Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/114

 92 HISTORY OF GKEECE. which we read in Thucydides, when the soldiers of the arma- ment and the Samian citizens, pledged themselves to each other by solemn oaths to uphold their democracy to maintain harmony and good feeling with each other, to prose :ute energetically the war against the Peloponnesians, and to remain at enmity with the oligarchical conspirators at Athens, is a scene among the most dramatic and inspiriting which occurs in his history. 1 More- over, we recognize at Samos the same absence of reactionary vengeance as at Athens, after the attack of the oligarchs, Athe- nian as well as Samian, has been repelled ; although those oli- garchs had begun by assassinating Hyperbolus and others. There is throughout this whole democratical movement at Samos a generous exaltation of common sentiment over personal, and at the same time an absence of ferocity against opponents, such as nothing except democracy ever inspired in the Grecian bosom. It is, indeed, true that this was a special movement of generous enthusiasm, and that the details of a democratical government correspond to it but imperfectly. Neither in the life of an indi- vidual, nor in that of a people, does the ordinary and every-day movement appear at all worthy of those particular seasons in which a man is lifted above his own level and becomes capable of extreme devotion and heroism. Yet such emotions, though their complete predominance is never otherwise than transitory, have their foundation in veins of sentiment which are not even at other times wholly extinct, but count among the manifold forces tending to modify and improve, if they cannot govern, human action. Even their moments of transitory predominance leave a luminous track behind, and render the men who have passed through them more apt to conceive again the same generous impulse, through in fainter degree. It is one of the merits of Grecian democracy that it did raise this feeling of equal and patriotic communion : sometimes, and on rare occasions, like the scene at Samos, with overwhelming intensity, so as to impassion an unanimous multitude ; more frequently, in feebler tide, yet such as gave some chance to an honest and eloquent orator, of making successful appeal to public feeling against corruption or selfishness. If we follow the movements of Antiphon and hia Thucyd. viii, 75.