“From the magnitude of our city, the products of the whole earth are brought to us, so that our enjoyment of foreign luxuries is as much our own and assured as those which we grow at home.... We combine elegance of taste with simplicity of life, and we pursue knowledge without being enervated: we employ wealth not for talking and ostentation, but as a real help in the proper season. The magistrates who discharge public trusts fulfil their domestic duties also--the private citizen, while engaged in professional business, has competent knowledge on public affairs: for we stand alone in regarding the man who keeps aloof from these latter not as harmless but as useless. In fine, I affirm that our city, considered as a whole, is the schoolmistress of Greece.”--Thuc. ii. 40. The continuity of the Athenian democracy was rudely broken by the Spartans the year after the fateful battle of Ægospotami. Having demolished the walls of the city (which was starved into surrender) amid the flute-playing and dancing of women crowned with wreaths, the Spartans set up the tyranny of the “Thirty,” which gave the Athenians a more bitter experience of injustice, oppression and cruelty than they had experienced even in the closing years of the Peisistratid dynasty. A remarkable proof of the intense hatred of political tyranny which prevailed at Athens nearly half a century later was afforded by the reception given to two young Thracian Greeks, who had at one time studied under Plato, when they repaired to Athens after assassinating Cotys, the tyrant of their country. Partly on general grounds, partly because Cotys had been a dangerous enemy of Athens, they were received with the greatest honour, being admitted to the freedom of the city and presented with golden wreaths. So glowing were the eulogies passed upon them in the Assembly that one of the two felt constrained to declare, “It was a god who did the deed; we only lent our hands.” The feeling against despotic power was scarcely less strong in Magna Græcia, where the iron entered into the soul of many communities under the usurpation of Dionysius of Syracuse, about the beginning of the fourth century B.C. His request for a wife from the city of Rhegium, which was accompanied with a promise of benefactions to the city, was rejected; and in the public discussion of the subject one of the speakers remarked that the daughter of the public executioner would be the only suitable wife for him. Dionysius fared better at Locri, where he obtained the hand of a lady named Doris, the daughter of an eminent citizen, but not till after another citizen, a friend of Plato, had refused his daughter, saying that he would rather see her dead than wedded to a despot. Doris, it is interesting to learn, made her voyage to Syracuse in a magnificent new ship with five banks of oars, and on landing was conveyed to the