In the later Thucydides we meet with the same teaching concerning the moral government of the world. In a memorable passage of his _History of the Peloponnesian War_ the historian becomes the moralist and gives his reader a tragic illustration of the workings of the law of Nemesis. Thucydides is approaching the chapter in his history which depicts the terrible catastrophe which befell the Athenians in Sicily. He skillfully foreshadows the coming tragedy by preluding his narrative of the Sicilian Expedition with an account of the arrogant and wicked conduct of the Athenians in driving the Melians from their island home and adding the stolen land to their own empire.[481] This high-handed crime, like the impiety of the presumptuous Mede at the Hellespont, arouses the avenging Nemesis. The reader forecasts the future, and in the cruel fate of the Melians reads the doom of the Athenian army before Syracuse. This moralizing of the primitive unethical conception of the gods as envious and unjust, and the evolving therefrom of the morally advanced doctrine of Nemesis, is an instructive illustration of how, as time passed, Greek ethical feeling was deepened and Greek ethical thought was purified and elevated through intellectual progress and the teachings of experience.[482] [Sidenote: Further moralization of the doctrine of Nemesis] There was a still further evolution of Greek ethical thought along the line traced above. The mutations and tragedies of life,--terrible reverses of fortune, sudden loss of reputation and friends, irremediable ruin following great prosperity,--these things are by a truer moral insight recognized as the sign neither of the envy nor of the righteous anger of the gods, but of the divine pity and love.[483] “The wholesomeness of punishment for the wrongdoer himself is the crown of Æschylean ethics.”[484] Phidias taught the same lofty truth through carving the myth of Prometheus Unbound on the throne of his Olympian Zeus. It spoke, as no other scene wrought there, of the moral significance of suffering, of divine mercy and deliverance.[485] And Plato’s philosophy accords with the Æschylean teaching that “Zeus has put in suffering sovereign instruction.” “Then this must be our notion of the just man,” he says, “that even when he is in poverty or sickness or any other seeming misfortune, all things will in the end work together for good to him in life and death.”[486] In this ethical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human life, of the miscarriage of ambitious plans, the wrecking of high hopes, the Greek thinkers reached at last the same elevated point of view that was attained by the great prophets of the Hebrew race.[487] [Sidenote: The amelioration of war rules and practices]