Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale, Che la vostra miseria non mi tange Ne fiamma d' esto incendio non m' assale.[4] In the tragic hour the soul is thus vouchsafed a deeper vision, discerns a remoter, serener, mightier ideal which henceforth it pursues unalterably, undeviatingly, as if swept on by a law of Nature itself. Sorrow, thus conceived, is the divinest thought within the Divine mind, and when manifested in that most complex of unities, the consciousness of a State, the soul of a race, it assumes proportions that by their very vagueness inspire but a deeper awe, presenting a study the loftiest that can engage the human intellect. Genius for empire in a race supplies that impressiveness with which a heroic or royal origin invests the protagonist of a tragedy, an Agamemnon or a Theseus. Hence, though traceable in all, the operation of this law, analogous to the law of Tragedy, displays itself in the history of imperial cities or nations in grander and more imposing dimensions. Nowhere, for instance, are its effects exhibited in a more impressive manner than in the fall of Imperial Athens--most poignantly perhaps in that hour of her history which transforms the character of Athenian politics, when amid the happy tumult of the autumn vintage, the choric song, the procession, the revel of the Oschophoria, there came a rumour of the disaster at Syracuse, which, swiftly silenced, started to life again, a wild surmise, then panic, and the dread certainty of ruin. That hour was but the essential agony of a soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the Athens[5] of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion. In the writings of such men, in their speculations upon politics, one pervading desire encounters us, alike in the grave serenity of the Laws, the impassioned vehemence of the _Crown_, in the measured cadences of the _Panegyric_, the effort to lead Athens towards some higher enterprise, to secure for Athens and for Hellas some uniting power, civic or imperial, another empire than that which fell in Sicily, and moved by a loftier ideal. The serious admiration of Thucydides for Sparta, the ironic admiration of Socrates, Plato's appeals to Crete and to ancient Lacedsemon, these are not renegadism, not disloyalty to Athens, but fidelity to another Athens than that of Kleon or of Kritias. History never again beheld such a band of pamphleteers![6] In the history of Rome, during the second war against Carthage, a similar moment occurs. After Cannae, Rome lies faint from haemorrhage, but rises a new city. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus is greater than the Rome of the Decemvirs. It is not the inevitable change which centuries bring; another, a higher purpose has implanted itself within Rome's life as a State. The Rome of Gracchus and of Drusus announces Imperial Rome, the Rome of the Caesars.