[2] The twenty-two books of Sulla's Memoirs, _rerum suarum gestarum commentarii_, were dedicated to his friend Lucullus; they were still in existence in the time of Tacitus and Plutarch, though the fragments which now remain serve but to mock us with regret for the loss. Of Sulla's verses--like many cultured Romans of that age, the conqueror of Caius Marius amused his leisure with writing Greek epigrams--exactly so much has survived as of the troubadour songs of Richard I of England, or of Frederick II of Jerusalem and Sicily. Sulla's remark on the young Caesar is for the youth of Caius Julius as illuminating as Richelieu's on Condé or as Pasquale Paoli's on Bonaparte. [3] Aristotle refers only to the effect on the spectators; but the continued existence of the State makes it at once actor and spectator in the tragedy. The transforming power is thus more intimate and profound. [4] "God in His mercy such created me "That misery of yours attains me not, "Nor any flame assails me of this burning." [5] In illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned--the author of the _Politics_--in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when perfected (+teleôthén+) is the noblest thing that lives, but separated from justice (+chôristhèn nómou kaì díkês+) the basest of all." "Virtue cannot be the ruin of those who possess it, nor Justice the destruction of a City." The tragedies of Sophocles that are of a later date than 413 B.C. betray an attitude towards political life distinct from that which characterizes his earlier works. The shading-in of the life of the State into that of the individual defies analysis, and it were hazardous to affirm what traits of thought ought to be referred to the genius of the State as distinct from the individual; but it appears as difficult to imagine _before_ Syracuse, the vehement insistence upon Justice, the impassioned idealization which characterize Plato, Socrates, and Demosthenes, as it is difficult _after_ Syracuse to imagine the political temper of a Pericles or an Anaxagoras.