Page:The Children's Plutarch, Greeks.djvu/15

 strangers visiting a Greek city without the protection of some friendly citizen, could be robbed of their freedom and fortune and sold into lifelong slavery, with no more rights than the beasts of the field. I would have had him dwell on this fact, not so as to spoil the children's pleasure in the beautiful and noble things that the Greeks unselfishly did for their country and for one another, but so as to make them understand how in our strangely mixed humanity men could die heroes and martyrs to their country's cause while they lived masters of those whom they denied liberty and country and the ownership of their lives and limbs.

I would have the children who read this glowing book, so full of examples of sublime self-sacrifice, see that the Spartans were heroic champions of freedom in spite of holding the Helots in bitter bondage, and that the Athenians who fell in battle for their mother city could be her devoted children though they forbade their hapless stepbrothers her love and blessing. In such things the Greeks were savage, as the Hebrews were who also bought and sold their fellow-men.

The thing which seems to have made the Spartans so mighty in war and the Athenians so glorious in peace is another thing that Mr. Gould does not dwell on. It was their being, with all the other Greeks, republicans. This made them patriots as no other form of government could; it made