Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/70

48 H-STORY OF GREECE. him sympathize warmly with Euripides, and ensure to the latter personal satisfaction for an offensive remark ; his appetites, ming- ling license with insult, end by drawing upon him personal ene- mies of a formidable character. UEtat, c'est moi stands marked in the whole series of proceedings ; the personality of the monarch is the determining element. Now at Athens, no such element exists. There is, on the one hand, no easy way of bringing to bear the ascendency of an energetic chief to improve the military organization, as Athens found to her cost, when she was after- wards assailed by Philip, the successor after some interval, and in many respects the parallel, of Archelaus. But on the other hand,- neither the personal tastes nor the appetites, of any indi- vidual Athenian, count as active causes in the march of public affairs, which is determined by the established law and by the pronounced sentiments of the body of citizens. However gross an insult might have been offered to Euripides at Athens, the di- kasts would never have sentenced that the offender should be handed over to him to be flogged. They would have inflicted such measure of punishment as the nature of the wrong, and the preexisting law appeared to them to require. Political measures, or judicial sentences, at Athens, might be well or ill-judged ; but at any rate, they were always dictated by regard to a known law and to the public conceptions entertained of state-interests, state- dignity, and state-obligations, without the avowed intrusion of any man's personality. To Euripides, who had throughout his whole life been the butt of Aristophanes and other comic writers, and who had been compelled to hear, in the crowded theatre, taunts far more galling than what is ascribed to Dekamnichus, the contrast must have been indeed striking, to have the offender made over to him, and the whip placed at his disposal, by order of his new patron. And it is little to his honor, that he should have availed himself of the privilege, by causing the punishment to be really administered ; a punishment which he could never have seen inflicted, during the fifty years cf his past life, upon any free Athenian citizen. Kr-ateuas did not survive the deed more than three or four days, after -which Orestes, son of Archelaus, a child, was placed on the throne, under the guardianship of ^Eropus. The latter, however, after about four years, made aw ly with his ward, and reigned in