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162 HISTORY OF GREECE. est statesman whom Athens ever produced, acting steadily within the limits of the constitution ; as well as by the ill-success of his two opponents, Kimon and Thucydides, aided by nu- merous partisans and by the great comic writers, at a period when comedy was a power in the state such as it has never been before or since, in their attempts to get him ostracized. They succeeded in fanning up the ordinary antipathy of the citizens towards philosophers, so far as to procure the ostracism of his friend and teacher Damon : but Perikles himself, to repeat the complaint of his bitter enemy, the comic poet Kratinus, 1 " was out of the reach of the oyster-shell." If Perikles was not con- ceived to be dangerous to the constitution, none of his successors were at all likely to be so regarded. Damon and Hyperbol'is were the two last persons ostracized : both of them were cases, and the only cases, of an unequivocal abuse of the institution, because, whatever the grounds of displeasure against them may have been, it is impossible to conceive either of them as menac- ing to the state, whereas all the other known sufferers were men of such position and power, that the six or eight thousand citizens who inscribed each name on the shell, or at least a large proportion of them, may well have done so under the most con- scientious belief that they were guarding the constitution against real danger. Such a change, in the character of the persons ostracized, plainly evinces that the ostracism had become dissev- ered from that genuine patriotic prudence which originally ren- dered it both legitimate and popular. It had served for two generations an inestimable tutelary purpose, it lived to be twice dishonored, and then passed, by universal acquiescence, into matter of history. A process analogous to the ostracism subsisted at Argos, 9 at Syracuse, and in some other Grecian democracies. Aristotle states that it was abused for factious purposes : and at Syracuse, 1 Kratinus ap. Plutarch, Perikles, 13. 'O aiivoK.ityakoq Zevf 6dt TrpooepxsTai IlepiK^f, ru6dov km TOV Kjiaviov "E^wv, txEidr/ rovarpaKov irapoixerai. For the attacks of the comic writers upon Damon, see Plutarch, Peri kles, c. 4. Aristot Polit. iii, 8, 4 v, 2, 5