In truth Pausanias was a man made of common stuff and cast in a common mould. His intelligence and abilities seem to have been little above the average, his opinions not very different from those of his contemporaries. [Sidenote: His political opinions.] While he looked back with regret to the great age of Greek freedom, he appears to have acquiesced in the Roman dominion as inevitable, acknowledging the incapacity of the degenerate Greeks to govern themselves, the general clemency of the Roman rule, and especially the wisdom and beneficence of the good emperors under whom it was his happiness to live. Of democracy he had no admiration. He thought the Athenians the only people who ever throve under it, and on observing that the slaves who fought and died for Athens were buried with their masters, he remarks with apparent surprise that even a democracy can occasionally be just. With his turn for study and for brooding over the past, it was natural that he should prefer a life of privacy to the cares and turmoils of a public career. Accordingly we find that he admired the prudence of Isocrates who lived placidly to old age in the shade and tranquillity of retirement, and that he censured implicitly the imprudence of Demosthenes, whose fiery genius hurried him through the storm and sunshine of public life to exile and a violent death. Such a preference, implied rather than expressed, says much for the decay of public spirit in Greece. Our author himself was conscious that his lot had fallen on evil days. He speaks sorrowfully of the olden time when the gods openly visited the good with honour, and the bad with their displeasure; when the benefactors of mankind were raised to the rank of divinities, and evil-doers were degraded into wild beasts and stones. “But in the present age,” he adds mournfully, “when wickedness is growing to such a height, and spreading over every land and city, men are changed into gods no more, save in the hollow rhetoric which flattery addresses to power; and the wrath of the gods at the wicked is reserved for a distant future when they shall have gone hence.” We cannot doubt that here he glances covertly at the practice of deifying the Roman emperors, which seems to have stirred his honest indignation as a mark of the supple servility and political degeneracy of the age. Nor was he a stranger to those graver thoughts on the vaster issues of life and history which the aspect of Greece in its decline was fitted to awake. The sight of the great city of Megalopolis lying in ruins brings to his mind the high hopes with which it had been founded, and that again ushers in a train of melancholy reflexions on the instability of human affairs. He thinks how from so many golden cities of the ancient world—from Nineveh and Babylon, from Thebes and Mycenae—the glory had passed away; how nature itself, which seems so stable, is subject to great mutations; how transitory, then, is earthly glory, how brief and frail the life of man!