductory sketch of Thucydides,^[†] we have to lament that too little is known, but of whom the recorded anecdotes indicate a man worthy to have been the friend of Pericles.^* Ephialtes perished by assassination, a victim to the rancorous hatred of the oligarchical party. Assassination afterwards disappears from Athenian public life, until reintroduced on a regular system by the same party, to effect the revolution of the Four Hundred. The Athenian Many, of whose democratic irritability and suspicion we hear so much, are rather to be accused of too easy and goodnatured a confidence, when we reflect that they had living in the midst of them the very men who, on the first show of an opportunity, were ready to compass the subversion of the democracy by the dark deeds of Peisander and Antiphon, and when they had effected their object, perpetrated all the villanies of Critias and his associates.^zThese men^aought always to be present to the mind, not merely as^ba^b dark background to the picture of the Athenian republic, but as an active power in it^a.^zcThey^c were no obscure private individuals, but men of rank and fortune, not only prominent as politicians and public speakers, but continually trusted with all the great offices of state. Truly Athens was in more danger from these men than from the demagogues: they were indeed themselves the worst of the demagogues—described by Phrynichus, their confederate, as, for their own purposes, the leaders and instigators of the Demos to its most blameable actions, ποριστὰς καὶ ἐσηγητὰς τω̑ν κακω̑ν τῳ̑ δήμῳ, ἐξ ὠ̑ν τὰ πλείω αὐτοὺς ὠϕελει̑σθαι.^[*]

These are a few of the topics on which a flood of light is let in by Mr. Grote’s History, and from which those who have not read it may form some notion of the interest which pervades it, especially the part relating to the important century between 500 and 400 ^d The searching character of Mr. Grote’s historical criticism is not suspiciously confined to matters in which his own political opinions may be supposed to be interested. Though the statement has the air of an exaggeration, yet after much study of Mr. Grote’s book we do not hesitate to assert, that there is hardly a fact of importance in Grecian history which was perfectly understood before his re-examination of it. This will not seem incredible, to those who are aware how new an art that of writing history is; how very recently it is that we possess histories, of events not cotemporary with the writer, which, apart from literary merit, have any value otherwise than as materials; how utterly uncritical, until lately, were all historians, even as to the most important facts in history, and how much, even after criticism had commenced, the later writers merely continued to repeat after the earlier. In our own generation, Niebuhr has effected a radical revolution in the opinions of all educated persons respecting Roman history. Grecian events, subsequent to the Homeric period, are more authentically recorded; but there, too, a very moderate acquaintance with the evidence was sufficient to show how superficially it had hitherto been examined.

^e That the Sophists, for example, were not the knaves and profligates they are so often represented^fto have been^f , could be gathered even from the statements of the hostile witnesses on whose authority they were condemned. The Protagoras alone, of their great enemy Plato, is a sufficient document.^gBut Mr. Grote has been the first to point out clearly what the Sophists really were .^hThat term was the common designation for speculative inquirers generally, and more particularly for instructors of youth; and was applied to Socrates and Plato, as much as to those whom they confuted. The Sophists formed no school, had no common doctrines, but speculated in the most conflicting ways on physics and metaphysics; while with respect to morals, those among them who professed to prepare young men for active life, taught the current morality of the age in its best form: the apologue of the Choice of Hercules was the composition of a Sophist.^[*] It is most unjust to the Sophists to adopt, as the verdict of history upon them, the severe judgment of Plato, although from Plato’s point of view they deserved it. He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind. One who had these high aspirations, had naturally little esteem for men who did not see, or aspire to see, beyond the common ideas of their age; but, as Mr. Grote remarks, to accept his judgment of them would be like characterizing the teachers and politicians of the present time in the words applied to them by Owen or Fourier.^[†] Even Plato, for the most part, puts the immoral doctrines ascribed to the Sophists (such as the doctrine that might makes right) into the mouths not of Sophists, but of ambitious active politicians, like Callicles. The Sophists, in Plato, almost always express themselves not only with decorum, but with good sense and feeling, on the subject of social duties; thoughⁱhis hero Socratesⁱ always succeeds in puzzling them, and displaying the confusion of their ideas, or rather of the common ideas of mankind, of which they are the exponents.^hg

