ONE:"Precisely. But not quite in the way you imagine. Directly Maitrank saw those deeds he knew exactly what had happened. But that wonderful man did not betray himself. His confidential secretary told me that he never turned a hair. He simply regretted that he had no spare capital; he got a warrant for your arrest, and he will be in London tomorrow morning."We find the same theory reproduced and enforced with weighty illustrations by the great historian of that age. It is not known whether Thucydides owed any part of his culture to Protagoras, but the introduction to his history breathes the same spirit as the observations which we have just transcribed. He, too, characterises antiquity as a scene of barbarism, isolation, and lawless violence, particularly remarking that piracy was not then counted a dishonourable profession. He points to the tribes outside Greece, together with the most backward among the Greeks themselves, as representing the low condition from which Athens and her sister states had only emerged within a comparatively recent period. And in the funeral oration which he puts into the mouth of Pericles, the legendary glories of Athens are passed over without the slightest allusion,69 while exclusive prominence is given to her proud position as the intellectual centre of Greece. Evidently a radical change had taken place in mens conceptions since Herodotus wrote. They were learning to despise the mythical glories of their ancestors, to exalt the present at the expense of the past, to fix their attention exclusively on immediate human interests, and, possibly, to anticipate the coming of a loftier civilisation than had as yet been seen.
TWO:The Cyrenaic school ended, curiously enough, in pessimism. The doctrine that pleasure is the only good, and the doctrine that life yields a preponderance of painful over pleasurable feelings, are severally compatible with a preference of existence to non-existence; when united, as they were by Hgsias, a Cyrenaic professor, they logically lead to suicide; and we are told that the public authorities of Alexandria were obliged to order the discontinuance of his lectures, so great was their effect in promoting self-destruction.124"Well, fortune was kind to me. I couldn't think what that blacklead was doing there."
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