But no--they fell, even more rapidly than they rose, till their grace
and their cultivation, for them they could not lose, made them the
willing ministers to the luxury, the frivolity, the sentimentality,
the vice of the whole old world--the Scapia or Figaro of the old
world--infinitely able, but with all his ability consecrated to the
service of his own base self. The Greekling--as Juvenal has it--in
want of a dinner, would climb somehow to heaven itself, at the
bidding of his Roman master.

Ah what a fall! And what was the inherent weakness which caused that
fall?

I say at once--want of honesty. The Greek was not to be depended on;
if it suited him, he would lie, betray, overreach, change sides, and
think it no sin. He was the sharpest of men. Sharp practice, in our
modern sense of the word, was the very element in which he floated.
Any scholar knows it. In the grand times of Marathon and Salamis,
down to the disastrous times of the Peloponnesian War and the thirty
tyrants, no public man's hands were clean, with the exception,
perhaps, of Aristides, who was banished because men were tired of
hearing him called the Just. The exciting cause of the Peloponnesian
war, and the consequent downfall of Athens, was not merely the
tyranny she exercised over the states allied to her, it was the sharp
practice of the Athenians, in misappropriating the tribute paid by
the allies to the decoration of Athens. And in laying the
foundations of the Parthenon was sown, by a just judgment, the seed
of ruin for the state which gloried in it. And if the rulers were
such, what were the people? If the free were such, what were the
slaves?