Theoretical politics.
And in every generation, if the military efficiency of Persia grew weaker, her financial supremacy became more and more apparent. In the face of all these brilliant essays and signal failures, in the face of the acknowledged intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, coupled with their continued exhibitions of political impotence in foreign policy, it was fully to be expected that Greek thinkers should discuss the causes of these contrasts, and endeavour to ascertain the laws of public happiness and the conditions of public strength. And so there were a series of essays, of which several remain, on the Greek State and its proper internal regulation, and a series of solutions for the practical difficulties of the day, especially the external dangers to which the
Hellenic world was exposed. These documents form the main body of the splendid prose Literature of the Attic Restoration, as I have elsewhere called it[118:1], and of the period which closed with the actual solution of the difficulties in foreign politics by the famous Philip of Macedon[118:2].
Inestimable even to the practical historian.
The historian of Greece must evidently take into account these speculations, though they be not strictly history; but the facts can hardly be understood and appreciated without the inestimable comments of the greatest thinkers and writers whom the country produced.
Plato.
Xenophon.
Aristotle.
Foremost among these in literary perfection is Plato, whose speculations on the proper conditions—the internal conditions only—of a Polity in the Hellenic sense will ever remain a monument of genius, though his ideal could hardly lead, or be intended to lead, to practical results. Then we have Xenophon, who in his political romance on the Education of Cyrus stands half-way between the mere philosopher and the practical man of the world. The most instructive of all is Aristotle, who, though he lived to see the old order pass away, and a new departure in the history of the race, nevertheless confined himself to the traditional problems, and composed a special book—his Politics—on the virtues and vices of the ordinary Greek polity. The practical side, the necessary
steps to reform and strengthen the leading States of Greece, especially in their external policy, and in the face of powerful and dangerous neighbours, we find discussed in the pamphlets of Isocrates and the public speeches of Demosthenes. It is on the proper place of these documents, and the weight assigned to them in modern histories, that I invite the reader's attention.
