But even since the appearance of his book (1889) a new and important review of the obscure moments of Athenian growth has been recovered in the work of Aristotle on _The Polity of the Athenians_[96:2]. He does not indeed concern himself either with the foreign policy or with the artistic grandeur of the city. But as regards her internal development he brings us several new and curious facts. He ascribes the creation of the sovran Demos living at Athens on salaries for public duties, not to Pericles, but to Aristides. The whole democratic reform is in fact completed before the former arrives at power. The political activity of Themistocles is also prolonged for several years later than we had suspected, and it is even at his instigation that Ephialtes attacks the Areopagus. The political _rôle_ of Pericles is in fact so reduced, that we almost suspect an _animus_ against him in the author, who elsewhere shows his preference for the conservative side in politics. We should indeed rejoice could we confront this Aristotle with Thucydides, and see what truth there is in his departure from our received histories. Plutarch, who uses the work constantly in the _Life_ of Solon, evidently disregards it when he comes to treat of Themistocles and Pericles. Had Thucydides been a little fuller, had he given himself the trouble to preserve a few more details, we should be in a better position to face this new historical problem, and estimate the really great period of the history of Athens. [Sidenote: Effects of his literary genius.] [Sidenote: The Peloponnesian war of no world-wide consequence.] And yet such was his literary genius, such his rhetorical force, that, crabbed and sour as he may have been, he has so impressed his own and his subject's importance upon the learned world as to bring the Peloponnesian war into much greater prominence than the greater events of Greek history. Thus in a well-known selection of fifteen decisive battles from the world's history, the defeat of the Athenians at Syracuse figures as a world event; whereas it only settled the question whether one kind of Greek or another should dominate in Sicily, and perhaps in Greece. The domestic quarrels within the limits of a single nationality are not of this transcendent import. If the Carthaginians had crushed Rome, or the northern hordes of Asia destroyed the civilization of Persia when it was growing under Cyrus, there indeed a great battle might be called a decisive event. But even had the Athenians conquered Syracuse, it is quite certain that their domination of the Greek world would have broken down from within, from the inherent weaknesses in all Greek democracies, which Plato and Aristotle have long ago analyzed and explained. [Sidenote: No representation in Greek assemblies.]