Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/396

 874 mbTOEY OF GREECE. Four Hundred, wjis equally devoted and more intelligent ; and that the burst of effort, which sent a subsequent fleet to victory at Arginusse, was to the full as strenuous. If, then, we survey the eighty-seven years of Athenian history, between the battle of Marathon and the renovation of the democ- racy after the Thirty, we shall see no ground for the assertion, so often made, of increased and increasing moral and political cor- ruption. It is my belief that the people had become both morally and politically better, and that their democracy had worked to their improvement. The remark made by Thucydides, on the occasion of the Korkyraean bloodshed, on the violent and reckless political antipathies, arising out of the confluence of external warfare with internal party-feud, 1 wherever else it may find its application, has no bearing upon Athens : the proceedings after the Four Hundred and after the Thirty prove the contrary. And while Athens may thus be vindicated on the moral side, it is indisputable that her population had acquired a far larger range of ideas and capacities than they possessed at the time of the battle of Marathon. This, indeed, is the very matter of fact deplored by Aristophanes, and admitted by those writers, who, while denouncing the sophists, connect such enlarged range of ideas with the dissemination of the pretended sophistical poison. In my judgment, not only the charge against the sophists as poisoners, but even the existence of such poison in the Athenian system, deserves nothing less than an emphatic denial. Let us examine again the names of these professional teachers, beginning with Prodikus, one of the most renowned. Who is there that has not read the well-known fable called " The Choice of Hercules," which is to be found in every book professing to 1 Thucydides (iii, 82) specifies very distinctly the cause to which he ascribes the bad consequences which he depicts. He makes no allusion to sophists or sophistical teaching; though Brandis (Gesch. der Gr. Rom. Philos. i, p. 518, not. f.) drags in " the sophistical spirit of the statesmen of that time," as if it were the cause of the mischief, and as if it were to be found in the speeches of Thucydides, i, 76, v, 105. There cannot be a more unwarranted assertion ; nor can a learned man like Brandis be ignorant, that such words as "the sophistical spirit," (Der Bophistische Geist,) are understood "oy a modem reader in a sense totall; different from i*.s true Athenian sense