^j Again, the Athenian democracy had been so outrageously, and without measure, misrepresented, that whoever had read, as so few have done, Thucydides and the orators with decent intelligence and candour, could easily perceive that the vulgar representation was very wide of the truth; just as any one who had read Livy could see, and many did see, that the Agrarian law was not the unjust spoliation that was pretended: but as it required Niebuhr to detect with accuracy what the Agrarian law actually was,^[*] so no less profound a knowledge of Greek literature than that of Mr. Grote, combined with equal powers of reasoning and reflection, would have sufficed to make the effective working of the Athenian Constitution as well known to us as it may now be pronounced to be. The mountain of error which had accumulated and hardened over Greek history, the removal of which had been meritoriously commenced by Dr. Thirlwall, has not only been shaken off, but the outlines of the real object are now made visible. And so cautious and sober is Mr. Grote in the^kestimation^k of evidence, so constantly on his guard against letting his conclusions outrun his proofs, as to make it a matter of wonder that among so much that is irreparably lost, his researches have enabled him to arrive at so considerable an amount of positive and certifiable result.

This conscientious scrupulousness in maintaining the demarcation between conjecture and proof, is more indispensable than any other excellence in a historian, and above all in one who sets aside the common notion of many of the facts which he relates, and replaces it by a version of his own. Without this quality, such an innovator on existing beliefs inspires no reliance, and can only, at most, unsettle historical opinion, without helping to restore it. Anybody can scrawl over the canvas with the commonplaces of rhetoric or the catchwords of party politics; and many, especially in Germany, can paint-in a picture from the more or less ingenious suggestions of a learned imagination. But Mr. Grote commands the confidence of the reader by his sobriety in hypothesis, by never attempting to pass off an inference as a fact, and, when he differs from the common opinion, explaining his reasons with the precision and minuteness of one who neither desires nor expects that anything will be taken upon trust. He has felt that a history of Greece, to be of any value, must be also a running commentary on the evidence, and he has endeavoured to put the reader in a position to judge for himself on every disputable point. But the discussions, though to a historical taste as interesting as the narrative, are not carried on at its expense. Wherever the facts, authentically known, allow a consecutive stream of narrative to be kept up, the story is told in a more interesting manner than it has anywhere been told before, except in the finest passages of Thucydides.

We are indeed disposed to assign to this history almost as high a rank in narrative as in thought. It is open, no doubt, to minute criticism; and many writers are superior to Mr. Grote in rapidity, grace, and picturesqueness of style. But even in these respects there is no such deficiency as amounts to a fault, while in two qualities, far more important to the interest, not to say the value, of his recitals, he has few equals and probably no superior. The first is, that at each point in the series of events, he makes it his primary object to fill his own mind and his reader’s with as correct and complete a conception as can be formed of the situation; so that we enter at once into the impressions and feelings of the actors, both collective and individual^l . Niebuhr had already, in his Lectures on Ancient History^m ,^[*] carried his characteristic liveliness of conception into the representation of the leading characters of Greek history, depicting them, often we fear with insufficient warrant from evidence, like persons with whom he had long lived and been familiar; but, for clearness and correctness in conceiving the surrounding circumstances, and the posture of affairs at each particular moment, we do not think him at all comparable to Mr. Grote.

