For various views on this matter cp. Heeren, Eng. tr. of Researches on the _Political History of Ancient Greece_, pp. 129-34; Thirlwall, _History of Greece_, ch. xviii (1st ed. iii, 62-70); Grote, iv, 490-504; Abbott, _History of Greece_, i, 405-9; Holm, _History of Greece_, Eng. tr. ii, 268, note 8 to ch. xvii (a vindication). Grote, who vindicates the policy of Pericles with much care, endorses the statesman's own plea that his use of the confederate treasure in ennobling the city gave her a valuable prestige. But even to the Athenian opposition this answer was indecisive, for, as Grote records, the argument of Thucydides was that Athens was "disgraced in the eyes of the Greeks" by her use of the treasure. This meant that her prestige was fully balanced by hatred, so that the civic gain was a new danger. Not that matters would have gone a whit better if, as our Tory historians used retrospectively to prescribe, democracy had been permanently subverted by aristocracy. No other ideal then in vogue would have produced even so much "good life" as was actually attained. We know that the rich and the great in the Greek cities were the worst citizens, in the sense of being the least law-abiding; and that the lower-class Athenians who served in the fleet were the best disciplined; the middle-class hoplites less so; and the rich men who formed the cavalry the least orderly of all.[130] Above all, the aristocrats were cruel and rapacious when in power as the demos never were, even when they had overthrown the guiltiest of their tyrants.[131] The leading aristocrats were simply weaker versions of the demagogues, making up for their weakness by their cruelty; and nothing can be more misleading than to take the account given of Kleon by Aristophanes for even a semblance of the truth. The great humorist saw nothing as it really was: his very genius was as it were a many-faceted mirror that could reflect no whole, and left his practical judgment worth less than that of any of the men he ridiculed. Kleon is to be conceived as a powerful figure of the type of a New York Tammany "Boss," without culture or philosophy, but shrewd, executive, and abounding in energy. The aristocrats were but slighter egoists with a varnish of education, as far as he from a worthy philosophy. And the philosophers _par excellence_, Plato and Aristotle, were equally incapable of practical statesmanship. The central truth of the entire process is that free Greece fell because her children never transcended, in conception or in practice, that primary ethic of egoism in which even love for one's country is only a reflex of hate for another people. This is clear in the whole play of the astounding hatreds of Athenians for Athenians through every struggle of Athens for her life. The treasons of Alcibiades are evoked and amply balanced by the murderous plots of his fellows against him: every figure in the line