Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/306

 284 mSTORY *JF GT5EECE. words, bestowed upon themselves the appellation of ' the best men, the honorable and good, the elegant, the superior," etc., and attached to those without their own circle epithets of a contrary tenor, implying low moral attributes, no such difference will be found borne out by the facts of Grecian history. 1 Abundance of infirmity, with occasional bad passions, was doubtless liable to work upon the people generally, often corrupting and misguiding even the Athenian democracy, the best apparently of all the democracies in Greece. But after all, the rich and great men were only a part of the people, and taking them as a class, apart from honorable individual exceptions, by no means the best part. If exempted by their position from some of the vices which beset smaller and poorer men, they imbibed from that same posi- tion an unmeasured self-importance, and an excess of personal ambition as well as of personal appetite, peculiar to them- selves, not less anti-social in tendency, and operating upon a much grander scale. To the prejudices and superstitions belong- ing to the age, they were noway superior, considering them as a class ; while their animosities among one another, virulent and unscrupulous, were among the foremost causes of misfortune in Grecian commonwealth, and indeed many of the most excep- tionable acts committed by the democracies, consisted in their allowing themselves to be made the tools of one aristocrat for the ruin of another. Of the intense party-selfishness which char- acterized them as a body, sometimes exaggerated into the strongest anti-popular antipathy, as we see in the famous oligar- chical oath cited by Aristotle, 2 we shall find many illustrations as we advance in the history, but none more striking than this Korkyraean revolution. 1 See the valuable preliminary discourse, prefixed to Welcker's edition of Theognis, page xxi, sect. 9, seq. (., Tl &V tyt* KOKOV
 * Aristotel. Politic, v. 7. 1 9. K.al TU dy/iti tavwovf l(rouar. t lot