ⁿOne of the beneficial fruits of this quality is, that it makes the history a philosophic one without apparent effort. There is no need of lengthened discussion to connect causes with their effects; the causes and effects are parts of the same picture, and the causes are seen in action before it appears what they are to produce. For example, the reader whose mind is filled with the greatness attained by Athens while her councils were ruled by the commanding intellect and self-restraining prudence of Pericles, might almost anticipate the coming disasters when he finds, in the early chapters of the^oseventh volume^o , into the hands of what advisers Athens had already fallen. And, mark well, these evil advisers were not the demagogues, but the chiefs of the aristocracy, the richest and most highborn men in the republic—Nicias and Alcibiades. Mr. Grote had already shown grounds for believing that Cleon, and men of his stamp, had been far too severely dealt with by historians; not that they did not frequently deserve censure, but that they were by no means the worst misleaders of the Athenian people. The demagogues were, as he observes, essentially opposition speakers. The conduct of affairs was habitually in the hands of the rich and great, who had by far the largest share of personal influence, and on whose mismanagement there would have been hardly any check, but for the demagogues and their hostile criticism. These opinions receive ample confirmation from the course of affairs, when, there being no longer any lowborn Cleon or Hyperbolus to balance their influence, Nicias and Alcibiades had full scope to ruin the commonwealth. The contrary vices of these two men, both equally fatal, are exemplified in the crowning act of their maladministration; the one having been the principal adviser of the ill-starred expedition to Syracuse, while the other was the main cause of its ruinous failure, by his intellectual and moral incapacity.ⁿ

^p This genuine realization of the successive situations,^qalso^q renders the narrative itself a picture of the Greek mind. Carrying on, throughout, the succession of feelings concurrently with that of events, the writer becomes, as it were, himself a Greek, and takes the reader along with him. And hence, if every discussion or dissertation in the book were omitted, it would still be wonderfully in advance of any former history in making the Greeks intelligible. For example, no modern writer has made the reader enter into the religious feelings of the Greeks as Mr. Grote does. Other historians let it be supposed that, except in some special emergencies, beliefs and feelings relating to the unknown world counted for very little among the determining causes of events; and it is a kind of accredited opinion, that the religion of the ancients sat almost as lightly on them, as if it had been to them, what it is in modern literature, a mere poetical ornament. But the case was quite otherwise: religion was one of the most active elements in Grecian life, with an effect, in the early rude times, probably on the whole beneficial, but growing more and more injurious as civilization advanced. Mr. Grote is the first historian who has given an adequate impression of the omnipresence of this element in Grecian life; the incessant reference to supernatural hopes and fears which pervaded public and private transactions, as well as the terrible power with which those feelings were capable of acting, and not unfrequently did act, on the Hellenic susceptibilities. While our admiration is thus increased for the few superior minds who, like Pericles and Epaminondas, rose above at least the vulgarer parts of the religion of their country, or, like Plato, probably rejected it altogether, we are enabled to see the explanation of much that would otherwise be enigmatical, and to judge the Greeks with the same amount of allowance for errors produced by their religion, which in parallel cases is always conceded to the moderns.

The other eminent quality which distinguishes Mr. Grote’s narrative is its pervading ἤθος; the moral interest, which is so much deeper and more impressive than picturesque interest, and exists in portions of the history which afford no materials for the latter. The events do not always admit of being vividly depicted to the mental eye; and when they do, the author does not always make use of the opportunity: but one thing he never fails in—the moral aspect of the events and of the persons is never out of sight, and gives the predominating character to the recital. We use the word moral not solely in the restricted sense of right and wrong, but as inclusive of the whole of the sentiments connected with the occasion. Along with the clear light of the scrutinizing intellect, there is the earnest feeling of a sympathizing contemporary. This rich source of impressiveness in narration is often wanting in writers of the liveliest fancy, and the most brilliant faculty of delineating the mere outside of historical facts^r .

