§ 46. What may most properly make the modern historian pause and revise his judgment of the Athenian democracy, is the evident dislike which the most thoughtful classes, represented by these great historians, and by the professed pupils of Socrates, displayed to this form of society[110:1]. We are now so accustomed to histories written by modern Radicals, or by men who do not think out their politics, that we may perhaps be put off with the plea that the democracy which these authors and thinkers disliked and derided, and which some of them tried to overthrow, was a debased form of what had been established under Pericles, and that it was the accidental decay or the accidental abuses of democracy which disgusted them, whereas its genuine greatness had been clearly manifested by the great century of progress which had now come sadly to a close. [Sidenote: Vacillation of modern critics.] [Sidenote: Grote's estimate of Pericles] Ernst Curtius, a German _savant_ of the highest type, has so little thought out this subject that on one page we find him saying that the voluntary submission of the people to a single man, Pericles, was a proof of the high condition of their State; whereas on another he says their voluntary submission to a single man, Cleon, is a proof of its degeneracy. But we can hardly expect any real appreciation of the working of a democracy from a German professor brought up in the last generation. Indeed his inconsistencies, and his hypotheses of decay and regeneration in the Athenian Demos at various moments, are ably dissected by Holm in a valuable appendix to his chapter on Athens in 360 B.C.[111:1] But our dealing is rather with Grote, who knew perfectly the conditions of the problem. He argues that Cleon, on the whole, and without military ability, tried to carry out the policy of Pericles, and that the policy of Pericles was a sound and far-seeing one, which would have preserved Athens through all her dangers, had she steadily adhered to it. § 47. I have already discussed at length the narrow basis of the Athenian imperial democracy, and expressed my judgment that even great successes would soon have brought about its fall. [Sidenote: compared with Plato's.] [Sidenote: The war policy of Pericles.]