Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/163

Rh bed from the process of counterfeiting usual in that age—the plating of interior metal with thin silver-foil.

Nevertheless this rapid bloom bore no fruit. In a life of indolence in which their energies were never tried either by stance on the part of the natives, or by hard labour of their own, even Greeks speedily lost all elasticity of body and of mind. None of the brilliant names in Greek art or literature shed glory on the Italian Achæans, while Sicily could claim ever so many of them, and even in Italy the Chalcidian Rhegium could produce its Ibycus, and the Doric Tarentum its Archytas. With this people, among whom the spit was for ever turning on the hearth, nothing flourished from the first but boxing. The rigid aristocracy, which early gained the helm in the several communities, and which found, in case of need, a sure reserve of support in the federal power, prevented the rise of tyrants. The only danger to be apprehended was that the government of the best might be converted into a government of the few, especially if the privileged families in the different communities should combine to assist each other in carrying out their designs. Such was the predominant aim in the combination of mutually pledged "friends," which bore the name of Pythagoras. It enjoined the principle that the ruling class should be "honoured like gods," and that the subject class should be held in "subservience like beasts," and by such theory and practice provoked a formidable reaction, which terminated in the annihilation of the Pythagorean "friends," and the renewal of the ancient federal constitution. But frantic party feuds, insurrections en masse of the slaves, social abuses of all sorts, attempts to carry out an impracticable state-philosophy, in short, all the evils of demoralized civilization raged incessantly in the Achæan communities, till under the accumulated pressure their political power was utterly broken.

It is no matter of wonder therefore that the Achæans settled in Italy exercised less influence on its civilization than the other Greek settlements there. An agricultural people, they had less occasion than those engaged in commerce to extend their influence beyond their political bounds. Within their own dominions they enslaved the native population, and crushed the germs of their national development as Italians, while they refused to open up to them, by means of complete Hellenization, a new career. In this way the