A History of Greece; from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great, Volume 4

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John Murray, 1869 - Greece - 422 pages
 

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Page 81 - ... a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within those forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control, and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts — combined too with a perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party contest, that the forms of the constitution will not be less sacred in the eyes of his...
Page 451 - Spartans, without having been prepared for it by the same elaborate and iron discipline. While this inscription was intended as a general commemoration of the exploit, there was another near it, alike simple and impressive, destined for the Spartan dead separately : " Stranger, tell the Lacedaemonians, that we lie here, in obedience to their orders.
Page 126 - I was never yet afraid of men who have a place set apart in the middle of their city where they meet to cheat one another and forswear themselves. If I live, they shall have troubles of their own to talk about apart from the lonians.
Page 370 - ... entertained by the Greek boatmen of the strength and uncertain direction of the currents around Mount Athos, and of the gales and high seas to which the vicinity of the mountain is subject during half the year, and which are rendered more formidable by the deficiency of harbours in the Gulf of Orfana...
Page 102 - Surely heaven and earth are about to change places — the fish are coming to dwell on dry land, and mankind going to inhabit the sea — when you, Spartans, propose to subvert the popular governments, and to set up in the cities that wicked and bloody thing called a Despot. ' First try what it is, for yourselves at Sparta, and then force it upon others if you can : you have not tasted its calamities as we have, and you take very good care to keep it away from yourselves. We adjure you by the common...
Page 301 - There is no feature which more largely pervades the impressible Grecian character, than a liability to be intoxicated and demoralised by success : there was no fault from which so few eminent Greeks were free : there was hardly any danger, against which it was at once so necessary and so difficult for the Grecian governments to take security — especially the democracies, where the manifestations of enthusiasm were always the loudest. Such is the real explanation of those charges which have been...
Page 141 - To what extent the information communicated to him was incorrect or exaggerated we cannot now decide, but the way in which the city was treated would lead us to suppose that its acquisition cannot have cost the conqueror either much time or much loss. Cyrus comes into the list as king of Babylon, and the inhabitants, with their whole territory, become tributary to the Persians, forming the richest satrapy in the empire ; but we do not hear that the people were otherwise ill-used, and it is certain...
Page 319 - Herodotus), with that of an inspired teacher, prophet, and worker of miracles — approaching to and sometimes even confounded with the gods, — and employing all these gifts to found a new special order of brethren bound together by religious rites and observances peculiar to themselves. In his prominent vocation, analogous to that of Epimenides, Orpheus, or Melampus, he appears as the revealer of a mode of life calculated to raise his disciples above the level of mankind, and to recommend them...
Page 383 - We may well believe that the numbers of Xerxes were greater than were ever assembled in ancient times, or perhaps at any known epoch of history.
Page 318 - ... from him. But that he believed in the metempsychosis or transmigration of the souls of deceased men into other men as well as into animals, we know, not only by other evidence, but also by the testimony of his contemporary, the philosopher Xenophane"s of Elea : Pythagoras, seeing a dog beaten and hearing him howl, desired the striker to desist, saying — " It is the soul of a friend of mine, whom I recognised by his voice.

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