^sNor is the narrative deficient in the commoner sources of interest. The apt selection and artistic grouping of the details of battles and sieges, Mr. Grote had found done to his hand by the consummate narrators whom he follows, and in this respect he could do no better than simply to reproduce their recital. There is much more that belongs peculiarly to himself, in the series of remarkable characters whom he exhibits before us, not so much (generally speaking) in description or analysis, as in action. In the earlier period, the prominent characters are Themistocles and Aristides: Themistocles, the most sagacious, the most far-sighted, the most judiciously daring, the craftiest, and unfortunately also one of the most unprincipled of politicians; who first saved, then aggrandized, and at last would have sold his country: Aristides, the personification of public and private integrity, the one only Grecian statesman who finds grace before the somewhat pedantically rigid tribunal of the Platonic Socrates.

^tThe^t figure which most brightly illuminates^uthe middle period^u of Mr. Grote’s history is Pericles—“the Thunderer”—“the Olympian Zeus,” as he was called by his libellers, the comic dramatists of Athens.^[*] Seldom, if ever, has there been seen in a statesman of any age, such a combination of great qualities as were united in this illustrious man: unrivalled in eloquence; eminent in all the acquirements, talents, and accomplishments of his country; the associate of all those among his^vcotemporaries^v who were above their age, either in positive knowledge or in freedom from superstition; though an aristocrat by birth and fortune, a thorough democrat in principle and conduct, yet never stooping to even the pardonable arts of courting popularity, but acquiring and maintaining his ascendancy solely by his commanding qualities; never flattering his countrymen save on what was really admirable in them, and which it was for their good to be taught to cherish, but the determined enemy of their faults and follies; ever ready to peril his popularity by giving disagreeable advice, and when not appreciated, rising up against the injustice done him with a scornful dignity almost amounting to defiance. Such was Pericles: and that such a man should have been practically first minister of Athens during the greatest part of a long political life, is not so much honourable to him as to the imperial people who were willing to be so led; who, though in fits of temporary irritation and disappointment, excusable in the circumstances, they several times withdrew their favour from him, always hastened to give it back; and over whom, while he lived, no person of talents and virtues inferior to his was able to obtain any mischievous degree of influence. It is impossible to estimate how great a share this one man had in making the Athenians what they were^w . A great man had, in the unbounded publicity of Athenian political life, extraordinary facilities for moulding his country after his own image; and seldom has any people, during a whole generation, enjoyed such a course of education, as forty years of listening to the lofty spirit and practical wisdom of Pericles must have been to the Athenian Demos.

As the next in this gallery of historical portraits, we quote the character of another but a far inferior Athenian statesman, whom Mr. Grote is, we think, the very first to appreciate correctly, and bring before us in the colours and lineaments of life.^x

We have the more willingly extracted this passage, because, like many others in these volumes, it contains lessons applicable to other times and circumstances than those of Greece; Nicias being a perfect type of one large class of the favourites of public opinion, modern as well as ancient. And the view here incidentally presented of some points in the character and disposition of the Athenian Many, will afford to readers who only know Athens and Greece through the medium of writers like Mitford, some faint idea of how much they have to unlearn.^s

With regard to style, in the ordinary sense, what is most noticeable in Mr. Grote is, that his style always rises with his subject. The more valuable the thought, or interesting the incident, the apter and more forcible is the expression; as is generally the case with writers who are thinking of their subject rather than of their literary reputation. We can conscientiously say of him what, rightly understood, is the highest praise which, on the score of mere composition, a writer in the more intellectual departments of literature can desire or deserve; that everything which he has to express, he is always able to express adequately and worthily.^y

[* ]Edinburgh Review, October 1853. Vide supra (p. 283 [pp. 273-305 of this edition]) the review of the first and second volumes. The articles in the Edinburgh Review on the intermediate volumes of Mr. Grote’s History were not written by the author. [See George Cornewall Lewis, “Grote’s History of Greece,” Edinburgh Review, XCI (Jan., 1850), 118-52, and John Conington, ibid., XCIV (July, 1851), 204-28.] Some passages from shorter notices of those volumes, published as they successively appeared, have been incorporated with the following article. [See pp. 309n-310n, 318-21, 327-9, and 331-6.]

