Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/303

 FOURTH YEAR OF THE WAR- TROUBLES IN KORRVUA. 281 of intestine conflict, instead of being kept within such limits as consists with the maintenance of one society among the contend- ing parties, becomes for the time inflamed and poisoned with all the unscrupulous hostility of foreign war, chiefly from actual alliance between parties within the state and foreigners without. In fol- lowing the impressive description of the historian, we have to keep in mind the general state of manners in his time, especially the cruelties tolerated by the laws of war, as compared with that greater humanity and respect for life which has grown up during the last two centuries in modern Europe. And we have farther to recollect that if he had been describing the effects of politi- cal fury among Carthaginians and Jews, instead of among his contemporary Greeks, he would have added to his list of horrors mutilation, crucifixion, and other refinements on simple murder. The language of Thucydides is to be taken rather as a gen- eralization and concentration of phenomena which he had ob- served among different communities, rather than as belonging altogether to any one of them. Nor are we to believe what a superficial reading of his opening words might at first suggest that the bloodshed in Korkyra was only the earliest, but by no means the worst, of a series of similar horrors spread over the Grecian world. The facts stated in his own history suffice to show that though the same causes which worked upon this unfortunate island became disseminated, and produced analogous mischiefs throughout many other communities, yet the case of Korkyra, as it was the first, so it was also the worst and most aggravated in point of intensity. Fortunately, the account of Thucydides enables us to understand it from beginning to end, and to appreciate the degree of guilt of the various parties im- plicated, which we can seldom do with certainty ; because when once the interchange of violence has begun, the feelings arising out of the contest itself presently overpower in the minds of both parties the original cause of dispute, as well as all scruples f, are an epexegesis, or explanatory comment, upon Prc bably we ought to consider some such word as kvo/il^ero to be under- stood, just as the Scholiast understands that word for his view of th sentence.