Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/198

180 HISTORY OF GREECE. to it. Neither of these two veins of sentiment was ever wholly absent; but according as the one or the other was present at different times in varying proportions, the patriotism of the citizen was a very different feeling. That which Herodotus remarks is, the extraordinary efforts of heart and hand which the Athenians suddenly displayed, the efficacy of the active nentiment throughout the bulk of the citizens ; and we shall observe even more memorable evidences of the same phenome- i on in tracing down the history from Kleisthenes to the end of the Pelopounesian war : we shall trace a series of events and motives eminently calculated to stimulate that self-imposed laboi and discipline which the early democracy had first called forth. But when we advance farther down, from the restoration of the democracy after the Thirty Tyrants to the time of Demosthenes, I venture upon this brief anticipation, in the conviction that one period of Grecian history can only be thoroughly understood by contrasting it with another, we shall find a sensible change in Athenian patriotism. The active sentiment of obligation is comparatively inoperative, the citizen, it is true, has a keen sense of the value of the democracy as protecting him and insuring to him valuable rights, and he is, moreover, willing to perform his ordinary sphere of legal duties towards it ; but he looks upon it as a thing established, and capable of maintaining itself in a due measure of foreign ascendency, without any such personal efforts as those which his forefathers cheerfully imposed upon themselves. The orations of Demosthenes contain melan- choly proofs of such altered tone of patriotism, of that lan- guor, paralysis, and waiting for others to act, which preceded the catastrophe of Chseroneia, notwithstanding an unabated attach- ment to the democracy as a source of protection and good govern- ment. 1 That same preternatural activity which the allies of Sparta, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, both de- nounced and admired in the Athenians, is noted by the orator as now belonging to their enemy Philip. 1 Compare the remarkable speech of the Corinthian envoys at Spartr (Thucyd. i, 68-71), with the Qthoirpa-yfioovvi} which Demosthenes so em- phatically notices in Philip (Olynthiac. i, 6, p. 13) : also Philippic, i, 2, and the Philippics and Olynthiacs generally.