improvements must prevail. Fixed institutions are best for a city at peace. But the call to manifold enterprise imposes the need of manifold development. Hence—owing to their varied experience—the Athenians have been greater innovators than you[1]." The analogy suggested here between politics and a progressive art[2] is the more significant when it is remembered what the historian's age had seen accomplished in sculpture, architecture and drama. It is also worthy of remark that the only unqualified censures of democracy which occur in Thucydides, and the only protests against change as such, are ascribed to the "violent" Cleon and the "licentious" Alcibiades[3].
§ 10. The choice of moments for the introduction of speeches is not, with Thucydides, a matter of rhetorical caprice, but has an intelligible relation to the general plan of his work. A speech or debate reported in the direct form always signalises a noteworthy point in the inner or mental history of the war, as distinguished from the narrative of its external facts: it announces thoughts and arguments which exercised an important inHuence, and which therefore require to be apprehended with the utmost possible distinctness. The event which furnishes
- ↑ i. 71.
- ↑ "Among early inquirers into the nature of human action the arts helped to fill up the void of speculation." (Prof. Jowett, Introduction to Plato's Republic.)
- ↑ iii. 37 § 3; vi. 18 § 7. Thucydides speaks of the οὐ δημοτικὴ παρανομία of Alcibiades in vi. 28; cf. vi. 15, where the same term is applied to him as in i. 132 to Pausanias.
