nted the progressive element, the Spartans the conservative. The
Athenians believed in a strong centralized government. The Lacedaemonians
professed greater regard for autonomy. A little ingenuity, a good deal
of hardihood, might multiply such futilities indefinitely. In fact, it
would be possible to write the story of our Peloponnesian war in phrases
of Thucydides, and I should not be surprised if such a task were a
regular school exercise at Eton or at Rugby. Why, it was but the other
day that Professor Tyrrell, of Dublin, translated a passage from
Lowell's Biglow Papers into choice Aristophanese.

[Note: According to _fama clamosa_, Winfield was originally Wingfield, a
very common Virginian name. The classical parallel of Tromes and
Atrometos will suggest itself to every one who has read Demosthenes.
Dem. 18, 129.]

Unfortunately, such feats, as I have already said, imperil one's
intellectual honesty, and one would not like to imitate the Byzantine
historians who were given to similar tricks. One of these gentlemen,
Choricius by name, had a seaport to describe. How the actual seaport lay
mattered little to Choricius, so long as the Epidamnus of Thucydides was
at hand; and if the task of narrating our Peloponnesian war were
assigned to the ghost of Choricius, I have no doubt that he would open
it with a description of Charleston in terms of Epidamnus. Little
matters of topography would not trouble such an one. To the sophist an
island is an island, a river a river, a height a height, everywhere.
Sphacteria would furnish the model for Morris Island; the Achelous would
serve indifferently for Potomac or Mississippi, the Epipolae for
Missionary Ridge, Plataea for Vicksburg, the harbor of Syracuse for
Hampton Roads; and Thucydides' description of the naval engagement and
the watching crowds would be made available for the fight between
Merrimac and Monitor.

The debates in Thucydides would be a quarry for the debates in either
Congress, as they had been a quarry for centuries of rhetorical
historians. And as for the "winged words," why should they have wings,
if not to flit from character to character? A well-known scholar, at a
loss for authentic details as to the life of Pindar, fell back on a lot
of apophthegms attributed to his hero, and in so doing maintained the
strange doctrine that apophthegms were more to be trusted than any other
form of tradition. There could not have been a more hopeless thesis. The
general