Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/196

172 and weak points in the system, is indeed true enough, and of these I shall have a word to say at the end of this chapter; but I must now turn for a moment to the other claim which Pericles made for Athens, that her political system, so far from crushing the individual, gave him and his abilities freer play than he could look for in any other Greek State.

II. A people actually employed day by day in the details of its own government must necessarily be undergoing a process of education. If every individual Athenian was expected, some time or other in his life, to have to do such work as auditing accounts, superintending public workmen, or arranging contracts for the supply of sacrificial victims (I select these simply as specimens of the minor sort of duties which might fall to him), it is obvious that a degree of intellectual alacrity would also be expected from him which no one would look for in the humbler classes of an oligarchically-governed State. In such a State, as, for example, at Rome in the best age of senatorial rule, the intelligence of the governing class might be of a high average, but there would be no call, no stimulus, for the mental education of the people. Sparta is an even stronger example of the same tendency; for there not only was the mass of the population kept in a state of rude and rustic ignorance, but the ruling class itself was educated on a system in which intellectual ardour was rigidly discouraged. But at Athens the individual had every inducement to train his own intelligence for the benefit of the