I cannot concur in Dr. Arnold’s explanation of these words, or of the general sense of the passage. He thinks that Thucydidês means to affirm what applies generally “to an opposition minority when it succeeds in revolutionizing the established government, whether the government be a democracy or a monarchy; whether the minority be an aristocratical party or a popular one.” It seems to me, on the contrary, that the affirmation bears only on the special case of an oligarchical conspiracy subverting a democracy, and that the comparison taken is applicable only to the state of things as it stood under the preceding democracy. Next, the explanation given of the words by Dr. Arnold, assumes that “to be beaten in a fair race, or when the terms of the match are fair,” causes to the loser _the maximum_ of pain and offence. This is surely not the fact: or rather, the reverse is the fact. The man who loses his cause or his election through unjust favor, jealousy, or antipathy, is _more_ hurt than if he had lost it under circumstances where he could find no injustice to complain of. In both cases, he is doubtless mortified; but if there be injustice, he is offended and angry as well as mortified: he is disposed to take vengeance on men whom he looks upon as his personal enemies. It is important to distinguish the mortification of simple failure, from the discontent and anger arising out of belief that the failure has been unjustly brought about: it is this discontent, tending to break out in active opposition, which Thucydidês has present to his mind in the comparison which he takes between the state of feeling which precedes and follows the subversion of the democracy. It appears to me that the words τῶν ὁμοίων are masculine, and that they have reference, like πάντες and ἴσοι, in the preceding line, to the privileged minority of equal confederates who are supposed to have just got possession of the government. At Sparta, the word οἱ ὅμοιοι acquired a sort of technical sense, to designate the small ascendent minority of wealthy Spartan citizens, who monopolized in their own hands political power, to the practical exclusion of the remainder (see Xenoph. Hellen. iii. 3, 5; Xenoph. Resp. Lac. x, 7; xiii, 1; Demosth. cont. Lept. s. 88). Now these ὅμοιοι, or peers, here indicated by Thucydidês as the peers of a recently-formed oligarchy, are not merely equal among themselves, but rivals one with another, and personally known to each other. It is important to bear in mind all these attributes as tacitly implied, though not literally designated or _connoted_ by the word ὅμοιοι, or peers; because the comparison instituted by Thucydidês is founded on all the attributes taken together; just as Aristotle (Rhetoric, ii, 8; ii, 13, 4), in speaking of the envy and jealousy apt to arise towards τοὺς ὁμοίους, considers them as ἀντεράστας and ἀνταγωνίστας.