ministration-new weapons thrust into the hands of the democracy -the selfishness of Athenians as citizens predominating over their patriotism as Greeks-art triumphant-manners degradedmorality debased! With Pericles, too, commences that fatal war, whose progress showed how inevitably the constitution of Athens, converted and mainly by his means-into the will of a despotic majority, was too strong for the maxims by which he himself would have controlled its working. A noble subject for the hand of genius! were it only for the sake of transferring to fresh canvass the bold strokes of Thucydides, or of retouching the feebler pencillings of Xenophon.

The curtain which falls upon the humiliation of Athens must rise on her renewed ascendency. One generation has scarcely passed since she was groaning beneath the thirty tyrants and their reign of terror-her native energies prostrate, her external resources reft away. Seventy-five cities now hail her the head of their confederacy. Egean Isles are numbered among her foreign settlements. Lacedæmon recognises her dominion of the seas. She is confessedly, and without a rival, first of the Grecian communities.

Look at her half a century later! An enemy more deadly than Thebes or Sparta has fought his way to tyranny. Against the craft of Philip, and the valour of his son, the eloquent thunders of Demosthenes have pealed in vain. And if the last sparks of antique heroism do not expire with Phocion, yet the fitful gleams they throw out from time to time serve but to mock the ruins they adorn.'

Again, four hundred years have fled. The Athenians are creating a thirteenth tribe in honour of Adrian; and their city is receiving its latest embellishments from the bounty of Emperors and Sophists!

Century after century rolls on in merited obscurity. Athens is insulted by the name, without the substance of freedom, until her conquest by Omar. She is an appendage of the harem, and a pandar and eunuch governs her governor,' until the Greeks of our own time show something of their fathers' spirit. Then

"last scene of all

That ends this strange, eventful history--"

a Bavarian prince builds his palace in the city of Theseus-his subjects address him in a jargon which mingles Turkish, French, Italian, and German with remnants of the lowest Hellenic dialect—and the traveller, who has been landed by a steam-boat at

the mole of the Piræus, returns from a day's shooting in Boeotia to an English Hotel in Athens, kept by a native of Wapping!

On these signal epochs, or some such as these, separated indeed by very different intervals, but exhibiting the true stages of Athenian elevation and decline, Mr Bulwer might have lavished, with admirable effect, the stores of his knowledge, and the shrewdness of his philosophy. At each of them it would have been an enviable task to trace out the effects of accumulated causes;—to portray successive states of manners, literature, art, and policy; and to call up, by a few magic touches, the images of statesmen and warriors, orators and poets. Here, too, would have been ample room for that tone of levity or sarcasm, to which Mr Bulwer occasionally inclines, and which does not so exactly harmonize with the regular march of historic narrative. And, that such isolated pictures would have been drawn by him with vigour and enthusiasm, may be proved at once by a few sketches, of a kindred nature, which these volumes supply, and which we quote with infinite pleasure, though the first of them is not exclusively Athenian. Its subject is the Olympic festival :

If warmed for a moment from the gravity of the historic muse, we might conjure up the picture of this festival, we would invoke the imagination of the reader to that sacred ground, decorated with the profusest triumphs of Grecian art,-all Greece assembled from her continent, her colonies, her isles,- -war suspended,— -a sabbath of solemnity and rejoicing, the Spartan no longer grave, the Athenian forgetful of the forum, the high-born Thessalian,-the gay Corinthian,-the lively gestures of the Asiatic lonian;-suffering the various events of various times to confound themselves in one recollection of the past, he may see every eye turned from the combatants to one majestic figure-hear every lip murmuring a single name-glorious in greater fields; Olympia itself is forgotten. Who is the spectacle of the day? Themistocles, the conqueror of Salamis, and the saviour of Greece! Again, the huzzas of countless thousands following the chariot-wheels of the competitors,-whose name is shouted forth, the victor without a rival?-it is Alcibiades, the destroyer of Athens! Turn to the temple of the Olympian god, pass the brazen gates, proceed through the columned aisles,what arrests the awe and wonder of the crowd? Seated on a throne of ebon and of ivory, of gold and gems-the olive crown on his head, in his right hand the statue of victory, in his left, wrought of all metals, the cloud-compelling sceptre-behold the colossal master-piece of Phidias, the Homeric dream embodied, the majesty of the Olympian Jove! Enter the banquet-room of the conquerors;-to whose verse, hymned in a solemn and mighty chorus, bends the listening Spartan ?-it is the verse of the Dorian Pindar! In that motley and glittering space (the fair of Olympia, the mart of every commerce, the focus of all intellect) join the throng, earnest and breathless, gathered round that sunburnt traveller;-now drinking in the wild account of Babylonian gardens, or of temples whose awful deity no lip may name,-now, with clenched hands and glowing cheeks, tracking the march of Xerxes along exhaust

