[HUTTON] THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 233 
This or something of the sort was the cause of his execution: 
of all Hellenes of my time he had least deserved a fate so 
unhappy: when his practice of every customary virtue is 
taken into account. 
The historian’s verdict throws more light on his own tempera- 
ment and point of view than on the peculiar hardships of Nicias’ 
fate. Why was this conventional, wealthy, reputable and hitherto 
lucky Athenian general held up for special commiseration ? Grote 
has argued that his repute testifies to the inner conservatism of the 
Athenian people, who chose this typical conservative to lead them. 
But why did Thucydides also choose him for a special tribute of pity ? 
I can only suggest that the historian, himself an “‘intellectuel’’, 
as the phrase goes in France, a member of the ‘“‘aufklarung’’, as they 
say in Germany, one of the “‘illuminati’’ as the Italians have it, had 
arrived very positively at this conclusion from the use of his intellect 
and his illumination, that intellect and illumination are a very dubious 
advantage to their owner and his countrymen—from the politica | 
point of view: that after all that man is the best citizen who sticks 
to the old paths and does not see beyond them; that those laws are 
best, which are the laws of one’s own country; and that that religion is 
truest which is the religion of one’s own country—the answer which the 
oracle of Delphi by the way also once had given to an over-specula*ive 
enquirer after absolute truth:—and therefore his praise of Nicias. 
It is not an unfamiliar point of view of course. It finds support 
from Aristotle when he comes to eulogise the same Nicias and to criti- 
cise the reformer and idealist Hippodamus of Miletus. There is a 
brilliant array of Frenchmen of our own days, who similarly exalt 
on general grounds a conservatism and an orthodoxy which some of 
them can hardly be supposed to augment with their personal con- 
victions; which most of them perhaps endorse with their judgment 
rather than with their private emotions, Barrés, Bazin, Brunetiere, 
Bordeaux, Bourget, Bergson: but I do not know that a stranger and 
stronger instance of this conservatism of experience and judgment can 
be found than the eulogy of Thucydides—the disillusioned historian 
—pronounced over the pietist, traditionalist and in every sense com- 
monplace character of Nicias. It suggests that to Thucydides’ 
mind the ultimate truth of politics is that ‘dullness with honesty’’— 
average honesty at any rate, “is better for a state than cleverness 
with recklessness; cleverness without balance.” The words are the 
words of Cleon (III. 57). 
And that aphorism leads one to the very curious and piquant 
difficulties which surround the relations of Thucydides and Cleon. 
