Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/395

 FICKLENESS IMPUTED TO THE PEOPLE. 37; influenced more or less by such intensifying cause. This is a defect which of course belongs in a certain degree to all exercise of power by numerous bodies, even though they be representative bodies, especially when the character of the people, instead of being comparatively sedate and slow to move, like the PIngli.sh, is quick, impressible, and fiery, like Greeks or Italians ; but it operated far more powerfully on the self-acting Demos assembled in the Pnyx. It was in fact the constitutional malady of the de- mocracy, of which the people were themselves perfectly sensible, as I shall show hereafter from the securities which they tried to provide against it, but which no securities could ever wholly eradicate. Frequency of public assemblies, far from aggravating the evil, had a tendency to lighten it. The people thus became accustomed to hear and balance many different views as a prelim- inary to ultimate judgment; they contracted personal interest and esteem for a numerous class of dissentient speakers; and they even acquired a certain practical consciousness of their own liability to error. Moreover, the diffusion of habits of public speaking, by means of the sophists and the rhetors, whom it has been so much the custom to disparage, tended in the same direc- tion, to break the unity of sentiment among the listening crowd, to multiply separate judgments, and to neutralize the contagion of mere sympathizing impulse. These were important deductions, still farther assisted by the superior taste and intelli- gence of the Athenian people : but still, the inherent malady remained, excessive and misleading intensity of present senti- ment. It was this which gave such inestimable value to the ascendency of Perikles, as depicted by Thucydides : his hold on the people was so firm, that he could always speak with effect against excess of the reigning tone of feeling. " When Perikles (says the historian) saw the people in a state of unseasonable and insolent confidence, he spoke so as to cow them into alarm ; when again they were in groundless terror, he combated it, and brought them back to confidence." * "We shall find Demosthenes, surprise us, and where the difference here adverted to is important to notice: see Politic, iii, 10. 5, 6. 1 Thucyd. ii, 65. "Oirore yovv altr&oiro n avroiif napcl naipbv vfipti c, TI.KJUV KareTT^ijaaev irufav liri rb ^ofJeladai ' KOI is naXiv iirt rd itapoelv.