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 FOURTH YEAR OF THE WAR -TROUBLES IN KORKVRA. 279 his enemies in (he most unmeasured language, coupled with the disposition to treat both prudence in action and candor in speech as if it were nothing but treachery or cowardice, the exclusive regard to party ends, with the reckless adoption, and even ad- miring preference, of fraud or violence as the most effectual means, the loss of respect for legal authority, as well as of confidence in private agreement, and the surrender even of blood and friendship to the overruling ascendency of party-ties, the perversion of ordinary morality, bringing with it altered signifi- cation of all the common words importing blame or approbation, the unnatural predominance of the ambitious and contentions passions, overpowering in men's minds all real public objects, and equalizing for the time the better and the worse cause, by taking hold of democracy on one side and aristocracy on the other as mere pretences to sanctify personal triumph, all these gloomy social phenomena, here indicated by the historian, have their causes deeply seated in the human mind, and are likely, unless the bases of constitutional morality shall come to be laid more surely and firmly than they have hitherto been, to recur from time to time, under diverse modifications, " so long as hu- man nature shall be the same as it is now," to use the language of Thucydides himself. 1 He has described, with fidelity not 1 Thucyd. iii, 82. yr/vuitva fj.lv nal UEI lao/ieva luf uv fj OVTTJ 6vatf uv&puTTUV $, uuMov <5e Kal tjcfv^aiTepa Kai TOI eldsai dui^ayuEva, ug uv luaarai, al uerap^al ruv %vv-vx<-tiv iQiartivTai, etc. The many ob?curitics and perplexities of construction which pervade these memorable chapters, are familiar to all readers of Thucydides, ever since Dionysius of Halikarnassus, whose remarks upon them are sufficiently severe (Judic. de Thucyd. p. 883). To discuss difficulties which the best commentators are sometimes unable satisfactorily to explain, is no part of the business of this work: yet there is one sentence which I venture to notice as erroneously construed by most of them, following the Scholiast. Td (5* euTT?.rjKTUf 6%i> uvdpbg uoipa TrpoasTedrj, uau2.eia 6e (Dr. Arnold and others read uatyakeia in the dative) T& ETriBovhevaaadai, u The Scholiast explains the latter half of this as follows : rd lmirol.i! Bovfavaaadai 5C uad?iiav 7rp6affif UTrorpoTr^f ivofii&ro, and this explanation is partly adopted by Poppo, Goller, and Dr. Arnold, with differences about uatyukeia and ^TrijSovTievaao&ac, but all agreeing about the word utroTpotrr), so that the sentence is made to mean, in th -words of Dr