seems to have happened at the end of the war-time is that, owing largely to the democratic enthusiasm of the sophistic movement in Athens, the common people is strongly in power; owing to the same movement its old taboos and rules of conduct are a little shaken and less able to stand against strong temptation; but meantime the true moral lessons of the enlightenment, the hardest of all lessons for man to learn, have never worked into their bones. Just as the French Revolution called into power the brutal and superstitious peasant who was the product of the Old Régime and could never rise to the ideas of the Revolution, so the Athenian enlightenment had put into power the old unregenerate mass of sentiment that had not been permeated by the enlightenment. Cleon was no friend of sophists, but their avowed enemy. And when he told the Assembly in its difficulties simply to double the tribute of the allies and sack their towns if they did not pay; when he urged the killing in cold blood of all the Mitylenean prisoners, he was preaching doctrines that would probably have seemed natural enough in the old days, before any sophists had troubled men's minds with talk about duties towards dirty foreigners. And the people who followed
