Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/195

Rh in military disaster or political peril, and yet never resting in that constant criticism of life, thought, and morals which laid the foundation of so much of the philosophy of the future. Thucydides, again, was actually engaged in the wars, and suffered, as he believed unjustly, from the rancour of the demagogues; but he, too, worked on through the time of storm and stress to build up the "eternal possession" which he has bequeathed to posterity. It was when the days of strife were over and Athens had found peace without honour that the intellectual sceptre departed from her and found a place for a time in the Greek city of Alexander on the Nile. Peace may nurture genius, but does not seem to produce it. Nine of the ten orators might, perhaps, have lived in any age of Athenian history; but it required a time of fierce strife and desperate struggle for freedom to make a Demosthenes.