All Greece--we have the emphatic and disinterested testimony of Thucydides for the statement--was gradually corrupted and embittered by the long war. Probably all war, as it accustoms people more and more to desperate needs and desperate expedients for meeting them, and sets more and more aside the common generosities and humanities of life, tends to some degradation of character. But this particular war was specially harmful. For one thing it was a struggle not simply between two foreign powers, but between two principles, oligarchy and democracy. In almost all the cities of the Athenian alliance there were large numbers of malcontent rich, who were only too ready, if chance offered, to overthrow the constitution, massacre the mob, and revolt to Sparta. In a good many of the cities on the other side there were masses of discontented poor who had been touched by the breath of democratic doctrines, and were anxious for a chance to cut the throats of the ruling Few. It was like the state of things produced in many cities of Europe by the French Revolution. A secret civil strife lay in the background behind the open war; and the open war itself was a long protracted struggle for life or death. Probably the most high-minded man when engaged in a death-grapple fights in much the same way as the most low-minded. And there can be no doubt that as the toils of war closed tighter round Athens, and she began to feel herself fighting, gasp by gasp, for both her empire and her life, the ideals of the Saviour of Hellas fell away from her. She fought with every weapon that came. Such times called forth naturally the men that suited them. The assembly cared less to listen to decent and thoughtful people, not to speak of philosophers. It was feeling bitter and fierce and frightened and it liked speakers who were feeling the same. The same fear that made it cruel made it also superstitious. On one occasion the whole city went mad with alarm because of a prank played on some ancient figures of Hermes. On another a great army was lost because it and its general were afraid to move during an eclipse of the moon. So soon had Anaxagoras been forgotten.