Agrestides volunteered to go on this perilous adventure—perilous by reason of the storms to which that coast is liable, and from Athenian ships being on the look-out to prevent communication between the admiral at Miletos and his countrymen. And so, tossed about in a frail boat, and still more agitated in his mind, we must leave Agrestides for a little while. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVII ‘I am rapt, and cannot cover The monstrous bulk of this ingratitude With any size of words!’ TIMON OF ATHENS. In the pleasant isle of Samos there were many and great misgivings amongst the Athenian generals and the high-born, delicately nurtured, intellectual Greeks who at this crisis were serving under them. Sailors are generally conservative; they were often known to be oligarchic, sometimes even monarchic. The officers and many of the men in the fleet at Samos were no exception to this rule. Pressed to serve among them, in this last extremity of their country, were not only many of the ‘aristoi,’ the better sort, who formed the bulk of the aristocracy, but some even of the ‘beltistoi,’ the very best of all, the very highest of that favoured class who divide mankind—that is, the gentle portion of mankind, the rest not counting into the good—that is, the well-to-do and worthy citizens of some estate, the better, and the best, in which last class they place themselves. Somehow this self-complacent distinction has at different times been adopted by various ranks and classes, and the highest in the social scale have been the most apt to consider themselves entitled to have applied to them the predication of an adjective, with its varying degrees of comparison, which other simpler folk suppose should be kept exclusively to denote an ascending scale of virtue.