with all the secrecy of a
criminal. He went to the palace, not like a victorious commander who had
merited and might demand the greatest rewards, but like an offender who
had come to supplicate a pardon for his crimes. His reception was
answerable; "_Exceptusque brevi osculo et nullo sermone, turbae
servientium immixtus est_." Yet in that worst season of this worst of
monarchical[9] tyrannies, modesty, discretion, and a coolness of temper,
formed some kind of security, even for the highest merit. But at Athens,
the nicest and best studied behavior was not a sufficient guard for a
man of great capacity. Some of their bravest commanders were obliged to
fly their country, some to enter into the service of its enemies, rather
than abide a popular determination on their conduct, lest, as one of
them said, their giddiness might make the people condemn where they
meant to acquit; to throw in a black bean even when they intended a
white one.

The Athenians made a very rapid progress to the most enormous excesses.
The people, under no restraint, soon grew dissolute, luxurious, and
idle. They renounced all labor, and began to subsist themselves from the
public revenues. They lost all concern for their common honor or safety,
and could bear no advice that tended to reform them. At this time truth
became offensive to those lords the people, and most highly dangerous to
the speaker. The orators no longer ascended the _rostrum_, but to
corrupt them further with the most fulsome adulation. These orators were
all bribed by foreign princes on the one side or the other. And besides
its own parties, in this city there were parties, and avowed ones too,
for the Persians, Spartans, and Macedonians, supported each of them by
one or more demagogues pensioned and bribed to this iniquitous service.
The people, forgetful of all virtue and public spirit, and intoxicated
with the flatteries of their orators (these courtiers of republics, and
endowed with the distinguishing characteristics of all other courtiers),
this people, I say, at last arrived at that pitch of madness, that they
coolly and deliberately, by an express law, made it capital for any man
to propose an application of the immense sums squandered in public
shows, even to the most necessary purposes of the state. When you see
the people of this republic banishing and murdering their best and
ablest citizens, dissipating the public treasure with the most senseless
extravagance, and sp