appears entitled, both by the extent and variety of his knowledge, the acquirement of which implies long research and experience, and by the position he assumes as Mentor and instructor of posterity, a position recognised and justified by the permanence and popularity of his works. Here we are led once more to revert to the parallel of Homer; for whom the same essential characteristics have obtained, during nearly three thousand years, the attributes and honours of old age, in the imagination of his readers and the ideal representations of classic art.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX A. (Page 28.)

ON THE RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE OF THE ATHENIANS.

THE view here taken differs widely from that of a living historian, distinguished for his warm admiration of the Athenian democracy. Mr. Grote has pronounced one of the virtues for which Athens was preeminent above all the other Greek republics, to be her liberal treatment of men of science. This opinion has been expressed in the course of his elaborate justification of the conduct of the Athenians towards Socrates; in which he discovers not so much evidence of bigotry, as of an enlightened spirit of toleration. "There was but one city, in the antient world at least," he maintains, where a man, who boldly promulgated doctrines so repugnant to the prevailing notions and feelings, would have been permitted to live and teach so long; "and that one city was Athens in any other government of Greece he would have been quickly arrested in his career." The modern public had surely a right to expect that so sweeping an imputation on the great body of the Hellenic people would have been supported by some appeal to historical facts. No such appeal has however been made by Mr. Grote, and for the best of reasons: that every fact or evidence bearing on the subject, convincingly proves the very reverse of his dogma to be true; proves, not only that Athens was notorious for acts of wanton and bloodthirsty persecution against enlightened men and liberal doctrines, but that she was the only Greek state open to the charge of such bigotry and illiberality, either in conduct or in sentiment.

1 Hist. of Greece, vol. vii. p. 634. sqq. 672. sqq.

Athenian intolerance persecuted and judicially murdered Socrates; drove Plato, Euclid, and others of the most illustrious disciples of Socrates, into exile by the terror of a similar fate; fined and banished Anaxagoras, and in his absence condemned him to death; fined and banished Damon and Protagoras; persecuted Pericles, Aspasia, and Phidias; threw the latter into prison and allowed him there to languish and die; and forced Diagoras to escape by flight the result of a similar persecution with which he was menaced. Here we have some eight or ten well authenticated cases, of the best or wisest men of the age, both her own citizens and foreigners, having been slain or cruelly treated by Athens, all on the same cause or pretext, it matters not which, of their enlightened views and free expression of opinion. Several other less well attested cases might be added to the list.1

Mr. Grote will not find it easy to substantiate against any other Greek republic, or against the whole body of Hellenic states united, charges of intolerance approaching in number and magnitude to those above stated. We question, indeed, whether a single such case can be discovered beyond the limits of Attica; and we repeat the assertion made in the text: that one of the most honourable traits in the character of the Hellenic race, with the single exception of the Athenians, was the respect paid by them to boldness and originality of opinion and doctrine in their philosophers and public teachers. Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno, taught successively at Elea theories as sceptical and as repugnant to the popular prejudice and superstition as any for which Anaxagoras and Socrates suffered.3 Were they "quickly arrested in

1 Of Diogenes of Apollonia, see Diog. Laert. IX. 57. Of Prodicus, see Smith's Biogr. Dict. sub v.

Even before the settlement of distinguished foreign professors at Athens, the early inferior order of moral speculators, Agathocles, Pythoclides, and others, are described on high authority (Plato, Protag. p. 316.; Plut. Vit. Per. 4.), as under the necessity, for fear of the popular odium, of surreptitiously inculcating their doctrines through the medium of lessons in music and other accomplishments of which they were also professors.

