NITIAL movements in the direction of civil liberty have had their promptings in, or have gained fresh force from, strong personal friendships. A reason for this is found in the fact that no sentiment is purer or stronger than that which impels a man to be unselfishly devoted to the highest interests held before him in the ideal of one who has his love and his reverence; and that when this sentiment is superadded to a generous desire for the good of one's fellows, a man will do or die with his friend in behalf of the liberties of all.

The Athenians ascribed their deliverance from regal tyranny to the joint endeavors of the two friends, Harmodius and Aristogiton. Hippias and Hipparchus, sons of Pisistratus, held tyrannically the chief power in Athens, in the sixth century before our era. Harmodius and Aristogiton, devoted friends, were young Athenian citiHarmodius being outraged by an insult to his sister, on his account, from the tyrant Hippias, turned to

zens.

his friend Aristogiton for sympathy and assistance. A wrong done to either of these friends was a wrong done to both, and both were aroused to a purpose of vengeance. On the occasion of the great feast of Panathenæa they slew Hipparchus, intending also to slay Hippias. Harmodius was instantly stricken down by the royal guards; and Aristogiton was taken and executed. This trag

edy was a means of arousing the Athenians against the tyranny of the reigning dynasty, and Hippias was soon expelled from his country; and it is said that he afterwards perished at Marathon, while treacherously acting as a guide to the Persians against his countrymen. "Harmodius and Aristogiton were afterwards," says the historian Grote, "commemorated as the winners and prototypes of Athenian liberty. Statues were erected in their

honor, shortly after the final expulsion of the Pisistratides; immunity from taxes and public burdens was granted to the descendants of their families; and the [Athenian] speaker who proposed the abolition of such immunities, at a time when the number had been abusively multiplied, made his only special exception in favor of this respected lineage."

The bronze statues of these two friends, made by Antenor, and set up in the Agora of Athens, having been carried away by Xerxes, new ones by Critias were erected in their stead; although the originals were afterwards sent back to Athens by Alexander. It was of the firstnamed statues that Antipho made mention when, in answer to the tyrant Dionysius's question which was the finest kind of brass, he replied, "That of which the statues of Harmodius and Aristogiton are formed." An ancient

Greek song, ascribed to Alcæus, voices the sentiment of the Athenians concerning these liberty-loving and tyranny-hating friends, in the words:

"Bright shall your fame be through the ages,
Dearest Harmodius and Aristogiton;
For ye twain slew the lordly despot,

And gave just laws again to Athens."

It is true that historians are not agreed in wholly condemning the Athenian rulers whose overthrow was wrought by these friends, or in approving the spirit of these friends in their conspiracy against those rulers; but the fact remains that it was a personal friendship which brought Harmodius and Aristogiton to conspire against the Pisistratides, and that the overthrow of the Pisistratides as a result of that conspiracy was the beginning of better days for the liberty of Athens. Indeed, if it were true, as some students of history would have us suppose, that the Pisistratides were "the persons who in good truth gave Athens her freedom, far more than Harmodius and Aristogiton," it is worthy of note that Pisistratus, the father of Hippias and Hipparchus, and the founder of the dynasty bearing his name, came into power originally, and won the Athenians to their renewed struggle with the Megarians, through his intimate personal friendship with Solon the Sage. So whether it were through the action of Harmodius and Aristogiton, or of Pisistratus and Solon, that the beginning of Athenian liberties was made, in either case it received its impulse from friendship.

Legend and history intermingle in the early days of Rome, as of Greece; and in both cases the story that

gained currency and credence gives a foremost place to a personal friendship in bringing about the struggle that advanced the liberties of the commonwealth. Those were dark days for Rome, when Tarquin the Arrogant had trampled on the rights of both patricians and plebeians, and was ruthlessly swaying imperial power for the gratifying of his personal ambitions and hatreds. Then it was that Tarquin's son Sextus blindly followed his lusts in the treacherous and cowardly outrage on Lucretia the wife of his kinsman Collatinus, madly confident that justice could have no power over a son of Rome's ruler. And it seemed, at the time, as if Sextus might be right in his daring reliance on the wrong. But Tarquinius Collatinus had a friend, in his kinsman Lucius Junius Brutus, who had been feigning idiocy in order to save his life from the royal tyrant's hatred. To that friend Collatinus turned in his hour of need, and the two friends hasted together from the camp before Ardea, when the husband was summoned by his wife to hear the terrible story of her wrong, as she made ready to die by her own hand. It was the sympathy of friend with friend that made Brutus then rise up for the avenging of his friend's great wrong, by the overthrow of the tyrant ruler whose tyranny had made possible this wrong. And that outcome of friendship brought new liberty to Rome.

Shakespeare, following the narrative of Livy, tells the story of that scene by the bedside of the dead Lucretia, when her husband and father vied with each other in their despairing grief; and that husband's friend aroused them both to vigorous action, and pledged them both to this oath of vengeance:

"Now, by the Capitol that we adore,

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And by this chaste blood so unjustly stained,

By heaven's fair sun, that breeds the fat earth's store,
By all our country's rights in Rome maintained,
And by chaste Lucrece' soul that late complained

Her wrongs to us, and by this bloody knife,
We will revenge the death of this true wife.'

This said, he struck his hand upon his breast,
And kissed the fatal knife, to end his vow;
And to his protestation urged the rest,
Who, wondering at him, did his words allow:
Then jointly to the ground their knees they bow,

And that deep vow, which Brutus made before,
He doth again repeat, and that they swore.

"When they had sworn to this advised doom,
They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence;
To show her bleeding body thorough Rome,
And so to publish Tarquin's foul offence:
Which being done with speedy diligence,

The Romans plausibly did give consent
To Tarquin's everlasting banishment."

And on the ruins of the overthrown monarchy there arose the fabric of Rome's republic. Tarquinius Collatinus and Lucius Junius Brutus, the two friends who had brought about this change, were fittingly made the first consuls, or prætors, of the new government. When, finally, Brutus fell in a struggle with the deposed house of Tarquin, the matrons of Rome wore mourning for him for a twelvemonth; a statue was erected in his honor; and he was called the Avenger of Woman's Honor, because of what he had done with and for his friend, in the time of that friend's extremity.

English history gives similar testimony to that of