Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/370

 848 HISTORY OF GREECE. io assault from the common enemy of all mental progress ; * feeling of jealous ignorance, stationary or wistfully retrospective. of no mean force at Athens, as in every other society, and of course blended at Athens with the indigenous democratical senti- ment. This latter sentiment 1 of antipathy to new ideas, and new mental accomplishments, has been raised into factitious importance by the comic genius of Aristophanes, whose point of view modern, authors have too often accepted ; thus allowing some of the worst feelings of Grecian antiquity to influence their manner of conceiving the facts. Moreover, they have rarely made any allowance for that force of literary and philosophical antipathy, which was no less real and constant at Athens than the political ; and which made the different literary classes or individuals perpetually unjust one towards another. 2 It was the blessing and the glory of Athens, that every man could speak out his sentiments and his criticisms with a freedom unparalleled in the ancient world, and hardly paralleled even in the modern, in which a vast body of dissent both is, and always has been, condemned to absolute silence. But this known latitude of censure ought to have imposed on modern authors a peremptory 1 Isokrates alludes much to this sentiment, and to the men who looked upon gymnastic training with greater favor than upon philosophy, in the Orat. xv, De Permutatione, s. 267, et seq. A large portion of this oration is in fact a reply to accusations, the same as those preferred against mental cultivation hy the AtKatof Aoyof in the Nuhes of Aristophanes, 947, seq. ; favorite topics in the months of the pugilists " with smashed ears." (Plato, Gorgias, c. 71, p. 515, E ; TUV TO, ura Kareayoruv.) 1 There is but too much evidence of the abundance of such jealousies and antipathies during the times of Plato, Aristotle, and Isokrates ; see Stahr's Aristotelia, ch. iii, vol. i, pp. 37, 68. Aristotle was extremely jealous of the success of Isokrates, and was him- self much assailed by pupils of the latter, Kephisodorus and others, as well as by Dikaarchus. Eubulides, and a numerous host of writers in the same tone : arpardv oXov TUV iTrt&efievuv 'ApiffTOT&fi ; see the Fragments of Dikearchus, vol. ii, p. 225, ed. Didot. " De ingenio ejns (observes Cicero, in reference to Epicurus, de Finibus, ii, 25, 80) in his disputation! bus, non de moribus, quaeritur. Sit ista in Graecorum levitate perversitas, qui maledictis insectantur eos, a quibus de veritate dissentiunt." This ia a taint no way peculiar to Grecian philosophical controversy ; but it has nowhere been more infectious than among the Greeks, and modern ' str nans cannot be too much on their guard against it