the preceding period are inapplicable to this; while on the other hand, as the phenomena of this second period arise out of causes connected with the earlier state of things, they cannot be clearly understood unless that former state be fully known to us. Thus, to argue that the Romans were less bloody than the Greeks from a comparison between the factions of the Peloponnesian war, and the struggles of the Roman commons against the patricians, is to compare the two nations under very different circumstances; it is instituting a comparison between the intensity of our passions in manhood and in childhood. The bloody factions of Corcyra and Megara are analogous to the civil wars of Marius and Sylla, of Cæsar and Pompey, of Brutus and Cassius against the Triumvirs: the harmless contests between the commons and patricians can only be compared to those which prevailed in Greece before the Persian invasion, when the party of the coast at Athens was disputing the exclusive ascendency so long enjoyed by the eupatridæ or party of the plain.[53] And the true conclusion is, that the second contest between property and numbers is far more inevitably accompanied by atrocious crimes, than that earlier quarrel, in which property and numbers were united against property and birth.”[54] The Corcyrean sedition differed from the secession to the Mons Sacer, and other disputes between patricians and plebeians, in being a struggle of parties, not ranks. Very little positive information concerning the constitution of the island has been preserved.[55] Originally, probably, its Corinthian colonists established an oligarchy: but the prosecution of maritime affairs was always held greatly to favour the ascendency of the people, and in Thucydides we find no trace of a privileged body of citizens at Corcyra any more than at Athens. When speaking of the 250, whom the Corinthians selected as a sort of hostages to regain their influence, he calls them, “for the most part the first men of the city in power.”[56] Elsewhere he describes them as “those in possession of things,” or “the few,”[57] but not as the magistracy, or in terms which lead us to suppose that they formed a constitutional aristocracy either of birth or wealth. This, therefore, was a branch of the great struggle which gave its character to the whole Peloponnesian war, whether the oligarchical principle, under the patronage of Lacedæmon, or the democratic under the patronage of Athens, should reign in Greece. The co–existence of the two in peace seems, from the restless and intriguing temper of the people, to have been impossible; and the experience of other cities had shown that for the worsted party there was no security but in flight, attended usually by sentence of exile and confiscation. And there is no authority to which men submit so reluctantly, no hardships which they feel so keenly, as those which arise from the elevation of their former equals.