14. These obvious points of difference are sufficient to substantiate the result which we wish to arrive at. It is manifest that the second of the two forces, which in each of these instances came into collision, must necessarily have always overcome the first. The slow, cumbrous, unwieldy body of the Spartan confederacy was sure to suffer under the blows of its skilful, forward, and enterprising antagonist. The maxims which, according to Thucydides, were current at this time,[854] that rashness was to be called courage in a friend's cause, provident foresight hidden cowardice, moderation a cloak for pusillanimity, and that to be prudent in every thing was to be active in nothing, necessarily impeded and shackled the beneficial effects of the measures of the Doric party. The “honesty and openness” of the Doric character, the noble simplicity of the ancient times of Greece, soon disappeared in this tumultuous age.[855] Sparta therefore and [pg 218] the Peloponnesians emerge from the contest, altered, and as it were reversed; and even before its termination appear in a character of which they had before probably contained only the first seeds.
But in the second half of the war, when the Spartans gave up their great armaments by land, and began to equip fleets with hired seamen; when they had learnt to consider money as the chief instrument of warfare, and begged it at the court of Persia; when they sought less to protect the states joined to them by affinity and alliance, than to dissolve the Athenian confederacy; when they began to secure conquered states by harmosts of their own, and by oligarchs forced upon the people, and found that the secret management of the political clubs was more to their interest than open negotiation with the government; we see developed on the one hand an energy and address, which was first manifested in the enterprises of the great Brasidas, and on the other a worldly policy, as was shown in Gylippus, and afterwards more strongly in Lysander; when the descendants of Hercules found it advisable to exchange the lion's for the fox's skin.[856] And, since the enterprises conducted in the spirit of earlier times either wholly failed or else remained fruitless, this new system, though the state had inwardly declined, brought with it, by the mockery of fate, external fame and victory.[857]
Book II. Religion And Mythology Of The Dorians.
Chapter I.
§ 1. Apollo and Artemis the principal deities of the Doric race. § 2. Traces of the worship of Apollo in Tempe. § 3. Route of the Theoria from Tempe to Delphi. § 4. Establishment of the worship of Apollo at Delphi; § 5. Crete; § 6. And Delos. § 7. Early history of Crissa. § 8. Doric population of Delphi. § 9. Opposition to the worship of the Delphian Apollo.
1. In turning from the history of the external affairs of the Dorians to the consideration of their intellectual existence, our first step must be to enquire into their religion; and for this purpose we will proceed to analyse and resolve it into the various worships and ceremonies of which it was composed, and to trace the origin and connexion of these as they successively arose.