‘I would never remember a man nor hold him of any account because of his speed of foot, or skill in wrestling, his bigness, or his strength, his beauty, or his wealth. He might be more kingly than Pelops, more eloquent than Adrastus; but all his fame would avail him naught unless he were a man of mettle in fight. This is the supreme virtue, the best sport, the highest prize that a young man can win.’ Tyrtæus, as we see in his verses, regarded the art of poetry as ancillary to the art of war, and the greatest of the Athenian dramatists shared his views. The real gravamen of Æschylus’ attack upon Euripides in the _Frogs_ is that the latter did not sufficiently exalt the martial spirit among a nation, of whom the old poet says: ‘Their life was in shafts of ash and of elm, in bright plumes fluttering wide, In lance and greaves and corslet and helm and heart of seven bulls hide.’ Prose literature gives us the same evidence as poetry. Thucydides and Xenophon look upon history chiefly as a succession of battles and campaigns. Of the social history of their time they tell us scarcely anything, but they will dilate with the most intense interest on the smallest details of a skirmish. To them, as to most of their contemporaries, war was the one thing that mattered, the great business and the great sport of life, and our historians have only in comparatively recent times escaped from their point of view. It is probable indeed that many of those Athenians, whom we think of only as men of letters, were viewed by their contemporaries in rather a different light. Æschylus was perhaps better known as one of the heroes of Salamis than as a dramatist. Sophocles was an admiral in charge of the Athenian fleet the year after the performance of the _Antigone_, and the anecdote that his military position was due to his literary skill is probably a literary invention. Thucydides had been appointed to the command of the Athenian troops in Thrace long before he set to work on his history. The stubborn courage of Socrates was proved upon the field of Delium, and Euripides, that keenest critic of the war spirit, served his forty years in the Athenian army when fighting was at its fiercest. We generally imagine Pericles and Nicias as being civilian ministers, men holding the same sort of position as Pitt and Walpole: in reality through most of their lives they were soldiers on active service, and Cleon, who was almost a professional politician, was ready and willing at a moment’s notice to take command of a difficult and dangerous military expedition and, what is more, had enough technical knowledge to bring it to a successful termination.