rather than alive. Calamities fall upon us, sicknesses vex and harass us, and make life, short though it be, to appear long. So death, through the wretchedness of our life, is a most sweet refuge to our race; and God, who gives us the tastes that we enjoy of pleasant times, is seen, in his very gift, to be envious."

Of Xerxes an end. Now for Themistocles.

The Greek allied fleet were on the point of withdrawing before the Persians and leaving the Euboeans exposed to destruction. With Eu-ry-bi'a-des, Lacedæmonian commanderin-chief, the Euboeans in suppliance prevailing nothing, they went to a man more open to negotiations. Now Herodotus:

They went to Themistocles, the Athenian commander, to whom they gave a bribe of thirty talents, on his promise that the fleet should remain and risk a battle in defense of Euboea.

And Themistocles succeeded in detaining the fleet in the way which I will now relate. He made over to Eurybiades five talents out of the thirty paid him, which he gave as if they came from himself: and having in this way gained over the admiral, he addressed himself to Adeimantus, the son of Ocyus, the Corinthian leader, who was the only remonstrant now, and who still threatened to sail away from Artemisium and not wait for the other captains. Addressing himself to this man, Themistocles said with an oath, Thou forsake us? By no means! I will pay thee better for remaining than the Mede would for leaving thy friends"-and straightway he sent on board the ship of Adeimantus a present of three talents of silver. So these two captains were won by gifts, and came over to the views of Themistocles, who was thereby enabled to gratify the wishes of the Euboeans. He likewise made his own gain on the occasion; for he kept the rest of the money, and no one knew of it. The commanders who took the gifts thought that the sums were furnished by Athens, and had been sent to be used in this way.

Thus it came to pass that the Greeks stayed at Euboea and there gave battle to the enemy.

Here is the device of Themistocles for detaching the subject Ionian Greeks from the interest of Xerxes. It reads like a larger contrivance of O-dys'seus. In truth, Themistocles might be a study in real life from the Odysseus of Homer's romance. Herodotus:

Themistocles chose out the swiftest sailers from among the Athenian vessels, and proceeding to the various watering-places along the coast, cut inscriptions on the rocks, which were read by the Ionians the day following, on their arrival at Artemisium. The inscriptions ran thus : "Men of Ionia, ye do wrong to fight against your own fathers and to give your help to enslave Greece. We beseech you, therefore, to come over, if possible, to our side: if you cannot do this, then, we pray you, stand aloof from the contest yourselves, and persuade the Carians to do the like. If neither of these things be possible, and you are hindered, by a force too strong to resist, from venturing upon desertion, at least when we come to blows, fight backwardly, remembering that you are sprung from us, and that it was through you we first provoked the hatred of the barbarians.” Themistocles, in putting up these inscriptions, looked, I believe, to two chances-either Xerxes would not discover them, in which case they might bring over the Ionians to the side of the Greeks ; or they would be reported to him and made a ground of accusation against the Ionians, who would thereupon be distrusted, and would not be allowed to take part in the sea-fights.

When the time came for finally deciding where the Grecian fleet should make its stand against the Persians, Themistocles took infinite trouble to secure a vote in favor of Salamis. Finding, to his disgust, that the majority at last were going against him, he took a bold step. Let Herodotus tell what it was:

He went out secretly from the council, and instructing a certain man what he should say, sent him on board a merchant ship to the fleet of the Medes. The man's name was Sicinnus; he was one of Themistocles' household slaves, and acted as tutor to his sons; in after times, when the Thespians were admitting persons to citizenship, Themistocles made him a Thespian, and a rich man to boot. The ship brought Sicinnus to the Persian fleet, and there he delivered his message to the leaders in these words: "The Athenian commander has sent me to you privily, without the knowledge of the other Greeks. He is a wellwisher to the king's cause, and would rather success should attend on you than on his countrymen; wherefore he bids me tell you, that fear has seized the Greeks and they are meditating a hasty flight. Now then it is open to you to achieve the best work that ever ye wrought, if only ye will hinder their escaping. They no longer agree among themselves, so that they will not now make any resistance-nay, 'tis likely ye may

see a fight already begun between such as favour and such as oppose your cause." The messenger, when he had thus expressed himself, departed and was seen no more,

Herodotus reports as follows a message sent, after the Persians depart, by Themistocles to Xerxes:

"Themistocles the Athenian, anxious to render thee a service, has restrained the Greeks, who were impatient to pursue thy ships, and to break up the bridges at the Hellespont. Now, therefore, return home at thy leisure."

