Such a drama could not be acted, in an important city belonging to the Greek name, without producing a deep and extensive impression throughout all the other cities. And Thucydidês has taken advantage of it to give a sort of general sketch of Grecian politics during the Peloponnesian war; violence of civil discord in each city, aggravated by foreign war, and by the contending efforts of Athens and Sparta,—the former espousing the democratical party everywhere; the latter, the oligarchical. The Korkyræan sedition was the first case in which these two causes of political antipathy and exasperation were seen acting with full united force, and where the malignity of sentiment and demoralization flowing from such an union was seen without disguise. The picture drawn by Thucydidês, of moral and political feeling under these influences, will ever remain memorable as the work of an analyst and a philosopher: he has conceived and described the perverting causes with a spirit of generalization which renders these two chapters hardly less applicable to other political societies, far distant both in time and place,—especially, under many points of view, to France between 1789 and 1799,—than to Greece in the fifth century before the Christian era. The deadly bitterness infused into intestine party contests by the accompanying dangers of foreign war and intervention of foreign enemies,—the mutual fears between political rivals, where each thinks that the other will forestall him in striking a mortal blow, and where constitutional maxims have ceased to carry authority either as restraint or as protection,—the superior popularity of the man who is most forward with the sword, or who runs down his enemies in the most unmeasured language, coupled with the disposition to treat both prudence in action and candor in speech as if it were nothing but treachery or cowardice,—the exclusive regard to party ends, with the reckless adoption, and even admiring preference, of fraud or violence as the most effectual means,—the loss of respect for legal authority, as well as of confidence in private agreement, and the surrender even of blood and friendship to the overruling ascendency of party-ties,—the perversion of ordinary morality, bringing with it altered signification of all the common words importing blame or approbation,—the unnatural predominance of the ambitious and contentious passions, overpowering in men’s minds all real public objects, and equalizing for the time the better and the worse cause, by taking hold of democracy on one side and aristocracy on the other as mere pretences to sanctify personal triumph,—all these gloomy social phenomena, here indicated by the historian, have their causes deeply seated in the human mind, and are likely, unless the bases of constitutional morality shall come to be laid more surely and firmly than they have hitherto been, to recur from time to time, under diverse modifications, “so long as human nature shall be the same as it is now,” to use the language of Thucydidês himself.[466] He has described, with fidelity not inferior to his sketch of the pestilence at Athens, the symptoms of a certain morbid political condition, wherein the vehemence of intestine conflict, instead of being kept within such limits as consists with the maintenance of one society among the contending parties, becomes for the time inflamed and poisoned with all the unscrupulous hostility of foreign war, chiefly from actual alliance between parties within the state and foreigners without. In following the impressive description of the historian, we have to keep in mind the general state of manners in his time, especially the cruelties tolerated by the laws of war, as compared with that greater humanity and respect for life which has grown up during the last two centuries in modern Europe. And we have farther to recollect that if he had been describing the effects of political fury among Carthaginians and Jews, instead of among his contemporary Greeks, he would have added to his list of horrors mutilation, crucifixion, and other refinements on simple murder.