stronger in men and ships and military skill; still the gods may help the innocent ("That risk causes us no uneasiness," say the envoys: "we are quite as pious as you"); the Lacedaemonians are bound by every tie of honour and kinship to intervene ("We shall of course see that they do not"); in any case we choose to fight and hope rather than to accept slavery. "A very regrettable misjudgement," say the Athenians; and the war proceeds to its hideous end.
As I read this Melian Dialogue, as it is called, again and again, I feel more clearly the note of deep and angry satire. Probably the Athenian war-party would indignantly have repudiated the reasoning put into the mouths of their leaders. After all they were a democracy; and, as Thucydides fully recognizes, a great mass of men, if it does commit infamies, likes first to be drugged and stimulated with lies: it seldom, like the wicked man in Aristotle's Ethics, "calmly sins." But in any case the massacre of Melos produced on the minds of men like Thucydides and Euripides—and we might probably add almost all the great writers who were anywise touched by the philosophic spirit—this peculiar impression. It seemed like a revelation of naked and trium-
