Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/177

VI it could be sure of obtaining in other States; for at Athens alone poverty was no hindrance to the development of genius. If these two propositions were in any real sense true of the Athenians of that day, then surely we may find here the "good life" which Aristotle claims as the true end of the City-State — the full and free culture of the individual aiming at the advantage of the community.

We have now to see how far these two propositions hold good of Athens in the time of Pericles. Very different views, it must be said at once, were taken by later writers and orators of the Athenians and their democracy. Plato, for instance, makes Socrates say in the Gorgias, "I hear that Pericles made the Athenians a lazy, cowardly, talkative, and money-loving people, by accustoming them to receive wages." Isocrates describes democracy at Athens as passing into disorder, freedom into lawlessness, equality into reckless impudence. Aristotle, too, never shows enthusiasm for Athenian institutions, nor does he connect Pericles with any attempt to realise his own ideal of. But Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle knew Athens only when her best days were past, and when the gifted and animated population of the golden age had been thinned down sadly by war and pestilence. It is not scientific to judge of the working of Athenian institutions in the fifth century B.C. by the opinions