John Malcolm Mitchell

“ He who thus obeys it will attain tranquillity of mind; nothing can irritate him, for everything is according to nature, and death itself “is such as generation is, a mystery of nature, a composition out of the same elements, and a decomposition into the same, and altogether not a thing of which any man should be ashamed, for it is not contrary to the nature of a reasonable animal, and not contrary to the reason of our constitution.”
The morality of Marcus Aurelius cannot be said to have been new when it was given to the world. ”

“ Up to his time the laws of Athens were unwritten, and were administered arbitrarily by the Eupatridae. As at Rome by the twelve Tables, so at Athens it was found necessary to allay the discontent of the people by publishing these unwritten laws in a codified form, and Draco, himself a Eupatrid, carried this out. According to Plutarch (Life of Solon) : “For nearly all crimes there was the same penalty of death. The man who was convicted of idleness, or who stole a cabbage or an apple, was liable to death no less than the robber of temples or the murderer.” ”

“ For Heraclitus the soul approaches most nearly to perfection when it is most akin to the fiery vapour out of which it was originally created, and as this is most so in death, “while we live our souls are dead in us, but when we die our souls are restored to life.” ”

“ There can be no doubt that Aurelius believed in a deity, although Schultz is probably right in maintaining that all his theology amounts to this—the soul of man is most intimately united to his body, and together they make one animal which we call man; and so the deity is most intimately united to the world or the material universe, and together they form one whole. We find in the Meditations no speculations on the absolute nature of the deity, and no clear expressions of opinion as to a future state. ”

“ From this time till his death he remained undisputed master of Athens. The Alcmaeonids were compelled to leave Athens, and from the other noble families which remained he exacted 400 hostages whom he put in the care of his ally Lygdamis.
In the heyday of the Athenian democracy, citizens both conservative and progressive, politicians, philosophers and historians were unanimous in their denunciation of “tyranny.” Yet there is no doubt that the rule of Peisistratus was most beneficial to Athens both in her foreign and in her internal relations. ”

“ The more congenial study of Aristotle, though incomplete, is more valuable in the positive sense, and has not received the attention it deserves. Perhaps Grote’s most distinctive contribution to the study of Greek philosophy is his chapter in the History of Greece on the Sophists, of whom he took a view somewhat more favourable than has been accepted before or since. ”

“ Athens might fairly insist that the protection of the Aegean would become impossible if some of the chief islands were liable to be used as piratical strongholds, and further that it was only right that all should contribute in some way to the security which all enjoyed. The result was that, in the cases of Naxos and Thasos, for instance, the league’s resources were employed not against the Persians but against recalcitrant Greek islands, and that the Greek ideal of separate autonomy was outraged. ”

“ OSTRACISM, a political device instituted, probably by Cleisthenes in 508 B.C., as a constitutional safeguard for the Athenian democracy. Its effect was to remove from Athens for a period of ten years any person who threatened the harmony and tranquillity of the body politic. ”

“ At what date was election by lot, or sortition, introduced for the archonship? From the Constitution of Athens (c. 22) we gather that from the fall of the Tyranny to 487 B.C. the archons were αἱρετοί, not κληρωτοί (i.e. chosen by vote, not by lot) , and that in 487, limited sortition was introduced, whereby fifty candidates were elected by each tribe, and from these the archons and their “secretary” were chosen by lot. But against this must be set the statement by the same authority that this double method was part of the Solonian reform. The solution of the dilemma is a matter of inference. ”

“ Further, the tribe names were taken from legendary heroes (Cecropis, Pandionis, Aegeis recalled the storied kings of Attica) , and, therefore, contributed to the idea of a national unity; even Ajax, the eponym of the tribe Aeantis, though not Attic, was famous as an ally (Herod, v. 66) and ranked as a national hero. Each tribe had its shrine and its particular hero-cult, which, however, was free from local association and the dominance of particular families. This national idea Cleisthenes further emphasized by setting up in the market-place at Athens a statue of each tribal hero. ”

“ Thus the great attempt on the part of Athens to lead a harmonious league of free Greek states for the good of Hellas degenerated into an empire which proved intolerable to the autonomous states of Greece. Her failure was due partly to the commercial jealousy of Corinth working on the dull antipathy of Sparta, partly to the hatred of compromise and discipline which was fatally characteristic of Greece and especially of Ionian Greece, and partly also to the lack of tact and restraint shown by Athens and her representatives in her relations with the allies. ”

“ What Solon said of him in his youth was true throughout, “there is no better-disposed man in Athens, save for his ambition.” He was succeeded by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, by whom the tyranny was in various ways brought into disrepute.
It should be observed that the tyranny of Peisistratus is one of the many epochs of Greek history on which opinion has almost entirely changed since the age of Grote. Shortly, his services to Greece and to the world may be summed up under three heads: In foreign policy, he sketched out the plan on which Athens was to act in her external relations. ”

“ Political Career.—In politics Grote belonged to the “philosophic Radicals” of the school of J. S. Mill and Bentham, whose chief principles were representative government, vote by ballot, the abolition of a state church, frequent elections. He adhered to these principles throughout, and refused to countenance any reforms which were incompatible with them. By this uncompromising attitude, he gradually lost all his supporters save a few men of like rigidity. ”