Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/300

 27S HISTORY OP GREECE. there established a fortified position on the mountain Istone, not far from the city. They burned their vessels in ordei to cut off all hopes of retreat, and maintained themselves foi near two years on a system of ravage and plunder which inflicted great misery on the island. 1 This was a frequent way whereby, of old, invaders wore out and mastered a city, the walls of which they found impregnable. The ultimate fate of these occupants of Istone, which belongs to a future chapter, will be found to constitute a close suitable to the bloody drama yet unfinished in Korkyra. Such a drama could not be acted, in an important city belong- ing to the Greek name, without producing a deep and extensive impression throughout all the other cities. And Thucydides has taken advantage of it to give a sort of general sketch of Grecian politics during the Peloponnesian war ; violence of civil discord in each city, aggravated by foreign war, and by the contending efforts of Athens and Sparta, the former espousing the dem- >cratical party everywhere ; the latter, the oligarchical. The Korkyraean sedition was the first case in which these two causes of political antipathy and exasperation were seen acting with full united force, and where the malignity of sentiment and de- moralization flowing from such an union was seen without dis- guise. The picture drawn by Thucydides, of moral and political feeling under these influences, will ever remain memorable as the work of an analyst and a philosopher : he has conceived and described the perverting causes with a spirit of generalization which renders these two chapters hardly less applicable to other political societies, far distant both in time and place, especially, under many points of view, to France between 1789 and 1799, than to Greece in the fifth century before the Christian era. The deadly bitterness infused into intestine party contests by the accompanying dangers of foreign war and intervention of foreign enemies, the mutual fears between political rivals, where each thinks that the other will forestall him in striking a mortal blow, and where constitutional maxims have ceased to carry authority either as restraint or as protection, the superior popularity of the man who is most forward with the sword, or who runs down 1 Thucyd. Hi, 85.