[† ][59]aWe have not space to giveb the smallest specimen of the delineation of this remarkable character, now brought into clearer light than ever before—a philosopher inculcating, under a supposed religious impulse, pure reason and a rigid discipline of the logical faculty. But we invite attention to the estimate, contained in this chapter, of the peculiarities of the Socratic teaching, and of the urgent need, at the present and at all times, of such a teacher. Socrates, in morals, is conceived by Mr. Grote as the parallel of Bacon in physics. He exposed the loose, vague, confused, and misleading character of the common notions of mankind on the most familiar subjects. By apt interrogations, forcing the interlocutors to become conscious of the want of precision in their own ideas, he showed that the words in popular use on all moral subjects (words which, because they are familiar, all persons fancy they understand) in reality answer to no distinct and well-defined ideas; and that the common notions, which those words serve to express, all require to be reconsidered. This is exactly what Bacon showed to be the casecwithc respect to the phrases and notions commonly current on physical subjects. It is the fashion of the present day to decry negative dialectics; as if making men conscious of their ignorance were not the first step—and an absolutely necessary one—towards inducing them to acquire knowledge. “Opinio copiæ,” says Bacon, “maxima causa inopiæ est.” [“Instauratio Magna,” Novum Organum, Works, Vol. I, p. 125.] The war which Bacon made upon confused general ideas, “notiones temere a rebus abstractas,” [ibid., Book I, Aph. 14, p. 158,] was essentially negative, but it constituted the epoch from which alone advancement in positive knowledge became possible. It is to Bacon that we owe Newton, and the modern physical science. In like manner Socrates, by convincing men of their ignorance, and pointing out the conditions of knowledge, originated the positive movement which produced Plato and Aristotle. With them and their immediate disciples that movement ceased, and has never yet been so effectually revived as to be permanent. The common notions of the present time on moral and mental subjects are as incapable of supporting the Socratic cross-examination as those of his own age: they are, just as much, the wild fruits of the undisciplined understanding—of the “intellectus sibi permissus,” as Bacon phrases it [see ibid., pp. 138, 160]; rough generalizations of first impressions, or consecrations of accidental feelings, without due analysis or mental circumscription.a

[[*] ]Grote did not treat Plato in Vol. XII (1856) of his History (for his reasons, see Vol. XII, pp. 662-3), but in his Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates (1865).

[[†] ]See Vol. XI, Chap. lxxxiv, pp. 75ff.

[[*] ]See Xenophon, Anabasis, passim.

[[†] ]See Grote, History, Vol. X, p. 616.

[d-d]53 only

[[*] ]See De Corona, in De Corona and De Falsa Legatione (Greek and English), trans. C. A. Vince and J. H. Vince (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1926), p. 186 (225).

[* ]By some oversight, Mr. Grote has passed over one whole generation of Grecian poets. He has given as full an account as the materials permit, of the earlier poets, down to the age of Alcæus and Sappho, and has spoken at some length of the dramatists, but has said nothing (except incidentally) of Pindar, Simonides, Anacreon, Bacchylides, or the two Bœotian poetesses, Myrtis and Corinna, the last of whom was five times crowned at Thebes in competition with Pindar.

[* ]Mr. Grote’s paraphrase of

• Ἄγροικος ὀργήν, κυαμοτρώξ, ἀκράχολος,
• Δη̑μος Πνυκίτης, δύσκολον γερόντιον.
• (Arist. Eq. 41.) [See The Knights, in Aristophanes, trans. Rogers, Vol. I, p. 128 (41-2); Grote, History, Vol. IV, p. 138.]

[† ]See this point admirably handled in the remarks, in the last chapter but one of the fourth volume, [pp. 497ff.,] on the condemnation of Miltiades.

[‡ ]Τὴν πα̑σαν πόλιν τη̑ς Ἑλλάδος παίδευσιν εἰ̑ναι. (Thucydides [(Greek and English), trans. Charles Foster Smith, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), Vol. I, p. 330], II, 41.)

