Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/94

 78 HISTORY OF GREECE. matic politics, rhetoric, and logic of Aristotle, are traceable to the same general tendencies in the minds of the Grecian people : and we find the germ of these expansive forces in the senate and agora of their legendary government. The poets, first epic and then lyric, were the precursors of the orators, in their power of moving the feelings of an assembled crowd ; whilst the Homeric poems the general training-book of educated Greeks consti- tuted a treasury of direct and animated expression, full of con- crete forms, and rare in the use of abstractions, and thence better suited to the workings of oratory. The subsequent critics had no difficulty in selecting from the Iliad and Odyssey, samples of eloquence in all its phases and varieties. On the whole, then, the society depicted in the old Greek poems is loose and unsettled, presenting very little of legal restraint, and still less of legal protection, but concentrating such politi- cal power as does exist in the hands of a legitimate hereditary king, whose ascendency over the other chiefs is more or less com- plete according to his personal force and character. Whether that ascendency be greater or less, however, the mass of the people is in either case politically passive and of little account Though the Grecian freeman of the heroic age is above the de- graded level of the Gallic plebs, as described by Ctesar, 1 he is far from rivalling the fierce independence and sense of dignity, com- bined with individual force, which characterize the Germanic tribes before their establishment in the Koman empire. Still less does his condition, or the society in which he moves, cor- respond to those pleasing dreams of spontaneous rectitude and innocence, in which Tacitus and Seneca indulge with regard to primitive man. 2 1 Caspar, Bell. Gallic, vi. 12. 8 Seneca, Epist. xc. ; Tacitus. Annal. iii. 26. " Vetustissimi mortalium (says the latter), null adhuc mala libidine, sine probro. scelcre, eoque sine pcenil ant coCn itione, agebant : neque praemiis opus erat, cum honesta suopte ingenio petercntur ; et ubi nihil contra morem cuperent, nihil per metum vetabantur. At postquara exui aequalitas, et pro modestii et pudore ambitio ct vis incedebat, provenere dominationes, multosque apud populos seternum. mansere," etc. Compare Strabo, vii. p. 301. These are the same fancies so eloquently set forrt by Rousseau, in the last century. A far more sagacious criticism pervades the preface of Thncy dides.