Page:Xenophon by Alexander Grant.djvu/184

174 life gave him a wide experience and a sort of cosmopolite point of view. He seems a typical instance of the "sound mind in a sound body." He was endowed with great activity, curiosity, and enlightened intelligence, and he wrote on war, contemporary history, politics, the lives of great men, education, finance, rural and domestic economy, the equestrian art, and the chase. He serves then to us as a measure of ancient Greece in many of the departments of life. And when we read a treatise like the 'Revenues of Athens,' written by a man of his eminence, we see how totally undeveloped in his time must have been the notions of political economy and of foreign politics, as implying a system of different powers in relation to each other. We see the want of the idea of science in his assuming that the silver mines of Laurion were inexhaustible, instead of referring to any mineralogical data on the subject. We see a great contrast to our own notions in his opinion, laid down in the 'Œconomicus,' that agriculture is the easiest of all arts, requiring only the application of common-sense. In the same work we find the indorsement of that degraded conception of the position of the wife in a household, which was one of the weakest points in ancient Greek civilisation. Throughout his histories and military disquisitions we see how comparatively petty and barbarous in their details the most important wars of his day were. No great general had as yet lived; the movement of large masses of troops had not become a science. There was no artillery more formidable than the bow and arrow, or the stone