rces from these wider horizons, deepening its
own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might
have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these
presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex
influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the
sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm
ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in
the choral ode of the _Oedipus_, delineates, "the laws of sublimer
range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."

Sec. 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT

The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to
history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the
moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul,
exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the
serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed
law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down
the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of
the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of
Thermopylae, the +energeia tes psyches+--the energy of the soul. This
energy of the soul in Aristotle is the _vertu_ of Machiavelli, the
spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State.
It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a
nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of
insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which
adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer
daring.

In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the
centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more
worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her
history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas.
Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.

Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a
place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his
work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as
the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement
to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes.
His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the
Achaean league,