e on the subject,
bored them.

His rival, Themistocles, was more suited to their taste, a clever scamp,
who must always be dealing with both sides in every quarrel, and
outwitting both. Athens was driven to banish him also at last, at his
too flagrant treachery. But he was not dismissed with the scathing scorn
our modern age would heap upon a traitor. He was sent regretfully, as
one turns from a charming but too persistently lawless friend. The
banishment was only for ten years, and he had his nest already prepared
with the Persian King. If you would understand the Greek spirit in its
fullest perfection, study Themistocles. Rampant individualism, seeking
personal pleasure, clamorous for the admiration of its fellows, but not
restrained from secret falsity by any strong moral sense--that was what
the Greeks developed in the end.

Neither must Athens be regarded as a democracy in the modern sense. She
was only so by contrast with Persia or with Sparta. Not every man in the
beautiful city voted, or enjoyed the riches that flowed into her
coffers, and could thus afford, free from pecuniary care, to devote
himself to art. Athens probably had never more than thirty thousand
"citizens." The rest of the adult male population, vastly outnumbering
these, were slaves, or foreigners attracted by the city's splendor.

But those thirty thousand were certainly men. "There were giants in
those days." One sometimes stands in wonder at their boldness. What all
Greece could not do, what Persia had completely failed in, they
undertook. Athens alone should conquer the world. By force of arms they
would found an empire of intellect. They fought Persia and Sparta, both
at once. Plague swept their city, yet they would not yield.[2] Their own
subject allies turned against them; and they fought those too. They sent
fleets and armies against Syracuse, the mightiest power of the West. It
was Athens against all mankind!

[Footnote 2: See _Great Plague at Athens_, page 34.]

She was unequal to the task, superbly unequal to it. The destruction of
her army at Syracuse[3] was only the foremost of a series of inevitable
disasters, which left her helpless. After that, Sparta, and then Thebes,
became the leading city of Greece. Athens slowly regained her fighting
strength; her intellectual supremacy she had not lost. Socrates,[4]
greatest of her sons, endeavored to teach a morality higher than earth
had yet received, higher than his contemporaries co