Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/169

V commerce, he allied himself with the lower or trading classes. And in such ways, even while seeking his own glory, and violating the most vital principles of the older Greek life, he opened the eyes of the Greeks to things that lay beyond their narrow bounds, and had never been dreamed of in their philosophy since the age of Mycenæ, before the true State had come into being. Even in plotting with the Persians against Greece, his very selfishness revealed to the Greeks the dangers which surrounded them, and the want of union of which their system of City-States was the chief cause.

It is not possible, within the scope of this chapter, to illustrate these and other characteristics of tyranny from recorded facts. But the reader has only to take up his Herodotus, and to read the stories of men like Cleisthenes of Sicyon, Periander of Corinth, Gelo of Syracuse, Polycrates of Samos, Aristagoras of Miletus, and Pisistratus at Athens, in order to realise for himself how in various ways, both for good and for evil, the tyrant overstepped the limits of "the ideas in which he (and all Greeks) had been trained." Only let him remember that every word and every phrase of Herodotus are worth close attention, and that he is not to be read like a modern book in which words and phrases are often of little more account than the paper on which they are printed. To use the felicitous language of a true Greek scholar, Herodotus' finished art "preserved unimpaired the primitive energy of words;" and in the fresh light of those words we