The greed of Themistocles was as great as his genius. Commencing his shameless levies with the Andrians, he used his power to enforce a general scheme of spoliation for his own aggrandizement on the exposed and helpless isles of Greece. It is melancholy that Herodotus should be, as probably he was, justified in the heavy indictment brought against this great representative Greek in the following words:

Meanwhile Themistocles, who never ceased his pursuit of gain, sent threatening messages to the other islanders with demands for different sums, employing the same messengers and the same words as he had used toward the Adrians. "If," he said, "they did not send him the amount required, he would bring the Greek fleet upon them, and besiege them till he took their cities." By these means he collected large sums from the Carystians and the Parians, who, when they heard that Andros was already besieged, and that Themistocles was the best esteemed of all the captains, sent the money through fear. Whether any of the other islanders did the like, I cannot say for certain; but I think some did besides those I have mentioned. However, the Carystians, though they complied, were not spared any the more; but Themistocles was softened by the Parians' gift, and therefore they received no visit from the army. In this way it was Themistocles, during his stay at Andros, obtained money from the islanders, unbeknown to the other captains.

Herodotus was, like nearly every writer of the first class in every literature, a man of comparatively high moral tone. Comparatively, we say, and this qualification is necessary. For there are stories told by Herodotus which it would not

do for us to repeat in these pages.

But the fault in taste

and in ethical standard is the fault, not of the man, but of his age and of heathenism. The total effect of the historyand this is the individual praise of Herodotus-makes for, rather than against, good morals. The fluent garrulity of the historian, his evident willingness to gratify popular appetite -perhaps we should say, rather, his own frankly genuine sympathy with popular appetite-makes his pages a marvelously perfect mirror to reflect for all generations the features and the lineaments of the age and the race to which he belonged. The literary image thus immortally preserved we prize and prize highly; but as for the original of the image, the reality itself, that did not perish too soon.

otus.

V.

THUCYDIDES.

THUCYDIDES is not so entertaining an historian as HerodThis is due partly to the nature of his subject; but partly it is due to the nature of the man. Indeed, since it was mainly the nature of the man that prescribed his choice of a subject, it may fairly be said that the difference, existing against Thucydides as compared with Herodotus, in point of entertainingness, is chiefly attributable to the less engaging personal quality of the author himself.

What Thucydides describes is the so-called Pel-o-pon-ne'sian war. This is the name given to a conflict, continued with little interruption during twenty-seven years, between - Sparta (chief Peloponnesian power) with her allies, on the one side, and Athens with her allies, on the other. flict was confined almost exclusively to the states and colonies of Greece. It partook strongly of the character of a civil

The con

war.

The prize contended for was leadership in Hellenic affairs. Sparta envied Athens her empire. Or, to put the matter from the other point of view, Athens threatened the independence of Sparta and of Hellas. The result of this mutual jealously was that, continuously, for the space of almost a whole human generation, the states of Greece devoted themselves energetically to the business of destroying one another. Energetically, but not exclusively; for Athens, meantime— and this is one of the miracles of history-warring, as it were, with her left hand, carried forward, with her right, those matchless achievements of hers, in letters and in arts, which have made her name the immortal synonym and symbol of genius, of culture, and of taste. It is beyond measure astonishing that, embroiled in internecine war at home, embarked in arduous naval expeditions abroad, suffering, almost to decimation, within her own city walls from a plague unsurpassed for virulence, this incomparably spirited little municipality, probably not at her height of prosperity numbering more than about twenty thousand free citizens (representing a total population of, say, five hundred thousand souls), should, at this very same moment of her history, have been living a life of the intellect flowering into such products as Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides.

For Thucydides wrote of his own times in his history. Of his own times, but, alas! of his own times, in only one aspect of those times, the aspect of war. Immensely is this to be regretted. No account whatever, scarcely even a hint, from that master hand, of the double life that Athens lived during all those troubled days! You would scarcely guess from Thucydides, that, besides her remarkable activity in war, Athens was maintaining meantime a parallel activity more remarkable still that was not of war, in the production of such works in literature and in art as, generally and justly, are assumed to be sufficiently described when they are simply