Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/18

8 This is a monstrous perversion of historical fact. Nothing so "sophistical" can be detected in Peisthetærus even by a German Professor predetermined to find "sophistry" everywhere. The Athenians had indeed suffered serious checks and severe defeats at Oropus, Delium, Amphipolis, and elsewhere; but no one who reads the history of the Peloponnesian war, without a preconceived theory to maintain, can fail to see that their affairs were to al appearance more prosperous at the commencement of the year 414, than they were when the war began. They had destroyed the prestige of the Spartan name, had detached Argos from her alliance, and in fact felt themselves so secure at home that they conceived the idea of employing their superabundant strength in the Sicilian expedition. It is impossible not to assent to the truth of Grote's remark, that the Melian Dialogue is introduced by Thucydides to illustrate the overweening insolence of the Athenians in this the culminating period of their prosperity: to point the moral, so striking to the Greek mind, that Pride goes before a fall, exactly in the same spirit as the Poet's, when he makes Agamemnon walk over purple to the House of Death.

No Athenian audience would have tolerated at any time, least of al at this time, a drama which represented themselves as gaping, light-minded, feeble birds, and their enemies as Olympian Gods. What says Alcibiades (Thucyd, 17)? ; an assertion which, sanguine and vainglorious as he was, he would