Page:Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889) Vol 2.djvu/219

 were conducted in a manner different from those against the Barbarians;—they were prosecuted with moderation and forbearance, and never to the extinction of either State. If, at a later period, the two Republics who occupied the first rank in Greece were divided even in their policy towards foreign nations, and made war on each other on that account; still the Greeks were again united in one purpose by the Macedonian Hero, so as to play out their own peculiar part in the drama of World-History. Their Culture was wholly for the State and its purposes,—Legislation, Government, War by land and sea,—and in this they unquestionably far excelled their natural opponents in Asia. Among the latter, however, the true Religion lay concealed, unknown perhaps to the ruling nation themselves; and to this the Greeks were never able to attain. What it was in particular which entitled the predominant nation of the East,—the Persians,—to arrogate for themselves a superiority over the Greeks at the time when this antagonism broke forth into open rupture, is not quite clear; but it is certain that they did regard the latter as Barbarians, i.e. as a people far inferior to themselves in the arts of political existence and the science of their application; and indeed it would not otherwise have occurred to them to attempt the subjugation of Greece.

Invasion followed on the part of the Greeks, and the Asiatic dominion was destroyed;—a conquest which must have been easily accomplished by the first nation of actual Citizens, over an empire wherein there was properly but one race possessed of true freedom and enjoying real citizenship; while the rest were mere subjects, to whom, after the fall of their leaders who fought only for their own dominion, it might be a matter of indifference into whose hands the supreme authority fell, which they in their own person were wholly unaccustomed to exercise.

In the meantime the acquired supremacy of the Greeks