But if there were mischievous exceptions, we must not forget that the main body of the schools kept alive in the Greek mind a serious and exalted view of human dignity and human responsibility,--above all, they trained their hearers in that noble contempt for death which is perhaps the strongest feature in Hellenistic as compared with modern society; for there can be no doubt that Christian dogmas make cowards of all those who do not live up to their lofty ideal. The Greeks had no eternal punishment to scare them from facing death, and so we find whole cities preferring suicide to the loss of what they claimed as their rightful liberty[173:1]. People who do this may be censured; they cannot be despised. [Sidenote: Rise of despots on principle.] § 71. Secondly, most philosophers had become so convinced of the necessity of monarchy, if not of the rule of one superior spirit, as better than the vacillations and excitements of a crowd, that many of their pupils considered themselves fit to undertake the duty of improving the masses by absolute control; and so we have a recrudescence, in a very different society, of those tyrants whose merits and defects we have already discussed at an earlier stage in this essay[173:2]. The long series of passages from essays _That Monarchy is best_, which we may read in the commonplace book of Stobæus[173:3], is indeed followed by a series of passages _On the Censure of Tyranny_; but the former is chiefly taken from Hellenistic philosophical tracts, whereas the latter is drawn wholly from older authors, such as Xenophon, who lived in the days of successful republics. [Sidenote: Probably not wholly unpopular.] Even the literary men, who are always anti-despotic in theory, confess that many of these later tyrants were good and worthy men; and the fact that Gonatas, the greatest and best of the Antigonids, constantly 'planted a tyrant' in a free State which he found hard to manage, proves rather that this form of government was not unacceptable to the majority, than that he violated all the deepest convictions of his unmanageable subjects for the sake of an end certain to be balked if he adopted impolitic means. The force of imitation also helped the creation of tyrannies in the Greek cities; for were not the Hellenistic monarchies the greatest success of the age? And we may assume that many sanguine people did not lay to heart the wide difference between the requirements of the provinces of a large and scattered empire, and those of a town with a territory of ten miles square. These then were phenomena which manifested themselves all over the peninsula,--aye, even at times at Athens and Sparta, though these cities were protected by a great history and by the sentimental respect of all the world from the experiments which might be condoned in smaller and less august cities. [Sidenote: Contemptible position of Athens and Sparta in politics,]