Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/152

128 executive, which looks as though they felt they were living on a volcano ready at any time to break out in eruption, and must at all risks endeavour to check the popular tendency.

The third event which shows disturbance in Attica is the most singular of all. Plutarch, in describing it, uses language which implies that the Athenian State was suffering from a malignant disease in religion and morals, and that the happy relations between the human and divine inhabitants of Attica were seriously deranged. As in the case of bodily disease, this cannot be ascribed to a single event only, such as the Cylonian sacrilege; it indicates an unhealthy condition. Fear, pestilence, disaster, are only symptoms of a general demoralisation, caused in part perhaps by the rise of new ideas and the introduction of new and strange worships among the lower classes. The remedy was curious; they sent for a wise man, as a minister of religion, to set them right. The mission of Epimenides the Cretan to Athens is a singular example of that readiness to submit their troubles to a master-mind which is characteristic of the earlier Greeks; it is in fact no more than the tendency towards absolutism taking an unusual form. It may be that we should see in it the first public recognition of certain new worships which had crept into Attica, and which were afterwards embodied in the calendar of public feasts by Pisistratus, on behalf of the lower population whose interests he represented. Epimenides,