[e-e][quoted also in JSM’s “Grote’s Greece—Volumes V and VI,” Spectator, XXII (10 March, 1849), 227]

[f-f]S Our

[g-g]S intolerance [printer’s error in S?]

[h-h]S daily

[i-i]S may do

[j]S ever

[k-k]S , though they do no positive damage, are not the less sure to offend

[* ]Vol. VI, pp. 193-6. [Grote is translating from Thucydides, II, 37-40 (trans. Smith, Vol. I, pp. 322-8).] We have ventured to change a few expressions in Mr. Grote’s translation, in order, though at the expense of smoothness, to bring it closer to the literal meaning of the original. [See the collation in the Bibliographic Index, pp. 533-4 below, and 318f-f_k-k above.]

[† ][59] [See Thucydides, trans. Smith, Vol. I, p. 322 (II, 36).] It is worthy of notice that in the speech of Nicias to his troops, preceding their final death-struggle in the harbour of Syracuse, he too (if correctly reported by Thucydides) reminds them of the same feature in their national institutions and habits, the unrivalled freedom of the individual in respect to his mode of life:

πατρίδος τε τη̑ς ἐλευθερωτάτης ὑπομιμνήσκων, καὶ τη̑ς ἐν αὐτῃ̑ ἀνεπιτάκτον πα̑σιν ἐς τὴν δίαιταν ἐξουσίας. (Ibid. [Vol. IV, p. 136], VII, 69.)

[l-l][quoted also in JSM’s “Grote’s Greece—Volumes V and VI,” Spectator, XXII (10 March, 1849), 227]

[m-m]S the

[n-n]+53, 59, 67

[o-o]S pursuit

[p-p]S further

[q-q]+59, 67 [quoted from JSM’s “Grote’s Greece—Volumes V and VI,” Spectator, XXII (10 March, 1849), 227]

[r]S There have been few things lately written more worthy of being meditated on than this striking paragraph.

[s-s]53, 59 round

[t-t]53 this

[u-u]59 energetic [printer’s error?]

[v-v]53 Ionian

[* ]Τούς τε καλοὺς κἀγαθοὺς ὀνομαζομένους οὐκ ἐλάσσω αὐτοὺς νομίζειν σϕίσι πράγματα παρέξειν του̑ δήμου, ποριστὰς ὄντας καὶ ἐσηγητὰς τω̑ν κακω̑ν τῳ̑ δήμῳ, ἐξ ὠ̑ν τὰ πλείω αὐτοὺς ὠϕελει̑σθαι· καὶ τὸ μὲν ἐπ’ ἐκείνοις εἰ̑ναι, καὶ ἄκριτοι ἄν καὶ βιαιότερον ἀποθνήσκειν, τόν τε δη̑μον σϕω̑ν τε καταϕυγὴν εἰ̑ναι καὶ ἐκείνων σωϕρονιστήν. Καὶ ταυ̑τα παρ’ αὑτω̑ν τω̑ν ἔργων ἐπισταμένας τὰς πόλεις σαϕω̑ς αὐτὸς εἰδέναι, ὅτι οὕτω νομίζουσιν. (Thucydides [trans. Smith, Vol. IV, pp. 274-6], VIII, 48.)

[w-w]53 , having . . . death,

[[*] ]See Thirlwall’s translation of Niebuhr, “On Xenophon’s Hellenica,” Philological Museum, I (1832), 495.

[[†] ]Artaxerxes II.

