236 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
find in Cleon’s argument: to that depreciation of scruples and humani- 
tarian sympathies which we find in Cleon’s arraignment of Athenian 
susceptibility: but that, this vein of sympathy with Cleon’s speech 
by no means prevents him from heartily disliking and distrusting 
the speaker. He sympathizes with him as a Tory and dislikes him 
as a democrat and a man. The sympathy is merely intellectual and 
never personal. The dislike is profound and personal: a dislike of 
taste and feeling. There is no agreement between him and Cleon 
except in opinions. Thucydides was divided like other men between 
his judgment and his personal tastes, like the great Lord Falkland, 
for example; his friends were all among the educated and the refined 
and sensitive: his judgment was against his friends, at any rate in 
politics, as too sensitive and scrupulous and undecided for the rough 
business of politics. His taste and judgment met together again and 
were reconciled when he encountered the personality of Nicias, a 
man of the upper class, “a gentleman” as we say, and yet an un- 
hesitating and confirmed conservative: hence the extravagant praise 
of Nicias and the very mixed verdict and uncertain sound with which 
Thucydides expresses himself on the cultivated and refined members 
of his own circle: the men who knew everything and did nothing. 
When he coined that epigram I cannot but think that to him it ex- 
pressed something more than a democratic scoff, a Cleonic scoff, 
at mugwumps and kidglove politicians and independents. It expressed 
something of a serious truth. These academic thinkers were not of 
the stuff of statesmen: were too many sided and undecided: indepen- 
dents are people who cannot be depended upon: professors and philoso- 
phers are the worst of statesmen: they think they can arrange the world 
with essays and lectures. They make bad Presidents. 
Whatever else we can read between the lines of his history is 
consistent with these assumptions and explanations. It is pretty 
obvious that Thucydides had a great admiration for Pericles. It is 
not from him but from Plutarch that we hear that Pericles was like 
other great reformers; that he had to begin by playing to the gallery, 
if by so doing he could advertise himself and get a following, and pre- 
pare the way for serious and conservative reforms later on. Thu- 
cydides admits no such opportunism. Pericles is with him the ideal 
reformer who aimed at conciliating all opposites and making Athens 
the union of all conflicting virtues: the seat of liberty, yet the home of 
law and lawful authority: the temple of art, yet the city of severe 
simplicity and economy: and most of all, the very fountain of free 
thought, free speech, free life and philosophy, and yet the nursing 
mother of soldiers, sailors and men of action: a sort of Platonic Calli- 
polis reconciling and embracing the opposite virtues of Athens and 
