Among the Athenian citizens, certainly, it produced a strength and unanimity of positive political sentiment, such as has rarely been seen in the history of mankind, which excites our surprise and admiration the more when we compare it with the apathy which had preceded,—and which is even implied as the natural state of the public mind in Solon’s famous proclamation against neutrality in a sedition.[313] Because democracy happens to be unpalatable to most modern readers, they have been accustomed to look upon the sentiment here described only in its least honorable manifestations,—in the caricatures of Aristophanês, or in the empty common-places of rhetorical declaimers. But it is not in this way that the force, the earnestness, or the binding value, of democratical sentiment at Athens is to be measured. We must listen to it as it comes from the lips of Periklês,[314] while he is strenuously enforcing upon the people those active duties for which it both implanted the stimulus and supplied the courage; or from the oligarchical Nikias in the harbor of Syracuse, when he is endeavoring to revive the courage of his despairing troops for one last death-struggle, and when he appeals to their democratical patriotism as to the only flame yet alive and burning even in that moment of agony.[315] From the time of Kleisthenês downward, the creation of this new mighty impulse makes an entire revolution in the Athenian character. And if the change still stood out in so prominent a manner before the eyes of Herodotus, much more must it have been felt by the contemporaries among whom it occurred. [312] Herodot. iii, 80. Πλῆθος δὲ ἄρχον, ~πρῶτα μὲν, οὔνομα πάντων κάλλιστον ἔχει, ἰσονομίην~· δεύτερα δὲ, τούτων τῶν ὁ μόναρχος, ποιέει οὐδέν· πάλῳ μὲν ἀρχὰς ἄρχει, ὑπεύθυνον δὲ ἀρχὴν ἔχει, βουλεύματα δὲ πάντα ἐς τὸ κοινὸν ἀναφέρει. The democratical speaker at Syracuse, Athenagoras, also puts this name and promise in the first rank of advantages—(Thucyd. vi, 39)—ἐγὼ δέ φημι, ~πρῶτα μὲν~, δῆμον ξύμπαν ὠνόμασθαι, ὀλιγαρχίαν δὲ, μέρος, etc. [313] See the preceding chapter xi, of this History, vol. iii, p. 145, respecting the Solonian declaration here adverted to. [314] See the two speeches of Periklês in Thucyd. ii, 35-46, and ii, 60-64. Compare the reflections of Thucydidês upon the two democracies of Athens and Syracuse, vi, 69 and vii, 21-55. [315] Thucyd. vii, 69. Πατρίδος τε τῆς ἐλευθερωτάτης ὑπομιμνήσκων καὶ τῆς ἐν αὐτῇ ἀνεπιτακτοῦ πᾶσιν ἐς τὴν δίαιταν ἐξουσίας, etc.