EFFICACY OF THE DEMOCRATICAL IDEA. 17g the best government, and presenting the greatest cliance 01 beneficent results, for a Grecian community. Among the Athe nian citizens, certainly, it produced a strength and unanimity of positive political sentiment, such as has rarely been seen in the history of mankind, which excites our surprise and admiration the more when we compare it with the apathy which had pre- ceded, and which is even implied as the natural state of the public mind in Solon's famous proclamation against neutrality in a sedition. 1 Because democracy happens to be unpalatable to most modern readers, they have been accustomed to look upon the sentiment here described only in its least honorable manifes- tations, in the caricatures of Aristophanes, or in the empty common-places of rhetorical declaimers. But it is not in this way that the force, the earnestness, or the binding value, of democratical sentiment at Athens is to be measured. We must listen to it as it comes from the lips of Perikles, 3 while he is strenuously enforcing upon the people those active duties for which it both implanted the stimulus and supplied the courage ; or from the oligarchical Nikias in the harbor of Syracuse, when he is endeavoring to revive the courage of his despairing troops for one last death-struggle, and when he appeals to their demo- cratical patriotism as to the only flame yet alive and burning even in that moment of agony. 3 From the time of Kleisthenes downward, the creation of this new mighty impulse makes an entire revolution in the Athenian character. And if the change still stood out in so prominent a manner before the eyes of Herodotus, much more must it have been felt by the contempo- raries among whom it occurred. The attachment of an Athenian citizen to his democratical constitution comprised two distinct veins of sentiment : first, his lights, protection, and advantages derived from it, next, his .obligations of exertion and sacrifice towards it and with reference 1 See the preceding chapter xi, of this History, vol. iii, p. 145, respecting the Solonian declaration here adverted to.
- See the two speeches of Perikles in Thucyd. ii, 35-46, and ii, 60-64.
Compare the reflections of Thucydides upon the two democracies of Athens and Syracuse, vi, 69 and vii, 21-55.
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