eridge's italics and three exclamation points
may answer for all parallelisms. When historical characters get far
enough off it may be possible to imitate Plutarch, but only then. Victor
Hugo wrote a passionate protest against the execution of John Brown, in
which he compared Virginia hanging John Brown with Washington putting
Spartacus to death. What Washington would have done with Spartacus can
readily be divined. Those who have stood nearest to Grant and Sherman,
to Lee and Jackson, the men, fail to see any strong resemblance to
leaders in other wars. Nicias, in the Peloponnesian war, whose name
means Winfield, has nothing in common with General Scott, whose plan of
putting down the rebellion, the "Anaconda Plan," as it was called, bears
some resemblance to the scheme of Demosthenes, the Athenian general, for
quelling the Peloponnese. Brasidas was in some respects like Stonewall
Jackson, but Brasidas was not a Presbyterian elder, nor Stonewall
Jackson a cajoling diplomatist.

IV

This paper is rapidly becoming what life is,--a series of
renunciations,--and the reader is by this time sufficiently enlightened
as to the reasons why I gave up the ambitious title Two Wars, and
substituted A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War. If I were a military
man, I might have been tempted to draw some further illustrations from
the history of the two struggles, but my short and desultory service in
the field does not entitle me to set up as a strategist. I went from my
books to the front, and went back from the front to my books, from the
Confederate war to the Peloponnesian war, from Lee and Early to
Thucydides and Aristophanes. I fancy that I understood my Greek history
and my Greek authors better for my experience in the field, but some
degree of understanding would have come to me even if I had not stirred
from home. For while my home was spared until the month preceding the
surrender, every vibration of the great struggle was felt at the foot of
the Blue Ridge. We were not too far off to sympathize with the scares
at Richmond. There was the Pawnee affair, for instance. Early in the war
all Richmond was stirred by the absurd report that the Pawnee was on its
way up James River to lay the Confederate capital in ashes, just as all
Athens was stirred, in the early part of the Peloponnesian war, by a
naval demonstration against the Piraeus. The Pawnee war, as it was
jocularly called, did not last long. Shot-guns and revolvers, to