neration of the Persian Empire--once so magnificent and mighty.

This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human
spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it,
for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a
spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a
generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato
and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter
experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them,
as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore
herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then
civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is
going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered.
Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of
praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted
Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not
indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own
immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the
world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta,
and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took
up the burden of war between brethren. There are few passages in history
more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls
Athens the School of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly
coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coarsening
of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is
succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the
war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a
sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between
the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of
the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to
force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in
Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.

The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face
another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the
spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through
slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship; in
the other she lost