ed rivers, and over bridges that spanned the sea;-what moves, what hushes that mighty audience? It is Herodotus reading his history!**

Or, take the reception of Aristagoras at Athens, after he has failed to obtain the aid of Sparta in the Ionian revolt:

The patient and plotting Milesian departed thence to Athens: he arrived there just at the moment when the Athenian ambassadors had returned from Sardis, charged with the haughty reply of Artaphernes to the mission concerning Hippias. The citizens were aroused, excited, inflamed; equally indignant at the insolence, and fearful of the power of the Satrap. It was a favourable occasion for Aristagoras!

To the imagination of the reader this passage in history presents a striking picture. We may behold the great assembly of that lively, high-souled, sensitive, and inflammable people. There is the Agora ;there the half-built temple to acus;-above, the citadel, where yet hang the chains of the captive, enemy;-still linger in the ears of the populace, already vain of their prowess, and haughty in their freedom, the menaces of the Persian-the words that threatened them with the restoration of the exiled tyrant; and at this moment, and in this concourse, we see the subtle Milesian, wise in the experience of mankind, popular with all free states, from having restored freedom to the colonies of lonia-every advantage of foreign circumstance and intrinsic ability in his favour,-about to address the breathless and excited multitude. He rose he painted, as he had done to Cleomenes, in lively colours, the wealth of Asia, the effeminate habits of its people-he described its armies fighting without spear or shield-he invoked the valour of a nation already successful in war against hardy and heroic foes he appealed to old hereditary ties; the people of Miletus had been an Athenian colony-should not the parent protect the child in the greatest of all blessings the right of liberty? Now he entreats-now he promises,-the sympathy of the free, the enthusiasm of the brave, are alike aroused. He succeeds: the people accede to his views. "It is easier," says the homely Herodotus, “to gain (or delude) a multitude than an individual; and the eloquence which had failed with Cleomenes enlisted thirty thousand Athenians."†

The next extract must be longer. It paints the condition of Athens about the period of Cimon's death, thirty years after the battles of Platæa and Mycale,-eighteen years before the breaking out of the Peloponnesian war:

A rapid glance over the events of the few years commemorated in the last book of this history, will suffice to show the eminence which Athens had attained over the other states of Greece. She was the head of the

Ionian league the mistress of the Grecian seas; with Sparta, the sole rival that could cope with her armies, and arrest her ambition, she had obtained a peace; Corinth was humbled-Ægina ruined-Megara had shrunk into her dependency and garrison. The states of Boeotia had received their very constitution from the hands of an Athenian generalthe democracies planted by Athens served to make liberty itself subservient to her will, and involved in her safety. She had remedied the sterility of her own soil by securing the rich pastures of the neighbouring Eubœa. She had added the gold of Thasos to the silver of Laurion, and established a footing in Thessaly, which was at once a fortress against the Asiatic arms and a mart for Asiatic commerce. The fairest lands of the opposite coast-the most powerful islands of the Grecian seas, contributed to her treasury, or were almost legally subjected to her revenge. Her navy was rapidly increasing in skill, in number, and renown; at home the recall of Cimon had conciliated domestic contentions, and the death of Cimon dispirited for a while the foes to the established constitution. In all Greece, Myronides was perhaps the ablest general. Pericles (now rapidly rising to the sole administration of affairs) was undoubtedly the most highly educated, cautious, and commanding states

man.

