than reform the hereditary institutions of the Dorians, and we bow to the authority of a poet, distinguished not less by deep wisdom and grave morality, than by the qualities for which his name has furnished an epithet. One of the remarkable things in Herodotus, and one of the most remarkable things of the kind in any author, is the debate he puts into the mouth of the Magophoni, as to the constitution they ought to adopt for Persia, after the overthrow of the usurpers. It is a discussion of the relative merits of the three simple forms of government, concluding with a deliberate preference of the monarchical, the one in which, it is alleged, mankind have universally sought and found a refuge from the evils of all others. Mitford, an able, certainly, but prejudiced and not very learned writer, considers this as an expression of the opinion of Herodotus, veiled in the specious guise of a dramatic propriety of discourse. This we do not think reconcilable with another very remarkable passage of the old historian, to which we shall hereafter refer, nor indeed with probability, considering what was the date of his testimony. But if the disputation referred to does not prove Herodotus to have been a monarchist, it shows him to have been deep in political speculation, and is a striking confirmation of our previous remarks, as to the pervading influence, as well as the profound and comprehensive spirit, of political philosophy among the Greeks. But whatever may be the extent and variety of the sources on which we have to draw for our knowledge of the political opinions and institutions of Greece, it is impossible not to join in Heyne's lamentations over the historians, Ephorus and Theopompus, two famous disciples of Isocrates. The lat ter, especially, is recommended to us by the very censures passed upon him by the ancients. He is represented as a fault-finder by complexion, and as more to be relied on when he praised, than when he blamed. As to his censoriousness, Professor Wachsmuth well remarks, that considering the corruptions, almost beyond all credibility, of the times in which he lived and wrote, it is not in the least to be wondered at, The passage cited is Pyth. I. 61, with Böckh's Explic. + Opusc. II. 280, sqq., an excellent dissertation on the extent of our losses in the political writings of the ancients, and bearing on more than one of the points discussed in the text. Pluto. Lysander, c. 30. But see Niebuhr, R. G. v. 1. p. 150. and was most probably any thing but excessive. His master, Isocrates, "that old man eloquent" himself, whom That dishonest victory At Cheronea, fatal to liberty, the panegyrist, par excellence, of Athens, the professed champion of the constitution of Solon and Clisthenes, or rather, as he affirms in one of his orations,* of that constitution of a thousand years, which the two law-givers only accommodated in some particulars to a new condition of thingswho makes it his boast that he had omitted no opportunity of extolling the democracy, and who, even in that most instructive parallel, or rather contrast, between that democracy in its pristine estate, and as it then was, debauched and deformed by demagogues, and become the stain and scandal of Greece, still prefers it to an oligarchy, and glories, as well he might, in the victories of Conon, and the merciful and moderate policy of Thrasybulus and his compeerst—even he seems to have lived long enough to survive all faith in popular governments, and to wish, like Abbe Sieyes in 1799, for "one head and one sword" to think and to fight for confederated Greece. His celebrated pupil, who was born more than half a century later, saw under the despotism of Macedon, the consummation of all the evils of which the Areopagitic oration is so lively a portraiture. Cheronea was indeed an era of downfall, but what shall we say of Cranon and Antipater? and then the degradation beyond all power of language to characterize, for which the people of Athens were thus prepared, and which it exhibited in such glaring and disgusting forms under Demetrius the Phalerean, and Demetrius Poliorcetes. What wonder is it, that a man of ardent and elevated genius, like Theopompus, living in scenes of such baseness and profligacy, and that amidst the ruins of so much glory, should find every thing amiss, and if he wrote as he felt, should leave behind him a dark picture of his degenerate and worthless contemporaries? He was a witness, for instance, to the administration of that great "friend of the people," Eubulus of Anaphlystus, the whole drift of whose Panathenaic. Theseus, according to him, was the founder of democracy; and in a certain sense, we have no doubt he was. * Προς Φιλιππον. + Areopagitic. policy was to render the mob he misled as dissolute and brutish as the herd of Comus, and who caused them to devote to theatrical amusements, by a solemn act of legislation, and under pain of death denounced against any patriotic attempt to repeal it, the funds necessary to the public defencehe saw this pestilent demagogue, vehemently suspected, too, (as from the tendency of his measures he well might be,) of being all the while in the pay of Philip of Macedon, reduce Athens to a condition as bad in point of effeminacy and debauchery as that of Tarentum, and honored for doing so, both during his life and after his death, beyond the wisest and best of her statesmen; how should he record the doings or draw the character of such a man, without seeming to write history with the pen of satire? In the tenth book of his history of Philip, this celebrated writer treated of the demagogues of Athens in detail, those cup-bearers of the democracy, as Plato expresses it, who drenched it with liberty until it was drunk, and to whose profligate sycophancy the most popular of the tragic poets imputes all the errors and vices of the otherwise unerring people. There is not to be found in the catalogues of laborious compilers like Fabricius, the trace of any work of antiquity, of