Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/281

IX it is his earnest conviction, and not only his rhetorical art, which has led him into these crabbed constructions and antithetical obscurities. He sees evil days coming upon Greece, and he marks the cause as being not so much the deadly war in which almost all Greek cities were engaged, as the internal tendency to disease on which that war acted with fatal result. The life-blood of the City-State, he believed, was poisoned and fevered; the true end of this form of social life was no longer pursued; every organ lost its natural and healthy action. And we are justified in believing that Thucydides was right; for the Greek cities never wholly recovered their tone after the war which had so sadly exaggerated their chief inherent weakness. Corcyra, for example, whose misfortunes suggested these remarks to the historian, was a powerful State before the war and its attendant stasis, but from that time forward ceased to exercise any influence in Greece. She continued to exist, and later inscriptions testify to the working of her council and her assembly, but her growth was apparently stunted and her strength sapped by the disease. And with loss of sanity and unity came loss also of that spirit of youth and independence which in the sixth and fifth centuries had borne such ripe fruit in art and poetry. As we pursue Greek history