without the consent of the tax payers. They were with him, and 

 made cheerful sacrifices on the altar of devotion to the state. Noth- 

 ing short of a generous, patriotic appreciation of art could have led 

 them to approve such large appropriations for public buildings, winch 

 in the time of Pericles alone must have cost upward of ten millions of 



Athenians have been charged with ingratitude in ostracizing emi- 

 nent citizens of such acknowledged worth that their statues were set 

 up in the prytaneum. Grote, Curtius and Freeman defend these ostra- 

 cisms as a logical sequence of the theory that the state's integrity and 

 glory are the first and supreme interest. We are told that ostracism 

 was a milder penalty than a bill of attainder; that it was sometimes 

 demanded by cogent political reasons; that if mistakes were made, 

 they could he atoned for afterward. 



Religious festivals and public amusements were closely united and 

 subsidized in the Greek system of autonomy. There was no real free- 

 dom of conscience, as there ought to have been, in a city crowded with 

 costly temples and images which invited one to worship the likeness 

 of every thing in heaven above, in the earth beneath and waters under 

 the earth. That Socrates should have been condemned to death by a 

 jury of Greek polytheists will always be one of the mysteries of popu- 

 lar inhumanity. 



• It will be less a mystery to one who recalls the exasperating defiance 

 of Socrates in making his own defense, after refusing the oration skill- 

 fully prepared for him by Lysias. Had Socrates been ambitious of a 

 martyr's death, he could not have gained that distinction more surely 

 than by his sneering assault on the dignity of the state as symbolized 

 in one of its cherished institutions. 



There was no lack of assailable points in the Greek plan of an auton- 

 omous city. Athens had 21,000 free citizens, not counting women and 

 children. Below these were 10,000 foreign residents, mostly engaged 

 in business, with no rights that made.them respectable and contented. 

 By the census of 309 B. C. the slaves numbered 400,000; they were a 

 constant menace to the peace and permanence of the state — an uneasy 

 Typhon beneath the roots of society. Many of the slaves were equal 

 to their masters in education and fitness for freedom. Xenophon 

 speaks of slaves and freemen as often so much alike that they could not 

 be readily distinguished in the street. In trying to decide how far the 

 Greek ship of state was sea-worthy, its system of slavery should not 

 be overlooked. The cheapness of slaves gave to the freemen of Athens 