which we more sensibly regret the loss, than of this. Theopompus, like Xenophon, was a continuator of THUCYDIDES. It is, indeed, a subject of congratulation, that the work of this great man did not share the fate of his successors. Antiquity has left us three witnesses of the three common forms of government in their excess or corruption, in three historians, hitherto, perhaps, unrivalled by the moderns -Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus. Of these, the first in order is, in our opinion, the first in merit. Sallust is flattered by the comparison, but we well know and fully appreciate the transcendent power of him who painted the despotism of the first Cæsars, the Dante of history, whose deep thought revealed rather than expressed in sentences of a pregnant, and sometimes obscure brevity, seems in harmony with his dark and terrible subject, like the famous words upon the gate of hell * Euripides. Queste parole di colore oscuro. Δεινον δι πολλοι κακούργους ὅταν ἔχωσι προστατας. - Orest. 772-3. But the mighty annalist of Tiberius, and Caligula, and Claudius, and Nero, deplores the dismal monotony of the crimes he records, and envies the historians of an earlier age, the more brilliant and various subjects presented to them by the achievements of "THE ROMAN PEOPLE." And it is principally in this respect, that we consider the two great works of Tacitus as on the whole less precious as monuments of the past, and as requiring for their execution, if possible, a less commanding order of ability, than that of Thucydides. With all his profound knowledge of human nature, in which no one ever surpassed him, the Roman historian found his theme not only cloying for sameness, but to present fewer objects of high interest, and to teach fewer lessons of practical importance for succeeding times, than he desired to transmit to them. Monarchical despotism, especially in that rude form, is a comparatively simple thing. Even the military democracy into which the monarchy of the Caesars soon degenerated, and which furnished, in bloody contests for the crown, scenes of a more stirring and diversified dramatic character, will bear no comparison with the tumultuary popular governments, always in a state of war and commotion, that figure in Greek story. Such governments, it cannot be too often repeated, are the true school of politics. Accordingly, never was subject so fortunately, or, we should rather say, wisely chosen, as that of Thucydides; for the choice itself is the best evidence of his pre-eminent ability to do it justice. He foresaw, he tells us, from his knowledge of Greek affairs, that the war was destined to be, as it proved, the most eventful and most obstinate that had ever been waged among men. He began at once to take all the measures necessary for obtaining the best information. He deliberately records and ratifies as a historian what had thus been revealed to the prophetic eye of the statesman, and in a solemn proem, worthy of the heroic poem it precedes,t he has sketched in a few words the outline of this grand historical picture. There can be no better illustration of the remarks we made, when speaking just now of the freedom which the authors before us, like so many other Germans of the present time, use in questioning the opinions of such men as Aristotle, than the absurd judgment passed by Dionysius of Halicarnassus -a generally excellent critic-upon Thucydides, in regard * Plato called ultra democracy the wavтorwλion of governments. Plut. Dio. + Marcellinus. to the choice of his subject. It is the language of a finical and fantastical pedant, who would have history written so as to give no offence "to ears polite," and who thought it a "dreadful thing" to remind a people of the stern but instructive lessons of its experience, as Nick Bottom thought it, "to bring in, God shield us! a lion among ladies." The flagrant folly of Dionysius in this respect, is the more remarkable, because in the same breath he praises, and justly, we have no doubt, Theopompus for that very severity in exposing the corruptions of his age and country, for which others. censured him, and for an approach to which the critic himself finds so much fault with Thucydides. According to him, the former of these two historians excelled all others by his deep insight into motives, his sagacity in detecting hypocrisy, and the power with which he tore off the masks of a specious but dishonest conduct. Like Tacitus, he looked rather to the dark side of human nature, and for the benefit of his patient, used the knife and the cautery without mercy. Yet it is this very eulogist of such a writer, who thinks the most important period of Greek affairs should have been suffered to sink into oblivion, because it was not such a one as that people might dwell on with particular complacency! The Peloponnesian war has been aptly called the "thirty years war" of Greece; though with a view to distant consequences, it was far worse than that memorable struggle. It not only produced but perpetuated the scenes painted by Schiller in "Wallenstein's Lager." It was a great era, not of revolution merely, but of downfall and ruin. We have already spoken of the light in which it was regarded by Thucydides, and we may here add, that its moral and political effects of all sorts have been very forcibly summed up, perhaps even somewhat exaggerated, by Professor Wachsmuth.t That is to say, at least, we think all the seeds of decay and corruption had been sown broad cast before that war, and were only brought up a little sooner, and made preternaturally fruitful and teeming, by its baneful influences of all sorts; while he appears to regard it not only as the occasion, but to a greater extent than we are ready to admit, the prime cause of much that ensued upon it. At any rate, however, it was an epoch in the history of those commonwealths that * L. I. c. 22, 23. tv. II. pp. 181. sqq., and 393, 4. The former passage is only a paraphrase of Thucydides. |