doctrine of Solon, that political
power ought to be commensurate with public service. In the Persian war
the services of the Democracy eclipsed those of the Patrician orders,
for the fleet that swept the Asiatics from the Egean Sea was manned by
the poorer Athenians. That class, whose valour had saved the State and
had preserved European civilisation, had gained a title to increase of
influence and privilege. The offices of State, which had been a monopoly
of the rich, were thrown open to the poor, and in order to make sure
that they should obtain their share, all but the highest commands were
distributed by lot.

Whilst the ancient authorities were decaying, there was no accepted
standard of moral and political right to make the framework of society
fast in the midst of change. The instability that had seized on the
forms threatened the very principles of government. The national beliefs
were yielding to doubt, and doubt was not yet making way for knowledge.
There had been a time when the obligations of public as well as private
life were identified with the will of the gods. But that time had
passed. Pallas, the ethereal goddess of the Athenians, and the Sun god
whose oracles, delivered from the temple between the twin summits of
Parnassus, did so much for the Greek nationality, aided in keeping up a
lofty ideal of religion; but when the enlightened men of Greece learnt
to apply their keen faculty of reasoning to the system of their
inherited belief, they became quickly conscious that the conceptions of
the gods corrupted the life and degraded the minds of the public.
Popular morality could not be sustained by the popular religion. The
moral instruction which was no longer supplied by the gods could not yet
be found in books. There was no venerable code expounded by experts, no
doctrine proclaimed by men of reputed sanctity like those teachers of
the far East whose words still rule the fate of nearly half mankind. The
effort to account for things by close observation and exact reasoning
began by destroying. There came a time when the philosophers of the
Porch and the Academy wrought the dictates of wisdom and virtue into a
system so consistent and profound that it has vastly shortened the task
of the Christian divines. But that time had not yet come.

The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from
the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of science was the age
of Pericles, and the ende