Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/282

258 into the fourth century, we feel that we have already enjoyed the best that Greece could give us; that in the heavier atmosphere of those later times, the "white violets" of Sappho, and all such delicate blooms of art and literature, could no longer blow in quite their old perfection.

Not, indeed, that the decay that set in was wholly the result of stasis. To reckon up all the concurrent causes, it would be necessary to do what is no longer possible, — to write the social and economical history of the Greek cities, as well as their external history and their internecine feuds. But I have followed Thucydides in selecting this phenomenon of stasis as the one cause most likely to let us into the secrets of decay, and the one cause of which we have any knowledge that can be called accurate; and I am now further going to call Aristotle as witness, though I have only space to allude briefly to his evidence.

Aristotle, writing some sixty or seventy years after Thucydides, was so deeply impressed with the universality and the virulence of this disease, that he devoted a whole book of his Politics to the analysis of it; a book which has aptly been called a treatise on the pathology of Greek society. He deals with it in his own cool and scientific fashion, starting with a general declaration of its nature, and proceeding to analyse it as it appeared in the several forms of constitution (especially oligarchy and democracy), and to offer suggestions in each case