Historical Greece (concluded)

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J. Murray, 1888 - Greece
 

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Page 50 - Parliament, judges, juries, witnesses, prosecutors, have all their respective, though certainly not equal, shares. Witnesses, of such a character as not to deserve credit in the most trifling cause, upon the most immaterial facts, gave evidence so incredible, or, to speak more properly, so impossible to be true, that it ought not to have been believed if it had come from the mouth of Cato ; and upon such evidence, from such witnesses, were innocent men condemned to death and executed.
Page 454 - It was then proposed in the assembly that a committee of thirty should be named to draw up laws for the future government of the city, and to undertake its temporary administration. Among the most prominent of the thirty names were those of Critias and Theramenes. The proposal was of course carried. Lysander himself addressed the assembly, and contemptuously told them that they had better take thought for their personal safety, which now...
Page 4 - ... in the public agora. They were thus present to the eye of every Athenian in all his acts of intercommunion, either for business or pleasure, with his fellow-citizens. The religious feeling of the Greeks considered the god to be planted or domiciliated where his statue stood, so that the companionship, sympathy and guardianship of Hermes, became associated with most of the manifestations of conjunct life at Athens, political, social, commercial or gymnastic.
Page 519 - But the Athenian demos, on coming back from Piraeus, exhibited the rare phenomenon of a restoration after cruel wrong suffered, sacrificing all the strong impulse of retaliation to a generous and deliberate regard for the future march of the commonwealth.
Page 8 - ... committing sacrilege of a character flagrant and unheard of. ^For intentional mutilation of a public and sacred statue, where the material afforded no temptation to plunder, is a case to which we know no parallel,) much more mutilation by wholesale — spread by one band and in one night throughout an entire city. Though neither the parties concerned, nor their purposes, were ever more than partially made out, the concert and conspiracy itself is unquestionable.
Page 415 - KannSnus,— originally adopted, we do not know when, on the proposition of a citizen of that name, as a psephism or decree for some particular case, but since generalized into common practice, and grown into great prescriptive reverence,— which peremptorily forbade any such collective trial or sentence, and directed that a separate judicial vote should, in all cases, be taken for or against each accused party.
Page 473 - The subsequent orators affirmed that more than 1500 victims were put to death without trial by the thirty : 4 on this numerical estimate little stress is to be laid,, but the total was doubtless prodigious. It became more and more plain that no man was safe in Attica, so that Athenian emigrants, many in great poverty and destitution, were multiplied throughout the neighbouring territories—in Megara, Thebes,.
Page 474 - The edict of the Thirty was, in fact, a general suppression of the higher class of teachers or professors, above the rank of the elementary (teacher of letters or) grammatist. If such an edict could have been maintained in force for a generation, combined with the other mandates of the Thirty — the city out of which Sophocles and Euripides had just died, and in which Plato and Isocrates were in vigorous age, would have been degraded to the intellectual level of the meanest community in Greece.
Page 531 - Spartan envoys, down to the end of his career. The manoeuvres whereby his political enemies first procured his exile were indeed base and guilty in a high degree. But we must recollect that if his enemies were more numerous and violent than those of any other politician in Athens, the generating seed was sown by his own overweening insolence and contempt of restraints, legal as well as social. On the other hand, he was never once defeated either by land or sea. In courage, in ability, in enterprise,...
Page 419 - Prytanes were so intimidated by the incensed manifestations of the assembly that all of them, except one, relinquished their opposition and agreed to put the question. That single obstinate Prytanis, whose refusal no menace could subdue, was a man whose name we read with peculiar interest, and in whom an impregnable adherence to law and duty was only one amongst many titles to honour. It was the philosopher Sokrates...

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