which afterwards placed its Cleons at the head of armies, this would hardly be conclusive, but it would have been most improbable that any one of low birth, promoted to such high office, should have escaped satire, and the men who had no connexion with the Eupatrids had hardly forced themselves forward at the time of the Samian Expedition. We need not trouble ourselves much on a matter which affected the growth of the poet's mind very slightly. His father was able to give his son the education which the highest Athenians gave to theirs.[1] The boy was not hindered by any servile employment from giving his genius full play.
The date of his birth was not in itself remarkable. Athens was exulting in her liberation from the despotism of the sons of Peisistratos, and growing great in the consciousness of a freedom for which her people were prepared to live and, if need be, to die.[2] Harmodios and Aristogeiton were the favourite heroes of the people, and their names resounded continually in drinking songs and odes. The title of Tyrannos, which Peisistratos had assumed, had already, through them and others like them, gained the hateful associations which did not belong originally to its meaning, but which have clung to it ever since. Traces of the hatred with which he had been taught to look upon it in his childhood may be seen in the