2 The case of the Pythagoreans of Croto, the only one which here occurs to us, forms no real exception; that sect being, as Mr. Grote justly observes (vol. IV. p. 542. 546.), not a harmless fraternity of speculative philosophers, but a powerful and dangerous body of political conspirators openly arrayed against the existing institutions of the republic. 3 Grote, vol. iv. p. 521., vш. p. 499. sqq.

their career"? All three of them passed long lives in the bosom of their native or adopted home, objects of unqualified esteem and admiration to their fellow-citizens. Empedocles not only taught at Agrigentum doctrines still stranger than those of the Eleatics, but arrogated to himself, with far greater audacity than Socrates, the credit of a divinely inspired missionary and of direct intercourse with the Deity. Was he quickly arrested in his career? He was idolised as the most illustrious man and citizen of his age and country, not only by his Agrigentine fellow-townsmen, but by the whole body of Sicilian states. We hear nothing of Anaxagoras having been in any way molested on account of his moral or political opinions in his native Ionia, either before he settled at Athens, or after he was driven by Attic intolerance to return home. On the contrary, as we learn on no less authority than that of Aristotle2, he spent the latter part of his life so greatly revered and esteemed that at his death he was decreed a public funeral, and that his memory continued in after ages to be fondly cherished at Lampsacus, his chosen place of residence. When the disciples of Socrates fled from Athens after the death of their master, Euclides, one of the most distinguished among them, took refuge in the neighbouring state of Megara. There, instead of being repelled and stigmatised as an atheist or revolutionist, he found a safe and honourable asylum, established a school, and continued to teach undisturbed during the rest of his life, the doctrines for which his master had suffered death in the only city of Greece where, Mr. Grote assures us, persons who taught such doctrines were not exposed to persecution. Here too he was joined by Plato, another refugee from Attic intolerance, who for a while assisted him in his labours, and afterwards extended his own sphere of philosophical instruction, with general applause, to Cyrene, Syracuse, and other republics. No where do we hear of Protagoras, or Prodicus, or any other member of the fraternity of "sophists," having been exposed in any Greek state but Athens to the same indignities to which those distinguished masters were there subjected. Every where but in that city, even in obtuse and ascetic Sparta, they seem to have been treated with the honours due to their genius, whatever the novelty or peculiarity of the mode in which it was displayed.

Heraclitus of Ephesus is perhaps the one among early Greek

philosophers whose character offers the greatest analogy, it can hardly be called resemblance, to that of Socrates. Austere and morose in his manners, careless of the refinements or even the decencies of polite society, dogmatical as a teacher and a disputant, and open-mouthed in his contempt for the political institutions of his native city, yet this man was offered the dignity of first magistrate and legislator by the Ephesians', as a tribute to his talents and integrity; and when he scornfully and contumeliously refused the appointment, as a disgrace rather than an honour to a man of sense or spirit, he was allowed to follow out unmolested in his own way his own eccentric line of life and doctrine.

Had Mr. Grote therefore reversed his proposition, and asserted that Athens was the only state in Greece where Socrates would have been treated as he was treated by the Athenians; and that had he been a citizen of Agrigentum, or Megara, or Syracuse, or Ephesus, he would have been cherished and honoured as an ornament and benefactor to his country; had Mr. Grote even pronounced that all or most of the religious and political bigotry of Greece was concentrated in the Athenian democracy, and that the rest of the nation was singularly free from those defects, he would assuredly have been much nearer the truth; in so far at least as historical facts are to be regarded as tests of historical truth. But we go further, and maintain, that the most enlightened men in Athens, not perhaps even excepting Socrates himself, were tainted with the spirit common to the mass; and we do so in concurrence with Mr Grote's own opinion. We cannot indeed agree with him in all his views as to the character and influence of the Sophists; his learned investigation of that subject being marked by the defect common to many of his more elaborate researches after truth, of being carried beyond the region of truth into that of exaggeration. But we entirely agree both with his doctrine and his arguments, that the spirit in which those teachers were assailed by Plato and the other Socratics was a spirit of persecuting intolerance, different in kind no doubt, but equal in warmth and zeal, to that which led the more vulgar tribe of bigots to hunt to the death their illustrious fellow-citizen.

We should not probably have been led to enter at so great detail, in this purely incidental mode, on a question which it may