not only to substitute the contentions of the tongue for those of the sword, but also to conceive their situation with its present and prospective liabilities, instead of being hurried away by blind retrospective vengeance against the past. [128] This testimony of Thucydidês is amply sufficient to refute the vague assertions in the Oration xxv, of Lysias (Δήμου Καταλυσ. Ἀπολ. sects. 34, 35), about great enormities now committed by the Athenians; though Mr. Mitford copies these assertions as if they were real history, referring them to a time four years afterwards (History of Greece, ch. xx, s. 1, vol. iv, p. 327). [129] Thucyd. viii, 68. [130] See about the events in Korkyra, vol. vi, ch. 1, p. 283. There are few contrasts in Grecian history more memorable or more instructive, than that between this oligarchical conspiracy, conducted by some of the ablest hands at Athens, and the democratical movement going on at the same time in Samos, among the Athenian armament and the Samian citizens. In the former, we have nothing but selfishness and personal ambition, from the beginning: first, a partnership to seize for their own advantage the powers of government; next, after this object has been accomplished, a breach among the partners, arising out of disappointment alike selfish. We find appeal made to nothing but the worst tendencies; either tricks to practise upon the credulity of the people, or extra-judicial murders to work upon their fear. In the latter, on the contrary, the sentiment invoked is that of common patriotism, and equal, public-minded sympathy. That which we read in Thucydidês,—when the soldiers of the armament and the Samian citizens, pledged themselves to each other by solemn oaths to uphold their democracy, to maintain harmony and good feeling with each other, to prosecute energetically the war against the Peloponnesians, and to remain at enmity with the oligarchical conspirators at Athens,—is a scene among the most dramatic and inspiriting which occurs in his history.[131] Moreover, we recognize at Samos the same absence of reactionary vengeance as at Athens, after the attack of the oligarchs, Athenian as well as Samian, has been repelled; although those oligarchs had begun by assassinating Hyperbolus and others. There is throughout this whole democratical movement at Samos a generous exaltation of common sentiment over personal, and at the same time an absence of ferocity against opponents, such as nothing except democracy ever inspired in the Grecian bosom. [131] Thucyd. viii, 75.