[* ]Ἀθηναι̑οι μέν νυν ἤυξηντο· δηλοι̑ δὲ οὐ κατ’ ἕν μόνον ἀλλὰ πανταχη̑, ἡ ἰσηγορίη ὡς ἔστι χρη̑μα σπουδαι̑ον, εἰ καὶ Ἀθηναι̑οι τυραννευομένοι μέν, οὐδαμω̑ν τω̑ν σϕέας περιοικεόντων ἔσαν τὰ πολέμια ἀμείνους, ἀπαλλαχθέντες δὲ τυράννων, μακρῳ̑ πρω̑τοι ἐγένοντο· δηλοι̑ ὡ̑ν ταυ̑τα, ὅτι κατεχομένοι μὲν, ἐθελοκάκεον, ὡς δεσπότῃ ἐργαζομένοι, ἐλευθερωθέντων δέ, αὐτὸς ἔκαστος ὲωυτῳ̑ προθυμέετο κατεργάζεσθαι. (Herodotus [trans. Godley, Vol. III, p. 86], V, 78.)

[[*] ]Ibid., Vol. II, pp. 104-10 (III, 80-2).

[[*] ]See Plutarch, Lives, trans. Perrin, Vol. I, p. 456.

[x-x]53, 59 by

[y-y]53 was

[[*] ]Horace, “Carmina,” in The Odes and Epodes (Latin and English), trans. C. E. Bennett (London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 178 (III, iii, 2-3).

[[†] ]See Thucydides, trans. Smith, Vol. I, pp. 40-98 (I, 17-58).

[* ]See particularly [Claudius] Ælian, Varia Historia [ed. Rudolph Hercher (Leipzig: Teubneri, 1866), p. 115], XI, 9, and [p. 157,] XIII, 39.

[z-z]+59, 67

[a-a][quoted from JSM’s “Grote’s Greece—Volumes VII and VIII,” Spectator, XXIII (16 March, 1850), p. 256]

[b-b]S the

[c-c]53 These

[[*] ]Thucydides, VIII, 48 (trans. Smith, Vol. IV, p. 274).

[d]53 We have chosen our instances according to our own estimate of their importance, rather than according to their fitness to display the merits of the book.

[e]53 [no paragraph]

[f-f]+59, 67

[g-g]+59, 67

[h-h][quoted from JSM’s “Grote’s Greece—Volumes VII and VIII,” Spectator, XXIII (16 March, 1850), p. 256]

[[*] ]Prodicus.

[[†] ]See Vol. VIII, p. 538.

[i-i]S, 59 by his Socratic dialectics he

[j]53 [no paragraph]

[[*] ]See Niebuhr, History of Rome, Vol. II, pp. 129ff.

[k-k]53, 59 estimate

[l]53 , and understand without effort how things came to pass as they did

[m]53 (recently published)

[[*] ]Trans. Leonhard Schmitz, 3 vols. (London: Taylor, Walton, and Maberly, 1852.

[n-n]+59, 67 [quoted from JSM’s “Grote’s Greece—Volumes VII and VIII,” Spectator, XXIII (16 March, 1850), p. 256]

[o-o]S present volumes

[p]53 [no paragraph]

[q-q]+59, 67

[r]53 : but where it is present, it may enable us to content ourselves with far less of those more superficial merits than are found in Mr. Grote’s book; it might even reconcile us, if need were, to their entire absence

[s-s]336+59, 67 [quoted from JSM’s “Grote’s History of Greece [Vols. V and VI],” Spectator, XXII (3 March, 1849), 202-3]

[t-t]S But the

[u-u]S this division

[[*] ]See Aristophanes, Acharnians, in Aristophanes, trans. Rogers, Vol. I, p. 234 (212).

[v-v]S contemporaries

[w]S , the greatest people who have yet appeared on this planet

[x]S [centred heading] character of nicias.

[[*] ]Thucydides, trans. Smith, Vol. II, p. 88 (III, 51).

