panic, and the dread
certainty of ruin. That hour was but the essential agony of a
soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation
of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the
Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion. In the
writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one
pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the
Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the _Crown_, in the measured
cadences of the _Panegyric_, the effort to lead Athens towards some
higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting
power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in
Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal. The serious admiration of
Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's
appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism,
not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of
Kleon or of Kritias. History never again beheld such a band of
pamphleteers![6]

In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a
similar moment occurs. After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage,
but rises a new city. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater
than the Rome of the Decemvirs. It is not the inevitable change which
centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within
Rome's life as a State. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces
Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.

So in the history of Islam, from the anguish and struggles of the
eighth century, the Islam of Haroun and Mutasim arises, imparting even
to dying Persia, as it were, a second prime, by the wisdom and
imaginative justice of its sway.

In the development of Imperial Britain, the conflict which in the
life-history of these two States, Athens and Rome, has its essential
agony at Cannae or at Syracuse, the conflict which affects the national
consciousness as the hour of tragic insight affects the individual
life, finds its parallel in the fifteenth century. After the
short-lived glory of Agincourt and the vain coronation at Paris,
humiliation follows humiliation, calamity follows calamity. The empire
purchased by the war of a century is lost in a day; and England's
chivalry, as if stung to madness by the magnitude of the disaster,
turns its mutilating swords, like Paris after Sedan, against itself.
The havoc of civil war prolongs the rancour and