[Footnote 3: Plutarch, _Ti. Gracch._ 9; cf. Greenidge, _A History of Rome_, p. 111.] [Footnote 4: [Ηρωζου]Περι Πολιτειαϛ, 30 (Ed. Drerup). With characteristic conservatism the English scholars, Adcock and Knox (_Klio_, 1913, pp. 249 _ff._), uphold the attribution of this pamphlet to Herodes Atticus.] [Footnote 5: Thucy., III, 82, 8. (The translation used here and elsewhere in the book is that of Jowett.)] [Footnote 6: Thucy., III, 37, 2.] [Footnote 7: The same is true of the second Athenian empire. The confederation from which it grew had no reason to outlast the occasion which had called t into existence--the "tyranny" of Sparta. It was, therefore, by design at least, a temporary, and not a permanent, union.] [Footnote 8: _Hellenica Oxyrhyn._, II, 2-4.] [Footnote 9: _Attische Urkunden_, I Teil. (Sitzb. d. Akad. in Wien. Phil.-hist. Klasse. 165, 6, 1911).] [Footnote 10: It was revived on much less objectionable terms by Antigonus Doson. See below, page 34 and chapter VII.] [Footnote 11: _Lysistrata_, 579 _ff._] [Footnote 12: See below, chapter VII.] [Footnote 13: See below, chapter VII.] [Footnote 14: See above, page 30.] [Footnote 15: See below, chapter VII.] [Footnote 16: See especially Ed. Meyer, _Kleine Schriften_, 283 _ff._, and below, chapter IV.] [Footnote 17: Bury, J.B., _The Constitution of the Later Roman Empire_ (1910), pp. 10 _ff._, 36.] II ATHENS: AN IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY No form of government, or profession of political idea, saves a state from imperialism. Even this country, which is dedicated, as is no other of the modern great powers, to the concept of popular sovereignty; which uprears the structure of its state upon a belief in the essential equality of men, and treats, or at least aims to treat, as comparatively negligible the differences created by birth and race, education and religion, property and occupation;-even this idealistic republic has become an empire in our own time and almost without our perceiving it. M. Bouché-Leclercq has given a prominent place in his _Leçons d'histoire romaine_[18] to the discomforting doctrine that the Romans conquered the world in spite of themselves--a debatable question, as he himself shows. It is not our sense of truth that is gratified when we are told that the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," designates the English. Yet Seeley has maintained the thesis that the British empire was secured in a "prolonged fit of national absence of mind." Unwittingly, it seems, the modern foster-mother of liberal institutions has become the mistress of countless millions.