[y]53 [paragraph] We have observed an announcement that the History is to be completed in one more volume; but it seems to us impossible that the remaining matter can be compressed into such a space without undue abridgment, even if the author adheres rigidly to the limit which he originally, and, we think, unnecessarily prescribed to himself—the end of the generation of Alexander. The conquests of the great Macedonian—the long struggles which led to the formation of Greek kingdoms from the fragments of the Persian empire—the Lamian war, and the administration of Athens under Phocion and under Demetrius Phalereus—are yet to come. But, above all, an historical and philosophical estimate of Plato and Aristotle is promised for the next volume; and to be as thorough and satisfactory as that already given of Socrates, it will probably require to be much longer. If to this be added any account of the civil, as distinguished from the political life of Athens, her internal legislation, and the practical condition of her people, or any general estimate of the Greeks and of Grecian civilisation, we anticipate a sufficient overflow to extend far into a thirteenth volume; and we hope that Mr. Grote may be induced to add a fourteenth, and continue the History to the Roman Conquest. We do not ask him to recount the events of the Macedonian period with the minuteness suitable to the Peloponnesian and Theban wars; but there are few readers who would not regret the absence of a general outline of that period; while there are portions of the later history, particularly that of the Peloponnesian Greeks, which, in personal interest, may vie with any of the preceding: and it would be gratifying to have a delineation of Agis and Cleomenes, Aratus and Philopœmen, from the same hand which has drawn the great men of an earlier and more fortunate time. The objections to a further lengthening of the work, appear to us altogether unimportant. No one who reads this History will wish that it were shorter. A book which has reached twelve volumes may well extend to fourteen; and if its reduction to the apostolic number were considered desirable, a better way of effecting this in future editions would be to make some reduction in the unnecessary size and width of the type, in which this work greatly exceeds the standard editions of Gibbon, or any other of the more voluminous English historians. [See Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1776-88).]

[† ][59]aWe have not space to giveb the smallest specimen of the delineation of this remarkable character, now brought into clearer light than ever before—a philosopher inculcating, under a supposed religious impulse, pure reason and a rigid discipline of the logical faculty. But we invite attention to the estimate, contained in this chapter, of the peculiarities of the Socratic teaching, and of the urgent need, at the present and at all times, of such a teacher. Socrates, in morals, is conceived by Mr. Grote as the parallel of Bacon in physics. He exposed the loose, vague, confused, and misleading character of the common notions of mankind on the most familiar subjects. By apt interrogations, forcing the interlocutors to become conscious of the want of precision in their own ideas, he showed that the words in popular use on all moral subjects (words which, because they are familiar, all persons fancy they understand) in reality answer to no distinct and well-defined ideas; and that the common notions, which those words serve to express, all require to be reconsidered. This is exactly what Bacon showed to be the casecwithc respect to the phrases and notions commonly current on physical subjects. It is the fashion of the present day to decry negative dialectics; as if making men conscious of their ignorance were not the first step—and an absolutely necessary one—towards inducing them to acquire knowledge. “Opinio copiæ,” says Bacon, “maxima causa inopiæ est.” [“Instauratio Magna,” Novum Organum, Works, Vol. I, p. 125.] The war which Bacon made upon confused general ideas, “notiones temere a rebus abstractas,” [ibid., Book I, Aph. 14, p. 158,] was essentially negative, but it constituted the epoch from which alone advancement in positive knowledge became possible. It is to Bacon that we owe Newton, and the modern physical science. In like manner Socrates, by convincing men of their ignorance, and pointing out the conditions of knowledge, originated the positive movement which produced Plato and Aristotle. With them and their immediate disciples that movement ceased, and has never yet been so effectually revived as to be permanent. The common notions of the present time on moral and mental subjects are as incapable of supporting the Socratic cross-examination as those of his own age: they are, just as much, the wild fruits of the undisciplined understanding—of the “intellectus sibi permissus,” as Bacon phrases it [see ibid., pp. 138, 160]; rough generalizations of first impressions, or consecrations of accidental feelings, without due analysis or mental circumscription.a

[aWe have not space to give][quoted from JSM’s “Grote’s Greece–Volumes VII and VIII,” Spectator, XXIII (16 March, 1850), 256]

[b]S the briefest analysis of a dissertation so rich in matter, or

[cwithc]S in