BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR. 15J of one not implying the weakness of the remainder : the relish for all pleasures of art and elegance, and the appetite for intellec tual expansion, coinciding in the same bosom with energetic promptitude as well as endurance : abundance of recreative spectacles, yet noway abating the cheerfulness of obedience even to the hardest calls of patriotic duty : that combination of reason and courage which encountered danger the more willingly from having discussed and calculated it beforehand : lastly, an anxious interest as well as a competence of judgment in public discussion and public action, common to every citizen rich and poor, and combined with every man's own private industry. So compre- hensive an ideal of many-sided social development, bringing out the capacities for action and endurance, as well as those for enjoyment, would be sufficiently remarkable, even if we supposed it only existing in the imagination of a philosopher : but it be- comes still more so when we recollect that the main features of it at least were drawn from the fellow-citizens of the speaker. It must be taken, however, as belonging peculiarly to the Athens of Perikles and his contemporaries; nor would it have suited either the period of the Persian war, fifty years before, or that of Demosthenes, seventy years afterwards. At the former period, the art, the letters, and the philosophy, were as yet backward, while even the active energy and democratical stim- ulus, though very powerful, had not been worked up to the pitch which they afterwards reached : at the latter period, although the intellectual manifestations of Athens subsist in full or even increased vigor, we shall find the personal enterprise and ener- getic spirit of her citizens materially abated. As the circum- stances, which I have already recounted, go far to explain the previous upward movement, so those which fill the coming chap- ters, containing the disasters of the Peloponnesian war, will be found to explain still more completely the declining tendency shortly about to commence. Athens was brought to the brink of entire ruin, from which it is surprising that she recovered at all, but noway surprising that she recovered at the expense of a considerable loss of personal energy in the character of her citizens. And thus the season at which Perikles delivered his discourse
lends to it an additional and peculiar pathos. It was delivered
