240 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
to conciliate Sparta, and therefore to have advocated against Sparta 
‘a preventive war’’ as the Germans call it: but he warned Athens 
against a policy of adventure and world domination, such as came 
afterwards with Alcibiades and the Sicilian Expedition. If the other 
policy—the policy of domination in the East, instead of in the West, 
over Asia Minor and the Persian Empire, instead of over the Greeks 
of Sicily, had ever been seriously suggested to Pericles, as it suggested 
itself to Isocrates and to Aristotle and to Alexander, it is conceivable 
that he might have agreed, for this would have meant domination 
over Asiatics not over Greeks. But there was no room for such a 
suggestion in the divided state of Greece and its internal feuds. 
Be that as it may, Pericles remained opposed to wars of conquest, 
and Thucydides evidently both in principle and from bitter experience 
followed Pericles. It may be even that he would have agreed with 
Plato, that the ideal Athens was not even the Athens of Pericles with 
the Athenian Empire of the year 431, but just the city of Athens and 
the adjoining Attica, just a Greek xéks living in friendly relations 
with other Greek zédets, just a municipality as we call it; or a free city 
of the middle ages, Genoa, Venice, Bremen, without their external 
possessions. It may be that even to the same degree as Plato, Thu- 
cydides was a little-Athens man (uxporoXirns). At any rate there is 
nothing to show that he would have disliked or did dislike, if he knew 
it, the Platonic ideal. 
Modern British readers are less friendly to the city-state and to 
this intense and extreme decentralization, which comes to them as 
doubly ‘“‘suspect’’; “‘suspect’’ on account of all their associations, 
experiences and prejudices derived from the history of 2,000 years, 
and twice suspect as associated not with the name of Greece and the 
Greek zéits and Plato and Thucydides, but with the ideals of Rous- 
seau and a number of impracticable modern doctrinaires, French and 
others: Karl Marx and Bakounine and many members of the Paris 
Commune of 1871, who wanted to break up France into communes 
like the municipality of Paris. 
But the other and second aspect of Thucydides’ dislike of Im- 
perialism is much more modern and commends itself just now to all 
of us. Thucydides’ idea of Imperialism was far removed from the 
ideas associated with that word by reasonable Canadians, Australians, 
Africanders and by the majority of the people of the Mother Country: 
the idea of a united Empire of free peoples, bound together in a per- 
petual defensive alliance with the minimum of machinery for that 
bond and therefore the maximum of good feeling and mutual forbear- 
ance: the idea of a generous loyalty to the past and its traditions: 
of a generous repudiation of narrow nativism and know-nothing-ism. 