But a single act of successful daring had more than all else contributed to the Athenian power. Even in the lifetime of Aristides it had been proposed to transfer the common treasury from Delos to Athens. The motion failed-perhaps through the virtuous opposition of Aristides himself. But when, at the siege of Ithome, the feud between the Athenians and Spartans broke out, the fairest pretext and the most favourable occasion conspired in favour of a measure so seductive to the national ambition. Under pretence of saving the treasury from the hazard of falling a prey to the Spartan rapacity or need, it was removed at once to Athens; and while the enfeebled power of Sparta, fully engrossed by the Messenian war, forbade all resistance to the transfer, from that, the most formidable quarter, the conquest of Naxos, and the recent reduction of Thasos, seem to have intimidated the spirit, and for a time even to have silenced the reproaches of the tributary states themselves. Thus, in actual possession of the tribute of her allies, Athens acquired a new right to its collection and its management, and while she devoted some of the treasures to the maintenance of her strength, she began early to uphold the prerogative of appropriating a part to the enhancement of her splendour.*

*For the transfer itself there were excuses yet more plausible than that assigned by Justin. First, in the year following the breach between the Spartans and Athenians (B. c. 460), probably the same year in which the transfer was effected, the Athenians were again at war with the great king in Egypt, and there was therefore a show of justice in the argument noticed by Boeckh (though, in the source whence he derives it, the argument applies to the earlier time of Aristides), that the transfer provided a place of greater security against the barbarians. Secondly, Delos itself was already, and had long been, under Athenian influence. Pisistratus had made a purification of the island, Delian 'soothsayers had predicted to Athens the sovereignty of the seas, and 'the Athenians seem to have arrogated a right of interference with the

As this most important measure occurred at the very period when the power of Cimon was weakened by the humiliating circumstances that attended his expedition to Ithomë, and by the vigorous and popular measures of the opposition, so there seems every reason to believe, that it was principally advised and effected by Pericles, who appears shortly afterwards presiding over the administration of the finances.

‹ Though the Athenian commerce had greatly increased, it was still principally confined to the Thracian coasts and the Black Sea. The desire of enterprises, too vast for a state whose power reverses might suddenly destroy, was not yet indulged to excess; nor had the turbulent spirits of the Piræus yet poured in upon the various barriers of the social state and the political constitution, the rashness of sailors and the avarice of merchants. Agriculture, to which all classes in Athens were addicted, raised a healthful counteraction to the impetus given to trade. Nor was it till some years afterwards, when Pericles gathered all the citizens into the town, and left no safety-valve to the ferment and vices of the Agora that the Athenian aristocracy gradually lost all patriotism and manhood, and an energetic democracy was corrupted into a vehement though educated mob. The spirit of faction, it is true, ran high, but a third party, headed by Myronides and Tolmides, checked the excesses of either extreme.

Thus, at home and abroad, time and fortune, the concurrence of events, and the happy accident of great men, not only maintained the present eminence of Athens, but promised, to ordinary foresight, a long duration of her glory and her power. To deeper observers, the picture might have presented dim, but prophetic shadows. It was clear that the command Athens had obtained, was utterly disproportioned to her natural resources that her greatness was altogether artificial, and rested partly upon moral, rather than physical causes, and partly upon the fears and the weakness of her neighbours. A sterile soil, a limited territory, a scanty population-all these-the drawbacks and disadvantages of nature -the wonderful energy and confident daring of a free state might conceal in prosperity; but the first calamity could not fail to expose them to jealous and hostile eyes; the empire delegated to the Athenians, they must naturally desire to retain and to increase; and there was every reason to forebode that their ambition would soon exceed their capacities to sustain it. As the state became accustomed to its power, it would learn to abuse it. Increasing civilisation, luxury, and art, brought with them new expenses, and Athens had already been permitted to indulge with impunity the dangerous passion of exacting tribute from her neighbours. Dependence upon other resources than those of the native population has ever been a main cause of the destruction of despotisms, and it cannot fail, sooner or later, to be equally pernicious to the republics that trust to it. The resources of taxation confined to freemen and natives, are almost incalculable; the resources of tribute wrung

temple. The transfer was probably therefore, in appearance, little more than a transfer from a place under the power of Athens to Athens itself. Thirdly, it seems that when the question was first agitated, during the life of Aristides, it was at the desire of one of the allies ' themselves (the Samians).'